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Anti-Assimilation group protests Christmas tree event in Jerusalem

Gopstein

Benzi Gopstein holds a noose at a Lehava meeting shared on social media (Twitter/@ronnie_barkan)
IMEMC News | December 6, 2015

The right-wing Jewish group ‘Lehava’ held a protest outside of the YMCA in Jerusalem, shouting at Palestinian Christian children and families as they were entering and leaving the annual Christmas-tree decoration party.

Lehava is a group that calls for the expulsion of the indigenous Palestinian population from their homes in what is now Israel, in Jerusalem and in the West Bank. At a protest last year outside of a business that had some Palestinian employees, the group chanted “Stop hiring Arabs,” “stop dating our women” and “employing Arabs equals Assimilation.”

The group, whose name in Hebrew stands for the “Organization for the Prevention of Assimilation in the Holy Land”, has also disrupted weddings between Palestinians and Israeli Jews, and handed out fliers saying they are trying to “save the daughters of Israel” by preventing them from dating or marrying Arab men.

A 2011 investigation by the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz found that around half of the annual budget of the controversial Lehava organization was funded directly by the Israeli government.

The leader of the group, Benzi Gopstein, was reportedly present at the YMCA protest on Friday. Gopstein is on the record voicing support for Pinhas Aburamed, an Israeli man who murdered a Palestinian who he thought was trying to flirt with a Jewish girl. Gopstein said that Aburamed is a hero and should receive a medal.

The event that the right-wing Jewish Lehava group chose to protest was a family event described on the YMCA’s website as “A festive evening in the YMCA lobby decorating the Christmas tree, singing carols and enjoying holiday treats.”

The protesters shouted anti-Palestinian and anti-Christian slogans at the children who came to decorate the Christmas tree, including, “The Arabs won’t defeat us with knifes, and the Christians won’t buy us with presents,” and “Jews want a hanukkiah [menorah], not a fir tree”, according to Israel National News.

Around 1% of the population of Israel, the West Bank and Gaza is Christian. The percentage had been higher before the Israeli military occupation and theft of Palestinian land began. The emigration of Palestinian Christians to other countries increased significantly after the Oslo Accords were signed in 1993 and Israeli settlement expansion increased exponentially.

Many Palestinian Christians in Bethlehem, Jerusalem and Nazareth can trace their ancestry back to early Christians who have remained continuously on the land where Christians believe that Jesus was born, died and resurrected.

December 6, 2015 - Posted by | Civil Liberties, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Subjugation - Torture, Timeless or most popular | , , , , , ,

3 Comments »

  1. Precisely: the Palestinians, Christian and Muslim alike, are the original people; the Jewish interlopers are outsiders having no connection to the land of any kind.

    Like

    Comment by traducteur | December 6, 2015 | Reply

  2. What hit me was the though of Israeli fascist military being allowed to remove any youth into a disappeared state, for it has been preveiously stated that they have been capitalizing on HARVESTING HUMAN INTERNAL ORGANS FOR SALE,

    Meaning they are worth more than alive! We know this is an ongoing business from chilling news accounts, and even here in the USA in ex-change for a used cars. Cannibalism as medical practice. This should be invested and exposed with a timeline of ages, locations, and consequences for the butchered victims of another form of Zionist criminality.

    Like

    Comment by Bill Mitchell | December 6, 2015 | Reply

  3. P.S; Decided to follow-up myself, and it is happening, but real research needs to done, and explans why all the Palestinian children are disappearing and shot dead; their is a bounty on their organs by Israeli monsters!

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organ_transplantation_in_Israel

    Organ trafficking
    Main article: Organ trade

    According to organ trade expert Nancy Scheper-Hughes of Organ Watch (in 2001), Israel had become a “pariah” in the organ transplant world. The lack of donations due to Jewish custom heightened the disparity between the supply and demand of organs. This led to the popularity of “transplant tourism” in which patients in need of organs travel to medical centres abroad to receive organs.[12] Prior to the 2008 law prohibiting it, some Israeli organ brokers advertised on the radio and in newspapers. Kidneys, which are the most traded organ, may fetch up to $150,000 for brokers who usually pay the donors far less.[11] The Jewish weekly newspaper The Forward reported in the wake of this scandal that an Organ Trafficking Prohibition Act of 2009, sponsored by Democratic Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, has yet to be officially introduced in the U.S., but that its proposed language cites Israel as a model of a country that has enacted a law providing benefits for organ donors.[5]

    The lack of regulations against organ trafficking prior to 2008 made Israel a focal point for the international organ trade. Health insurance would reimburse Israelis for organ transplants done abroad, but this has been banned in the new law.[13]

    As a result of all the abuses of the illegal market in human organs, there is a growing movement of activists in Israel and in America to legalize a Government-regulated program to offer financial incentives to people for living kidney donations and to families for deceased donations from brain-stem dead donors. This movement is headed, among other organizations, by the Alliance for Organ Donor Incentives.
    The Aftonbladet accusations
    Main article: 2009 Aftonbladet Israel controversy

    In August 2009 the Swedish tabloid Aftonbladet published an article alleging that in 1992 the Israeli Defense Force took organs from Palestinians who died in Israeli custody.[14] The allegations were denied by Israel, and the article caused a diplomatic row between Israel and Sweden.[15] However the author of the article, Donald Boström, spoke to Israel Radio on 19 August 2009 and said he was worried by the allegations he reported: “It concerns me, to the extent that I want it to be investigated, that’s true. But whether it’s true or not — I have no idea, I have no clue.”[16]

    In December an interview was broadcast on Israeli television during which Israel’s chief pathologist, Dr. Yehuda Hiss, discussed the harvesting of organs in the 1990s at the Abu Kabir Forensic Institute.[17] The interview was followed by a confirmation from Israeli officials that organs were taken in the 1990s without the permission of families of the deceased. Officials denied that the practice continued, and noted that both Israeli and Palestinian organs were taken without permission. “We started to harvest corneas for various hospitals in Israel,” Hiss said in an interview on Israel’s Channel 2 network. “Whatever was done was highly informal. No permission was asked from the families,” he said.[18]

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    Comment by Bill Mitchell | December 6, 2015 | Reply


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