Gov’t Opposes $13M Judgment Against Iran
The Bennetts had sued over murdered daughter
January 21, 2010
There’s a lovely, and sad, article in today’s Los Angeles Times about a San Diego couple (the mother writes for the local Jewish Journal, actually) whose daughter was killed in a Hamas-backed suicide bombing in Jerusalem in 2002. They sued Iran—Hamas’s sponsor—and in U.S. federal court won an uncontested $13 million judgment (they pledged to donate the sum to charities).
Enter the U.S. State Department, which has appealed the decision, on the grounds that it would involve a lien being placed on the former Iranian Embassy in Washington, D.C. The building has lay dormant since the severing of diplomatic ties in 1980—minus the occasional event, for which State charges a fee, putting the proceeds toward upkeep—but the government claims that the lien would violate diplomatic protocol, as well as further complicate U.S.-Iranian relations. Relations that are already quite complex, of course, in part due to Iran’s sponsorship of terrorism. Go figure.
Marc Tracy is a staff writer at The New Republic, and was previously a staff writer at Tablet. He tweets @marcatracy.
