Israeli Security Guard Kills Mentally Ill Jew at Kotel

Israeli Security Guard Kills Mentally Ill Jew at Kotel

Posted: 21 Jun 2013 01:59 AM PDT

A 45 year-old mentally ill Jewish man, known to those who frequent the Kotel as a volunteer for Chabad’s soup kitchen there, was shot ten times (Hebrew) by a private security guard and killed.  The man’s crime?  Aside from being mentally ill (he was known to have told others that he converted to Islam), he was believed by the killer to have shouted “Allahu Akbar,” which turns out to have been false.  The guard, trying to defend the indefensible, claims he saw the man removing something from his pocket.  I’m certain if the man had anything in his pocket, authorities, eager to justify the killing, would’ve told us.  No, this is yet another case of the Israeli security state chewing up and swallowing its own.
Walla reports the guard is an Israeli Druze who was working for the firm, Modiin Ezrahi (“Civilian Intelligence”).  The fact that he has to be a native Arab-speaker would indicate he should’ve known whether the victim was saying the Arabic words “Allahu Akbar” or not.  The whole thing stinks to high heaven.  This incident recalls another infamous one in which Druze IDF sniper, Taysir Hayb, murdered British filmmaker Tom Hurndall.
Israeli MK David Dahan, who prays at the Kotel every morning and knew the victim said:

He sat in the [Kotel] plaza and read the newspaper.  Then he went to the restroom and returned complaining about the Mossad [ed., or "establishment" in the sense of 'power élite']: “This Mossad!”  He’s known for this.  He walks around talking to himself.  He’s anti-establishment, perhaps from being homeless.

So you can see that a deranged man’s mumbling about the power elite was confused with swearing allegiance to Allah.  All of which brought him to a pine box at the Mount of Olives.  Now he doesn’t need to worry about finding a home.  Israel will pay for his eternal resting place.
Another Kotel regular who knew of the victim and his eccentricities tried to justify the killing by saying that the killer and victim had engaged in a shouting match in which the Jewish man had said he hated Druze and would kill the security guard.  Then, the source said, the victim shouted “Allahu Akbar” and placed his hands in his pockets.  Now tell me how a mentally ill fellow who’d defamed your Druze ethnicity and turned around and then shouted a Muslim slogan, should be deemed a lethal terrorist threat.  It simply makes no sense.
The director of the Chabad soup kitchen where he volunteered and received food said he’d been a client for many years during which she’d never seen evidence of any violent tendencies in the man.
Though I don’t know who employed this guard, it’s well-known that the extremist-settler group Elad employs such security guards to protect Jewish settlements in East Jerusalem.  They’ve been known to brutalize Palestinians regularly including in one instance running over Palestinian boys and in another shooting a boy to death.  It wouldn’t surprise me to find out that this security guard is in that mold and employed by a similar group.
There is simply no excuse for killing anyone at what is supposedly (though I dislike this notion) Judaism’s holiest site for being mentally ill and behaving in a slightly asocial manner.  Even if there is a threat, which there wasn’t–TEN bullets!?   There will be no discipline for this crime.  The guard will be surrounded by well-wishers saying, tut, tut, you did nothing wrong.  It couldn’t be helped.  Better to shoot first and be wrong than not to shoot at all and have a terror attack you could’ve stopped.  It’ll all be nonsense.  Justification for murder.