Israeli Prime Minister Ehmud Olmert has condemned the actions of youths who have been implicated in brutal videotaped attacks on foreign workers, religious Jews, drug addicts and gays.
Along with his ministers, Olmert viewed video footage of the attacks at a weekly cabinet meeting.
"I am sure that there is not a person in Israel who can remain indifferent to these scenes, which indicate that we too as a society have failed in the education of these youths,'' Olmert said.
The footage was also shown on Israeli television stations. The video showed people getting stomped as they lay helplessly on the floor. One man got hit from behind with an empty bottle and the video also showed the attackers proclaiming their allegiance to Adolf Hitler with a Nazi salute.
"In the old days, people put notches on their clubs. We have technology now," Len Rudner of the Canadian Jewish Congress told CTV's Canada AM, discussing the motivation to record the vicious attacks. "We don't have to settle for notches, we can actually show the pictures and put it to music."
A police spokesman confirmed Sunday that eight suspects, all immigrants from the former Soviet Union, were arrested recently in connection with at least 15 attacks. A ninth suspect has fled the country.
All suspects are in either their late teens or early 20s. They all have Israeli citizenship, said Mickey Rosenfeld.
In Israel, a person can claim automatic citizenship if a parent or grandparent has Jewish roots under the "law of return." About one million Soviets have moved to Israel since the early 1990s. Israel's population is currently around 7 million people.
Police said the eight men arrested did not identify themselves as Jews. The families of the youths had come to Israel to escape hardships in the Soviet Union.
Olmert warned that the acts of a few should not reflect on the Russian immigrant community in Israel as a whole.
"I stress that we should not implicate an entire community and engage in generalizations,'' he said.
The arrests marked the first time an organized cell has been discovered in Israel, according to police spokesman Mickey Rosenfeld. Isolated incidents of anti-Semitism have been recorded in Israel in the past.
A court ruled Sunday that the suspects will be kept in custody. While in court, the suspects covered their faces, revealing the tattoos on their arms. Some of these tattoos revealed the number '88,' which is white supremacist code for "Heil Hitler." H is the eighth letter of the alphabet.
The revoking of the suspects' citizenship has been been proposed by Cabinet Minister Eli Yishai and other politicians have suggested an amendment to the law of return and for hate crimes legislation, which currently does not exist in the country.
"One of the peculiars I suppose of the law in Israel is that there are no specific laws such as we have in Canada with the Canadian Human Rights Commission or Ontario Human Rights Code," Rudner said. "Because who would have thought that in Israel this kind of thing would be a problem?"
With files from The Associated Press
