When the pogromchiks from Jerusalem go to court, they’ll have a strong case, saying they only did what was expected of them.

Israel officially condemned last week the fact Jewish terrorists attacked a Palestinian vehicle with Molotov cocktails, wounding six of its passengers. Prime Minister Netanyahu quickly had an envoy call Palestinian President Abbas, and promised him Israel would put those responsible on trial. If Abbas is buying this, given Israel’s record regarding the price-taggers, then I have some juicy bridges to sell him at very reasonable prices.

This attack took place on Thursday afternoon. Several hours later, a gang of proud Jewish hoodlums tried to lynch three Palestinians in Jerusalem. The attackers, most of whom appear to have been juveniles, were uttering cries like “a Jew is a soul, an Arab is a son of a whore” and the all-time crowd pleaser, “Death to Arabs.” The goons also tried to prevent emergency forces from treating the victims. One of them is critically wounded.

During the attack on the dorms of Palestinian students in Safed two years ago, inspired by the town’s rabbi Shmuel Eliahu’s ban on renting apartments to non-Jews, the calls of “A Jew is a soul” were heard (Hebrew). The same cry is common (Hebrew) among the fans of racist group Beitar Jerusalem (which sidelines as a soccer team). The supremacists we’re dealing with have nothing to be proud of aside from the fact of their Jewishness, used in the minimalist Orthodox sense of thinking every Jew is a priori superior to every non-Jew.

Hence the speaking of “souls” as a battle cry: a common Orthodox concept is that non-Jews do not have souls. This concept is very strong in Kabbalah (I guess Madonna is in for some nasty shock; being not just a gentile but a woman makes her a particular object of hatred), but exists elsewhere (such as in the Talmudic concept of “you [Jews] are human, they [non-Jews] are not, and Yehuda Halevi’s Kuzari, which rates being on an “inanimate-vegetable-animal-speaking being-Jew” scale).

The attackers quickly spread the lie that they went on the warpath because one of the victims tried to flirt with a Jewish girl. This fiction, the attempt to violate a pure-blooded female of the master race, is well known to us from any racism regime, from the American South to Nazi Germany. Such attacks are becoming common: in at least one case, that of Pinhas Aburamed, it ended in murder (Hebrew). One organized pogrom against Palestinians took place in Pisgat Ze’ev in 2008, and drew some short public attention because the attackers chose the eve of Holocaust Memorial Day as their time of attack. After some suspects were arrested, eight rabbis – most of them employed by the state – wrote a public letter in their defense (Hebrew).

The pogromchiks from Jerusalem would be able to say in their defense that they were only doing what their political leadership urged them to do. They will have a very strong case. Last year, Likud MK Hotovely invited the racist organization Lehava (more about it here) to speak about the risks of “assimilation” in the Knesset. The leader of Lehava, Benzi Gopstein, is on record (Hebrew) saying Pinhas Aburamed, who murdered a Palestinian he thought was trying to flirt with a Jewish girl, is a hero and should receive a medal. While Gopstein was playing the extremist in Hotolevy’s comittee, the general manager of the Education Ministry was telling the committee much the same thing, albeit in more controlled language: he said (Hebrew) the Ministry will attempt curb “assimilation” by “acting to increase Jewish identity” through “education for family life.” The ministry, in short, accepted Gopstein and Lehava’s basic assumption: “assimilation” – a relationship between a Jew and a non-Jew – is a problem the ministry ought to address. This is the same ministry, under the same minister (Likud’s Gideon Sa’ar) that forbade the teaching of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights to students, fearing they may learn they have the right to convert to another religion (Hebrew).

In one of the Knesset’s worse moments. MK Danny Danon claimed that Bedouins in Israel are responsible for over 1,000 kidnappings of Jewish girls every year (Hebrew). The police said in response it is unaware of even one such case. Danon merely repeated his lies.

Lehava (the Hebrew acronym stands for for “preventing assimilation in the holy land”) has a record of expressing satisfaction with lynch attempts – including against African refugees. So, naturally, its main activist is supported by the government, through an NGO ironically called Hemla (“compassion”). Other NGOs opposed to “assimilation,” such as the veteran Yad Le’Ahim, are supported by the Interior Ministry and aid it unofficially.

Assuming the attackers – both in Jerusalem and the West Bank – need legal aid, the NGO Honenu, dedicated to the defense of Jewish terrorists, would spring to action. Honenu receives tax exemption status from Netanyahu’s government; at the same time, the government denied that status to Rabbis for Human Rights, claiming it is “political.” Honenu is connected to “Ha’Kol Ha’Yehudi,” a leading extremist Jewish pride site which was quick to celebrate the Jerusalem pogrom (Hebrew). In turn, it is operated by the students of the extremist yeshiva of Yitzhar, which so worried the ISA that it tried to close it; but the Ministry of Education keeps funding the yeshiva. Recently, the prosecution decided not to indict two of the yeshiva rabbis, who wrote a gentile-killing manual; it also sent the aforementioned Shmuel Eliahu home scot-free. The reasoning was that Israeli law against racism does specifically exempts racism, if it is expressed in religious terms.

To sum, Eliahu, Honenu and Lehava, as well as the yeshiva of Yitzhar, are funded by the State of Israel. At the same time, MKs like Danon and Hotolevy are warning us (quietly supported by the Ministry of Education) that the Palestinians are after our women. I wonder whether the cops who arrested the Jerusalem goons uttered the famous quote from Casablanca, that they were shocked, shocked at what they did. The hoodlums themselves could claim, with reason, they merely did what they were taught to do in school and urged to do by their elected officials. The Netanyahu government, in short, provides the “infrastructure” of the Jewish Brotherhood.

Israeli leftists often compare their country to apartheid South Africa or the dying Weimar Republic. The comparison is not without merit. (Even though one suspects it is the left’s infatuation with martyrdom that makes the Weimar comparison so popular.) But perhaps another model needs to be examined: that of Pakistan. A country whose identity is violently religious, with an army too strong for its own good, nuclear weapons (according to foreign reports), and a rapidly-disintegrating claim to support the United States, which funds it generously while its education system teaches its students to hate all infidels, and its young people, considering themselves victimized, engage in state-supported terrorism.