Gag on this!

This is psoitively hilarious. For 5 days, the Israeli media has been awash with a story concerning a new and serious scandal involving Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. At the request of the police, the Israeli district court issued a comprehensive gag order on anything having to do with the story, but even so last Friday Yediot Ahronot let it be known that the case involves illegal bribes (or at least money transfers) from an American businessman. The police & judges of Israel are pretending to live in a quaint time before the existence of that damn internets and the blogosphere. Yesterday, The New York Post broke the name of the American businessman, Mr. Morris Talansky of Woodmere (Woodburgh), NY, who is being questioned for passing large sums of money to Olmert when he was mayor of Jerusalem in the 1990s. (I should mention I had dinner with Olmert back in those days -- a "slim customer" if I ever saw one.) Anyhow, the word broke in Israel via the Internet yesterday afternoon, and here it is 24 hours later, and not a single one of the gutless major papers and news outlets (and their constantly updated web sites) has a word concerning Talansky, who has been here is Israel visiting his children (address has already been posted on the net) since Passover. On one Israeli radio station this morning, announcers told listeners to go The New York Post web site, without saying what will be found there, and Haaretz ran a clouded picture of the web page. Bloggers have been uncovering parts of the story: Talansky's ties to Olmert are proven through the New Jerusalem Fund web site, which lists the home address of Talansky in Woodsburgh, NY, as the business address for the Fund. All of this we know from the Internet and blogs, (even The New York Times has been able to advance the story) and yet the dinosaurs of the Israeli legal system still demand that the gag order be kept in place, and the gutless publishers of once brave independent Israeli newspapers are playing along. Ridiculous.