Breaking News: Leader of Terror-Murder Cell Follower of Shas and Beitar Jerusalem

(Tikun Olam) - Israel's Shabak announced today it had arrested six Israeli Jews wanted in the immolation murder of Palestinian youth, Mohamed Abu Khdeir. The leader of the terror cell is Yizhar Bazri, the grandson of a well-known Jerusalem rabbi and a member of the Jerusalem Beitar racist fan club, La Familia.  [La Familia is proud of its Jewish identity. The group is notorious for chants that insult Arab and black players, and for displaying the flag of the banned Kach party. Cheers with lines such as "death to the Arabs" and "Muhammad is a homosexual" are common] Bazri is from the Jerusalem Har Nof neighborhood, another suspect is from Beit Shemesh and another from the West Bank settlement, Adam.  They are being defended by the settler terror legal defense group, Honenu, which also defended Yigal Amir and other settler terrorists.

Unlike what I posted earlier, the conspiracy doesn't seem particularly rooted in the West Bank (though one suspect lives there).  Rather, the suspects are all ardent followers of the Shas party, the home of Mizrahi Orthodox nationalists.  Until recently, the racist Rabbi Ovadia Yosef was the party's spiritual leader.  Another criticial affiliation the suspects had was to the Likud-affiliated Beitar Jerusalem soccer club.  Beitar has an ardently racist fan club called, ironically enough, La Familia (the reference to the mafia is probably deliberate).

Bazri's grandfather is the head of the Jerusalem rabbinical court, a distinguished religious position.  Another relative is a noted Shas-affiliated Kabbalist-wonder rabbi, Rabbi David Bazri, who was convicted of hate speech (Hebrew) in 2008.  Their offence involved incitement against Arabs which occurred at a protest against the founding of a bi-cultural Jewish-Arab school in a Jerusalem neighborhood.

○ One of six Jewish nationalists arrested confesses to revenge killing of Arab teen