1 Nov 2009 10:41 PM By Noam Sheizaf



Today at 6 pm  the court order the police requested was lifted, and the Israeli media could finally publish the story everybody knew of for weeks: Another Jewish terrorist was arrested.

Yaakov Teitel, an immigrant from the US, is suspected of killing two Palestinians, placing the bomb that wounded professor Ze'ev Sternhell and rigging the package bomb which left the child of a Messianic Jew seriously wounded. Teitel also admitted to the murder at the gay community center in Tel Aviv, but there is no evidence linking him to this crime.

This is the second Jewish terrorist to come out of Rahel Shvut settlements. In 2005 Asher Weisgen, a bus driver, shot and killed four Palestinians near Shiloh in the West Bank. Even so, when you listen to the settlers in the Israeli media this evening, all of what they talk about is "the incitement against the Right". None of them seems ready to ask some tough question on racist anti-Arab discourse they were promoting, or about the de-legitimization of the left.

What's funny is that the settlers were pushing their message even before the Taitel's arrest was made public. As Ido Keinan reveled in his blog, a Right wing PR group named "Mateh Arim" (מטה ערים) distributed a talking points e-mail, in which speakers for the Right were instructed to counterattack by the Left immediately. One of the points reads:

"Assaf Goldring who recently murdered his 3 year-old daughter was a left wing activist and a kibbutz member. No right-wing journalist used this to hint that all leftists or kibbutz members are the same as Goldring. It is both unprofessional and rude when Left wing journalists dare to smear the right, the religious or the settlers when something [of this sort] happens."

Is this is the best they could come up with? A domestic violence case of some kibbutz member? Obviously, this is the perfect example to the 60-year-old fact that while hate talk goes in all directions in Israel, bullets fly only from right to left.

The truth is that the Israeli media is very easy on right-wing terrorism. This sort of violence against Arabs and Jews alike existed since the seventies - the famous cases are of course the Jewish Underground who not only murdered, but tried to carry out an attack against Palestinian buses that would have made the Hamas look like a youth organization; the murder of Emil Grinzwaig in a Peace Now rally; and most notably, the murder of PM Rabin - but there are violent attacks on Arabs on regular basis which are reported almost only on the Arab media, and there are several unsolved murders of Palestinians in the West Bank from recent years.

How come our world-known internal security organization, the Shin Beit, who managed to do the impossible and destroy the Palestinian terrorist infrastructure just a few years ago, is unable to find a handful of Jewish terrorists?

First possible explanation: as Alon Ben David, channel 10's military correspondent explained just too candidly this evening: "these [Jews] are no Palestinian that you can pressure during interrogations."

Second possible explanation: there are more than a handful of terrorists.

 

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Posted at 1 Nov 2009 10:41 PM by Noam Sheizaf

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Posted By News - 3 Nov 2009 4:41 AM

Jack Teitel was among the settlers living in the West Bank (AP) The New York Times is reporting that

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