JERUSALEM — An influential Israeli rabbi has said God should strike the Palestinians and their leader with a plague, calling for their death in a fiery sermon before Middle East peace talks set to begin next week.
"Abu Mazen and all these evil people should perish from this earth," Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, spiritual head of the religious Shas party in Israel's government, said in a sermon late Saturday, using Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas's popular name.
"God should strike them and these Palestinians -- evil haters of Israel -- with a plague," the 89-year-old rabbi said in his weekly address to the faithful, excerpts of which were broadcast on Israeli radio Sunday.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu distanced himself from the comments and said Israel wanted to reach a peace deal with the Palestinians that would ensure good neighborly relations.
"The comments do not reflect Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's view or the position of the government of Israel," Netanyahu's office said in a statement.
The Iraqi-born cleric has made similar remarks before, most notably in 2001, during a Palestinian uprising, when he called for Arabs' annihilation and said it was forbidden to be merciful to them.
He later said he was referring only to "terrorists" who attacked Israelis. In the 1990s, Yosef broke with other Orthodox Jewish leaders by voicing support for territorial compromise with the Palestinians.
Saeb Erekat, the chief Palestinian negotiator, said Yosef's latest comments were tantamount to calling for "genocide against Palestinians." The rabbi's remarks, he said, were "an insult to all our efforts to advance the negotiations process."
(msnbc.com 29 August , 2010)
1 comment:
Iran’s President Ahmadinejad did NOT call for Israeli Jews to be annihilated. Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, the spiritual leader of Israel’s Shas party, HAS called, more than once, for the Palestinians and, in fact, all Arabs to be exterminated.
As reported by the mainstream Western media, Ahmadinejad called for Israel to be “wiped off the map”. What that meant, it was wrongly asserted, was the destruction, the driving into the sea, of Israel’s Jews. His actual words were to the effect that he wanted the Zionist state to disappear as the Soviet Union had done. In other words, there would be a place in a Palestine for all Jews who wanted to stay and live in peace with their fellow Arab citizens.
As has been accurately reported, Rabbi Yosef called for the Palestinian Authority, its President Mahmoud Abbas and “all these evil people” (the occupied and oppressed Palestinians) to “perish from this world.” How was this to happen? “God should strike them with a plague.”
And what if God doesn’t act in the way Rabbi Yosef wishes? He gave his own answer to that in 2001 when his subject was the Arabs. He said: “It is forbidden to be merciful to them. You (the Israeli government and the IDF) must send missiles to them and annihilate them. They are evil and damnable.”
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