Bigots Worried Gay Pride Stabbing Will Give Them Bad Name

“Please judge each of us by our own despicable behavior and discourse, not that of a completely separate hateful individual.”

Jerusalem, August 7 – Israelis who believe people who are different from them do not enjoy the same human rights as others expressed concern this week that society might judge them negatively as a result of last week’s fatal stabbing attack at the Jerusalem Gay Pride march.

Humans Against Transsexualism, Etc. (HATE), an umbrella organization of pro-discrimination groups, issued a statement calling for the media and the public not to paint their hateful, bigoted membership with the same brush as they paint the hateful, bigoted murderer. The statement asked Israeli society to be measured in its response to the murder, saying that theirs is a completely different kind of animosity toward deviant, unnatural , or alien values from that of Yishai Shlissel, the accused murderer.

“We beg the public not to be taken in by the stereotyping so rampant in the media in the aftermath of last week’s violence,” began the statement. “It would be profoundly unjust for the public to judge us and our constituency by the actions of one man who coincidentally professes all of the same things we do. The most appropriate course of action, we are sure most everyone agrees, is to judge each of us by our own behavior and discourse, not that of a completely separate hateful individual.”

Bigots across the country have faced increased scrutiny and opprobrium since the stabbing, which injured six people, one of whom, a sixteen-year-old girl, later died of her wounds. HATE and its member organizations soon realized they needed to work together to help deflect criticism they perceive as unjustified. “For one thing, it;s not true that all of us do not view the girl’s death as tragic,” said HATE coordinator Tzvi Oot. “She herself was not gay or whatever, but came to support her friends who were. Many of our members are dead against hurting those who are not themselves practitioners of deviant sexuality, so it’s wrong to say this Shlissel person represents us as a group.”

Another important point, noted Oot, is that some of HATE’s constituents were just as murderously opposed to Jewish practice as they are to the LGBTQ community. “We have plenty of members who hate Haredim more than they hate gays, so no matter what Shlissel did, they’re against him and others like him. Those who are portraying all of us bigots as uniformly supportive of such acts are gravely mistaken – a good number of us disapprove of the attacker.”

It remains unclear what effect, if any, HATE’s efforts have had on public discourse. Political figures from left and right have refused to meet with HATE representatives, frustrating the coalition’s attempts to get their message out. “We had an entire full-page ad ready to go in Haaretz on Monday,” recalled Oot. “It went into exquisite detail about why and how it is right and just to hate the people we hate, and why everyone should, yet at the same time decrying the knee-jerk reactions people had in the wake of the stabbing, as if this one guy was authorized to act on our behalf.”

“It’s soiling our reputation,” he said.