Muffti is glad they got him. What a strange story. The man was granted the right to carry a handgun despite suspicion of murder. He confessed to murders in 2000 but the shin-bet claimed it wasn’t him that did the shooting. He managed to smuggle in a hand gun by plane.
Muffti believed in the presumption of innocence until proven guilty, but dude did claim in court that ‘it was my pleasure and honor to serve God…I have no regrets’. Here is the story from Jpost.
The state on Thursday filed a 25-page indictment against US-born, alleged Jewish terrorist Ya’acov Teitel, which included two counts of premeditated murder and three counts of attempted murder and involved 14 separate incidents between 1997 and 2008.The indictment was filed and will be heard in Jerusalem District Court.
Teitel’s lawyer, Adi Keidar, told the court he needed one month to study the evidence before his client would be ready to answer the charges.
The state’s representative, Saguy Ophir, told the court the indictment was based on Teitel’s confession and on forensic evidence based on a DNA sample that was found at the scene of one of the crimes.
As he walked into the courtroom, Teitel more or less confessed that he was guilty of the acts for which he was charged.
“It was my pleasure and honor to serve my God,” he declared. “God is proud of what I have done. I have no regrets.”
The indictment goes into great detail as to how Teitel smuggled a handgun into Israel during a visit he made in 1997, when he decided to avenge terrorist attacks against Israelis. He took apart the gun and hid the metal pieces in a video player that he carried on board the plane, while sticking the plastic parts in his pocket.His first alleged killing took place on June 8, 1997. He obtained bullets for the gun by signing up for a target shooting exercise, renting a gun and purchasing 200 bullets of the same caliber that his own gun used, according to the indictment. He put 15 of the bullets aside. He then rented a car and parked it near the Holyland Hotel in Jerusalem. Teitel returned downtown by bus and headed towards east Jerusalem where he hailed an Arab taxicab. During the 15-minute ride to the Holyland Hotel, Teitel talked to the driver, Samir Balbisi, to make sure he was Arab. When they reached the hotel, Teitel kept talking until he saw that Balbisi was looking straight ahead. He took the gun out of his briefcase and fired one shot to the back of Balbisi’s head, all according to the indictment.
The second incident occurred on August 3, 1997, after Teitel had worked as a shepherd for a family in Sussiya in the South Hebron Hills.
According to the indictment, Teitel noticed that many Palestinians walked along the roads in the area and decided to kill one of them. He rented a car, loaded his pistol and drove towards Sussiya. At 6:30 p.m., he spotted Issa Massaf walking alone. On the pretext of asking him directions, Teitel got Massaf to approach the car and shot him in the chest, again all according to the indictment.
Other incidents for which Teitel was charged include:
• Attempted murder: On March 1, 2003, Teitel allegedly booby-trapped a flashlight with explosives and left it at the entrance to the courtyard of a Palestinian house. It was set to go off as soon as anyone turned the light on.
• Attempted murder: At around the same time, Teitel purportedly poured anti-freeze into bottles of juice and left them at a Palestinian village near the Eli settlement.
• Attempted murder: On March 20, 2008, Teitel allegedly left a booby-trapped Purim gift at the home of the leader of the messianic Christian community in Ariel, David Ortiz. His son Ami opened the wrapping and the bomb exploded, severely wounding him. He suffered burns, broken ribs, and shrapnel wounds throughout his body, including his eyes. Ami Ortiz spent several months in hospital and is still undergoing treatment.
One of the best-known of the alleged assaults by Teitel involved former Hebrew University professor and Israel Prize winner Ze’ev Sternhell. Teitel purportedly planted a bomb outside Sternhell’s home in Jerusalem and prepared it to go off when anyone opened the front door. Sternhell opened the door, the bomb exploded and he suffered shrapnel wounds to his thighs.
Teitel also allegedly targeted homosexuals and the police, who, in his opinion, deserved it for protecting the gay community during their parades in Jerusalem.
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i’m with the mufti on this one. the guy is a psychopath and should be locked in with the rest of the terrorists. cameras should be placed in the cells (and transmitted to our tv screens).
just trying to find the good in the bad 😉
Lets wait to see if his family hangs posters of him glorifying him and praising his actions which is what happens at lets “give the benefit of the doubt’ and say 80% of the homes of Palestinian terrorists.
http://www.israel-wat.com/qassam10.jpg
They need better graphic designers.
If any terrorists organizations read jewlicious blog. I do freelance!
Muffti asks:
Why doesn’t this guy qualify as a ‘real’ psychopath?
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He certainly does – but he pales in comparison to the Russian immigrant whose paranoia led him to plot the slaughter of his boss’s entire family… basically the closest Israel has come to a Manson-style killing.
Easy to see why this pushed Teitel off the front pages.
Middle says:
We don’t give Palestinian terrorists’ families the same benefit of the doubt
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Because there usually is no doubt. It’s usually a family – if not communal affair, not cloaked in secrecy.
Which leads directly to the need for deterrence – because of the Arab adulation of terrorists. Despite attempted spin by left-wing media, such lionizing of the terrorist is never in evidence when an Israeli loon takes things into his own hands.
The whole “tearing down his family’s home” discussion is very, very interesting.
Does anybody know what the actual policies are surrounding tearing down Arab terrorists’ homes? Did it arise as a response to Saddam Hussein’s payments to suicide bombers’ families? Or did it come from somewhere else?
We’ve discussed these issues on posts here before. The idea did not arise from Iraqi payments, that was just an aberration that came on the scene later – there were payments to families made before the Iraqi gov’t came into the game. In court cases, the Israeli government has argued both that it’s a deterrence and that there was familiarity on the part of the family with what was happening.
Here’s an article that covers both the legal aspects and history of these house demolitions. It appears the law existed under British mandatory rule.
CK, Themiddle,
See, I think if we were to be completley equitable, we would say equal punishment for equal crime and the issue would become simple. You engage in terror, your family loses their homes.
We can play the lawyer’s game of “distinguishing” one case from the other ad nauseum. Some of the distinctions are already mentioned: family involvement, for example. Also consider that his terrorism was not designed to destory the state, but to destory societal aspects he disapproved of; Jewish terror is not widespread or a phenomenon that needs to be deterred like Palestinian terror; and so on. The fact remains, however, he is a terrorist. Israel should deal with all terrorists in the same way.
It’s a difficult issue, ck, because we want to give his family the benefit of the doubt. We don’t give Palestinian terrorists’ families the same benefit of the doubt and even if we do, the deterrence factor overwhelms it. It isn’t just or ethical in any way to have a different procedure or outcome for Jewish terrorists.
This is a very difficult issue. I think that when Arab terrorist homes are destroyed, it’s done because based on the notion that the family was somehow complicit in the crime – they knew that there was a terrorist activist in their midst and did not do enough to thwart him or her from pursuing their mission. Destroying a terrorist’s family’s home is meant to act as a deterrent against future acts of terror. In this case it seems that no one in Teitel’s family had any inkling regarding his crimes. They never had an opportunity to deter him. I say “seems” because we don’t really know. I suppose we’ll have to wait for the trial to see what the specific facts are. In any case, the crimes he is accused of committing are heinous to the extreme – and if he is found guilty, which I am sure he will be, I hope that he gets the maximum possible penalty. It’s one thing to be ideologically opposed to leftists, messianics and gays, it’s quite another to take the law into your own hands and maim and murder. Teitel and his ilk sicken me.
Sorry to be slow on the uptake B-D…Muffti saw this story and thought he’d leave it to this more knowledgable co-writers to post. But then they didn’t and he thought it would be silly to not have something about it up. So he posted it.
Why doesn’t this guy qualify as a ‘real’ psychopath?
You’re just coming upon this story?
This guy’s arrest was timed to give the Israeli press something to run for “Rabin memorial” week.
Unfortunately for them, a more gruesome – and successful! – Russian immigrant murderer was nabbed that same week… stealing headlines and reminding us what a real psychopath looks like.
Now they’re trying to revive this story, but it’s pretty cut-and-dried… they arrested a neighbor of his, trying to flog the “right-wing underground” angle like they did when Rabin was killed – but no such thing exists, the neighbor had done nothing and known nothing, this is a lone loony.
Middle writes:
if Israelis learned that terrorism means their families lose their homes, then the likelihood of another Jewish terrorist will become much, much smaller.
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Well, no.
Even this nutter was careful not to let anyone in his family in on what he was doing. He already knew the law would come down hard if he were ever caught.
… and the last time I checked – Israel already turned 10,000 settlers out of their homes, for no reason at all. Which kinda guts any deterrent factor… Maybe left-liberals should consider that the next them they throw due process under the bus in the name of shiny Progress…
It doesn’t matter what the Israeli public sees. I don’t think the Israeli public approves of what this man did other than a very small segment and I doubt that even they truly believe what he did was okay. One of the points of the destruction of terrorist homes is to dissuade other terrorists from doing the same. I think that if Israelis learned that terrorism means their families lose their homes, then the likelihood of another Jewish terrorist will become much, much smaller. Deterrence is important and that’s the message.
By the way, the Arabs have found means of getting money to the family of terrorists. It was a form of payment to the terrorist and it was also a form of insurance – “if you sacrifice your life to murder Jews, we’ll take care of your family, even if they lose their home.” The same might happen here, where sympathy for the Jewish family might get them some support. That’s not the point. If he’s guilty, this man’s home should be destroyed.
Themiddle,
I think it would send a powerful message to the world that Israel sees all terrorists as the scum they are and punishes them equally.
On the other hand, how would much of the Israeli public respond to Jews being evicted from their homes for the actions of a family member? What I’m getting at, is would they somehow see this dirtbag’s family as deserving some sort of different treatment? I really don’t know the answer.
I’m going to be provocative here:
Will the Israeli authorities demolish his home or his family’s home?
They definitely should.
I don’t know whether the same laws apply here since usually the terrorists and their families are not Israeli citizens, and his family are Israeli citizens, but what he allegedly did is murder of civilians for ideological reasons and that’s terrorism. His home should be sealed or destroyed just as in the case of Palestinian terrorists.
Good thing his terrorism skills sucked.