Posted on 06/18/2009 5:08:18 PM PDT by forkinsocket
Police, Border Police, including anti-riot squads, spread out in Shfaram Wednesday to prevent the resumption of armed riots and clashes between the Druze and Christian communities that hit the town on Tuesday night.
"These are not ordinary disturbances. These are very grave events that included fire arms, and only by luck officers were not hurt," a senior police officer said.
The forces were deployed mainly between the town's Druze neighborhood and Christian homes in the town center after a night of riots during which four policemen were lightly injured by stones, and a riot control vehicle was damaged by gun shots. An officer who came under gun fire was saved by the flak jacket he was wearing.
Rioters torched cars and damaged shops and houses in the city center, mainly those belonging to Christians. Police officers armed with stun guns clashed until dawn with hundreds of rioting youngsters, mostly from the Druze neighborhood .
Religious leaders of both communities finally succeeded in calming the youths, who were apparently prompted to violence following a rumor that a YouTube clip on the Internet vilified Sheikh Mawfak Tarif, a Druze religious leader, and his late grandfather, Sheikh Amin Tarif.
Tensions had been running high in the town since Saturday night, when Druze and Christian teenagers started fighting among themselves. The fighting turned into a mass brawl, in which nine teenagers were stabbed, and two of them were moderately wounded.
The weekend fighting subsided with the help of religious leaders into a tense, volatile calm in Shfaram for a few days, until violence flared again on Tuesday night with the YouTube rumor.
"We worked for two days to calm things down and in one minute everything exploded," said attorney Nakad Nakad, a Hadash activist in the Druze community.
(Excerpt) Read more at haaretz.com ...
ML/NJ
It’s George Bush’s fault!!!!
ok, that’s rather quaint already, isn’t it?
Rioters torched cars and damaged shops and houses in the city center, mainly those belonging to Christians. Police officers armed with stun guns clashed until dawn with hundreds of rioting youngsters, mostly from the Druze neighborhood. Religious leaders of both communities finally succeeded in calming the youths, who were apparently prompted to violence following a rumor that a YouTube clip on the Internet vilified Sheikh Mawfak Tarif, a Druze religious leader, and his late grandfather, Sheikh Amin Tarif.
halfway between Haifa and Nazareth.
and I was feeling about half past dead...
I trust that older and wiser people manage to calm the hotheads down.
Druse and Christian clashes have been awful, in the past, in Lebanon. In the 19th century, it was just one massacre after another.
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