Alerts and Reports 

The fire

Saturday evening, December 4, 2010 -- Forty-eight hours after the terrible fire broke out, racists can no longer stop their frustration at not getting what they wanted - a pretext for an all-out assault against the Arab population in Israel (including the Druze). "I don’t want negligence, I want vengeance on the arsonists!" so wrote an anonymous person in the talkback section of the Y-net news website and speedily others added racist comments, inciting to bloody violence, of the kind which the web editors were supposed (in theory) to immediately delete.

Of course, the racists draw encouragement from the police announcement of two minors from Ussefiya being detained on suspicion of negligent behaviour which led to the fire. Who cares if it was negligence or intentional arson, who cares that Ussefiya is surrounded by the Carmel woods and was the first to be endangered when they caught fire? Just cry out "Catch the Arab!"

Still, it seems that so far these characters are not able to add a raging fire of racism and hatred to the physical fire still raging on the Caramel. The vast majority understands, if blame is to be apportioned, we should look in the right (and obvious) place: up there at the corridors of power, to those who for years heard the firefighters making dire warnings of a lack of equipment and an impending disaster – heard them, and chose to ignore the warnings and to go investing the government budgets in all sorts of other places.

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2.12 - Like everybody else we are in shock about the devastating fire which continues to rage on the Carmel Range, burning and killing indiscriminatingly

At this moment, the disaster overshadows political controversy.