Israeli politician claims LGBTQ+ community is more dangerous than ISIS
An Israel politician has said the LGBTQ+ community is more dangerous than a terrorist group.
In an interview with Israel’s Channel 12 on Tuesday (20 June), Yitzhak Pindrus, a member of the orthodox and conservative United Torah Judaism party (UTJ), said homosexuality was “the most dangerous thing” for the state of Israel.
He said he believed the LGBTQ+ community was more of a threat than Islamic State, or militant groups Hezbollah and Hamas, according to local newspaper Haaretz.
Pindrus said he held his views were purely because “it’s written in the Torah”, which comprises the first five books of the Old Testament and forms traditional Jewish law.
“It’s written that the land will expel you… I don’t just have to prevent the Pride march, I have to prevent the entire movement,” he went on.
According to Haaretz, the Channel 12 host he was speaking to, Nesli Barda, is lesbian.
The newspaper reported that Pindrus has long been vocal in his opposition to the LGBTQ+ community, noting that in 2010, when he was the deputy mayor of Jerusalem, he submitted a request to hold a “donkey parade” as a counter protest to a Gay Pride march in Israel. It was denied but protesters carried cardboard cut-outs of donkeys.
The use of animals was to equate homosexuality to bestiality, it was reported.
More recently, in January, he walked out of parliament – the knesset – when its new speaker, Amir Ohana, who is gay and a member of Likud, the majority ruling party, delivered his acceptance speech.
In the speech, Ohana spoke about his husband and children, which Pindrus later said he had a “right to feel uncomfortable” about.
Israel’s current government is a coalition of several parties alongside Likud, including Pindrus’ UTJ.
It has been described as the most religious and hard-line in Israel’s history, and includes Noam, a far-right, anti-LGBTQ religious party that has previously tried to link gay people to child trafficking and compared LGBTQ+ advocates to Nazis.