Justice Minister Amir Ohana reached out to Attorney General Avichai Mendelblit this weekend, asking him to take seriously what Ohana described as a growing threat to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his family.
In a letter to Mendelblit, Ohana said that the attorney general was not taking the threats seriously, and accused Mendelblit of acting as if he had a personal vendetta against Netanyahu.
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"Your smug letter indicates that you are not taking my request about the growing threats to the lives of the prime minister and his family seriously," Ohana wrote.
"Recently, it seems as if you have been acting like someone with a personal vendetta against the prime minister, in the sense of 'it's him or me,' as seen in a series of decisions, such as your intervention in preventing the prime minister from receiving [public] funding for the costs of the trial you forced upon him, despite you having an inherent conflict of interest as the accuser and prosecutor who is seeking to convict him," Ohana wrote.
Ohana's sent his harshly-worded missive in response to Mendelblit's refusal to his own request to cancel the regulation that stipulates that a senior member of the State Attorney's Office must sign off on a criminal investigation into suspected abuse of the freedom of expression to incite to violence. Ohana asked that the regulation be canceled in light of the growing incitement against Netanyahu and his family that has been appearing on social media.
The justice minister's letter went on to say that "we are talking about life and death… in a public arena that is already restive, we are now hearing explicit calls to kill the prime minister and his family. These are blatant, explicit calls, unlike what is known as 'the incitement that led up to the murder of Yitzhak Rabin.'
"We are not talking about hints, but explicit, sometimes graphic, threats to his life," the letter states.
Ohana also noted a few specific cases of incitement, including a post by one man who wrote that "any one of the demonstrators [against the government's policies] is willing to sacrifice himself for the sake of the country and be the Yigal Amir who carries out an assassination of Bibi…" and another man who wrote, "Whoa, you're right. We need to take out Bibi like they took out Rabin."
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