Clarifying comments, Liberman says his bone to pick is not with pre-military academies but their rabbis

Responding to the wave of criticism over his comments that religious pre-military academies are becoming “private miltias,” MK Avigdor Liberman says his comments were directed at the rabbis who lead them, not the cadets themselves.

“The academies, some of which I participated in establishing, are a tremendous and important educational enterprise,” Liberman writes on his Facebook page.

” I meet the graduate students of the academies and they are the salt of the earth, but in order to preserve this tremendous educational entity we must cut them off from the Smotriches and their ilk,” he writes referring to Transportation Minister Bezalel Smotrich who has caused recent controversy with remarks in which he put religion above state.

“We must remove from them the rabbis who preach values that contradict the IDF’s heritage,” he writes.

— Stuart Winer