Settlers desecrate mosque in Lod

The Arabs48 news website reported on Monday that extremist settlers attacked a mosque in the coastal Lod town, placed porn pictures in the mosque and wrote graffiti calling for expelling the Arab residents from Israel.

“Arabs should be expelled from Israel”, on of the graffiti reads, in addition to the graffiti which praises the Jewish terrorist Meir David Kahane who believed in expelling the Arabs and called for ethnic cleansing against them.

A resident of Lod said that he saw a settler walking around the mosque, and took pictures of the building in a provocative way, the resident spoke to him and asked about what he was doing, but he replied that “he likes the place”.

Another resident managed to take a picture of the settler and gave it to the Israeli police; the police responded by saying “we know this man”, and did not take any action against him. 

The incident took place on Thursday, the same day of the terrorist attack carried out the Eden Natan Zada, a deserter from the Israeli army, who staged on bus heading to Shfa-Amr Arab town in Israel and opened fire at the passengers killing four and wounding several others.

Sheikh Yousef al-Baz, the imam of the Big Mosque in Lod, said that mosque officials filed in the past several complaints to the police after receiving phone threats of attacks against the mosque, but the police failed to probe the threats.

“Now, after the massacre in Shfa-Amr, we demand the police to investigate such incidents”, al-Baz said, “the Israeli security should investigate the movements of extremist Jews in the city and other Arab areas”

The mosque was called Dahmash mosque after an Israeli Arab resident donated its construction at the beginning of the twentieth century. It was subjected to several attacks carried out by settlers and extremist Jewish groups.

Dozens of residents were slaughtered in the mosque in 1948 in an attempt to expel the Arab residents from the country after the 1948 war.

Reference:

Kahane believed that the Palestinians sought the genocide of the Israelis, and therefore he proposed the population transfer and even forcible deportation of all Arabs from Israel including the West Bank. In his view this was the only acceptable solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Kahane also believed that Israel should become a theocracy governed purely by Jewish law known as the Halakha. He hoped that the Israeli government would pass laws, including a ban on all sexual relations between Jews and non-Jews, in accordance with the traditions of Orthodox Judaism.

Kahane immigrated to Israel in 1971, and founded the ultra-radical Kach Party which fielded candidates for the Knesset starting in 1974.

The aims of this party were to rid the state of Israel of its Arab population, and establish theocracy.

Sexual union between Jew and Arab would be punished by death. To combat this movement, in 1985 the Israeli constitution was modified to outlaw racist political parties, and at that time Kahane lost his Knesset seat when he was unable to run for reelection.

In 1990 he was assassinated by Egyptian-American El Sayyid Nosair in New York City. Ten years later, his son was murdered in the West Bank during in an attack carried out by a Palestinian group. .

The movement was outlawed by the Israeli Knesset in 1985, after it modified the Israeli constitution to outlaw racist movements.