‘Gays run the media and tell us what to think,’ israeli MP says

JERUSALEM POST – Gay people are not like healthy or normal people, MK Bezalel Smotrich (Bayit Yehudi) said Thursday.

“I’m convinced that 95 percent of the citizens of Israel want to form beautiful, healthy, normal families and have grandchildren. A healthy person, a normal person, that is what he wants,” Smotrich told Galei Israel Radio, as an explanation as to why accepting LGBT people in society is dangerous.

According to Smotrich, many senior members of the media in Israel are gay, and as such “they hold the microphone and decide for all of us what we should think and what we should say.”

LGBT people, he said, have a great power to create a type of political correctness and getting the media and society to align with it.

“It influences society’s mindset. Dozens of the most dominant factors, cultural heroes, news editors and reporters, naturally cannot hear opinions like mine and will cut me off after a quarter of a sentence and make me look crazy, because they don’t let me explain myself,” Smotrich, a member of the hardline Tekuma party within Bayit Yehudi, argued.

When asked if he will continue to call the LGBT Pride Parade the “Abomination Parade,” which earned him criticism from Bayit Yehudi leader Naftali Bennett, Smotrich said “I didn’t make that word up; it was written in the Torah.

“If the head of my party wants to censor the Torah, good luck to him. I’m not going to censor the Torah,” he added.

Earlier this week, Bennett said in an interview with Hebrew women’s online magazine Saloona that Smotrich’s use of the word “abomination” is inappropriate.

“I disdain and reject these expressions, including by that MK. There is no place to call them that, even if that is his personal opinion…For the perspective of Jewish law, it says that a person who violates the Sabbath should die. Are we going to go out and kill people who violate the Sabbath?” Bennett asked.

Bennett called it wrong for people to obsess over gay people, pointing out that eating non-Kosher food is also called an abomination in the Torah and people do not say that about everyone who doesn’t eat kosher.

“Why are people specifically fixated on personal lives? I don’t accept it and I total reject it. To go and call someone that because of his personal choices and identity – I reject that. I want people to hear me say that as a leader in religious Zionism,” he stated.

Bennett’s comments came nearly three weeks after the stabbing at the LGBT Parade in Jerusalem by Yishai Shlissel, a man who committed the same crime ten years earlier. Two days later, Bennett was uninvited from speaking at a rally for tolerance organized by LGBT organizations in Tel Aviv, because he does not support gay marriage.

Last week, Bennett complained to police that he is the target is incitement, after receiving many Facebook comments that he and his party had blood on their hands and were to blame for Shlissel’s actions.