[NYTr] More on Israel's Russian Neo-Nazis

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

See also:
Russian Emigre Neo-Nazi Gang Caught in Israel After Attacks 9/10/07
https://blythe-systems.com/pipermail/nytr/Week-of-Mon-20070910/068141.html


LA Times - Sep 10, 2007 via rick kissell
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-israel10sep10,1,7051718.story?coll=la-headlines-world


Israel arrests alleged neo-Nazis

The nation is shocked over the news of youths accused of desecrating 
synagogues and beating Jews and others.

By Richard Boudreaux

JERUSALEM --- With eight young immigrants from the former Soviet Union 
under arrest, Israeli authorities said Sunday they had broken up a 
violent neo-Nazi gang that desecrated synagogues and staged at least 15 
attacks on religious Jews, Asian workers, drug addicts and homosexuals.

The news shocked Israelis, whose state was founded as a refuge for Jews 
in the wake of the Nazi Holocaust. Video said to have been taken by the 
skinhead gang to document its beatings was shown at Sunday's Cabinet 
meeting, triggering urgent debate over what to do about immigrants who 
came as Jewish offspring but grew up to commit hate crimes and shout, 
"Heil Hitler!"

Voicing outrage on radio talk shows, Israelis faulted a lax standard 
that allowed many families with Jewish roots but weak ties to Judaism to 
immigrate from the Soviet Union nearly a generation ago and take Israeli 
citizenship.

Israeli leaders said they were appalled.

"We as a society have failed to educate these youths and keep them away 
from dangerous and crazy ideologies," Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said, 
calling for harsh punishment of the arrested skinheads.

The Interior Ministry said it was studying the possibility of stripping 
the gang members of their citizenship and deporting them. All are young 
men in their late teens and early 20s who have "parents or grandparents 
who were Jewish in one way or another," police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld 
said.

A court decided Sunday to keep seven of the eight in custody, pending 
expected indictments this week. The suspects covered their faces with 
their shirts during the hearing.

"We didn't beat anyone," protested Arik Benyatov, 20, the gang's alleged 
leader, claiming his innocence.

Israeli newspapers said six of the eight alleged gangsters had confessed 
to police that they carried out assaults in and around Tel Aviv over a 
period of months before their arrests in August.

The arrests were made public Saturday, capping an investigation begun 
following the desecration of two synagogues sprayed with swastikas in 
the city of Petah Tikva more than a year ago.

Rosenfeld said the young men would be charged with "causing bodily harm 
to individuals and sabotaging synagogues."

Legal experts said the group could be deported if judged to have 
committed acts that constitute a breach of loyalty toward the state and 
the foundation of its existence.

Israeli television stations aired footage seized by the police showing 
several young men surrounding a Russian-born heroin addict and ordering 
him to kneel and beg forgiveness for being a Jew and a junkie. Then they 
pounded him with their fists.

A photograph of six of the suspects raising their arms in a Nazi salute 
ran across the front page of Israel's most widely read newspaper, Yediot 
Aharonot, under a one-word headline: "Unbelievable!"

Police said they found knives, spiked balls, explosives and at least one 
M-16 rifle in the suspects' possession.

The gang maintained computer contact with neo-Nazi groups in Germany and 
other countries abroad, police said.

Israelis have been scandalized before by neo-Nazi activity. In 2003, a 
combat soldier from an immigrant family was arrested after launching a 
Nazi website. A court sentenced him to community service and a tour of 
former Nazi death camps in Europe.

But police said this was the largest group of neo-Nazis ever arrested in 
Israel.

Under a 1970 amendment to Israel's 1950 law of return, a person can 
claim citizenship if a parent or grandparent has Jewish roots. 
Authorities say the law allowed many citizens of the former Soviet Union 
who felt little or no Jewish identity to join the exodus of about 1 
million people who fled to Israel in the late 1980s and early '90s as 
their country and its communist system were collapsing.

Interior Minister Meir Sheetrit and several lawmakers called Sunday for 
amending the law to stop granting automatic citizenship solely on the 
basis of a grandparent's roots.

Others, such as Avigdor Lieberman, a Moldovan immigrant serving in the 
Cabinet, cautioned against sweeping measures that would tarnish the 
image of all Russian-speaking immigrants and call their loyalty into 
question.

Taking the more conservative approach, Olmert said that such gangs could 
be dealt with by the police and the justice system. "There is no need to 
look for solutions that would affect an entire population," he said.

Amos Hermon, an official in the semiofficial Jewish Agency, which helps 
organize immigration to Israel, said neo-Nazism was a "minor phenomenon" 
in the country.

He called the gang a group of disaffected youths venting their 
frustrations by expressing "some of the most hurtful sentiments toward 
the Jewish people."

But Zalman Gilichinsky, an Israeli who has been documenting neo-Nazi 
groups for several years, said they were more common than Israeli 
leaders were willing to admit.

"There are such groups in nearly every city in Israel," he said on 
Israel Radio. "This group was perhaps a little careless and a little too 
violent, and this is why they got caught."

Other commentators said it was a wonder Israel's school system didn't 
previously identify the young gang members, especially in light of the 
fact that one arrested suspect appeared as "Eli the Nazi" in his high 
school yearbook several years ago.