I heard on the news this morning very briefly that the family of that activist in Israel that was run over by the bulldozer is suing Caterpillar (the makers of the bulldozer). I thought that was insane, but while I was looking for a link to post here and bitch about it, I came across this. http://www.jerusalemites.org/press_release/27-11-2004.htm Caterpillar had been asked in the past to stop the sale of their bulldozers to Israel by the Human Rights Watch, and they denied that they could do anything about it.

What does everyone think?

If I can find the link for the story about the family suing, I'll post here.
Ta da! Link

This argument is of the same flair as "guns don't kill people, people kill people".

I'm going to need a 40' pole to even come close to touching this one.

Alright, I'll make an attempt to save my thead.

Isn't it like not selling a gun to a convicted murderer. Telling the gun company, "Hey, you sold this dude some guns and he keeps killing people. Could you stop selling him guns?"

And the gun company says, "Hey, we can't help what he does with our guns. It would be unfair of us to deny him a gun."

This sounds like it would imply that the Israeli military is a convicted murderer, which opens up another whole can of worms. How about the US military and Lockheed Martin?

Furthermore, can a suit between two US entities take place over an incident that didn't happen in the US?

Unlike guns, bulldozers are NECESSARY for many activities. A better metaphor would be not selling knives to a convicted murderer.

To the first part, it's not my intention to call the Israeli government murderers, but it appears that this was the intention of Human Rights Watch.

To the second part, I think yes, but it's probably up for the courts to decide. I do remember a similar episode of Law & Order: SVU. Some dude told his brother in an another country to kill the first dude's wife while she was visiting the other country. The wife's family went after the husband. Acknowledging that SVU is fiction, I assume it's at least been discussed before.

That's what I thought this morning, until I found the article about Human Rights Watch's attempts to alert Caterpillar to the situation.

How did we become such a sue happy people?

*Ponders suing Anheuser-Busch for my headache.

This might be too heavy for a cross-thread reference, but ... A-B's hop fields are in Idaho. If Idaho doesn't exist, maybe A-B doesn't exist. Thus, you have no one to sue.

Son-of-a......I can never catcha break!

Bulldozers in this case, were sold as weapons, illegally.

I have a problem with what Caterpillar is doing, but the only grounds for a lawsuit I can find is to get them to stop breaking the law. Any type of civil suit is riiiiicockulous.