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<p>A D.C. court has ordered prominent anti-Israel activists to pay a rabbi $182,000 for falsely accusing him in court of “stalking” after he prayed at the Israel embassy, which they staked out for months in a protest.</p>
<p>Hazami Barmada, who “<a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20230604221715/https://www.aspendigital.org/person/hazami-barmada/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">held</a> several high-level positions at the United Nations” and in 2023 “joined the faculty of George Washington University,” and Atefeh Rokhvand, founder of Teachers Against Genocide, abused the court system by seeking a restraining order against Rabbi Shmuel Herzfeld, the Superior Court of the District of Columbia’s Domestic Violence Division ruled last week. The restraining order could have essentially prevented the rabbi from coming near the Israel embassy, because the pair was leading an around-the-clock protest there.</p>
<p>Video contradicted statements in the activists’ legal filings and showed that the rabbi had peacefully prayed at the embassy while Barmada mocked him through a megaphone, Judge John McCabe <a href="https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.dcd.267988/gov.uscourts.dcd.267988.36.1.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noopener">wrote</a> last week in a previously unreported ruling. Far from being scared of the so-called stalker, Barmada ridiculed his presence at the embassy as “hilarious,” he found.</p>
<p>“There is no evidence that Respondent ever threatened the Petitioners. There is no evidence that he ever followed, monitored or placed them under surveillance. The only times he ever saw them was at the location of the protests on three occasions (only two with regard to Ms. Rokhvand). The evidence suggests that his presence on those occasions was not an attempt to locate Petitioners or any other particular individuals; he was going to the embassy to pray,” the ruling said.</p>
<p>After Hamas’ October 7, 2023 terror attack, Barmada and Rokhvand led virtually permanent <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/immigration-agent-who-celebrates-hamas-is-using-paid-leave-from-dhs-to-threaten-military-officials">protests</a> at Israel’s embassy in Washington and outside the home of former Secretary of State Antony Blinken. “Hazami Barmada is 40 years old. She received an MPA degree from Harvard University’s Kennedy School and has worked at the Aspen Institute,” the ruling said. “She stated that she sometimes protested at the home of (now former) U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken in northern Virginia, at times throwing fake blood in the direction of motor vehicles entering or exiting his home.”</p>
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<p>As experienced protesters who routinely engage in abrasive behavior against others — activities which they defend as free speech — they would have known that the rabbi’s actions were also permitted, the judge said. As a result, he ordered the pair to pay Herzfeld’s legal bills under the anti-SLAPP Act, which aims to discourage “lawsuits filed by one side of a political or public policy debate aimed to punish or prevent the expression of opposing points of view.”</p>
<p>The anti-Israel activists sought charges against the rabbi alleging that he had stalked them based on three dates where he was present at the embassy. But on one day, Rokhvand was not even present, and “Barmada’s description in her petition of the events of March 21 did not accurately describe what had occurred,” the judge wrote.</p>
<p>“It was only upon observing the video evidence that the Court was able to clearly see that the Respondent’s activities were not even directed at the Petitioner in particular (other than his agreeing with her that inhumanity is awful no matter who is to blame), that Petitioner Barmada and her fellow protesters were far louder and more confrontational than Respondent, and that Petitioner Barmada was not in any way intimidated by the Respondent as she remarked about how ‘hilarious’ he and his companions were while speaking into a megaphone,” the ruling said.</p>
<div id="attachment_881179" style="width:615px" class="wp-caption alignnone"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-881179" class="size-large wp-image-881179" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/02/megaphone-605x576.png" alt="" width="605" height="576" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/02/megaphone-605x576.png 605w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/02/megaphone-300x286.png 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/02/megaphone-768x731.png 768w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/02/megaphone.png 1416w" sizes="(max-width: 605px) 100vw, 605px"/></p>
<p id="caption-attachment-881179" class="wp-caption-text">Barmada with megaphone / Instagram</p>
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<p>On the second day, the rabbi drove by in a car and asked through the window, “Why do you support the raping of innocent women?” The judge wrote that “The Petitioners may very well have been offended by what the Respondent said on May 2, just as the Respondent was likely offended when Petitioner Barmada called him a Nazi and a supporter of terrorizing children on March 21, 2024. However, as Petitioner’s own attorneys asserted” in justifying their own conduct, “these comments, while offensive, are constitutionally protected.”</p>
<p>In the third instance, on May 7, Rokhvand claimed the rabbi “went through my stuff.” The judge said video showed he had “simply directed his companion to take photographs of [a] basket of ear plugs,” which the rabbi said protesters were using to shield their own ears while subjecting others to excruciating noise levels. The judge added that the basket was not even near Rokhvand.</p>
<p>In May, the rabbi filed a <a href="https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.dcd.267988/gov.uscourts.dcd.267988.1.0.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noopener">civil lawsuit</a> in federal court alleging that Barmada and Rokhvand damaged his hearing by having their comrades blast a siren at him after he came to the embassy on a religious holiday to pray for the release of Hamas’ hostages. “The physical attack consisted of using speakers, sirens, and other sound-emitting devices to produce siren-like sounds in the range of 95-100 decibels—more than 1,000 times the noise level permitted under D.C. law— with the purpose and intent to injure Rabbi Herzfeld,” it said.</p>
<div id="attachment_762931" style="width:445px" class="wp-caption alignnone"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-762931" class="size-large wp-image-762931" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2024/07/blinken7-435x576.jpg" alt="Outside Blinken's home / Instagram" width="435" height="576" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2024/07/blinken7-435x576.jpg 435w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2024/07/blinken7-227x300.jpg 227w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2024/07/blinken7-768x1017.jpg 768w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2024/07/blinken7.jpg 840w" sizes="(max-width: 435px) 100vw, 435px"/></p>
<p id="caption-attachment-762931" class="wp-caption-text">Outside Blinken’s home / Instagram</p>
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<p>The next week, the protesters filed the action in city court against Herzfeld.</p>
<p>In an email to The Daily Wire, Barmada and Rokhvand suggested that that the rabbi’s lawyer, Steven Lieberman, was being greedy, saying the $182,000 figure was “over-inflated legal fees.”</p>
<p>“We were shocked by the tone and findings outlined in the subsequent order granting outrageous legal fees. Albeit ultimately deemed ‘protected speech,’ the evidence at trial showed Rabbi Herzfeld and his cohorts, on multiple occasions, came inappropriately close to females and made offensive and vile remarks to intimidate them, e.g. ‘why do you support rape,&#8217;” they said. “We will appeal, and look forward to a final ruling on the matter.”</p>
<p>The statement was sent through their lawyer Asim Humayun, who on Instagram has called for a “registry for Americans in IDF” and said he wears a Palestinian flag pin as a “piece of s—t repellant.” One picture shows that Media Benjamin, a prominent CodePink activist known for hounding pro-Israel congressmen, attended a hearing in the stalking case.</p>
<p>After the D.C. judge granted a temporary restraining order against the rabbi early in the case, Humayun posed smiling with Barmada, writing: “We had to take out a restraining order against a rabbi who keeps coming and harassing us, has wrongfully sued us, and lied about us in the news. We won’t be silenced!”</p>
<p>Herzfeld may be able to collect on the $182,000: despite Barmada presenting herself as a tent-dwelling radical at the around-the-clock protest in front of Blinken’s home, she apparently lives in a $1.5 million house with an indoor pool, according to the address in court records.</p>
<p><strong>Related: <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/soros-prosecutor-wont-shut-down-pro-palestinian-encampment-outside-antony-blinkens-home" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Soros Prosecutor Won’t Shut Down Pro-Palestinian Encampment Outside Antony Blinken’s Home</a></strong></p>
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Anti-Israel Activists Ordered To Pay $182,000 After Falsely Accusing Rabbi Of Stalking
