No Laughing Matter
I was wrong.
When Yaron Reuven's acolytes produced, with his approval, an hour-long hate video against me, in which I was portrayed with a swastika tattoo and condemned as an "antisemite heretic," I thought that it was very funny. It didn't bother me in the slightest, and I told people not to make a fuss about it.
But I was wrong.
Indeed, it does not personally bother me, and I do not consider myself to be any danger. But that's only because I live in Israel.
Yaron Reuven is leading a very dangerous movement. In the past, I have pointed out how he is a danger to the Jewish People due to his irresponsible and slanderous videos falsely justifying Hitler's accusations against the Jews, which have been gleefully shared by antisemites to hundreds of thousands of people. But he's also dangerous in another way.
Reuven is declaring that all kinds of people (and not just me) are heretics who are deserving of the death penalty in Judaism. But that's just the horrifying start.
Reuven further takes the horrific step of claiming that this is actually a practical ruling that is only limited by civil law. In perhaps the most shocking statement ever uttered by someone with the title of rabbi, he declares regarding a young man who challenged his lecture that "if it were legal, I would kill him."
The other aspect which makes this particularly dangerous is that Reuven (and Yosef Mizrachi), with their fetish for talking about punishment and suffering and violent deaths, attract a particular type of people - those who are violent. Mizrachi has openly boasted about this, while one of Reuven's most enthusiastic followers is a hate-filled felon who served time for stabbing someone.
Such people, when they hear it drilled into them that various rabbis are dangerous Nazi-like heretics who need to be killed in order to save the Jewish nation, and that the only reason not to kill them is that it is not legal, may not be able to restrain themselves. They may well decide that since they don't care about what it is legal, they will do the Right Thing.
After Reuven's lackeys sent death threats to certain rabbis, the police and FBI were informed about Reuven, and have questioned him. But it appears that they are not able to act at this point.
It seems to me that the only way to limit Reuven's influence is to remove any claim that he has to credibility. Since he proclaims himself to be a rabbi based on receiving semicha from the Rabbinic Alliance of America, they need to publicly denounce him. Several people have asked them to do this in the past, but so far to no avail. I urge people to continue to pressure them, before something terrible happens. Contact information can be found here.
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