Olmert: 'Jewish underground' behind attack on leftist prof.

[IndianaGreen]

I am sure Sarah Palin would love this kosher version of her radical Xtian views! The more justification for a one state solution to I/P issue, with a secular state having absolute power to restrain all religious radical movements. Marx was right about religion being the opiate of the masses!

Last update - 20:20 28/09/2008

Olmert: 'Jewish underground' behind attack on leftist prof.

By Reuters

A new ultranationalist underground is apparently active in Israel and responsible for a bombing that wounded an outspoken critic of Jewish settlement in the West Bank, outgoing Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said on Sunday.

"The security agencies have been ordered to deal with this case, investigate it and act with the utmost speed to bring to justice what appears to be another underground," Olmert told his cabinet in broadcast remarks.

Professor Zeev Sternhell, a political scientist at Jerusalem's Hebrew University and a leading opponent of settlement building in the Palestinian territories, was lightly wounded on Thursday when a pipe bomb exploded outside his home.

Police found posters in his Jerusalem neighborhood offering a NIS 1.1 million reward for the killing of a member of Israel's left-wing Peace Now movement.

Olmert compared the bombing with the 1995 assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin by a Jewish ultranationalist and a hand grenade attack that killed a Peace Now activist in 1983.

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1025124.html

[Scurrilous]

1. How I became a target for Israel's 'Jewish terrorists'

Peace campaigner attacked with a pipe bomb tells Donald Macintyre why right-wing extremism should be feared

<snip>

"Zeev Sternhell is careful about his choice of words when he unhesitatingly calls the pipe bomb which exploded outside his front door last week "an act of Jewish terrorism."

As a Holocaust survivor orphaned by the age of seven and a combat veteran of Israel's wars, Professor Sternhell, 73, who was lucky to have only been injured in the leg by flying shrapnel from the bomb, is "horrified" not for himself but because it might have hit his wife, daughter his grandchildren on one of their sleepovers, or their neighbours. "It was a terror act because they couldn't know who would have been hit."

Given that, as he wryly puts it, he has no known enemies in the "criminal underworld", the reason for what police think was attempted murder isn't hard to find. As a veteran member of Peace Now, and vigorous opponent of the occupation since the late 1970s, the Hebrew University scholar, Israel Prize laureate and internationally-known authority on the roots of fascism apparently became the target of the highest-profile attack inside Israel by far right-wing Jewish extremists since Yitzhak Rabin's assassination in 1995.

But if the attack was meant to silence one of the country's foremost public intellectuals, it hasn't worked. For a start he does not rule out a connection with strong signs of increasing violence by settlers against Palestinians in the West Bank. In recent weeks, extremist settlers have rioted, blocked roads, burned Palestinian orchards and in one case, armed settlers have attacked a village.

Lamenting that the army and the police are "either unwilling or unable or probably both" to enforce the law against attacks on Palestinians in a West Bank where the settlers enjoy a kind of "self rule", he says the extremists believe that "people like me who think that they are the real danger to Zionism, to the future of the Israeli state, should be neutralised and should be punished... So I think there is a link between the brutality and violence that is the reality of everyday life in the West Bank and this attack."

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