Israeli police arrest 18-year-old Jewish suspect in mosque arson case

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"Israeli police said Thursday they have arrested a suspect in a mosque burning that sparked violent protests in an Arab village earlier this week.

Police gave few details about the suspect, but his lawyer identified him as an 18-year-old seminary student with ties to one of the most hardline Jewish settlements in the West Bank.

Monday’s arson attack in Tuba-Zangria, a Bedouin village in northern Israel, set off a protest that were dispersed by police. The blaze damaged carpets and interior walls inside the mosque, and Israeli media said copies of the Quran, the Muslim holy book, were also burned.

Later in the day, Israel’s chief rabbis, President Shimon Peres and Christian and Druse religious leaders visited the village to condemn the attack and express solidarity with residents.

Police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said the suspect was arrested Monday, shortly after the incident, but a gag order had prevented publication of the arrest.

Lawyer Adi Keidar, who is representing the suspect, said his client was a student at a religious seminary in Yitzhar, an ultranationalist settlement deep inside the northern West Bank. The student denied the allegations and is exercising his right to remain silent, Keidar said."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/middle-east/israeli-police-arrest-18-year-old-jewish-suspect-in-mosque-arson-case/2011/10/06/gIQAQ9mHQL_story.html



Muslim and Christian cemeteries desecrated in Jaffa on eve of Yom Kippur

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"Hoodlums whose pride is their Jewishness have desecrated last evening – according to testimonies, less than an hour before Yom Kippur – two cemeteries in Jaffa. One of the cemeteries was Muslim, the other Orthodox Christian. The hoodlums desecrated tombstones and wrote “price tag” and “death to Arabs” on them. This being Yom Kippur, the Israeli media did not report anything yet – at least not that I’ve seen. MK Ahmed Tibi confirmed the details in an email, and you can see pictures here. Tibi further said that “We are facing a rising wave of terrorist acts by Jewish extremists who act almost with no hindrance in the occupied territories, and have lately turned their attention to the Green Line in order to harm places sacred to Muslims and Christians. The responsibility lies wholly with the government and its apparati”. A protest vigil will be held tonight in Jaffa; you can find details about it here (Hebrew and Arabic).

As my colleague Larry Darfner noted, this latest wave of attacks by Jews comes on the background of an almost unprecedented calmness, security-wise. The fact that they boil over the Green Line is not accidental. These people, after all, are the disciples of Baruch Goldstein; if they had broader horizons, they could name Abu Musab Al Zarqawi as another mentor. Their whole purpose is ending this calmness. They want blood, fire and columns of smoke. When these will appear, they will lean back and say “we told you so.” Another point worth noting is the desecration of the Christian cemetery: Contrary to the myths, it proves that the hatred of mankind of Orthodox Judaism has little if anything to do with the current conflict with the Palestinians. It is the last in a long, under-reported attacks on Christian establishments in Israel.

One further wonders whether this escalation – how many more steps to the gates of hell? – is not a response, among others, to the arrest of a suspect in the burning of the mosque in Tuba Zangaria. Terror organizations often react in this way to the arrest of their members, and the whole logic of the “price tag” pogroms is to punish Palestinians for the actions of the security forces.
The guilt resides, as Tibi noted correctly, with the government of Israel. PM Netanyahu may denounce these pogroms, but he is speaking out of both sides of his mouth: He had no problem whatsoever sitting on the same platform with Dov Lior, possibly the worst of the inciting rabbis. Shmuel Elihau, the municipal rabbi of Safed, keeps drawing his government salary despite publishing illegal calls for denying apartments to Israeli Palestinians. This is the same Eliahu who openly and clearly refused to denounce the “price tag” pogroms. He is still in office. Chief Rabbi Shlomo Amar – the one suspected of kidnapping and assault, not the one suspected of receiving bribes and inappropriately touching men – said this week that the burning of the mosque in Tuba Zangria “may have been a blood libel.” (Hebrew) It’s easy to imagine the uproar had, say, a Polish bishop said he opposed the burning of synagogues, but we should first ascertain this isn’t a blood libel against good Christians. Amar keeps his job as if nothing happened; we didn’t even had a proper public outcry. In short, the government of Israel looks, when trying to fight Jewish terrorism, like the Saudi government of a decade ago, facing the Salafist terrorists: It is a main source of funds to the terrorists, and they can only exist because the government’s armed forces support them.

The West Bank pogromchiks has made a mockery of the IDF’s legal obligation to protect the indigent population from them. Now they are trying to make it plain to Israeli Palestinians that they, too, will not be protected by the Zionist regime – and the latter know it’s not that the regime can’t, it’s that it won’t.

The pogromchiks, like Yigal Amir and like almost all Jewish terrorists, act out of supporting communities and out of the knowledge no one will turn them in. The vast majority of the settlers and the religious community, of course, will not dare to act themselves in this way. They will simply keep a quiet support from afar. As Yoel Bin Noon, who exposed the rabbis who gave the halachic decision to murder Rabin, found to his cost, the religious have no problems treating you as an outcast; Bin Noon had to move to another settlement and hire bodyguards for a while. If the settlers were serious about denouncing the pogroms, and not just paying lip service, Dov Lior and Shmuel Eliahu would have been excommunicated ages ago. However, lighting a fire on the Sabbath will get in you in trouble in the settlements – unless that fire is in a mosque. Historians dubbed the Ku Klux Klan of the years immediately after the Civil War as the military arm of the democratic party; the pogromchiks are the military arm of the Yesha Council, and they make every effort to import West Ban mores into Israel proper.

So what can be done? We can begin by closing down the hornet’s nest, the yeshiva in Yitzhar, and ban all its teachers and students from the West Bank. The government can announce that for every “price tag” action, a hesder yeshiva – yeshivas of part-time soldiers, the mainstay of the settler movement – will be closed down. Shmuel Eliahu, and all the rabbis who signed his call to deny apartments to non-Jews, can be fired. We can, in short, present the Jewish Brotherhood with an iron wall, and inform them for every “price tag” action, they’ll pay a much more painful price tag."

http://972mag.com/muslim-and-christian-cemeteries-desecrated-in-jaffa/24832/

Shin Bet says it has accumulated information on the involvement of Yitzhar's yeshiva students in illegal, subversive and violent activities against Arabs and the security forces.

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"The Shin Bet security service is urging the Education Ministry to immediately halt funding to the Od Yosef Hai Yeshiva in the settlement of Yitzhar, near Nablus, saying it has received intelligence information that senior rabbis in the yeshiva are encouraging their students to attack Arabs.

The army's GOC Central Command, Maj. Gen. Avi Mizrahi, recently issued restraining orders that forbid several students affiliated with the yeshiva to enter the West Bank. This decision was based on what security sources termed well-founded suspicions that these students had been involved in attacks on Arabs, including "price tag" attacks on Arab property (so called because they seek to deter the army from razing houses in the settlements) and the torching of mosques in nearby Palestinian villages.

The head of the yeshiva, Rabbi Yitzhak Shapira, was filmed in the past accompanying some of his students to a nearby Arab village; the students then threw stones while the rabbi looked on. Shapira is the author of the controversial work "The King's Torah," which, among other things, discusses circumstances under which Jewish law might permit the killing of non-Jews."

http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/news/shin-bet-urges-israeli-government-to-halt-funding-of-west-bank-yeshiva-1.386892