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Israeli police say they have broken up a gang of neo-Nazis who are accused of carrying out attacks on foreigners, gay people and religious Jews.

The eight suspects, aged 16-21, are all Israeli citizens from the former Soviet Union. They were arrested a month ago, but the news only emerged on Saturday.

Police say searches of their homes yielded Nazi uniforms, portraits of Adolf Hitler, knives, guns and TNT.

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Got to wonder about a "Law of Return" that allows in neo-Nazis who don't even consider themselves Jewish but excludes non-Jewish Palestinians who were born in Jerusalem, Jaffa etc.

[ 09 September 2007: Message edited by: aka Mycroft ]

In Soviet days, for example, Jews could only get exit visas for Israel. Of course, few people in their right minds wanted to go to Israel - so, as soon as they got to the transit point in Vienna, they would change destinations and head for the U.S., Canada, etc.

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Originally posted by Solidarity4Ever:
Then there should be a "Law of Expulsion" to deal with this sort of thing. Send them back to Russia (with love).

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So people can continue to pretend that being a citizen of a Jewish State and being a racist, fascist pig are mutually exclusive?

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Originally posted by ohara:
And it seems Israel is dealing with it. All some here seem capable of is finding dirt and trying to exploit it in any way possible that puts Isarel in a bad light.

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If the Babble community was really anti Israeli, Michelle woudn't let me post articles by Uri Avnery, Amira Hass, Ran Hacohen and Ilan Pappe.

[ 09 September 2007: Message edited by: CMOT Dibbler ]

[ 09 September 2007: Message edited by: CMOT Dibbler ]

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Originally posted by ohara:
And it seems Israel is dealing with it. All some here seem capable of is finding dirt and trying to exploit it in any way possible that puts Isarel in a bad light.

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Russians or others (Jews or not, who cares) who immigrated voluntarily since then are colonizers. It's no accident that they are among the most right-wing reactionary segments of the population. They should all be sent back to where they came. What a disgrace that they are encouraged and financed to settle on lands whose rightful owners can't even visit.

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What makes a person who came to Israel before 1967 an immigrant and a Jew who came after 1967 a colonizer? Couldn't it be argued that every indivual who has come to Isreal since 1948 is a colonizer?

[ 09 September 2007: Message edited by: CMOT Dibbler ]

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Originally posted by CMOT Dibbler:

What makes a Jew who came to Israel before 1967 an immigrant and a Jew who came after 1967 a colonizer? Couldn't it be argued that every Jewish person who has come to Isreal since 1948 is a colonizer?

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if you distinguish between "Jewish persons" and non-Jewish persons coming to Israel since 1948, you would be an anti-Semite...

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[ 09 September 2007: Message edited by: CMOT Dibbler ]

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Originally posted by ohara:
And it seems Israel is dealing with it. All some here seem capable of is finding dirt and trying to exploit it in any way possible that puts Isarel in a bad light.

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These guys aren't the only ones, the neo-nazi "National Bolshevik Party" is also active in Israel.

I think a lot of the problem is that Israel was so desperate to get non-Arabs to settle the West Bank (which is where many Soviet immigrants ended up) and residents of ex-Soviet states (Jewish or not) were so desperate to leave that not many questions were asked. My understanding from Soviet Jews is that quite a number of the "Soviet Jews" who went to Israel are either not Jewish at all or have such a tenuous link to Judaism that they don't consider themselves Jewish and only went to Israel because the ex-Soviet Union was such a basket case.

Of course, being sent as cannonfodder to the West Bank has alienated many Soviets as well.

It's not a surprise that many Soviet immigrants try to leave Israel (a number have come to Canada claiming refugee status on the grounds of alleged discrimination against them in Israel - not just think for a moment about the depths of this treachery - so-called Jewish leaders actually lobbying the US and Canadian government to deny Jews leaving the USSR refugee status so that their only "haven" would be Israel.)

Of course, if Israel and North American Jewish groups such as the CJC and AZF hadn't lobbied the Canadian and American Jews to stop accepting Soviet Jews as refugees in the 1980s (a rather cynical manouver designed to force Soviet Jewish emigrants to go to Israel by closing off all other options) this wouldn't be a problem today. Of course, there'd also be far fewer West Bank settlers.

In short, the presence of neo-nazis in Israel today is a direct result of Israel's desire to build settlements in the West Bank and Gaza.

[ 09 September 2007: Message edited by: aka Mycroft ]

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Originally posted by ohara:
And it seems Israel is dealing with it. All some here seem capable of is finding dirt and trying to exploit it in any way possible that puts Isarel in a bad light.

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And the usual suspect(s) still can't muster anything but ad hominem.

If Israel is dealing with it, good on them. It's their responsibility. However, I suspect they'll do it without any self-reflexion on the hypocrisy of their position.

You undoubtedly don't see the pitiful irony of Israel opening it's gates to ex-USSR "Jews" based on atavistic blood purity laws and allowing in exactly those the "Jewish State" is supposed to protect Jews from. If it weren't tragic, it would make pretty good comedy.

Ultimately, however, this case brings to light the crucial question faced by proponents of a blood-based Jewish State: why is it that Israel's blood purity laws are okay to exclude Everyone Else from Jew, but not Jew from Everyone Else? How can a Jewish State that believes in the supremacy of Jewish blood for the purposes of its immigration and citizenship policies deny the validity, or prosecute the proponents of, similar ideologies that seek to exclude Jews on the basis of exactly the same criteria?

[ 09 September 2007: Message edited by: B.L. Zeebub LLD ]

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Israel opening it's gates to ex-USSR "Jews" based on atavistic blood purity laws

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I've never heard of such a thing.

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MK Effi Eitam (National Religious Party - Ehud Leumi) stated he will propose a bill that would alter the Law of Return. The Law of Return ensures that any person who has at least one Jewish grandparent can immigrate to Israel and attain citizenship.

Eitam stated that Israel has become "a haven for people who hate Israel, hate Jews, and exploit the Law of Return to act on this hatred."

MK Ahmed Tibi of Ra'am Ta'al called on authorities to deal harshly with the cell, saying that it represents a "ludicrous and outrageous phenomenon, where people immigrated to Israel and received automatic citizenship under the Law of Return, while citizens of Nazareth and Taibe are not allowed to visit their own relatives merely due to the fact that they are Arabs."

NRP Chairman Zevulun Orlev recommended the Knesset pass a law that would allow the deportation and revocation of citizenship for people found to be neo-Nazis. Orlev stated that the group's violent attacks "are shocking, and must be dealt with harshly," adding that Israel must set an example to the world in how to deal with anti-Semitism.

Police have seized 5 kilograms of explosives, a pistol, and an M-16 assault rifle belonging to the group of neo-Nazi youths. Police believe the group intended to use the weapons against punk rockers in the city, with whom they often clash violently.

Six of the eight suspects have confessed to the charges against them, while two reported ringleaders of the group have professed their innocence. One of the reported leaders Eli Boanitov was quoted by police as saying, "I won't ever give up, I was a Nazi and I will stay a Nazi, until we kill them all I will not rest."

Police confirmed that the majority of the suspects were enrolled in Israeli public schools, and at least one was drafted into the army. Police suspect that the youth who was drafted fled the country after giving his army-issue M-16 to a member of the cell.

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Originally posted by Stockholm:

Similarly, Germany opens its gates to ex-USSR "Germans" based on atavistic blood purity laws

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Ah, good ol' Stockholm back to remind us that two wrongs do, in fact, make a right...

But only if they were the same wrong...

The more complete truth is that Germany has been expressly moving AWAY from blood-based nationalism and citizenship laws (jus sanguinis). The reforms of 2000 made German citizens out of tens-of-thousands of foreign born "non-Germans" and their descendants. With those reforms, Germany marked a crucial ideological shift to nationalism and citizenship not based primarily in blood.

The German "Right of Return" is limited in scope to Germans effected by the partitioning of Europe after WWII, requires clear documentation of ancestry (a paper trail), and does not include everyone of - even dubious - German ancestry worldwide. Germany also offers citizenship to Jews who had theirs revoked by the Nazis. These principles are largely in accordance with the notion of the Right of Return as defined in international law.

Israel, on the other hand, continues using "Jewishness" (defined by blood) as the primary catagory under which people may immigrate to Israel and gain citizenship.

Israel has reinforced this inclusion/exclusion with laws such as that denying Palestinians who marry Israeli citizens the right to abode, let alone citizenship. Israel also maintains a discriminatory rift between Israeli "nationality" (based in blood) and Israeli "citizenship". The former comes with more rights than the latter. In fact, to be thorough, we must also include the rank of non-national/non-citizen subject-without-rights (homo sacer) in the Israeli scheme to reflect the status of the Palestinians of the Occupied Territories who are legally Israel's responsibility.

Israel's Law of Return denies the Right of Return even to those Palestinians with documentation showing previous residence and land ownership in the territory of Israel.

The difference is not subtle.

[ 10 September 2007: Message edited by: B.L. Zeebub LLD ]

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Originally posted by aka Mycroft:

Of course, if Israel and North American Jewish groups such as the CJC and AZF hadn't lobbied the Canadian and American Jews to stop accepting Soviet Jews as refugees in the 1980s (a rather cynical manouver designed to force Soviet Jewish emigrants to go to Israel by closing off all other options) this wouldn't be a problem today. Of course, there'd also be far fewer West Bank settlers.

In short, the presence of neo-nazis in Israel today is a direct result of Israel's desire to build settlements in the West Bank and Gaza.

[ 09 September 2007: Message edited by: aka Mycroft ]

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Originally posted by ohara:
Mmm how stupid of me of course its all CJC's fault.

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Not quite, but you have to admit ohara, it's completely shameful for North American Jewish groups to have lobbied to deny Soviet Jews refugee status, particularly after years of saying "let our people go". A complete betrayal of Soviet Jews that could have had disastrous effects had, for intstance, the coup against Gorbachev succeeded and emigration ended and, worse, the anti-Semitic tendencies that were swirling in Russia in the early 1990s somehow took power.

Don't you agree that the CJC et al worked *against* the interest of Soviet Jews by doing this (also by lobbying for "direct flights to Israel" in order to prevent Soviet Jews from landing in Vienna and deciding to go somewhere other than Israel)? Or do you defend these actions that put the interests of Israel over the interests of Soviet Jews? Is it any wonder many Soviet Jews in Israel resent the country?

[ 09 September 2007: Message edited by: aka Mycroft ]

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Originally posted by quelar:
Seriously people, does this really have anything to do with Israeli politics or the CJC?

When I see this what I feel is that these are a bunch of stupid ignorant kids who need to get their heads straight, if these kids were in Canada, I doubt we'd be blaming the government policy for it, they're just stupidly, horribly misguided.

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Free of context, everything is the same is the same is the same... But it isn't Canada. It's Israel.

There is context. There is a brutal irony here. There is a terrible ideology operating in Israel's immigration system.

And notice that the irony has not been lost on the Israeli commentators on the topic. From all ends of the spectrum they've pointed directly at the Law of Return as a key factor in the equation either in calls to amend it, or calls to abolish it.

Don't tell me that if a bunch of neo-Nazis - or some other brand of terrorist - were allowed to immigrate into Canada carte blanche and began attacking Canadians that there wouldn't be some questions about the immigration and other government policies that allowed them to enter in the first place.

It just so happens in the case of Israel you've got this giant whopper of a turd called the "Law of Return" lying in the middle of the room that no one should ignore.

[ 10 September 2007: Message edited by: B.L. Zeebub LLD ]

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Originally posted by Stockholm:
This is a circle of 8 individuals in Israel. As far as a know, there are HUNDREDS of documented cases a year in Canada of anti-semitic incidents, meaning that there must be thousands in the US.

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So your answer is "no, but I don't really feel like admitting it because I don't like where this discussion is headed?"

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Originally posted by Stockholm:
This is a circle of 8 individuals in Israel. As far as a know, there are HUNDREDS of documented cases a year in Canada of anti-semitic incidents, meaning that there must be thousands in the US.

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Originally posted by unionist:
trying again...

Perhaps ohara could tell us when was the last time neo-Nazi and anti-Semitic behaviour of such scope and violence was recorded in the U.S. or Canada?

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There was a similar attack in London Ont a few years ago on an African Canadian by a neo-Nazi that also resulted in a prison term.

A Chasidic student was attacked in front of his Yeshiva last year also caught on video tape.

There were others but these are what immediatley springs to mind.

[ 10 September 2007: Message edited by: Petsy ]

NEVER YET IN CANADA?

That doesn't say much for Israel being a safe haven for Jews, does it?

I'm not even talking about Israel's aggressive and ethnocentric behaviour, which puts Jews in danger every single day of their lives, far more so than in any other country of the world.

[ 10 September 2007: Message edited by: aka Mycroft ]

I like your "Se non ora, quando?"

I first learned that in Pirkei Avot, a Hebrew theological treatise dating back to the early AD period:

Ve'im lo achshav, eimatai?

ETA: Actually, I like the full passage:

Im ein ani li, mi li?
If I am not for myself, who will be for me?

Ve'im ani le'atzmi, ma ani?
And if I am for myself alone, what am I?

Ve'im lo achshav, eimatai?
And if not now, when?

[ 10 September 2007: Message edited by: unionist ]

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Police Commissioner David Cohen said Monday that he believes there are dozens of people currently involved in neo-Nazi activities in Israel.

Cohen added that they apparently operate in small groups or alone, and not in large, organized groups. Nevertheless, as a result of the investigations conducted over the past year, which exposed one neo-Nazi organization, he believes it will be possible to locate other neo-Nazi activists and bring them to justice.

"The police will act with the utmost severity and zero tolerance," Cohen said at a ceremony at police headquarters Monday in honor of the upcoming Rosh Hashanah holiday. He also praised the investigators who exposed the neo-Nazis now on trial.

Meanwhile, graffiti with Nazi overtones, such as "Hitler is the Messiah" and "Long live Hitler and Jesus Christ," accompanied by crosses and swastikas, were discovered Monday evening on the walls of the synagogue of the Sephardi Chief Rabbi of Eilat, Rabbi Moshe Hadaya.

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By Meron Rappaport Haaretz. Sept. 16, 2007

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In Israel, the discussion immediately turned to the Law of Return, as if the phenomenon would disappear if only those Jews who are recognized as such by Jewish law [halakha] were allowed to enter Israel. This baseless argument is refuted by the fact that some of the neo-Nazi group's members are considered Jews according to halakha. And, sadly, the fact is that kosher Jews are also capable of acting like neo-Nazis.

This is undoubtedly a shocking phenomenon and the attackers, alongside the environment that bred this pattern of behavior, must be dealt with. But the victims also deserve attention. According to comments made by the attackers, most of their targets were foreign workers. Haaretz's Roni Singer-Heruti reported that the police mounted a concerted effort to locate the victims in order to strengthen the case against the attackers, but this effort was unsuccessful. None of the victims filed a complaint with the police. It seems that a foreign worker in Israel is more afraid of the police than of a gang of hooligans that beats him mercilessly. The hard work of the Immigration Police has apparently borne fruit.

This is no surprise to anyone involved in the field. Noa Kaufman, the director of a clinic run by Physicians for Human Rights, says that foreign workers occasionally come to the clinic after taking a beating. Although the staff encourages them to file a complaint with the police, the workers are usually scared of doing so.

The fact that no one complained about these brutal attacks on foreign workers should trouble us even more because they occurred in public places. Even if the gang members made sure there were no eyewitnesses to the attacks, they probably left the victims bleeding at the scene. It is possible that passersby stumbled upon them, saw the beaten people and continued on their way.

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During the second intifada, several hundred people gathered around Jaffa's Hassan Bek Mosque following a terror attack and threw rocks at Muslim worshipers, who took cover in the building. Prominent among the rock throwers were Russian-speaking skinheads with tattoos. In my layman's eyes, they looked incredibly like neo-Nazis. Time and again they broke through the police lines and surrounded the mosque, hurling rocks at its windows. The policemen took note of them, but did nothing. At one stage, several of the skinheads lifted the police barriers and tossed them at the mosque and at the worshipers' cars. The police continued to look on with curiosity. No one was arrested.

Even if there is no connection between those skinheads and the group in Petah Tikva, the latter could have learned from the police's behavior in Jaffa that those meant to uphold law and order would not be greatly upset by violence against the "others." Perhaps those skinheads did not salute with an upraised arm. Perhaps they did not venerate Hitler. But they venerated violence against those weaker than them, and this is just as bad.

Until Israeli society begins seriously combatting this dark racism, it will continue to regard the "neo-Nazis" as aliens who suddenly landed here. Public opinion will continue to believe that if we only send them back to the distant planet from whence they came, everything will be resolved. This is really not the case.

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Originally posted by Stockholm:

Similarly, Germany opens its gates to ex-USSR "Germans" based on atavistic blood purity laws

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Crap. This is false news. And defamation.

The "blood laws" allowing Germans citizenship in the DDR and the GDR were created because millions of ethnic Germans where expelled to Germany from Poland, Russia, Lithuania, Czecholslovakia, Hungary and even the Netherlands and France, after the war.

The reason they were allowed a specific dispensation based on being ethnically German was because there were millions of stateless Germans living in Germany without any rights whatsoever, as they had been expelled from their country of birth.

The laws specifically relate to these events. There is no blanket acceptance of German people, as German citizenship simply because they are German. They must have been stripped of their citizenship and deported to Germany first.

The reason that these laws refer to "ethinc Germans" was because the Poles were not kicking Poles out of Poland. Simple. Thus the reason the laws only relate to "ethnic Germans" is because the specific problem the law addresses is one of stateless ethnic German being deported to Germany.

Otherewise German citizenship laws are quite normal. For instance one can claim German citizenship if ones mother or father were a German citizen. There is no ethnic requirement. One can not simply show up and say my grand pappy was Prussian, so therefore give me the keys to Berlin.

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The law is codified in Article 116 of the Basic Law for the Federal Republic of Germany, which provides access to German citizenship for anyone "who has been admitted to the territory of the German Reich within the boundaries of December 31, 1937 as a refugee or expellee of German ethnic origin or as the spouse or descendant of such person".

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Right of return

You know this. I have told you this before. Yet you continue to spread fals information about these laws, in order to justify Israeli blood laws.

Interestingly, Germany also allows special dispensation to the families of Jews who were victims of the Holocaust, even though they may not directly have any immediate relatives with German citizenship.

[ 16 September 2007: Message edited by: Cueball ]

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Originally posted by B.L. Zeebub LLD:

Ah, good ol' Stockholm back to remind us that two wrongs do, in fact, make a right...

But only if they were the same wrong...

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Not wrong at all as far as I can see.

[ 16 September 2007: Message edited by: Cueball ]

(How's that, Michelle?)

[ 17 September 2007: Message edited by: B.L. Zeebub LLD ]