Price Tag attacks. A Tale of Two Cities.

In Israel, they are called "price tag" attacks.

From Patrick Martin of the Globe and mail:

Amidst a series of audacious attacks carried out apparently by young Israeli settlers this week, one of the extremists’ targets stood out. It was a site I’d never heard of right in the centre of the city: The Nebi Akasha mosque, built more than 800 years ago.
It’s situated, I would learn, where three ultra-Orthodox Jewish neighbourhoods converge, on a small one-way street named Prague.
The mosque itself is a simple single-storey stone building, with most of its barred windows bricked up – no longer active as a place of worship since 1948. Attached is a modest, attractive stone minaret that stands about two and a half storeys high.
Across a courtyard dominated by a playground filled with children on swings and climbers sits an equally old domed mausoleum. Inside this stone structure are three graves, believed to be those of some of Saladin’s commanders who perished in the taking of Jerusalem in 1187.
The mosque is named for Akasha Bin Mohsin, a 10th century Muslim, whose tomb was on the site when the stone buildings were constructed.
It was to this unused historic structure that the young extremists came before dawn on Wednesday. They threw a gas bomb through a small opening of one of the bricked up windows, scorching the stone all around the window and doing minimal damage inside.
They spray-painted on the outside stone walls and on the green metal doors things written in Hebrew such as “Mohamed is dead,” “Mohamed is a pig,” and “price tag,” a reference to the costs that Muslim and other Arab institutions will pay if Israel moves to dismantle any Jewish settlements or outposts in the West Bank.

Reports of the vandalism attack spread throughout the country and the act was widely condemned. But words are one thing. Actions are another. Two young men, Avi Mayer and Arie Hasit showed up. They painted over the graffiti and scrubbed smoke off the exterior walls.

“What happened here is unconscionable, and I don’t think it is representative of Israeli society, this neighborhood or Jerusalem,” said Avi Mayer, a Jerusalemite who works for the Jewish Agency. I found the entire incident deplorable and felt I had to try and right this wrong..."

Thank you, Avi and Arie. May you go from strength to strength, and continue to be a source of light to all.

In Berkeley, there appears to have been a local version of a price tag attack. The fence surrounding Michael Lerner's home in the Berkeley Hills has been vandalized again.

From JTA:

The northern California home of Rabbi Michael Lerner, editor of the progressive Tikkun magazine, was vandalized for the fourth time in the last year.
In an e-mail sent to Tikkun supporters, Lerner said that on Tuesday evening, two black-hooded men pasted signs on the outside of his house and garage saying that "Palestine is an Arab fantasy." ...
"It seems obvious to me that the attack, while responding to the NPR interview with me this morning, is part of the same attempt to terrorize me and my family as the past three assaults," Lerner wrote in his e-mail. "As the police made clear to us the last time, the goal is not to destroy property as much as to remind us that they know where we live, and that we are not safe."
People. This type of childish hate-driven vandalism is wrong in Israel. And its also wrong in Berkeley. Your actions do nothing to help our people or to further our cause. Remember the words of our sage Hillel "That which is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor. That is the whole Torah; the rest is commentary".

Decent people must condemn the attack on Rabbi Lerner's home

The petty vandalism done to Rabbi Lerner's home can only be the act of fools, who do not understand that they are damaging the cause of Zionism and of Israel.

Only fools resort to violence to settle an otherwise peaceful political difference of opinion. Everyone else understands that as soon as you have used violence, you lost the argument, no matter how just your claims might be.

The perpetrators do not not represent anyone other than themselves. Rabbi Lerner's opinions and actions are despicable, but committing this act of petty vandalism against him will only give his cause an aura of undeserved glory and martyrdom.

Ami Isseroff