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Mock Trial of Israel in Athens Hands Down Ready-made Conviction

July 5, 1988
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A mock trial of Israel held here last week ended with a swift conviction for alleged atrocities against the Palestinian people.

The trial was staged by the Pan-Hellenic Cultural Movement, a front of the Greek Communist Party. There was no defense, because no respectable person here, Jew or gentile, would participate in what they called a staged farce.

The trial was held in a public garden before about 350 persons. Within five minutes after the final arguments, a three-page verdict was produced, prompting one spectator to say the author should go down in the Guinness Book of World Records for speed-writing.

The verdict charged that Israel rules the administered territories by martial law, that the most junior officers can order punishments on the spot and that the Israelis are employing mercenaries from the United States and Canada.

It also claimed that infant mortality among the Palestinians is 70 percent and that the Israeli public does not know what is going on in the territories, because the media is censored.

The highlight of the trial, which drew the loudest cheers, was the testimony of Makis Ganis, a Greek Jew who said he could prove that Zionism contains the seeds of Nazism.

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