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By Ira Sharkansky
 JERUSALEM— Israel is going through a bad patch. It has nothing to do with Palestine. That appears to be moribund, dead at its own hand. The American administration seems committed to prolonged life support, but the efforts of the president and his advisors are coming around to kick them. Mike Huckabee said that the United States should not be telling Jewish people where they can and cannot live in Jerusalem, just as it should not be telling people that they cannot live in the Bronx.
Huckabee may have chosen to begin his 2012 presidential campaign with something his supporters will see as Obama's error in judgment, and perhaps an affront to the Lord..
The more pressing problem is violent crime. Two cut up bodies were found in different places. The fear is that a serial killer is roaming the country.
The police have said they are close to solving the crimes. A court has ordered a ban on publication. Media personnel are complaining that they all know the details but cannot report them. We hear that the bodies are of two women, that there is a connection between the crimes, but they are not the work of a serial killer.
The body of an elderly man was found in a village on the Golan. His a son and grandson are in custody. The police say it was a dispute over property.
A group of five drunk Arab young men, accompanied by two Jewish women (one a soldier on weekend leave), beat to death a 59 year old Jewish man on a Tel Aviv beach, and dropped his body off a pier.
A rabbi said that something must be done to stop Arab boys for seducing Jewish girls. People from the village are blaming
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wayward Jewish girls for leading good boys astray. One of the accused is saying that the victim called him a "dirty Arab." If
the judges believe that, it may figure into the sentences. One doubts that any of them will be going home soon.
Still unsolved is a wild shooting that resulted in killings and injuries at a meeting place for young gays and lesbians in Tel Aviv. Thousands gathered a week later to protest a hate crime, despite the lack of a suspect. An ultra-Orthodox soldier has been arrested for threatening gays, but there in no indication that he was involved in this incident.
A yeshiva student died in a Ramle shooting. He was in the wrong place when a group of criminals sought to eliminate one of their adversaries.
Commentators and politicians are in panic. Where are the police? What has happened to our values?
Saner voices are saying that violence generally increases in the heat of summer, and that Israel scores low on crimes of violence. A table of murder rates per 100,000 population ranks it in 90th place (from the most violent) among 136 countries. It scores less violent than the United States, Switzerland, Sweden, the Czech Republic, South Korea, Finland, United Kingdom, New Zealand, and numerous countries of the Third World. The United States recorded 5.8 killings per 100,000 population. Israel was clustered with Canada, Australia and a number of Western European countries with between 1 and 2 cases per 100,000 population.
Idealists will reject comparisons as irrelevant, but that is the only way to judge how good is good and how bad is bad.
Some will insist that Israel's score be increased on account of all those murders it committed among peace loving Gazans and Lebanese. If so, America's score will have to skyrocket for the larger number of Iraqis, Afghans, Pakistanis killed since American troops arrived in their countries.
Israel is not an ideal country. Neither is it the den of evil imagined by those who target it for hate, or lamented by Israelis for its lack of perfection.
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