Rabbi's remarks cause outcry

JERUSALEM -- A leading Israeli rabbi has caused a storm in Israel for saying God must annihilate the Arabs and rain missiles down on them.

"May the Holy Name visit retribution on the Arab heads, and cause their seed to be lost, and annihilate them," the Israeli Ma'ariv daily quoted Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, spiritual leader of the ultra-Orthodox Shas party, as saying.

"It is forbidden to have pity on them. We must give them missiles with relish, annihilate them," he said in a sermon preceding the Jewish Passover holiday last week.

Shas spokespeople hastened to say the rabbi referred only to "Arab murderers and terrorists and not to the Arab public as a whole".

"Only a fool could have understood that the rabbi meant to harm innocent people or attack them with missiles," Ma'ariv quoted Shas spokesperson Itzhak Sudri as saying.

Nonetheless, Rabbi Yosef's words caused an outcry among secular Israeli politicians.

Legislator Zahava Gal-On, of the left-wing secular Meretz party, advised the "cursing rabbi" to take the anti-depressant drug Prozac, and called him the "11th plague", referring to the story of the Exodus and the 10 plagues which God cast on Egypt before Pharaoh let the Jews leave.

Minister without portfolio Saleh Tarif said he did not accept any explanations because "things like this do not need to be said in the first place".

"It really is a pity that such things are said at such a difficult time in relations between the nation and Arabs both within the country and without.

"These remarks add nothing but hatred and it is a shame they were uttered by someone as great in Torah learning as Rabbi Ovadia," said Tarif, a Druze and the first Arab-Israeli minister in Israel's history.

Rabbi Yosef has repeatedly angered many Israelis with his controversial remarks. -- Sapa-DPA