"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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