His son, also a rabbi, did him one better by introducing the fear of miscegenation, a frequent theme of Israeli fundamentalists: "They want to take our girls. They are endowed with true filthiness. There is pure and there is impure and they are impure" (Ibid.)

Nor are these sentiments confined to the fringes of Israeli religious thought. Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, the spiritual leader of Israel's powerful Shas party, representing the non-Ashkenazi ultra-orthodox, said in 2001: "It is forbidden to be merciful to them. You must send missiles to them and annihilate them. They are evil and damnable," (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/1 270038.stm).

Much has been written, and justly so, about the Taliban and other fundamentalists, Islamic and Christian both, and their effect of the politics of the states and people with whom they have influence. The state of Israel, however, has succeeded before the world (or at least the United States) in affecting a secular, peace-loving, and pragmatic  demeanor which is by and large the province of a small and shrinking Ashkenazi elite, and does not reflect the reality of the average working-class Jewish nationalist, most of who say they would never tolerate an Arab neighbor or work for an Arab boss (apart from the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, with whom Israelis are in violent conflict, 20% of Israel's citizens are Arabs). They tend to agree with their rabbis; in one recent poll, 75% of Jewish youths said Arabs were less intelligent and less clean than Jews (http://kashmiri-nomad.blogspot.com/2007/ 12/jewish-israeli-youth-arabs-are-less.h tml).

Update [2008-3-27 21:14:43 by BITNPB]: A little more context, for those who requested it: On March 10, a week after a Palestinian opened fire in the Mercaz HaRav yeshiva in Jerusalem killing eight students, apparently in revenge for Israel's killing of dozens of civilians in Gaza, a mob of hundreds of Israeli Jews converged on the Jabal al-Mukkabir neighborhood in Occupied East Jerusalem where the gunman's family lived. In what Haaretz termed an "organized, synchronized pogrom," the mob threw stones at Palestinian homes smashing windows and destroying water tanks, damaged cars and chanted "Death to the Arabs" while police did little to stop them.9 Haaretz observed that such an attack "could never take place in a Jewish neighborhood," and noted that while "Israel and the Jewish world raise a huge cry over every suspicion of an attack on Jews because of their ethnicity, it is intolerable that residents of the capital [sic] are attacked solely because of their nationality." (http://www.libertyforum.org/showflat.php?Cat=&Board=war_israel_palestine&Number=296146137)