The Knesset’s ethics committee ruled on Sunday that an Otzma Yehudit MK who filmed himself making racist and offensive remarks against opposition lawmakers would be barred from speaking at plenums and committees for five days.
Almog Cohen will also be unable to present bills or questions until the end of the Knesset’s winter session on 2 April and will receive an official reprimand.
The committee, under Governor MK Yinon Azulai, said Almog’s conduct “has no place in public discourse and certainly not in the Knesset plenum. His comments were defamatory and disrespectful…and cannot be defended.”
when cohen created a ruckus filmed himself during a plenary session last month, including making animal sounds on MLA Ofer Kassif – the only Jew in the Arab-majority faction Hadash-Tal – by making animal sounds on MK, saying that someone should “talk to him in that language”. should do what they understand”.
“You need to talk to her like a sheep,” he said.
Cohen also said of Ahmed Tibi of Tal, a trained gynecologist, “She is a doctor; I won’t let him treat my dog,” and commented that Yash Atid’s Merav Ben-Ari “sounds like a floor cleaner.”
The far-right MK has since apologized to Ben-Ari, but has refused to apologize to Hadash-Tal MPs, explicitly stating that the MK in the faction, which it claims are “terrorist supporters” and “traitors, “Were not fit to be sheep, they are not human.”
The ethics committee said that some of Cohen’s comments could be viewed as “racist and extremist”.
The panel also reprimanded Yesh Atid MKS Yorai Lahav-Hertzano and Vladimir Belyak in its decision. climbed over the tables In a committee hearing bills that were part of the government’s judicial overhaul bid.
“The public sees such behavior and it has a negative impact on them,” the panel said.
Yorai Hretzno Lahav and Marina Maximilian Blomin – go to the table pic.twitter.com/V9GKrbs7Fb
— amichayo (@amichayo) February 13, 2023
The two MKs refused to apologize for their behaviour, saying their actions came amid a government push that is threatening Israel’s democracy.
Cohen’s video from the plenum was also tied to the judicial shakeup, filmed during the first vote on bills that are at the heart of the government’s moves to overhaul the judicial system, including giving politicians complete control over the selection of judges and speeding up the judicial process. includes curbing. The High Court’s ability to nullify laws, and to allow 61 of the 120 members of the Knesset to re-enact laws when it does.
The far-right MK is a member of the ultra-nationalist Otzma Yehudit party, whose leader, National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir, has previously been convicted of inciting racism.
Ben Gevir was for years a self-styled disciple of the late racist Rabbi Meir Kahane, whose extreme platform called for the expulsion of Arabs and criminalizing relations between Jews and non-Jews. In recent years, Ben Gvir has tried to distance himself from some of his spiritual mentor’s views.
A few years after the rabbi’s assassination in 1990, Kahane’s Kach party was declared a terrorist organization by both the Israeli government and the US State Department, after which it disbanded.
Ben Gvir also used to hang on the wall of his Hebron home a picture of Baruch Goldstein, who in 1994 massacred 29 Palestinians at Hebron’s Tomb of the Patriarchs praying. He removed the picture once it became clear that it had hurt him politically, and has since said he no longer regards Goldstein as a “hero”.
Ahead of the 1 November elections – in which Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing, far-right and ultra-Orthodox parties won a plurality of Knesset seats – Cohen was caught on hidden cam Otzma Yehudit’s recent moderation of his extremist positions is a “ploy” to enter parliament, implying that members hold far more extreme ideologies than they actually voiced at the time.
