A Jewish extremist leader in Israel will reportedly face a criminal investigation after he published an article that called Christians "vampires" and advocated for them to be deported from Israel.
Bentzi Gopstein, the head of the radical anti-assimilation group Lehava, posted the incendiary article on the ultra-Orthodox Jewish website Kooker a few days before Christmas 2015. The article, headlined "Eradicate The Vampires," called Christians the "deadly enemy" of Judaism and claimed that the Vatican "rubbed their hands in glee" at "the chimneys of Auschwitz."
#JewishTimes #IsraelInside #BentziGopstein #Lehava #Jewishterrorism Police to probe extremist leader for… https://t.co/t5mxMQh6vA
— Israel News (@IsraelNewsNow) February 22, 2016
After Gopstein's Dec. 17 article was published, the Reform Movement's Religious Action Center, a religious rights organization, tried to persuade Israel's state prosecutor to investigate him for incitement and insulting religious sensibilities. On Sunday, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported that the state prosecution had given police the go-ahead to pursue such an investigation.
Lehava, which means "The Flame" in Hebrew, is an anti-Arab group made up mostly of teenagers, which is known for picketing mixed-faith weddings in Israel and for patrolling the streets of Jerusalem looking for interfaith couples. The group has also beaten up Arabs on several occasions.
There are about 160,000 Christians in Israel, according to the country's Central Bureau of Statistics, which is about two percent of Israel's population. Among the 160,000 Israeli Christians are numbers of Copts, Maronites, Protestants and others. The majority of Israeli Christians are Arab, and they face persecution by radical Jewish groups like Lehava or the so-called "Hilltop Youth," a loosely-affiliated group of young Jewish settlers who carry out "price-tag" attacks on Muslims and Christians alike.
In the past three years, over a dozen churches, monasteries and other Christian sites in Israel have been bombed, burned or vandalized--and only in one instance was a suspect charged with a crime, according to National Geographic. In a prominent recent example, the Church of the Multiplication of Loaves and Fishes on the Sea of Galilee was set ablaze in the middle of night by suspected Jewish radicals.
