November 29, 2022

NO ONE HATES JUST MEXICANS:

Meet the powerful rabbi who once called for killing innocent Palestinians (Shir Hever, 11/29/22, Middle East Eye)

[Rabbi Dov] Lior, a proponent of the ethnic cleansing of Arab Muslims, is the spiritual leader for the entire far-right Religious Zionism coalition, which includes three parties: Religious Zionism, Jewish Power and Noam.

The political alliance won 14 seats in the Israeli parliament earlier this month, more than any religious-nationalist party in the history of the state, making it the second largest bloc in the governing coalition after Prime Minister-designate Benjamin Netanyahu. Currently, the parties are locked in government-forming negotations with Netanyahu's Likud, reportedly winning control over several key state institutions.

Lior had urged Israelis to cast their votes for the coalition and spoke at its press conference after the election results were published. 

Lior is outspoken on political matters, and repeatedly promoted the theory that the "Western Land of Israel" (meaning all of historical Palestine) belongs to the Jews only.

He claims that the "Eastern Land of Israel," today the Kingdom of Jordan, which in his view also belongs to Jews, is less holy and may be compromised. Withdrawal from any part of the "Western Land of Israel", according to Lior, is a sin.

Lior supports the construction of illegal settlements on Palestinian territory and does not recognise the right of Palestinians to own land.

After Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated in 1995, Lior's name was listed among the rabbis who had allegedly issued a ruling condemning Rabin as a traitor worthy of death.

Itamar Ben-Gvir, the leader of the Jewish Power party, threatened to hurt Rabin in a television interview but was not charged because he was a minor at the time. Subsequently Lior and Ben-Gvir formed a lasting friendship.

Lior was the rabbi of the Kiryat Arba illegal settlement within the occupied city of Hebron between 1987 and 2015. One of his disciples, Baruch Goldstein, shot and murdered 29 Palestinians in the Abrahamic Mosque in Hebron in 1994. Rabbi Lior referred to Goldstein afterwards as "holier than all the martyrs of the Holocaust."

In 2011, he expressed written support for the book "The King's Torah," a racist and genocidal book by the rabbis Yitzhak Shapira and Yosef Elitzur, which, among other things, endorses the killing of non-Jewish babies before they grow to adulthood and pose an alleged risk to Jews.

No one hates Judaism more than those who describe opposition to this as anti-Semitism. 
Posted by at November 29, 2022 12:00 AM

  

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