JERUSALEM (AP):
Police yesterday said they have broken up a cell of young Israeli neo-Nazis accused of a string of violent racist attacks, shocking a nation that was founded 60 years ago as a refuge for Jews in the wake of the Holocaust.
The eight suspects, all immigrants from the former Soviet Union in their late teens or early 20s, are seen in home-made videos kicking helpless victims on the ground to a bloody pulp, hitting a man over the head with an empty beer bottle and proclaiming their allegiance to Adolf Hitler in a Nazi salute.
Israelis, living in a state created after the Nazi Holocaust in which six million Jews were killed, were shocked. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, who viewed the footage with his ministers at the weekly Cabinet, reacted with outrage at what he called "violence for the sake of violence".
"I am sure that there is not a person in Israel who can remain indifferent to these scenes, which indicate that we too as a society have failed in the education of these youths," he said.
First organised cell
While Israel has experienced isolated incidents of anti-Semitism in the past, police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said the arrests were the first time an organised cell has been discovered.
The eight youths, who immigrated to Israel as children, were arrested in recent days in connection with at least 15 attacks against religious Jews, foreign workers, drug addicts, the homeless and gays. A ninth member has fled the country, he said.
"This was a cell, an active neo-Nazi group, that in fact began here in Israel in working and carrying out sabotages as well as different attacks on individuals," Rosenfeld said.
Under the Israeli 'law of return', a person can claim automatic citizenship if a parent or grandparent has Jewish roots. Authorities say that formula allowed many Soviets with questionable ties to Judaism to immigrate here after the Soviet Union disintegrated. About one million Soviets have moved here since the early 1990s, making up a significant part of Israel's seven million citizens.
All eight of the suspects were immigrants with loose Jewish heritage who did not identify themselves as Jews and whose families had come to Israel to escape hardships in the former Soviet Union.
