Elhanan Ostrowitz, found guilty of vandalizing memorial sites last year, calls nationwide siren a ‘classic characteristic of a dictatorship’
An ultra-Orthodox man petitioned Israel’s High
Court of Justice to limit the nationwide siren on Remembrance Day so
that it sounds only at memorial sites and army bases, calling the siren a
“classic characteristic of a dictatorship.”
Elhanan Ostrowitz, who filed the petition, made headlines last year when he was arrested for vandalizing the Yad Vashem and Ammunition Hill memorials with anti-Zionist graffiti. Six months ago he was found guilty of a number of crimes, including trespassing and vandalism.
The siren which sounds for a minute across
Israel on Remembrance Day forces people “to stand at collective
attention,” in a manner only found in dictatorships, Ostrowitz wrote in
his petition. Because of its nature, the siren should only be sounded on
army bases and at memorials, so as not to force everyone to hear it, he
elaborated.
Ostrowitz said he, “like many of Israel’s
citizens,” felt the siren stopped people from freely expressing their
opinions and beliefs, and also caused unnecessary panic among the
public. The law demanding “all work and traffic be stopped” during the
siren is undemocratic, as it hurts the individual’s freedoms of
expression, occupation and other basic rights, he claimed.
Most of the people who stand at attention do
so “out of fear and against their personal belief,” Ostrowitz argued.
Such actions “define dictatorships… [and] Israel is the only place in
the Western world, or maybe the entire world, where a siren is sounded
in the entire public sphere,” he stated.
Keine Kommentare:
Kommentar veröffentlichen