Ben Gvir with Chomper
Photo: Gil Yochanan
_a.jpg "Photo: Yaron Brenner")
Itamar Ben Gvir
Photo: Yaron Brenner
Right activist: I coordinated story with my dog
Extreme Right-winger Itamar Ben Gvir sues police for wrongful arrest, and claims police cocked gun at his dog Chomper and threatened to kill him. Judge summons dog to court for jury to see how big he is
The Small Claims Court in Jerusalem has attracted so much interest in a long time. The dog belonging to extreme-Right activist Itamar Ben Gvir, who was summoned to court Monday, brought a bevy of journalists, photographers and simple curiosity seekers with him to the courtroom.
Ben Gvir was suing for NIS 16,000 (roughly USD 3,600) in compensation claiming that he was wrongfully arrested by police and that a police officer cocked his gun and aimed it at his dog, Chompy. As deliberations got underway, Ben Gvir said, “Me and my dog Chompy coordinated our stories.”
In the complaint Ben Gvir filed about half a year ago, he claimed that on October 6, 2005, at midnight, he came home to his Hebron home with his wife and shortly thereafter he went out to walk his dog, but ran into Hebron Police. Chompy started barking at the officer, and then, according to Ben Gvir, the policeman aimed his gun at the animal and said, “If your dog doesn’t stop barking I’ll shoot him and you.”
Judge Abraham Tennenbaum invited the dog into the courtroom mainly to give judges an idea of his size. “Ben Gvir wrote that it was a small dog, but police said it was a large and frightening dog,” the judge noted. During the trial, Ben Gvir, a law student, exhibited impressive abilities in the courtroom and familiarity with past verdicts. During his testimony, attorney Gilad Chen, who was representing the accused policemen, asked Ben Gvir if he defines himself as a normative person.
In response, he said: “Wow, wow, what a slap. If this is the slap you’re giving, pretty soon we’ll show you a host of slaps.”
To Judge Tennenbaum’s inquiry on how he calculated the sum he was demanding, Ben Gvir cited two previous verdicts in which he won his case and was ordered to be compensated NIS 15,000 for wrongful incarceration, and NIS 28,000 for wrongfully being kept overnight in prison.
The judge said the verdict would be handed down sometime in the next ten days, and asked both sides if this whole episode wasn’t unnecessary. Upon exiting the courtroom, Ben Gvir said, “There’s no doubt that if my name wasn’t Itamar Ben Gvir no one would think to arrest me. This is just another episode in the police’s plot to harass me.”
It should be noted that during the entire proceedings, the animal was very well behaved and barely barked at all.
