On Thursday, Larry Klayman, a Washington, D.C., lawyer, sued Facebook and Mark Zuckerber for $1 billion in damages. Facebook‘s offense? Failing to shut down the “Third Intifada” Facebook page sooner than it did. Since Klayman, is “known to be a strong supporter of Israel, and has been called a ‘Zionist’ publicly by radical Palestinians and other such Arabic
interests,” argued a breathless press release issued by Klayman, “Mr. Klayman is thus a target of this call to kill Jews.”
The “Third Intifada” page debuted on Facebook in March, initially calling for peaceful protests in the Palestinian territories on May 15. As a non-violent protest page, “Third Intifada” positioned itself to be the Palestinian heir to the digitally-assisted revolts that have swept the Middle East over the past few months. “After the Tunisian intifada and the Egyptian intifada and the Libyan intifada comes the Palestinian intifada,” read the information box on the Facebook page. Facebook resisted initial calls to de-activate the page.
Then, in the middle of last week, Israel’s Minister of Public Diplomacy Yuli Edelstein personally wrote Mark Zuckerberg a letter requesting that he take down the page. “Third Intifada,” it appears, had steered away from its non-violent beginnings. “On this Facebook page there are posted many remarks and movie clips
which call for the killing of Israelis and Jews and the ‘liberating’ of
Jerusalem and of Palestine through acts of violence,” wrote Edelstein. On March 29, Facebook relented, shutting down the page. “After administrators of the page received repeated warnings about posts
that violated our policies, we removed the page,” Andrew Noyes, of Facebook, told The New York Times.
That ought to have been the end of the story. But for Larry Klayman, “the damage had already been done,” in the words of the release. “The complaint alleges assault and negligence,” it continued, “including willful and
wanton conduct, gross negligence and recklessness on the part of the
Defendants, as it has put Mr. Klayman’s life at risk, as well as other
similarly situated Jews who are prominent public figures and otherwise.”
Who is Larry Klayman? For an introductory profile of the man, we turn to a 1998 article from Slate‘s Jacob Weisberg, entitled “Nut Watch.” Slate articles are typically known for ingenious, counterintuitive theses that its writers clearly spend hours thinking up–carefully-wrought and intricately worded. In the case of the Larry Klayman article, Weisberg’s thesis was this: “Klayman is off his rocker.”
Klayman has a history of filing lawsuits–many of them, against many people. Weisberg called him a “one-man litigation explosion.” In an interview with Weisberg, Klayman accused the reporter of being a Clinton spy, many of whom had been “casing” his office following a $90 million invasion-of-privacy suit he had lobbed at Hillary Clinton and others. Klayman was also suing his own mother. Literally. And after Newsweek reported this fact, Klayman resorted to a tactic that still works today: a wild-eyed press release.
