NAjjt/Wont.1 The Michigan Daily - Thursday, November 9, 1995 - 11A W Israeli authorities suspect conspiracy in assassination Police crack Rabin's suspect's school down on Ibarraged with accusations extreme Jewish right Los Angeles Times JERUSALEM -Launching a crack- down on the Jewish extreme right, po- lice yesterday announced the arrest of the leader of an anti-Arab group and rounded up several other far-right ac- tivists for interrogation. A judge in Tel Aviv ordered Avishai Raviv, founder of the tiny Eyal move- ment, held for a week of further inves- tigation, accusing him of conspiracy in the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. At least three other right-wing and religious extremists were detained for questioning, Israel Radio reported. One of them also was believed to be a mem- ber of Eyal. In addition, a seniorsecurity-services official resigned and another was sus- pended for failing to protect Rabin ad- equately as he left a Tel Aviv peace rally Saturday night. Two lower-rank- ing security officials were transferred to different jobs. Rabin was shot to death by Jewish law student Yigal Amir, 25, who was captured at the scene. He confessed to the murder with satisfaction, saying he acted alone as a sacred duty, but police have his 27-year-old brother Hagai also in custody for allegedly altering the bullets used in the murder. The assassination has devastated Is- rael and cast a giant question mark over the prospects for Rabin's search for. peace with Israel's Palestinian and Arab neighbors. Whether Rabin was murdered as part of a conspiracy by Jewish extremists who hated him for his willingness to trade West Bank land for peace is a burning issue for the shaken nation. "There is a serious danger of a grave disruption of the rule of order - up to the point of another political murder," AP PHOTO An Israeli naval cadet lights a memorial candle for late Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin at Kings Square in Tel Aviv yesterday. Attorney General Michael Ben-Yair told the newspaper Haaretz yesterday. Later, Ben-Yair asked Israel radio and television not to broadcast any new broadsides from extremist groups. Since the murder, there have been death threats against successor Shimon Peres and other Cabinet ministers. Police told Judge Edna Beckenstein that Raviv, 28, whom they arrested Monday, had known in advance about Amir's plan to kill the prime minister. Prosecutor Nissim Daodi said Raviv had conspired in the murder and failed to prevent the shooting. Beckenstein said confidential docu- ments submitted by police justified holding Raviv. He was ordered back on suspicion of committing a felony and failure to prevent a felony, said police spokesman Eric Bar-Chen. "Dictatorship! False arrest!" Raviv screamed as he was led into court. Standing before the judge with his hands in his pockets and chewing gum, Raviv said, "It hurt everyone" - an apparent reference to Rabin's murder. Police call Raviv"a catalyst"forAmir. Raviv told the judge that Amir talked with Eyal members about a big event he intended but "nobody took him seri- ously." "Words are one thing and actions are another. According to Jewish law, mur- der is forbidden," Raviv said, charging that the police are using Rabin's death as a pretext to harass the political right. "There are reasonable grounds to be- lieve that this suspect, who knew the suspected murderer, indeed failed to prevent the crime and conspired to com- mit the crime. For these reasons, I am ordering him held for seven days," the judge said. Eyal, a Hebrew acronym for Jewish Militant Organization, has the reputa- tion of being a blowhard group better known for words than action. A few months ago, Eyal claimed responsibil- ity for the murder of three Palestinians in the Arab village of Halhoul, but they were later discovered to have been killed by fellow Arabs. "They brag and posture, talk about the 'underground,' like to be thought of as 'Arab killers,' that sort of thing," said Ehud Sprinzak, a specialist in Jew- ish extremist groups at Hebrew Univer- sity. "Are they a threat? Every once in a while some one may arise who takes this seriously. Then they're a threat." Eyal, said Sprinzak, is small, with perhaps no more than Raviv and a lit- eral handful of followers as members. "Their touch with reality is not that strong," he said. The Washington Post TEL AVIV, Israel - The modernis- tic campus of Bar Ilan University, where Yitzhak Rabin's confessed assassin studied law and the Bible, has become a place under siege. Questions are being asked about the kind of education being offered at this religiously based institution, set in the concrete clutter of a Tel Aviv suburb. Some critics have gone so far as to suggest an extreme right-wing atmo- sphere at the school perhaps helped condition 25-year-old Yigal Amir to violence. Such accusations are deeply resented - here. Administra- m ere tors and students say Amir could not talk of # have learned vio- N lence at the school, Vi/ ience whatever his poli- tics - and what- - ever the politics of An Arab stu the campus. Mem- Unive bers of the BarlIlan Rabin's as community have struck back with a charge of their own: that there is a political offensive underway to smear not only the school but also the reli- gious-political segment of Israeli soci- ety that opposed Rabin's efforts to make peace with the Palestinians. "There is no question that there is a minority who are taking this opportu- nity to knock at us," said Shlomo Eckstein, university president. A law student who identified him- selfas Oren was more emphatic. "Some of the people who backed Rabin are trying to throw mud on a whole group of people to neutralize them," he said. "They are trying to isolate us as if we are not part of Israel," remarked an- other student, named Ido, who wore the skullcap that identifies him as a strict observer of religious practices. "It can only keep us divided." Bar Ilan's defenders say the criti- cism of their institution, as well as of the mainstream Israeli right, has a crass political motive: to steamroll opposi- tion to Israel's withdrawal from the West Bank. The assault is not only against people who may deserve criti- cism, like gun-wielding settlers, but against all opponents of the peace pro- cess, students said. "People will not accept being tainted at large for the act of one man. They can't equate opposition to leaving the West Bank to guilt for Yitzhak Rabin's death," said Oren, the law student. Bar Ilan was stunned that one of its own had acknowledged killing Rabin. All students must take a core curricu- lum in Jewish heritage; Amir was en- rolled in an advanced religious depart- ment. About two-thirds of the 20,000 r u{ ;r sc students are classified as religiously oriented. Among the students is a smat- tering of Israeli Arabs who prefer the conservative social climate and reli- gious studies. The school, while rejecting the no- tion that there are shortcomings in its ethical teachings, nonetheless ordered "special educational discussions" in all classes in the wake of the assassination. On Tuesday a lecturer spoke on the sanctity of life. A symposium on reli- gion and peace will be held in a nonth. "We've been tainted and there's no sense in trying to ignore Eckstein said. has ge " What has hap- pened now ysiaI shakes all of Is- raeli society, and Bar Ilan is part of Israeli AbdaIlah Daqwa scey v dent at Bar Ilan have to have sity, the school opendiscussion sassin attended of it." Uni ve rsity s p o k e sir a n David Weinberg said the school is not rightist-oriented, although he noted that in the religious communities of Israel, there has been a rightward trend in politics. Bar Ilan supports a satellite campus in Ariel, a large West Bank settlement. Abdallah Daqwa, an Arab student, said a right-wing atmosphere in the school has thickened since Rabin began to make concrete plans for withdrawal from the West Bank. He said he has had violent debates with students over~the peace process. "There has been talk of physical violence," he said. Oren said that if anyone had an in- citement problem it was Rabin, arguing that the prime minister had dismissed the legitimate concerns of the Israeli opposition. "In particular ... there are people on the left who hate the religious people and simply want to batterus," he said. The passion of the responses seemed to reflect a division beyond the one over the Palestinians. Israel has long been beset by disputes between secular and pious citizens over issues of law and custom. Some liberal observers fear that religious indoctrination is leading to a rejection of secular democratic values. This broader debate has touched issues as diverse as whether non-kosher food should be served in Israel, whether civil marriages are really marriages, even whether secular Jews are really Jews. Shmuel, a religion student, said that if the accusations keep flying, Israel will be divided into several parts, with religious people withdrawing into their own realm and ignoring if not opposing the state. Shin Bet housecleaning begins after Rabin's death Los Angeles Times JERUSALEM - A senior Shin Bet -- official resigned and another was sus- pended for failing to protect Prime Min- ister Yitzhak Rabin from an assassin Saturday night, government officials confirmed yesterday. The housecleaning, which also in- cluded the transfer of two lower-rank- ing officials, came after an internal in- quiry concluded that there were serious flaws in the plan for protecting Rabin at a mass peace rally in Tel Aviv's Kings of Israel Square. The inquiry commit- tee also said the prime minister's body- guards may have discounted the possi- bility of an attack by a Jew because they were indoctrinated to focus on Arabs as a security threat. Analysts said the committee's report is the most damning indictment of Shin Bet's practices in the history of the organization, which was created by Prime Minister David Ben Gurion in 1948. "Each of Israel's intelligence agen- cies have had their colossal failures," said Yossi Melman, a specialist on Israel's intelligence community who has published several books on the sub- ject. "This failure is to the Shin Bet what the 1973 Yom Kippur War was for ix military intelligence." In 1973, military intelligence failed to predict the sur- prise attack by the Syrian and Egyptian armies that nearly overwhelmed Israel's defensive lines. Rabin was shot three times at point- blank range Saturday by Yigal Amir, a Jewish extremist who said he wanted to stop Rabin's peacemaking efforts with the Palestinians. Although Amir had participated in anti-government dem- onstrations and admitted to planning on two previous occasions to assassinate the prime minister, he had no arrest record and was not known to security forces. Israel's Cabinet heard Shin Bet's ac- count of what went wrong at a closed- door session yesterday, then voted 17- 2 to appoint a state commission of in- quiry, headed by a former chiefjustice of the Supreme Court, to conduct an independent investigation. After a heated argument, Cabinet ministers voted to limit the committee's mandate to investigating the agency's protection procedures in general and the protec- tion measures in place the night Rabin was shot. The state committee will have the power to subpoena witnesses. The senior Shin Bet official who re- signed Tuesday night, referred to as "D" by Israeli media because military censors ban publication of his name, was singled out for responsibility by an internal Shin Bet investigating com- mittee composed of three former senior Shin Bet officials. Holding a rank equivalent to general in the Israeli army, the senior official who resigned was in charge of the pro- tection division of Shin Bet. That divi- sion provides security to Israeli offi- cials here and abroad, to Israeli embas- sies and to Israeli delegations traveling abroad. "D's'" deputy in charge of guarding officials here, whose rank is equivalent to major general, was suspended. The head of Rabin's bodyguard unit and another lower-ranking Shin Bet official were transferred to other jobs. "I appreciate what the Shin Bet has done," said Ori Orr, chairman of the Knesset's Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee. "They came up with all the hard decisions by themselves, even be- fore an outside investigation was launched." The internal investigation also re- portedly found that Rabin's bodyguards were unprepared for an attack on the prime minister by a Jew. Orr said yesterday that such a finding did not surprise him. "Even though the head of the Shin Bet came to us, to political leaders, and said that he was worried about right- wing extremists, and even though we shared his concerns, deep in our hearts, we didn't believe it was possible for a Jew to kill the prime minister," Orr said. "We lost our prime minister. The Shin Bet failed. We don't need any more details than that." The internal committee praised the actions of the single bodyguard who threw himself atop Rabin after the prime minister was shot and fell to the ground that night. The bodyguard was himself shot in the hand before he hustled the prime minister into his armor-plated Cadillac and ordered the driver to head for nearby Ichilov Hos- pital. The inquiry committee said that the bodyguard behaved "by the book" in getting the prime minister away from the scene as quickly as possible. But former Shin Bet officials said yesterday that the internal inquiry re- vealed a shocking collapse in security procedures the night of the mass rally, which drew more than 100,000 people. Yaacov Peri, a former head of Shin Bet told Army Radio yesterday that he be- lieves the current head of Shin Bet should resign. Still, the government must be careful not to be too sweeping in its critique of Shin Bet, Melman argued. "They don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater," he said. "They still need the Shin Bet, and its main task is still dealing with terrorism, and this threat will continue." Shin Bet has stepped up its surveil- lance ofright-wing groups, but Melman said the agency will now give greater attention to infiltrating such organiza- tions. S THESEASON ANNOUNCING A NEW SET OF COURSE OFFERINGS IN MICROBIOLOGY AND IMMUNOLOGY WINTER 1996 The Department of Microbiology and Immunology and Depart- ment of Biology will be continuing and expanding a series of courses set in a modular format, Each one credit module runs for one third of a semester. In some cases multiple modules can be combined to make up a traditional course. Students may choose from the various modules to create a program that best fits their educational objectives and interests. Microbiology 606,607, and 608 are three modules focusing on microbial physiology and pathogenesis. They are designed for upperclass advanced undergraduates and graduate students interested in the health sciences. These modules will be offered conscutively and will meet TTY from 10- 11:30 AM in 5623 Medical Science Building II. Prerequisites for all three modules - first year biochemistry and genetics or permission of course director. Module I (1/11-2/13) Microbiology 606 - Microbial Physiology & Metabolism (1 credit) Module II (2/15-3/19) Microbiology 607 - Microbial Pathogenesis I (1 credit) Module III (3/21- 4/23) Microbiology 608 - Microbial Pathogenesis 11(1 credit) The first module will focus on the metabolism and physiology of , growth. The second module deals with colonization mechanisms' and attributes of pathogens. The third module focuses on molecu- lar mechanisms underlying bacterial infectious disease. Microbiology 641 and 642 are two modules focusing on molecular and cellular events in the immune response. They are designed for ORDER NOW AND RECEIVE BY THE HOLIDAYS JOSTENS Ii' - I - ~A!A!.A m