‘Gays run the media,’ Bayit Yehudi MK says

Smotrich says healthy and normal people want a traditional family; Bennett rejects his MK’s use of “abomination” to describe LGBT people.

By LAHAV HARKOV
Updated: AUGUST 14, 2015 00:40
Bezalel Smotrich. (photo credit: Courtesy/Regavim)
Bezalel Smotrich.
(photo credit: Courtesy/Regavim)
The media in Israel are controlled by gay people, who are not healthy or normal, MK Bezalel Smotrich (Bayit Yehudi) charged on Thursday.
“I’m convinced that 95 percent of the citizens of Israel want to form beautiful, healthy, normal families and have grandchildren. A healthy person, a normal person, that is what he wants,” Smotrich told Galei Israel Radio, as an explanation as to why accepting LGBT people in society is dangerous.
According to Smotrich, many senior members of the Israeli media are homosexual, and as such “they hold the microphone and decide for all of us what we should think and what we should say.”
LGBT people, he said, have great power to create a type of political correctness and to getting the media and society to align with it.
“It influences society’s mindset. Dozens of the most dominant factors, cultural heroes, news editors and reporters, naturally cannot hear opinions like mine and will cut me off after a quarter of a sentence and make me look crazy, because they don’t let me explain myself,” Smotrich, a member of the hard-line Tekuma party within Bayit Yehudi, argued.
When asked if he will continue to call the Jerusalem Gay Pride Parade the “Abomination Parade,” which earned him criticism from Bayit Yehudi leader Naftali Bennett, Smotrich said “I didn’t make that word up; it was written in the Torah.”
“If the head of my party wants to censor the Torah, good luck to him. I’m not going to censor the Torah,” he added.
Earlier this week, Bennett said in an interview with Hebrew women’s online magazine Saloona that Smotrich’s use of the word “abomination” is inappropriate.
“I disdain and reject these expressions, including by that MK. There is no place to call them that, even if that is his personal opinion,” Bennett said. “From the perspective of Jewish law, it says that a person who violates the Sabbath should die. Are we going to go out and kill people who violate the Sabbath?”