At settler rally, Hebron rabbi calls Obama racist

Ma'an
A rabbi from the illegal settlement Kiryat Arba called US President Barack Obama a racist during a rally on Monday, the Hebrew-language daily newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth reported on Tuesday.

"Obama is a racist," said Rabbi Eliezer Waldman, who heads the Nir yeshiva at the settlement, while addressing a pro-settler rally in Jerusalem's Paris Square on Monday. The demonstration was in response to US demands that Israel stop building in occupied East Jerusalem.

"How dare he [Obama] tell the Jews where they can or can't live?" he added at the protest organized by the Yesha Council of settlements, which announced earlier this week it would set up 11 new West Bank outposts in defiance of both the US and Israel.

Some 1,500 Israeli settlers, right-wing activists and members of the Knesset attended the rally on Monday, during which crowds reportedly carrying torches approached the US Consulate and called for special envoy George Mitchell to "go home." The Israeli daily newspaper Haaretz reported that the crowd jeered at every mention of the envoy, who arrived in Tel Aviv the same day.

"Obama beware. This insolence will bring about the downfall of the American leadership," warned Rabbi Waldman. "Anyone who dares give an order to prevent Israeli life in Jerusalem or anywhere else in the Land of Israel is destined to fall."

According to Pinchas Wallerstein, who heads the Yesha Council, "We are brought here by America's treatment of Israel as if it were a banana republic and its willingness to abandon us in order to gain the support of public opinion within the Islamic world."

Yesha Council chairman Danny Dayan said, "We are here to call on the government to fend off US pressure to halt construction in Judea, Samaria [the West Bank] and [East] Jerusalem." He also chastised Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for giving in to US demands, although the Israeli leader has in fact rejected them.

"A government led by the Likud, Yisrael Beiteinu, Shas and Habayit Hayehudi cannot accept this. Netanyahu should follow in the footsteps of his predecessors – from David Ben-Gurion, who established Israel despite pressure from the US, to Levi Eshkol, who launched the Six Day War in the face of American pressure, and Menachem Begin, who bombed the Iraqi nuclear reactor in defiance of US demands," he added.

Eleven new outposts are set to go up in the West Bank within a few days, following a three-month campaign by settler activists and youth. Some 20,000 pamphlets describing their ideology and plans were distributed in synagogues over the weekend, according to news reports. Full story