In recent years, the Court has imposed a long series of rulings on the country that have no groundings whatsoever in the Law and are simply the attempts by the imperious justices to act as judicial legislators - that is, judicial dictators. The Court is also increasingly politicized. As events serve to discredit Israel’s Left from week to week, the Court has rushed forward to impose leftist and anti-religious views on the country. It has never criticized leftist attacks on free speech nor McCarthyist prosecution of anti-Oslo dissidents, while repeatedly placing Arab terrorists and murderers back onto the streets.

Things came to their crescendo this morning. The Supreme Court of Israel has gone far beyond anything else it has done before. The Supreme Court this morning, led by the anti-democratic Chief Justice Aharon Barak, ruled simply that Israel’s parliament does not have the right to pass laws.

Really.

The background to this judicial jihad against Israeli democracy is the battle over freedom of expression, where the Israel Supreme Court has been consistently OPPOSED to freedom of expression. Specifically, the ruling has to do with the Arutz 7 Radio Station.

As you know, the Israeli Far Left exercises near-complete hegemony over Israel’s media, including print and electronic. There has been one important challenger to that hegemony and that is the Arutz 7 radio station. Technically, Arutz 7 is described as a "pirate radio station", but that is only because the government has refused to allow it to buy a broadcasting franchise.

Arutz 7 was first set up as a counterweight to the Far Left pirate radio station set up in 1973 by Far Leftist Abbie Natan. That station was based on the belief that broadcasting nonstop loud rock and roll music and occasional leftist posturing was the ideal recipe for bringing peace to the Middle East. Despite the fact that Natan’s station was illegal, it was protected by the Labor Party establishment and even the Likud governments feared challenging its operations lest they be accused of assaulting free expression. Eventually Natan’s station went bankrupt and Natan scuttled the ship smack in the middle of Israel’s shipping lanes as a permanent hazard.

Years after Natan’s station was set up, the Arutz 7 station was established and - like Natan’s - at first broadcast from an offshore boat. But the moment that Arutz 7 set up operations, the very same Left that had always defended Natan’s illegal station suddenly demanded that "law and order" be applied and Arutz 7 shut down.

Ever since then, the Left has sought means to shut down Arutz 7 and protect its hegemony over all broadcasting. It has tried assorted legal tricks and suits. It has tried Knesset initiatives. It has tried boycotts. But Arutz 7 weathered it all. The Left even accused Arutz 7 as having "inspired" the assassination of Rabin because it broadcast attacks on Rabin’s policies. It tried to get the operators prosecuted for "incitement", that catchall crime dug up by Israel’s leftist McCarthyists every time they wish to suppress free speech.

A few years back it looked like the Left was about to succeed in silencing Arutz 7. But then some Knesset Members passed a law that legalized Arutz 7. That should have been the end of the story. But not in post-democratic Israel.

The Left filed a court petition to declare the Knesset Law illegal. Now let us put this in perspective. There are countries in which courts can declare legislative decisions to be illegal, on the basis of a Constitution. Israel however has no formal written constitution and so there is no constitutional basis upon which a court can override a Knesset law. Indeed, this is precisely the constitutional showdown I described a few weeks back when the Court ruled that Reform conversions in Israel must be accepted by the government and the Knesset initiated a new law declaring that they are NOT acceptable.

There exist several "Basic Laws" in Israel that are regarded as being somewhat more powerful than ordinary laws and so serving as building blocks for a future constitution. But the legal argument here is shaky. In reality these Basic Laws are simply laws passed by one Knesset and there is no basis for claiming that a law from an old Knesset can be used to restrict legislative powers of a new Knesset. Moreover, there is nothing in any of these Basic Laws that really can be seen as serving as the basis for the more atrocious Supreme Court rulings. There is nothing in them that can used to justify the Court’s ruling on conversions or this morning’s assault on Arutz 7. Indeed, Arutz 7 could make a reasonable argument that its continued operation is protected under the Basic Law guaranteeing freedom of occupation!!

But the Supreme Court of Aharon Barak does not need any legal figleaf for its capricious baseless rulings. It is sufficient that trendiness and "enlightened opinion" (meaning leftist secularist opinion) is served.

This morning, the Supreme Court ruled that the law passed by the Knesset that decriminalized Arutz 7 was itself illegal. In other words, the Supreme Court refuses to recognize the right of the Knesset to pass laws. Ultimate decisions regarding laws and legislating henceforth are the prerogative of the non-elected Supreme Court justices.

These of course are the same justices who put the murderers of Dani Katz back on the streets, who ruled that Israel has to pay indemnities to Palestinians hurt while attacking Jews, and who have a long track record of other arbitrary politicized abuses of their power.

There is only one way to deal with these characters and here it is:

Israel’s Knesset must immediately pass a new law dismissing the current Supreme Court and firing Aharon Barak as Chief Justice, preferably taking away his pension rights as well. It must institute new rules under which Supreme Court justices and other judges may be dismissed by the Knesset or by popular ballot propositions.

In addition, it must not only legalize Arutz 7, it must turn over to Arutz 7 the now bankrupt Channel 10 television station. It must privatize all the state-operated radio and television services and dismember the Israel Broadcasting Authority. The original logic behind having the IBA was so that Israel could express its own voice in its own defense, but the IBA has long been the voice of the PLO and the Far Left and there is no reason why taxpayers need to finance that when the EU and the New Israel Fund are so willing to finance anti-Israel propaganda on their own.

Among some other legislative initiatives now needed would be one making it illegal for any state-financed institution of higher learning to admit as a student or to hire anyone participating in the current movement of military mutiny and insubordination, nor anyone signing petitions that support such traitors. This is the only effective means to put a stop to the phenomenon, which is growing by the day (by the way).

Finally, a word about Arutz 7. While Arutz 7 has been an invaluable instrument for getting the truth out and for challenging the monolithic hegemony of the Far Left over Israeli broadcasting, Arutz 7 has itself partaken in some forms of lunacy that now will hurt its chances of surviving and of challenging this Leftist judicial jihad against it.

Arutz 7 now needs to prove its legitimacy as a serious medium. Its ability to do so has been severely damaged by the history of several central people at the station and a number of its programs in proliferating the nonsense of Barry Chamish. Chamish is the fabricator of silly conspiracy "theories", from UFO kidnappings to his latest, which is that the US Council on Foreign Relations really knocked down the World Trade Center and made it look like bin Laden did it. (If you think I am joking, send me an email request for the full text of this Chamish epistle.) Chamish is Israel’s king of the non sequitur, and is a certifiable lunatic. Yet Chamish’s ludicrous "theories" about how Yigal Amir did NOT kill Rabin and about how rather Rabin was killed by a conspiracy headed by Shimon Peres and the secret service have been regularly broadcast on the Arutz 7 programs of Adir Zik and others. Zik was involved in the recent "conference" to promote Chamish’s "theories" and was targeted by the Yediot Ahronot feature attacking the Chamish cultsters.

That nonsense will now come home to haunt them, and will make it much more difficult to defend them from this jihad against them and against