JERUSALEM, August 8, 2015 (WAFA) – The heads of the Catholic
churches Friday filed a complaint against chief of extremist Jewish group, Lehava,
for advocating torching churches
According to a press release issued by the Assembly of the Catholic
Ordinaries on Friday, Father Pietro Felet, Secretary General of the Assembly of
Catholic Ordinaries in the Holy Land, filed Friday morning an official
complaint to the Israeli police against leader of radical Israeli organization
Lehava, Bentsi Gofstein, demanding bringing him to justice for advocating
torching churches.
The complaint, filed on
behalf of over than twenty patriarchs and bishops, expressed “concern over what was described to
be growing security challenges to churches, people and buildings alike, in
areas under Israel's sovereignty or control.”
The complaint referred to several attacks that targeted churches
and Christian holy sites by radical parties and hinted that in vast majority of
these criminal incidents criminals were not brought to justice.
The
complaint was referring to remarks made by Gofstein during a panel debating
Jewish religious law on last Tuesday night in Jerusalem.
Responding
to a question on whether he “is in favor of burning churches in the Land of
Israel,” Gofstein answered: “Did the Rambam rule to destroy [idol worship] or
not? Idol worship must be destroyed. It’s simply yes – what’s the question?”
He
was reported in another version as answering, apparently alluding to the
rulings of the 12th century Jewish ‘sage’ Mainonides “The law is
straightforward, Maimonides’ interpretation is that one must burn idolatry.
There’s not a single rabbi that would deliberate that fact. I expect the
government of Israel to carry that out.”
When
the panel moderator warned him that the panel was filmed and if the recording
get to police he would be arrested, Gofstein said: “That’s the last thing that
bothers me. If that’s the truth then I’m prepared to sit 50 years in prison for
it.”
The
complaint was made one day after the Palestinian Foreign Ministry issued a
press statement vehemently denouncing
the Israeli government’s “tolerance toward Gobshtai and other extremists who
advocate murdering and terrorizing Palestinians and setting fire to their
property.”
The Foreign Ministry held the Israeli
government fully responsible for the consequences of such “racist and
provocative” calls that have resulted in murdering Palestinians in the most
atrocious fashion, particularly the burning to death of 18-month-old
Palestinian toddler ‘Ali Dawabsheh and critically injury of his family members
in an arson attack on a house in the Nablus village of Duma.
The Ministry, given a rise in the cycle of
violence and counter-violence, slammed Israeli government’s policies and
disregard of rising bloody extremism as responsible for the proliferation of
the culture of hatred, violence and racism.
In December 2014, several Lehava members,
including Gopstein himself, who lives in a settlement inside the West Bank city
of Hebron, were detained on charges of setting fire to a first-grade classroom
at Jerusalem's Hand-in-Hand school on November 29. Daubed on the walls in
Hebrew were slogans reading 'Death to Arabs' and 'There's no
coexistence with cancer.'
Lehava activists follow the teachings of the
late Meir Kahane, a virulently anti-Arab rabbi whose Kach party and another
offshoot were banned in 1994 after one of its members gunned down 29 Muslims in
a flashpoint mosque in the West Bank city of Hebron.
K.F./T.R.
