Yair Lapid: Coalition wants to ‘insult Muslims’ with muezzin bill

Yesh Atid chairman Yair Lapid has slammed coalition efforts to pass the so-called Muezzin Bill restricting the prayer call from mosques across Israel, saying the move would fuel anti-Israel sentiment while its only purpose is to “insult Muslims.”

The controversial bill, which would ban the use of loudspeakers to amplify the Muslim call to prayer during certain hours, “serves the haters of Israel around the world who will now claim that in Israel there is no freedom of religion,” Lapid wrote in a Hebrew statement on Facebook Tuesday.

Stressing that he supports limiting the volume of the muezzin call, Lapid said the proposed law is unnecessary as the problem can be addressed through existing laws and regulations concerning noise pollution. Instead, he charged, Knesset members are pushing the issue to create headlines and curry favor with right-wing voters.

“Why did the coalition decide to pass this additional law now? Because they want to insult Muslims,” he said. “They want to insult Muslims — just insult them, without there being any tangible value — because it works well for them with their constituencies, with the Likud Central Committee, for the upcoming primaries,” he said of the Likud lawmakers, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who have thrown their support behind the bill.

Netanyahu has said that the noise made by the call to prayer disturbs Israelis of all faiths and that similar laws exist in many European and some Muslim countries.

Health Minister Yaakov Litzman, a member of the ultra-Orthodox United Torah Judaism party, had blocked the draft law in its original form for fear it would also force the toning down of the sirens that announce the start of the Jewish day of rest at sundown each Friday but he lifted his objections after it was amended to apply only between 11 p.m. and 7 a.m., limiting its scope to the first of the five daily Muslim calls to prayer just before dawn.

The amplified prayer calls have been a frequent target of right-wing ire, with some claiming the loudspeakers are an unnecessarily loud nuisance that echoes in Jewish towns and neighborhoods.

The bill’s sponsor, Moti Yogev, of the right-wing Jewish Home party, says the legislation is necessary to avoid daily disturbance to the lives of non-Muslim Israelis.

He has also claimed that some muezzins — the lay officials charged with calling the faithful to prayer — abuse their function to incite hatred of Israel.

“Hundreds of thousands of Israeli citizens — in the Galilee, Negev, Jerusalem, Tel Aviv-Jaffa and other places in central Israel — suffer regularly and daily from the noise caused by the call of the muezzin from mosques,” reads the proposed legislation. “The noise made by these public calls disturbs the rest of the citizens several times a day, including in the early mornings and at nighttime,” it says.