"Jerusalem police on Wednesday evening rejected a request from Deputy Mayor Yitzhak Pindrus to hold a “donkey parade” alongside the city’s annual Gay Pride parade, which is set to begin at 4:30 p.m. on Thursday," The Jerusalem Post reports today.
Rabbi Yitzhak Pindrus of the United Torah Judaism party "had hoped to greet parade participants with the animals to represent what he terms the “bestial” nature of the pride march, police offered the deputy mayor a compromise of carrying cardboard cut-outs of donkeys during his group’s counterprotest. Pindrus accepted."
During the 2005 Jerusalem Pride march, Yishai Schlissel, a member of the ultra Orthodox haredi community, stabbed three participants with a knife.
Alongside the murder of two people at a Tel Aviv gay centre last year, it helped cement Israel's image as "an oasis of tolerance and acceptance in a region of virulent homophobia", as Pink News called it last month.
And as you can see from the illustration, donkeys, political protest, religious leaders and Jerusalem go way back.
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According to Haaretz two protests happened on the day.
ReplyDelete"Anti-gay protesters gathered Thursday next to several hundred gay activists preparing to march in the eighth annual Jerusalem Gay Pride parade, calling them to "get out of Jerusalem."
The protesters, led by extreme rightist activists Baruch Marzel and Itamar Ben Gvir, hoisted banners reading "sick perverts - get out of Jerusalem."
"It is a disease of choice, and a man can change his taste and his ways," Marzel said, adding "when someone has AIDS they tell them not to infect others, so why are these people allowed to march here in Jerusalem and infect us with their disease?"
The parade, which for the first time is expected to march all the way to the Knesset building, marks a year since the deadly shooting at the Tel Aviv Gay youth center, in which two people were killed and 13 were wounded.
"Meanwhile, rightists from the United Torah Judaism party organized a "donkeys' parade," expected to gather outside the Supreme Court, under the banner "the marchers who do what beasts do."
http://www.haaretz.com/news/national/anti-gay-protesters-sick-perverts-get-out-of-jerusalem-1.304824