After yesterday’s shooting there were a lot of fingers pointed towards religious parliament members, reminding them of their harsh words on the LGBT community – anything from calling them an abomination to accusing them of causing earthquakes and calling to treat them as one should treat the swine flu.
Some people on the other hand are calling to wait. The details of the murder are not yet clear, as the police didn’t apprehend the killer. The claim is that it may not even be a hate crime. I disagree for a few reasons:
a) It does not really matter if the killer itself was an ultra-orthodox, an orthodox, a secular person, an atheist – the fact is that those Members of Knesset (and famous rabbies) were engaged in blatant inciting, in this case against the LGBT community. One cannot just claim now their words are affecting only religious people.
b) More importantly, and somewhat related to the former – It’s enough to hear those MKs’ responses (”the killer is probably one of their own community”) and to read the comments in the news sites1 to see a part of the mainstream attitude towards this crime, or at least what the mainstream is willing to accept as legitimate attitude. In this case it does not really matter who did the crime and why, it retroactively turns into a hate crime.
Tactically, I’m not sure if the public calls to blame the religious leaders as partly responsible for this event is wise. Essentially, any other claim, in my opinion – is hypocrisy.
Blaming it entirely on the religious leaders, on the other hand is a different kind of hypocrisy.
- the ones that were approved – as I work in an internet news site, I can assure you the ones that were not approved are much worse [↩]
I’m not sure I agree with the claim that the consensus belief according to which this was a hate crime, committed by – or at least incited by – religious people, “retroactively” makes it such.
In my humble opinion, it only means that the presiding atmosphere of hate is bad enough to make the public willingly believe it. In other words, the truth matters; If eventually we’d all find out that this was a “love crime” (highly unlikely as it may be), the whole story would no doubt be revised.
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