13 Indicted For Participating in ‘Hate Wedding’

13 individuals were indicted Wednesday for alleged “hate activities” at a wedding last year in Yerushalayim. Attorney Itamar Ben-Gvir said he will be defending several of them. According to Ben-Gvir, the decision to indict the 13 – five of them under age 17 – “is a populist step by the prosecutor’s office. Usually, indictments are quietly handed down, but in this case they apparently wanted to get a lot of media coverage, and that trumps the rights of the defendants, who should have had an opportunity to first examine the indictments.”

According to prosecutors, the attendees of the wedding that took place on December 7, 2015 – including the groom himself – participated in what are being termed “hate crimes” for threatening Arabs with violence. In particular, the indictment said, the defendants wielded photos of the members of the Dawabshe family, including images of the infant who was burned to death when their home went up in flames in July of that year. The defendants wave the photos around, dancing and singing and calling for “revenge,” and for the demolition of the Al-Aqsa Mosque on Har HaBayis.

Participants also waved around weapons and conducted mock “executions,” apparently meant to stand in for actions they wished to take against Arabs. The indictment summed up their actions as “being part of a choir that advocated violence and terror, and praised such actions, showing support for and identification with the perpetrators of terror acts.”

Commenting on the indictments, Ben-Gvir said that police should work “in order. They should first be handing down indictments against participants in weddings in Rahat and Umm el-Faham where guns are actually fired into the air. Once again prosecutors have shown how tough they can be on the Jews and how they work to root out racism and hate – but only against them.”