A lynching is a lynching

[JohnLocke]

A lynching is a lynching
Haaretz
tuesday, August 9, 2005
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No one will deny that the murder of four innocent people in Shfaram by a Jewish terrorist last Thursday was despicable and requires urgent stocktaking on the part of the heads of government and the security establishment. One can also understand the anger and frustration of the Israeli Arabs, who suffer in any event from institutionalized discrimination and prejudice and from incitement and threats of a political nature.
Nevertheless, one cannot ignore some of the reactions on the part of heads of the Arab public after the terrorist attack. One such instance was the claim by MK Azmi Bishara, who was quoted as saying: "The Shin Bet security service had good reasons not to prevent this terror attack, which serves Sharon." This remark is both contemptible and foolish.
Nor indeed - despite full sympathy for the pain of one who has suffered personally - are the remarks made by Hanna Asleh (whose son, Asil, was killed in the events of October 2000) acceptable: "The massacre follows a series of acts carried out by the state against us; this nation has been fascist since its inception in 1948," he said.
(...)
Even more worrisome is the reaction on the part of the Higher Arab Monitoring Committee, the most senior leadership of the Arab community. At the conclusion of its meeting on Saturday, the committee decided, among other things, to demand that the police not investigate residents of Shfaram about the killing of the soldier who had carried out the shooting in the bus. The members of the committee had already guessed correctly by then what in fact took place in the bus where the murderer went on the rampage: He was bound by policemen who entered the bus after the shooting and his weapon was taken away. Some residents of the town climbed onto the bus, attacked him, beat him, and with the assistance of others who threw stones through the windows, carried out a lynching. The policemen were thrown off or forced to flee from the bus because of the threat to their lives; some of them were injured while trying to protect the bound murderer or while escaping from the bus.
No country in which the law is properly enforced would permit an incident in which people take the law into their own hands to be ignored without investigating the circumstances and those involved, and agree in advance to withhold charges against suspects in a crime. (...) The police, as a matter of course, detained and interrogated Jewish youths involved at the end of June in the attempted lynching of a young Palestinian resident of Muasi in the Gaza Strip. There is also the instance of Yoram Skolnik, who was convicted in April 1994 of murdering a bound Arab and was sentenced to imprisonment. The same law that applies to Jewish transgressors in the territories must also be applied, in a country where law prevails, to Arabs who break the law in Shfaram.
It is the duty of the police who have just begun investigating the circumstances of the death of the murderer, Eden Natan Zada, to carry out the inquiry to the end and to draw conclusions. The investigation must be conducted without concessions and without extraneous considerations, with the understanding that it is unacceptable for such a serious act to take place in Israel without those who are involved paying the full price for their actions.
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Read the rest here.