Mike Kelly, a reporter at The Bergen Record, wrote yesterday an extended report about the consequences of the deaths of Sarah Duker and Matthew Eisenfield in a 1996 terror attack. The families of the couple pursued lawsuits against Iran as a “last resort” to achieve some measure of justice for their losses.

Kelly also frames the lawsuits won by the Duker and Eisenfield families as the examples that paved the way for lawsuits by families of other American terror victims, including the suit that found the Arab Bank liable for supporting terror last month.

The story of Sara Duker’s untimely death — along with the loss of Matthew Eisenfeld and Alisa Flatow — still resonates today, not only in its brutality but in the dogged efforts by other families of U.S. terror victims to seek some measure of justice. …
The template for that landmark verdict was set years earlier — quietly and with little fanfare — in the lawsuits filed by the Duker, Eisenfeld and Flatow families.

However, Kelly writes that the lawsuits “were a last resort.”

With the FBI and Justice Department reluctant to pursue criminal indictments against their children’s killers, the families believed that their only choice to try to force action was to go to court. Their ultimate aim, they said, wasn’t about gaining money for themselves — it was to point a finger of blame at Iran for providing the financing for the attacks and, perhaps, to extract some punishment.

The role of Iran loomed large in the lawsuits brought by the Duker, Eisenfield and Flatow families. According to Kelly, during the 1990’s Iran gave $100 million in aid to the Palestinians with an estimated $75 million going directly to terror.

The New York Times reported in July that the research behind the Flatow lawsuit uncovered some of the ways Iran and international banks conspired to evade sanctions. The Arab Bank was found liable last month for financing Hamas, when it launched over twenty terror attacks against Israel. Damages are to be determined at a future trial.

In his profile of Nitsana Darsha-Leitner, founder of Shurat Hadin – The Israel Law Center, which appeared in the February 2014 issue of The Tower Magazine, editor David Hazony observed:

This, in essence, is what Nitsana has accomplished, as well, together with the efforts of U.S. Treasury officials and Mossad agents and governments around the world over the last two decades. By forcing terrorists to hire lawyers, accountants, and public relations firms, you have squeezed them into the rubric of civilizational order. You put them on their heels. Instead of aggressively planning their next attack, they started worrying where the next lawsuit or court action would come from.

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