Lieberman speaks truth to power and gets sued

I haven’t done a fun with Avigdor Lieberman post in a while. Truth is, until last week, Leiberman has been relatively quiet since he resigned his party (Israel Our Home) from the Kadima coalition. His party is poised to perhaps be returned as the third largest fraction in the next Israeli election.

Last week Lieberman suggested that Egyptian leader Hosni Mubarak can go to hell for never visiting Israel. This week he is being sued in an Israeli court for the alleged “libel” for insulting Mubarak. The Jerusalem Post carries this report:

An Egyptian lawyer has launched a lawsuit against Yisrael Beiteinu Avigdor Lieberman, who slammed Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak last week over not coming to visit Israel. An official at the general prosecutor's office says the lawyer, Galal Khalil Abdel-Rahman, filed the suit Monday.

The official spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to release the information. The lawyer could not be reached for comment. The official said the suit contends Lieberman insulted Mubarak when he said last week that the Egyptian president can "go to hell" because he never makes return visits to Israel but receives Israeli officials in Egypt. The suit demands Lieberman be summoned on libel charges.

Of course, in most traditional western court systems, truth is a defence against libel charges but during the last Sharon Administration the Knesset enacted a law which in effect made it against the law to ‘insult the dignity of a public official’ so I suppose Mubarak meets the bar per say. Either way, it will be fun to watching the Egyptians dive off the deep end of reason over how far Lieberman will go. And Lieberman is like a force of nature which nothing man-made can restrain.