Sunday, September 09, 2007

Next Year in Jerusalem

skinhead violencePolice said Sunday they have cracked a cell of young Israeli neo-Nazis accused in a string of attacks on foreign workers, religious Jews, drug addicts and gays.
Soviet Immigrants
Eight immigrants from the former Soviet Union have been arrested in recent days in connection with at least 15 attacks, and a ninth fled the country, police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said, in the first such known cell to be discovered in Israel.

All the suspects are in their late teens or early 20s and have Israeli citizenship, Rosenfeld said.

News of the arrests came as a shock in Israel, which was founded nearly 60 years ago as a refuge for Jews in the wake of the Nazi Holocaust and remains a most sensitive subject. Any forms of anti-Semitism around the world outrage Israelis, and the discovery of such violence in the country's midst made the front pages of newspapers and dominated talk on morning radio shows.
'Heil Hitler!'
Police found knives, spiked balls, explosives and other weapons in the suspects' possession, Rosenfeld said. One photo that was seized showed one suspect holding an M16 rifle in one hand and in the other, a sign reading "Heil Hitler," he added.

Police discovered the skinhead ring after investigating the desecration of two synagogues that were sprayed with swastikas in the central Israeli city of Petah Tikva more than a year ago, Rosenfeld said.
Part of International Movement
Police computer experts have determined they maintained contacts with neo-Nazi groups abroad, and materials seized include a German-language video about neo-Nazis in the U.S.

The group planned its attacks, and its targets were foreign workers from Asia, drug addicts, homosexuals, punks and Jews who wore skullcaps. In one case they discussed planning a murder, Rosenfeld said, without providing details.
Not Haters, Just Deniers
Israel doesn't specifically have a hate crimes law, and suspects in past cases have been tried as Holocaust deniers, he said.

The Anti-Defamation League, a U.S.-based group that fights anti-Semitism, condemned the neo-Nazi cell, but urged Israelis not to stigmatize the entire Russian immigrant community based on the acts of what appeared to be a marginal group.

Their statement read . .
"The suspicion that immigrants to Israel could have been acting in praise of Nazis and Hitler is an anathema to the Jewish state and is to be repelled. The tragic irony in this is that they would have been chosen for annihilation by the Nazis they strive to emulate."

Amos Herman, an official with the semiofficial Jewish Agency, which works on behalf of the government to encourage immigration to Israel, said the phenomenon was not representative of the Russian immigration.

He called the gang a group of frustrated, disgruntled youths trying to strike at the nation's most sensitive core.
"We thought that it would never happen here, but it has and we have to deal with it."


Adapted from an Associated Press story by Amy Teibel appearing September 9, 2007.

1 comment:

Online One State Bibliography Project said...

I think it is funny how the media and government is acting like this is some utterly unique singular event. Remember a few years ago when the "White Israeli Union" neo-Nazi group had its website taken down? With all the video of the neo-Nazis - giving the Hitler salute in their full IDF uniforms - talking about how to kill the Arabs for practice and how not to act like a "zhid" (Jew, in Russian)? Or then there were the skinhead gangs stormtrooping through Tel Aviv a few years ago too. Anyone who follows the "The Israeli Information and Assistance Center for the Victims of Anti-Semitism" ( http://pogrom.org.il/ ) which monitors neo-Nazis in Israel regularly knows this most recent event isn't particularly unique. The problem is that the government and police "turn a blind eye" to Israeli neo-Nazis which gives them freedom to expand. Rest assured this cell isn't all of them.

Here we have another aspect of Israel's demographic crisis. In the rush to import olim whose only real criteria is they are not Arab or Muslim it can't come as any surprise that that managed to import traditional Russian anti-Semites too. Most of these kids are Russians who were brought to Israel by their parents against their will, they don't want to be Israeli and never did. HOWEVER, in the end, if Israel had not imported the million plus Russians - many, or even most, of them non-Jewish - then the non-Arab population between the river and the sea would already be a definite minority to the Arab population. There just aren't enough legitimate Jews to maintain the current "Greater Israel," thus the floods of non-Jewish olim, the mass conversions of Ethiopians, Indians, and Peruvian Indians, and so on. These measures - the desperation for any non-Arab/Muslim immigrants - undermines the "Jewish character" of Israel just as surely as any compromise with the native Palestinians would.