Jerusalem – Eleven Israeli police officers, including the chief of Jerusalem’s police and two district commanders, were disciplined on Sunday over a stabbing spree at the city’s Gay Pride parade by a Jewish zealot who had been flagged as a threat.
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Seven of the officers were reassigned and four formally reprimanded in what Internal Security Minister Gilad Erdan described as personal sanctions “on an unprecedented scale” given the “grave events which could have been prevented”.
Yishai Schlissel, who has confessed to the stabbings, is an ultra-Orthodox Jew who said in court that he had been doing God’s will by killing a 16-year-old girl and wounding five others participants in the July 30 march, which he described as a religious abomination.
Schlissel had recently been freed from prison, where he had served time for stabbing three people at the 2005 Jerusalem Gay Pride parade.
An Israeli police spokeswoman said in a statement that officers had been instructed to be on the lookout for Schlissel and bar him for this year’s event, but had failed to do so due to negligence or faulty communication.
Some of the officers who were reassigned were also barred from promotion or command positions for periods of between five and seven years, the police statement said.
They should be commended. The police who refused to come out to help the five jewish boys almost lynched by Arabs should go to jail. Israel is an upside down country. Locking up frim Jews like schlissel but freeing Arab terrorists in mass
To #1 - You are a disturbed person, and should be ashamed of yourself, for justifying the actions of that psycho! I would have gone a stop farther, and fired the incompetent cops, for not keeping better surveillance on that psycho. Also, if the stabber had been an Arab, he would have been shot dead at the scene. Regarding the five American Yeshiva youths, who went traveling in Chebron on their own, they showed very bad judgment. If one wishes to visit the Cave of the Machpelah, there are organized groups which conduct tours, in armored buses. It is not too smart to rent a car, and drive unprotected into Arab areas of Chebron. They have to take responsibility for their own actions, which were foolish. They were extremely fortunate that they were saved from the raging Arab mob.
It was also a political decision error; the parade should never have been approved for any place in Jerusalem other than a place like the Teddy Stadium.
Jerusalem is too religious for a gay pride parade and to put it in a place of minimum security smacks of non thinking not only on the part of the police, but also on the part of the politicians and the organizers.