Arab Bank plc, which was found liable this year for hundreds of claims against it for aiding the terrorist organization Hamas, appealed to the Second Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals in New York on Tuesday to dismiss thousands of new claims.

Reuters reports:

A lawyer for the Jordan-based bank asked the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New York to uphold a lower court’s dismissal last year of lawsuits by foreign victims of attacks attributed to the Islamist militant group in Israel and the Palestinian territories.

Kevin Walsh, Arab Bank’s lawyer, argued that corporations cannot be sued under the Alien Tort Statute and its New York branch’s dollar-clearing activities were not enough to overcome a presumption against applying the law to foreign conduct.

In September, Arab Bank was found liable for helping “Hamas militants carry out a wave of violence in Israel that killed and wounded hundreds of Americans.” The liability finding was only a first step as damages are still to be determined and Arab Bank plans to appeal the verdict.

This week’s appeal is an effort to prevent non-Americans from suing the bank.

A fuller discussion of the legal issues in this week’s appeal appears can be found in a summary by the New York Law Journal.

The suit against Arab Bank follows the strategy pioneered by Shurat Hadin – Israel Law Center. In his profile of Shurat Hadin’s founder, Nitsana Darshan-Leitner, The Woman Who Makes Jihadis Squirm, which was published in the February 2014 issue of The Tower Magazine, editor David Hazony describes that strategy:

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.

The moment you recognize that terrorism is not a pathology but a deliberate methodology that counts on chaos to undermine your life, you have already taken the first step to containing, controlling, and defeating it.

[Photo: Jean pierre / WikiCommons ]