Proud to have shut down church, community center “We pressured people in various ways, talking to people in the community,” Bareli said, “and we patrolled to try to make things hard for them.” “We had a battle here when they began to create communal institutions, and especially a church and a community center,” Bareli added. “We fought against it, and eventually the Sderot city council shut the place down.” “It’s very important to me that in Sderot the people in my community won’t have to deal with Sudanese people who pray in churches, because that’s how Sderot begins to change.” Bareli, who said he has lived in Sderot for 15 years, identified himself as the rabbi of a synagogue called “Demanding Good.” Bareli’s anti-African campaign is reminiscent of a call by hundreds of Israel’s state-financed rabbis urging landlords in cities across the country to refuse to rent homes to Palestinian citizens of Israel. It also comes amid an intensified atmosphere of racism and incitement against Africans encouraged by top Israeli government officials and politicians. Defending Jewish supremacy Bareli defended the idea of Israel being a “Jewish state” in which one group has superior rights. “If we blur this message and say this is a country for all its citizens,” he warned, “and the other automatically becomes a citizen with equal rights, and you don’t have any special privileges just because you are a Jew, unfortunately, in moral terms, that’s like scoring a goal against your own team.” “Why bother fighting … killing people?” asks the Israeli rabbi, in defense of inferior rights for non-Jews. Bareli accused Sudanese people in particular of causing a “demographic problem” and urged the government to pay them to leave the country. Following the success of his anti-African campaign in Sderot, Bareli is now moving to Tel Aviv to set up a similar effort there, which was inaugurated by Israel’s deputy minister for religious affairs.
Posted on: Thu, 12 Sep 2013 16:33:39 +0000
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