I'm totally in shock over the news that Ya'akov Teitel of neighboring Shvut Rachel has been arrested. The media is all full of impossible to imagine charges. I can't believe any of it can be true.
The media has him tried an convicted, but we don't know the truth, and neither does the media.
The Ya'akov I know was always a "perfect gentleman," offering me rides home from the grocery store. Ya'akov would tell me that he didn't always agree with my articles, but he never elaborated on what he disagreed with. I got to know his generosity, his "chessed side." His wife was also very generous and kind about offering to help, even though giving me a ride always took them out of their way.
I'll leave you with those thoughts, because I can't comprehend that the news is about the person I know.
May G-d give strength to his wife, children and other relatives and friends.
24 comments:
Interesting that the Times quotes his brother in law Moshe Avitan. Is that the same Moshe Avitan who you reported was nearly killed in a terror attack? Funny that the Times wouldn't mention that.
yeah, and how did he elude the Shabba"k all these years? They are everywhere and listening to everything.
The timing with the Rabin memorial stuff is too coincidental, at least the release of information is.
I was curious to see how the Israeli radio was carrying the story. On their midnight wrapup, Reshet Bet talked about the 'mehabel' Teitel and the 'terroriste' Teitel. Guilty until convicted of innocence. Something is fishy about this.
Yeah, it's called the Erev Rav-run gov't.
This is not this first such "trial by news media," and I'm afraid it won't be the last.
The timing also coicides with Rav Kahane's yartzeit on 18 Marheshwan.
Anyone attending a memorial event should expect a Shabba"k presence there.
Teitel will be their excuse.
Another Shvut Rahel resident, Weisgan accused of killing four Arabs, "committed suicide" in prison. I don't believe it.
I hope nothing happens to Teitel while in custody.
Thank God I do not listen or watch them at all.
Rabbi Rotter has an opinion about how they've found someone to take responsibility for everything that has not been solved in the past. Apparently, Teitel is admitting to killing two arabs, but there is no weapon. How can a man be tried without the accesory and based on his admittance alone? Is that legal? Is Teitel being drugged right now? Has he had access to a lawyer since he was arrested a few weeks ago?
I don't know him and I certainly don't know if he is guilty of everything they say. But I do know that 99% of the time when a crazy is caught, a bunch of people say "I can't believe it", "Such a good guy", "So friendly", "a regular guy", "A good father", etc....
Mark
Oh, Batya, I am so sorry about your friend:(
Such horrible charges. I hope they're not true and will keep his family in my prayers.
sd, yes, that's the same guy.
re: the rest of the comments, I think you've said it all. I haven't a clue as to what's true. I understand that he has been kept isolated from lawyer and family.
I'm deleting "obnoxious" comments, so don't bother posting.
I looked at the several stories you linked to and theer are a couple of thoughts I have:
1) It would be good to know what facts you can rely on, because it would help in piecing togetehr what haperpned here.
2) The comments from IMRA are very good.
3) Something seems wrong with the confession, and Ya'akov Teitel apparently also attempted to confess to at least one thing (the Tel Aviv attack) and maybe many things, he didn't do.
4) There doesn't seem to be any more evidence linking him to the 1997 murders than there was in the year 2000, when he was first suspected of this, and at that time, rightly or wrongly, they let him go. The only thing new is his confessions and there isn't a single solitary piece of corroborating evidence beyond whatever might have existed then, and the crimes are different in character than the 2006-2008 ones he accused of doing. The 1997 crimes were shootings (to which has now been added a nonfatal stabbing) but the later crimes were bombs with not a single shooting in the bunch.
5) We are now supposed to believe that everything he did or might have done he did entirely on his own, including getting the weapons - that he smuggled a gun with himself on British Airways in 1997 - possible but unlikely - and then used it twice to kill an Arab and later discarded the weapon and left the country, and that when he made aliya in the year 2000 - or later - he smuggled more guns into Israel, and he did not acquire a single weapon in Israel nor did have any help either in learning how to use the guns or how to build bombs and maybe he learned how to use guns because his father was a dentist for the U.S. Marines!!
6) He first came to the attention of the police on October 7th because he was spotted putting up posters in Har Nof in Jerusalem justifying the Tel Aviv bombing, and the police at first tried to blame him for that attack, and he confessed even, although he later disputed it, because he had an alibi, and they had to drop those charges because at that very moment he had been driving a man and his wife about to give birth and they passed lie detector tests (a lie detector test is the only or best way to determine whether that is true? There are no other witnesses or records, not even doctors and nurses? The lie detector test must have ben a face saving way of dropping that charge without having to explain why tehy didn't do it earlier.)
There is the claim that they were following him all along but I wonder if they did anything more than connect the bombings together rather than connect them to him.
7) It would be interesting to know if there really was a bomb factory in his house or anywhere he went.
8) It would be interesting to know if really was in trouble in thhe United States when he came to Israel in the year 2000. and if so, it would be interesting to know what it was.
9) All but one of the bombings seem to be motivated by religious feelings, rather than nationalism, or they are against the police, and the exception could have a more personal motive. But then again the police probably wrote the excplanations
I can't find Moshe Avitan in the new York Times article online here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/02/world/middleeast/02israel.html?_r=1
but I do see that Batya is quoted.
The article from IsraelNN.com quoted by Arutz Sheva may have an inaccuracy. That one says he is a former U.S. Marine, but another article says he may have learned to use weapons because he father was a dentist for the Marines -n and you wouldn't say that if you thought he really was a Marine and it is not the kind of thing to propose if you don't know whether he was a Marine, so it must be that somebody knew he wasn't, and making him aa Marine might be a rather easy mistake for a reporter or his source to make..
The thought occurred to me that if the weapons were really found in his house - and the one at another
location - is really linked to him - then the most logical reason would be that he was hiding them for somebody else - perhaps there were some thoughts of armed resistance against an attempt to evacuate his or other settlements.
None of these weapons, nor anything similar, are supposed to have been used in the more recent crimes.
If so, if he was hiding them, and Batya maybe might know if taht is at all plausible, he probably would do his best to hide the involvement of any other people, and if it took confessing to 100 crimes, he would do it.
Batya might know if this nis plausible. People also confess just to get out of a bad situation, and also because they thhink they might be suspecfted of something a lot worse - just so long as they don't accuse him of X, a person might say anything that the investigatyior seems to believe. It's a principle in the Gemorah even that a person never says anything bad against himself - so if somebody is doing this, there has to be some special reason. Guilty people are not likely to confess when interrogated just because they are guilty.
A sheverer kasha:
Q. If Jack Teitel acted completely alone in everything he did, then how could the police have had acccurate "intelligence information" tht he had been involved in two murders in 1997?
What was the "intelligene information?" Ruach HaKodesh? Or something we would know now was unfounded?
Or shall we sa, it was some sort of personal background facts from which somebody could have drawn an inference. But then what would connect him to THOSE murders, as opposed to just general suspicion that he might have done something bad in Israel? The fact that he was an American, spent time in settlements and later left Israel and those two murders happened while he was in Israel? Was that it?
And if they truly suspected him at that time, and it wasn't something that they knew was wrong, and also he indeed smuggled in weapons in a shipping container at the same time he was arrested, then how was it that the weapons were not discovered?
You see, there are a lot of things wrong here with the picture. A perseon also is very unlikely to train himself to build bom successfully without either creating a lot of duds, or injuring or killing himself.
Some updates.
I have learned a bit more:
1) It was not the New York Times or any other Times that quoted Moshe Avitan, but the Jerusalem Post.
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull&cid=1256799066589
An article by YNet:
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3798651,00.html
mentions Moshe Avitan was a terror victim (offering that as a possible reason) but does not quote Avitan.
2) In the year 2000, Teitel was accused not of both 1997 murders, but only the second one, according to this YNet story:
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3798629,00.html
This was the shepherd south of Mount Hebron. The two murders therefore may not have been connected at that time.
It would be a good idea to try to find out if in fact there any kind of ballistics evidence linking the two killings.
3) His lawyer, Adi Kedar, is from the Honenu organization, which you mentioned in a post on December
22, 2004:
http://shilohmusings.blogspot.com/2004/12/rather-be-jailed-than-buried.html
So his lawyer was hired by his family and friends.
4) There was a gag order. But some details about the case leaked out and were published a little bit before.
It was News article number 130 on IsraelJustice.com dated October
22, 2009:
http://israeljustice.com/news2.asp?key=178
It has the following quote:
"They have accused him [Y. T.] of every [unsolved] murder [in the State of Israel] from [Haim] Arlosorov [in June 1933] to the murder in the gay bar," Shmuel Meidad, head of the Honeinu Legal Aid Organization, said. "Neither Defense Attorney Adi Kedar nor any one else has met with him."
That article says the Internet site B'Chadrei Charedim had something on it before.
5) The Ortiz family was informed about this about that time (maybe because they are U.S citizens like teitel himself, that a suspect to the attack had been found, but all details were secret, and they began to suspect that it was going to covered up.
6) His lawyer, Adi Kedar did not for quite some time have any idea what the case was about. It went the Supreme Court and he did not get any relief - they did not tell him anything.
7) His wife was not permitted to see him and she may even have been arrested solely to prevent her from attending a hearing on October 21:
8) His lawyer tried to get permission to tell him he had a right to remain silent but the judge did not permit him to speak to him although she said that herself. At that hearing teitel said he didn't recognize the authority of the court. But he would only accept a Torah court.
9) Some police source claims they have evidence that he left a suspicious package - note: not even a bomb but a suspicious package - near Rabbi Ovadia Yosef's home but he is not accused of that now.
10) The only bit of corroborating evidence I have read about is that cap matching his DNA is supposed to have been found near Prof. Zeev Sternhell's home. Note this is the very last attack he is accused of and it was much less successful than the rest of them.
11) The newspaper article headlines make it look like that Kedar accepts the truth of all these charges but he doesn't. He wanted a psychiatrist to see him, but this was for some kind of legal reasons that I don't understand. he did call him crazy, but he may not understand how somebody can be manipulated into confessing.
(
More:
It is obvious Teitel had help - in getting the posters which praised the killing of the homosexuals in Tel Aviv. Although this is not a big crime, and might be criminal at all in the United States, because there is no link to an actual crime there, it still should be of interest to the police. It clearly showed that Teitel belonged to some kind of organization. But - nobody seEms VERY interested.
It is not just logic that he didn't manufacture them himself, but as a matter of fact numerous flyers and so on have appeared from time to time so there has to be something bigger. You would think they would be interested in who financed all that. Especially since the were ready to accuse Teitel of committing the Tel Aviv murders himself.
I am not sure what the legal relevance of psychiatrists is to confessions - is there something that when someone confesses they are supposed to consult a psychiatrist?
Teitel was allowed to see one on Friday so the police lost custody of him at that time maybe. The detention period was also soon to expire.
There seem to be some discrepancies about Teitel's age. Most articles describe him as 37 but one says 35 and another says he was born in 1975, which would make him 34 or even still 33.
The New York Times says: " It was only after the Sternhell bombing that the police began to note similarities in many of the attacks and picked up his trail again."
So wait a second. Was he being followed when he put up those posters? Now that makes it a trap, or an excuse to involve other policemen and make the arrest look unrelated.
It is reported many different agencies were involved.
It has been variously reported that on October 7th 1) he had a gun and didn't resist or 2) he dropped bag containing two guns and printed material and tried to flee or 3) he was arrested in an apartment in Har Nof.
Teitel had no connections to Har Nof except a possible underground or fake underground organization.
And if maybe he was hiding weapons - including burying explosives in the ground!- to fight against a possible forced withdrawal - the most likely people to have asked him to do that is a fake Shin Bet organization.
They then would have searched it twice because somebody *knew* it was there.
This brings up the idea that what some policemen wanted to do at the first they didn't succeed in doing. there were too many honest police - and other officials - around whom they couldn't freeze out of the case. In the end maybe it became not about creating bad opinion about settlers or protecting the true culprits in the Tel Aviv case - because the most thorough way you can cover up a crime is to accuse someone else and get him prosecuted. That's probably what happened in Illinois in a lot of death penalty cases.
It became maybe not about anything like that but principally about protecting the policemen who had started the case. They needed fr it to be a good case so they themselves would not be investigated.
That could account for the fact that now they say he acted alone. If they didn't say that, other people, especially at Honenu might suspect that they might be trying to frame a case against them and they would challenge every one of the accusations - and they don't want that. The case is too flimsy.
Sammy, amazing research, thanks.
I'm not getting more involved than saying what I've said.
Besides saying that he disagreed with my blog, I don't know his views. My husband also disagrees with my opinions...
Another point - you can't let this thing go that the guns were smuggled in from the United States. If so, at least some of the guns should be traceable. Did did they try to trace anythig - ask the United States for help?
Because it just might be a convenient assumption because that way there's nobody else in Israel who helped him - and again this is something that does not scare anyone else that they might become a target.
What links the attacks is that they are all things which can be pinned on various people the police have been accused of not
treating correctly - even beating up and lying about it - politially
active setters - Orange people - and chareidim.
They don't usually work together, but the same people work *against* them.
Some of the targets are somewhat plausible sounding targets for a rightwinger, if yiou beelive they are violent, and some are plausible sounding targets for Chareidim (missionaries or converts and homosexuals)
And some are the police who could be targeted by anybody.
I'm just pulling things togetherfrom the Internet, and thinking.
Teitel was a loner, even the police admit it. For a computer expert, with today's printing equipment, no help needed.
Sammy, Please be careful when thinking out loud.
I am very interested in the new conspiracy culture which has arisen among dati leumi Jews. It seems like there is now a real subculture that perhaps began with the Rabin murder and is now continuing with conspiracy theories about the Shabak. Look for the appearance of and Avishai Raviv in this case.
a, Rather ironic for you to mock conspiracy possibilities when you don't have the guts to reveal your own identity.
There are so many inconsistencies surrounding the Rabin murder that to believe the official story is like believing in the Tooth Fairy.
Here's another perspective, not mine:
Bs’d
Another perspective on Yakov Teitel
by Yekutiel Ben Yaakov
jewishlegion@aol.com
After the arrest of American born Jewish “settler” Yaakov Teitel, the usual choir of right wing and nationalist leaders joined the leftist politicians and media commentators as they too began to raise their voices in a contest to see who could condemn Teitel in harsher language. Heaven forbid, the right wing camp should be insinuated in the action of a sole, random member of its political constituency. And the singing continues.
The following excerpt is from a recent article published on the Arutz Sheva website addressing the national ‘debate’ which continues in the headlines days after the news came public on Teitel:
“The arrest of Yaakov Teitel and his apparent confession to a series of ideological murders and attacks has aroused a lively public debate in Israel on the topic of apportioning blame. While most spokesmen in radio interviews, newspaper columns, and the like appear to agree in principle that entire population sectors should not be held responsible for the actions of lone individuals among their number, in practice the nationalist camp finds itself under attack.”
Once again the entire right-wing nationalist establishment cowers in fear and falls into the trap laid by the Israeli left. Does the right need to justify its right to live in Israel and does it need to go on the defensive because Teitel was arrested? What did the man do, after all? He confessed to attacking Arabs in retaliation for attacks against Jews. The fact that the Israeli media has turned Teitel into the most heinous terrorist since Brauch Goldstein and Yigal Amir does not mean we have to join the circus.
Let’s review how the left deals with their “terrorists”. Yitzhak Rabin openly confessed to partaking in the ideological murder of 16 Jews in commanding the attack of Menachem Begin’s Altalena – an overt attempt (and politically motivated, at that) to murder Begin and prevent the ship from reaching the Tel Aviv shoreline in 1948. He and his political bosses (Ben Gurion, et al.) undertook the action so that Begin’s Irgun wouldn’t pose a political threat to the Ben Gurion’s socialist Mapai party after the war.
The left also boasted unapologetically of its hunting “season” against young Irgun members. Former Prime Minister, now vegetable, Ariel Sharon also participated in attacks against right wing youth in his Haganah days.
The left also openly threatened to murder Rabbi Kahane should he ever achieve a position of power in Israel, and, indeed, physically assaulted him when he spoke in such leftist strongholds as Givatayim, where they bused in hundreds of kibbutznikim to do their dirty work. It was on Nov. 5, 1990 almost 19 years to the day when Rabbi Meir Kahane was assassinated. While it was the bullet of an Arab assassin that murdered the Rabbi, everyone knows the role Israeli leaders played in abandoning and cheapening his blood. A role that the Israeli left wears as a badge of honor to this day.
Yet we never saw the left pleading with the public not to judge them for the violent and homicidal crimes of the ideological extremists in their midst – including those who would later become prime ministers of Israel, or mayors of cities like Jerusalem, in the case of Teddy Kolleck, the man who led one of the Haganah’s most important departments in ‘the Season’, who ordered his charges to “beat and hand over Irgun operatives to the British police.”
Let’s put Teitel into perspective. He’s a lone Jew who, if he is guilty of the crimes he’s accused of, took arms to fight back against Arab terror – a terror, we hasten to add, that was aided and abetted by the Israeli left and successive Israeli governments, who actually gave thousands of assault rifle to PLO police who in many recorded incidents turned those weapons on Jewish men women and children in terrorist attacks. Teitel’s brother-in-law was a victim of one such recent terror attack. Occasionally, a Jew, fed up with the restraint policy of those governments and of the right wing establishment will stand up and fight back in the spirit of national heroes such as Shlomo Ben Yosef and David Raziel, who also carried out random attacks against the Arab population of pre-state Israel in retaliation for the ongoing terrorist attacks against Jews. Today, there are streets, kibbutzim and highways named after the Jewish heroes of those pre-state undergrounds. For Teitel there is a jail cell today, and on the outside, a choir of left and right wing moral crusaders who have nothing but words of condemnation, hatred and fear.
Me, I have no words of condemnation for Teitel. I condemn only the leaders of Israel, right wing, nationalist leaders included, who have brought about the murder of Jews and who ultimately bear full responsibility for Jews like Teitel taking the law into their own hands to defend themselves, their families and their communities. If the government and the right wing establishment would simply do what they are obligated to do, there would be no Teitels in jail.
If I were a Yesha official, my press release would sound a lot different from what’s been passing through the media these last few days. It would go something like this:
Teitel is innocent until proven otherwise. However, should he be found guilty of the acts alleged against him, he is still not the true or primary culprit. The government of Israel is the party to blame for arming Arab terrorists and permitting them to remain in Israel to murder innocent Jews. Until that same government is prepared to do its job, to safeguard unconditionally the Jewish citizens of this country, there may be many more Teitels rising up to take the law into their own hands. I am not condoning Jews taking the law into their own hands, however, in view of the one-sided anarchy that already exists, it is hard to join the choir that finds only words of condemnation for Teitel.
Short and simple.
Ya'aqov, let's see if history proves you right. Everyone seems to be watching out for their #1's.
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