Hate-Group Protest In Boro Park This Shabbos

Mevater ↓

Fri, Sep 25 2009, 5:11 pm

http://www.theyeshivaworld.com......html

As YWN has reported, a Topeka-based hate group (Westboro Baptist Church) is targeting Brooklyn Jews with a barrage of hate-filled demonstrations this week.

The anti-Semitic, anti-gay organization plans to picket five Shuls in Brooklyn this coming Shabbos, the day before Yom Kippur. The group is on a four-day visit to New York, where they’ll demonstrate at 19 locations, mostly synagogues, around the city and Long Island - including Great Neck.

They plan to assemble on sidewalks and sing anti-Jewish songs and display signs with slogans such as “God Hates Jews” and “America is Doomed.”

Hate-filled members of the group say that they have now decided to target Jews in Brooklyn because “there are 1.6 million Jews in New York and Brooklyn so we need to go there.”

The first of the five Shuls the group plans to picket on Shabbos is Cong. Shomrei Emunah in Boro Park.

Many anonymous emails & text messages are going around the community, with one of them reading: (unedited) “Hitler is coming to town. plz come out and show your support for us jews at 14th ave and 52nd street. at 830 shobbes morning. me yichye umi yumis….. plz pass it on people have to know whats going on”

YWN spoke with NYS Assemblyman Dov Hikind today about the Boro Park demonstration.

“My office has recieved more calls about this, than almost any other issue that I can remember,” Hikind said.

“People are very concerned, and rightfully so. I was driving down Canal Street in Manhattan on Thursday and came across the group with their anti-Semitic and hate-filled posters demonstrating. It absolutely sickened me.

“I plan on walking in from Flatbush to Boro Park on Shabbos morning to make sure that this thing does not get out of control. I would like nothing more than to see this demonstration go peacefully, and I will just be the only Jew standing there. Although it hurts and pains me to see this sick group specifically protest in Boro Park (a neighborhood filled with Holocaust survivors) just one day before Yom Kippur, I still hope that no Jews show up to confront them.”

Rabbi Beirish Freilich told YWN “I strongly urge people in the community to ignore the small group of protesters, and not even walk near the demonstration. It can only lead to a Chillul Hashem!”

Simcha Felder tells YWN that upon consulting with a prominent Gadol, he was instructed to tell people not to walk near the protest whatsoever.

Highly credible sources tell YWN that the NYPD will have a zero-tolerance level on both sides, and urge everyone to not break the law, and remain calm. Additionally NYPD tells YWN that people would be better off not coming to counter-protest, as they will just be giving them a “platform” and will encourage them to return to Boro Park again.

Is this the beginning of major trouble? What do you think?

Last edited by Mevater on Fri, Sep 25 2009, 5:19 pm; edited 1 time in total

↑ Mevater

Sat, Sep 26 2009, 11:44 pm

http://thefastertimes.com/hate.....days/

It was 1977 when the Illinois National Socialist Party of America secured the right to march through Skokie, a suburb of Chicago, and a home to many Holocaust survivors.

Moishe Stern, a man who peaked at about five feet from the ground, had survived the Holocaust with my grandparents. When he learned that the Nazis were coming to his hometown of Skokie, invading his life once more, he rented a truck.

As the story goes, this truck Stern rented was commonly used for cleaning up human sewage. His plan was to reverse the flow of the vacuum, thus drenching the parade of Illinois Nazis with excrement.

The march on Skokie, however, never happened. The **** never hit the klan, if you will.

I was recently reminded of Moishe Stern’s messy plot when the Westboro Baptist Church came to my childhood hometown–Great Neck, New York–to spew their vitriol upon the village’s large Jewish population during the week of the High Holidays.

This warped house of worship, founded by disbarred attorney Fred Phelps, is in truth a fifty member Kansas-based hate group, as reported by the national nonprofit civil rights law firm Southern Poverty Law Center, and is mainly a Phelps family operation. They travel the country spreading hate, conducting what they claim to have been “41,226 peaceful demonstrations opposing the fag lifestyle.” These dangerous reactionaries hate Jews, homosexuals and America, to name a few; and they protest at the funerals of AIDS victims and United States soldiers killed in war. With their very own Phelps family law firm (eleven of the founder’s thirteen children are attorneys, four of whom run the firm) they know how to corrupt First Amendment ideals and initiate frivolous and offensive lawsuits. Phelps even brought a case against President Ronald Reagan.

September 24 began the first day of their three day New York protest. They picketed a synagogue in Huntington, New York because the day before it was the site of a memorial service for slain Yale University graduate student Annie Le. The five person propaganda campaign also protested outside of Brooklyn Technical High School, where they met a counter demonstration of two hundred students holding signs of their own.

In Great Neck, officials, police, and religious leaders met to discuss how they should handle the protesters who were planning to picket in front of many of the village’s schools and religious institutions.

Rabbi Yoseph Geisinsky of Chabad voiced the general consensus in his interview with The Faster Times: “The best way to prepare for this is to ignore it completely. They come for media attention.” Geisinsky went on to explain that their goal is to provoke a physical reaction. “Their cause is to make money and to try to sue people.”

A spokesperson for Great Neck Synagogue who requested anonymity said, “We’ll run business as usual and won’t give them attention…Hopefully they’ll pack up their tents and leave.”

But on a discussion board at BroadwayWorld.com, one Great Neck resident sought the online community’s advice. Someone recommended hurling matzo balls. Another, in the spirit of Moishe Stern, proposed chucking feces.

It was about 6 p.m., Friday, September 25, when the group, consisting of three females, one male, and one small child, marched out to one corner of Old Mill and Middle Neck Road across from Temple Beth-El. Looking and sounding like hatemongering clowns without the make-up, they entered singing an anti-Semitic song over the tune of the Israeli national anthem, the Hatikvah. Two of the females wore Israeli flags wrapped around their waists like skirts, which they had desecrated with a light splattering of a pinkish substance. They threw the American flag onto the asphalt. One group member mocked the homosexual lifestyle by dragging across the ground a rainbow flag spangled with America’s fifty stars.

Demonstrating behind police barricades, with nearly two dozen police officers controlling the crowds, the group continued to invent repulsive lyrics over popular Jewish melodies like Hava Nagila. For just under thirty minutes the four adults of the group held about four signs each, which read things like “God Hates Jews,” “God Hates Israel,” “Fags are Beasts,” and “AntiChrist Obama” depicting the president with devil horns. The picketers shouted at the more than one hundred onlookers that had gathered across the road; but the hate group was difficult to hear, drowned out by the slow grind of honking traffic and the volume of the counter protest. The young child of the group moped around in the background clutching the cardboard ideas of his family.

About a dozen counter protesters waved Israeli flags. An elderly man in a grey suit stood in front of the synagogue with a placard that read “For peace, against bigotry.” The word shalom was written in Hebrew.

A young man, wearing only a thin Speedo, carried a poster that read “Gay Pride Nationwide.” About half way through the protest the Speedo-clad man popped out from the sun roof of a black SUV, which drove just a few feet from the hate group.

The crowd had mixed emotions. Some chuckled at what they termed “ridiculous.” The word “circus” circulated. Other locals angrily screamed back at the picketers.

A Roman Catholic resident of Great Neck for seventy three years, Gabe Chieco said “I thought I would never live to see the day” and went on to describe the Kansas group as “appalling.”

Great Neck youngsters far outnumbered the elderly onlookers and most shouted back at the hate group. “Go back to Kansas,” they jeered.

One of the female propagandists held a video camera and recorded the counter rally.

Seventeen year old Great Neck resident, Josh, carried an Israeli flag and a book for Shabbat. He saw the group as a “total joke and a waste of time,” but explained how these protests “are just bringing minorities together…We’re united under one cause,” he went on to say “and we love each other.”

A few minutes before 6:30 p.m. the members of the Westboro Baptist Church made for their blue Kia minivan. One group member dallied outside a bit longer, hoping to madden the onlookers; but in a Chaplinesque way, it seemed as if she were trying to fit into some overstuffed clown car.

The counter protesters crossed over Middle Neck Road. The only thing hurled as the minivan exited the scene was the chant of “Shabbat Shalom.” Then the residents of Great Neck disbanded, while a new parade followed the sunset to synagogue.

Everything seemed to return to normal except for the long stretch of traffic through town.