Minister wouldn’t join rally that ‘recognizes’ gays

Agriculture Minister Uri Ariel says he wouldn’t join a rally in protest of last Friday’s stabbing attack at Jerusalem’s Gay Pride Parade “because it requires a kind of recognition of them as a group, as a community, as people demanding to be recognized by Israeli legislation.”

Speaking to the Galey Israel radio station Wednesday, he explains: “Our state is a Jewish democratic state. It has its rules, and being Jewish is, among other things, about having, especially in the Israeli Jewish public space in the holy land, certain rules that do not include this issue of this community. That doesn’t give permission to anyone to hurt them in any way, certainly not to raise a hand but also not to curse or other things.”

Ariel also blasts Israeli media’s handling of the killing last week of Palestinian infant Ali Saad Dawabsha.

“People who have a microphone, and their sharp rhetoric, apparently couldn’t contain themselves…. They couldn’t help attacking this community [West Bank settlers]” for the crime, he says.

Israel’s security services believe the early Friday firebombing of the Dawabsha house, which left Ali dead and his brother and two parents in critical condition in Israeli hospitals, was committed by Jewish extremist terrorists who are part of the “price tag” movement. No arrests have yet been made, but the security cabinet on Sunday approved detention without trial for suspects in the case under special anti-terror laws.