The house of cards continues to topple

Israeli Police Chief Resigns in Scandal

JERUSALEM Feb 18, 2007 (AP)

Israel's police commander resigned Sunday after a government commission said he ignored ties between senior officers and underworld figures and failed to ensure a thorough investigation into the 1999 killing of a suspected crime boss.

So it's business as usual in the Middle East's only democracy and most moral of nations.

The resignation of Moshe Karadi was the latest in a series of public scandals and controversies involving Israel's top leadership including rape allegations against the president and questions over the prime minister's role in a bank sale.

Anyone starting to notice a pattern here?

Earlier Sunday, commission chairman Vardi Zeiler, a retired judge, said Karadi should lose his job for the incomplete investigation and for ignoring ties between senior police officers and top organized crime figures. Karadi was not police commissioner at the time of the killing, but a departmental head.

Terminating Karadi's appointment would "highlight a clear norm for generations to come that someone who behaves like Karadi would be unable to complete his term as police commissioner," Zeiler told reporters.

So Karadi is not just a sacrificial lamb being offered up to create the illusion that the Israeli police force are accountable to anyone other than themselves?

"If the (panel's) suspicions are correct, this is the beginning of a very corrupt police force, and the infiltration of underworld figures to the police, which corrupts the police and the regime," Zeiler added.

I sincerely doubt that this is "the beginning". Such corruption is woven into the fabric of Israeli society.

The commission was formed to examine whether police properly closed the case of the murder, in which a rogue police officer confessed to shooting a suspected crime boss hospitalized under police guard after an assassination attempt.

The officer, who said he operated at the behest of a well-known Israeli crime family, was later murdered in Mexico, allegedly by members of the crime family angered by his confession. The case was later closed after police concluded there was not enough evidence.

These guys do get around, don't they?

Karadi insisted that the allegations against him were untrue, but said he was resigning to "set a personal example" and spare the police the harm of a scandal.

How magnanimous of him. If you were falsely accused, would you leave your job quite so easily? I don't think so.