‘Cruel’ judge who let Jerusalem terrorist stay out of prison faces criticism
Terror victim's son slams ruling as "one of the most serious failures in the judicial history of Israel."
By LAHAV HARKOVUpdated: OCTOBER 11, 2016 00:45MK Yehudah Glick at the Temple Mount(photo credit: MARC ISRAEL SELLEM)
As Yom Kippur approaches, Jews around the world are atoning for their sins, but MK Yehudah Glick (Likud) announced on Monday that there was one person he would not forgive: Judge Hagit Mak-Kalmanovith, who postponed the prison sentence of the terrorist who ended up killing two Israelis in Jerusalem on Sunday.On May 30, the terrorist’s attorney reached a plea deal by which he would admit to assaulting a police officer and receive a reduced sentence of four months.The lawyer asked that the sentence be postponed until October, and Mak-Kalmanovith agreed. On Sunday, having not yet begun his sentence, the terrorist went on a shooting spree.“You listened to the pleading of the terrorist, who was arrested many times for violence.You were cruel to the merciful and had mercy on the cruel,” Glick wrote about Mak-Kalmanovith.Scene of shooting attack in Jerusalem"s Ammunition Hill, 9.10.16“As a result of your postponing the terrorist’s sentence for four months, he murdered two innocent Jews yesterday and wounded many others,” Glick went on.“On the eve of Yom Kippur, before your Lord, will you be able to say your hands are clean?” The terrorist’s name is still being withheld under a gag order.Glick encountered Mak-Kalmanovith in court on October 22, 2014, when he was the leading activist for Jewish prayer rights on the Temple Mount. He wrote in his Facebook post that the judge did not believe him when he said he felt his life was being threatened, and that he regularly faced violence from Arabs on the Temple Mount.“You preferred the terrorists over me and decided to ban me from the Temple Mount, because you said that I was dangerous. You accepted the twisted and false claim.... You preferred to believe the violent people, the terrorists, the villains and the liars. I felt that you were assassinating me,” he wrote.A week later, Muataz Hijazi of east Jerusalem shot Glick several times, critically wounding him.
“His assassination attempt did not hurt me as much as yours, which was like a knife to my heart,” Glick wrote.“There is no need to say that in the end, it was proven that I am innocent.”Later, Glick expressed regret for the tone of the post.“The Israeli judiciary is not immune from criticism and even harsh criticism, but no one should raise his hand against it.... If not for the judiciary, Israel would turn into anarchy.... I tried to criticize substantively, but I used an expression that was not appropriate, and I regret it,” he wrote.Micah Avni, whose father, Richard Lakin, was killed in a terrorist attack in Jerusalem last year, called on Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked to have Mak-Kalmanovith dismissed on Monday.Avni called the postponement of the terrorist’s sentence “one of the greatest failures in the history of the Israeli judiciary, which is directly connected to loss of dear human lives.”“This failure is even greater because the terrorist was a member of Hamas and boasted of a past rich with assaults on police officers and expressions supporting and encouraging terrorism and incitement on social media,” Avni wrote.“The State Attorney’s Office and judiciary’s leniency in all that is connected to security crimes must stop.”