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Lynch law is frequently prevalent in sparsely settled or frontier districts where government is weak and officers of the law too few and too powerless to enforce law and preserve order. The practice has been common in all countries when unsettled frontier conditions existed, or in periods of threatened anarchy. In what are considered civilized countries it was in the early twentieth century also found significantly in Russia and south-eastern Europe, but essentially and almost peculiarly in America. Lynch law is sometimes justified by its supporters as the administration of justice (in a social-moral sense, not in law) without the delays and inefficencies inherent to the legal system; in this way it echoes the Reign Of Terror during the French Revolution , which was justified by the claim "Terror is nothing more than Justice, swift and certain." WORD HISTORY The word lynching is recorded in English since 1835, as a verb derived from the expression Lynch law (1811), named after a member of the Lynch family, whose surname is either from Old English ''hlinc'' "hill" or Irish ''Loingseach'' "sailor." The term is said to originate from the career of Colonel Charles Lynch , a Virginia magistrate and officer on the Patriot (i.e. American) side during the American Revolutionary War , whose Vigilance Committee , an irregular court, tried and handed harsh sentences, fining and imprisoning petty criminals and Pro- British 'Tories' in his district c.1782, but hanging was never employed. Others derive it from . Still others held it came from Lynchs Creek, South Carolina , where summary justice was also administered to outlaws; some writers even attempted to trace it to Ireland, to England. One of the least likely theories traces it back to 1493 when James Fitzstephens Lynch, mayor and warden of Galway (Ireland), tried and executed his own son, but that would leave a transatlantic gap of centuries. Such extralegal punishments continued to be duplicated by others in the newly independent U.S.A. and later, elsewhere, after the war and became the basis for the English word " Lynching ", which is both a Verb describing the actual act and a Noun as well. The term "lynch law" came in to general use as a loosely employed description of efforts to maintain the established order either by the use of actual lynchings against those who would change it, or even their mere threat, which often prooved sufficient to silence activists and critics. The word lynching originally designated any sort of Summary Justice , especially by Flogging for reformatory purposes with more or less disregard for its legality, or the infliction of minor punishments without recourse to law; the term ''Lynch Mob '' -for a group of private persons who collectively ractice lynching- is attested from 1838. Since the Reconstruction Period after the Secession in the United States, it came to mean, generally, the summary infliction of capital punishment. Since the term lynch law came into colloquial use, it is to cover any case in which a portion of the community takes the execution of its ideas of justice into its own hands, irrespective of the legal authorities. The narrowing of focus to "extralegal execution by hanging" is from the 20th century. UNITED STATES See Also: Lynching in the United States EUROPE In Europe early examples of a similar phenomenon are found in the proceedings of the ''Vehmgerichte'' in medieval Germany, and of Lydford Law , Gibbet Law or Halifax Law , Cowper Justice and Jeddart Justice in the thinly settled and border districts of Great Britain. In 1944, Wolfgang Rosterg , a German POW known to be unsympathetic to the Nazi regime in Germany, was lynched by Nazi fanatics in a prison camp in Woodbridge , Scotland . After the end of the War , five of the perpetrators were Hanged at Pentonville Prison - the largest multiple execution in 20th Century Britain . MEXICO On November 23 2004 , three Mexican undercover federal agents doing a narcotics investigation were lynched in the town of San Juan Ixtayopan ( Mexico City ) by an angry crowd who saw them taking photographs and mistakenly suspected they were trying to abduct children from a Primary School . The policemen identified themselves immediately but were held and beaten for several hours before two of them were killed and set on fire. The whole incident was covered by the media almost from the beginning, including their pleas for help and their murder. By the time police rescue units arrived, two of the policemen were reduced to charred corpses and the third was seriously injured. Authorities suspect the lynching was provoked by the persons being investigated. Both local and federal authorities abandoned them to their fate, saying the town was too far away to even try to arrive in time and some officials stating they would provoke a massacre if they tried to rescue them from the mob. ISRAEL, WEST BANK AND GAZA STRIP Palestinian lynch mobs have executed Palestinians suspected of collaborating with Israel {Link without Title} . According to a Human Rights Watch report from 2001 : During the first Intifada, before the PA was established, hundreds of alleged collaborators were lynched, tortured or killed, at times with the implied support of the PLO. Street killings of alleged collaborators continue in the current Intifada (see below) but so far in much fewer numbers. {Link without Title} Israelis have been lynched as well. On Their bodies were then thrown out of the window into the hands of a mob of Palestinians, who mutilated them. Some news reports said that they were suspected of being undercover agents or assassins [http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2000/504/pal92.htm . Since then, nineteen Israelis and dozens of Palestinians have been lynched by Palestinian gangs and militias [http://www.guardian.co.uk/israel/Story/0,2763,667591,00.html . There have also been incidents of Israelis lynching or attempting to lynch Arabs suspected of terrorism, including the beating and killing of an Arab-American tourist after he skidded his car into a Jerusalem bus stop, killing two Israelis {Link without Title} , and an attempt on an innocent Arab bystander after a Palestinian suicide bombing {Link without Title} SOUTH AFRICA The practice of whipping and , wife of the imprisoned Nelson Mandela and a senior member of the African National Congress. SOURCES AND EXTERNAL LINKS
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