Zoabi: McFly Should Be Prosecuted For Knocking Over Defenseless Pine

“People who harm the defenseless, whether it is Palestinian children or Californian pines that leave behind a lone remnant, must face consequences.”

Jerusalem, October 15 – An Arab lawmaker in Israel’s parliament said she has reviewed the video evidence of Marty McFly’s trip to 1955 in  a DeLorean, and concluded that the teenager’s use of the car to fell a pine tree in Hill Valley, California, was an excessive use of force, and that he should stand trial for the crime.

MK Haneen Zoabi participated in a screening of footage from 1985 in which McFly, then 18, fled the scene of a conflict between Libyan freedom fighters and McFly’s comrade Ellis Brown, a scientist who had stolen precious materials they had entrusted to him. The fighters shot Brown when he gaped at them in a threatening manner, but McFly stole the vehicle containing the valuable metal and drove away, eventually reaching 1955 and knocking over a pine tree. Zoabi charged that the footage constitutes incriminating evidence of McFly’s disregard for arboreal life at a minimum, and possibly criminal intent. If no statute of limitations prevents it, she asserted, McFly should be prosecuted for the criminal negligence of his behavior.

With the thirtieth anniversary of events in the video approaching, a group of Opposition legislators sought to bring attention to the impunity with which certain individuals and groups have perpetrated violence, by staging a series of public showings featuring several such cases. In addition to McFly’s use of a car to knock down a tree, the group reviewed evidence that one Henry “Indiana” Jones, Jr. caused a German tank to plummet from a cliff in Turkey in 1938, and was never made to pay damages or to be charged with at least manslaughter for the death of a German officer inside the vehicle at the time.

Zoabi told reporters, “This is exactly what my colleagues and I have been railing against for years. There is a culture of impunity. People who harm the defenseless, whether it is Palestinian children or Californian pines that leave behind a lone remnant, must face consequences.”

As spokesman for McFly dismissed the allegations. “They’re just trying to hassle him because they’re jealous of his success,” insisted family friend Biff Tannen. “Now I suggest all you reporters and politicians make like a tree and get out of here,” he added menacingly. Tannen refused to comment on other footage purporting to show that McFly caused a collision involving a manure-carrying pickup truck as he rode a stolen skateboard through the streets of Hill Valley.

Observers attribute Tannen’s silence on those events to his own shame, as the film appears to show the collision resulting in a mouthful of manure for Tannen himself. “Whatever the factual basis for his defense of the McFlys, Mr. Tannen’s credibility on the subject remains suspect, so we should probably take his words with a grain of… salt.”