On his Tikkun Olam (healing the world) blog, Richard Silverstein reports that, in retaliation for the attack at Yeshivat HaRav,
Yesterday, {Mar. 17, 2008} there was a pogrom in the East Jerusalem neighborhood where the terrorist attacker lived. Extremist Orthodox-nationalist elements affiliated with the yeshiva rampaged through the streets breaking windows, destroying property, and seeking out residents to assault (they wisely stayed indoors). The police allowed themselves to be outmanuvered and outmanned and did little to restrain things.
Silverstein surmised that the crowd grew impatient at waiting for the Israeli government stated it intended to do "legally" -- destroy the home of the attacker's family -- and undertook to do the deed "illegally." Silverstein wrote:
The pogromists were trying to avoid that legal nicety and do it themselves much like a good old-fashioned American lynch mob used to do in the early part of the last century. So this is what it's come down to–vigilante justice by those who don't have much respect for the State or Israeli democracy to begin with. Keep in mind these are the type of people whose rabbis call for the murder of prime minister Olmert and sending other ministers to the gallows. So of course they would take the law into their own hands.
It's a bit more than a little annoying that America's PAST bad acts are inserted in a left-handed relationship to PRESENT bad acts, as if the human race has not not learned anything about how to behave in a more civilized manner.
Moreover, I'm not aware that the US system has laws on the books that permit it to destroy the homes of those who have committed crimes against the US or its people. Or did I entirely miss the destruction of Timothy McVeigh's parents' or relatives' homes?
For a mob to rampage through the streets of East Jerusalem intent on harming persons and property, regardless of whether or not related to the attacker, is barbaric.
That a state that calls itself civilized and democratic, and counts itself an ally of the United States, has a policy to destroy the property of relatives of an attacker, is no less barbaric.