Technion blasts student’s Facebook status expressing joy for teens’ murders

"Record...3 goals for the national team despite its absence from the Palestinian World Cup," Arab-Israeli student posts.

By LIDAR GRAVÉ-LAZI
Facebook post that caused stir, July 1, 2014. (photo credit: FACEBOOK)
Facebook post that caused stir, July 1, 2014.
(photo credit: FACEBOOK)
An Arab student from the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology caused an uproar on social media on Tuesday, when he posted a message to his Facebook page indicating he was happy about the murder of the three Israeli teens.
“Record... 3 goals for the national team despite its absence from the Palestinian World Cup!” he wrote and added a picture of the three murdered teens.
Technion president Prof. Peretz Lavie chided the “contemptible and despicable” expression.
“We must condemn such statements, which have no place in the discourse between people,” he said.
Lavie added that the university was “determined to review the case thoroughly and take appropriate and firm action against the person who wrote the status.”
He said that the Technion “lowers its head” along with all of Israel’s citizens and participates in the deep mourning of the families of the three victims.
On social media sites, the post went viral and within hours. The Israeli Facebook page “Statusim Metzizim” (“Tweeting Statuses”) picked up on the post and within hours it garnered some 10,000 shares and thousands of angry comments calling on the Technion to expel the student.
“As a student in the Technion, I immediately signed a document calling to expel this abhorrent person from the Technion, and now!” one female student wrote. “If need be, we will get together and yell all over campus until this filth will shamefully leave.”
Though the vast majority of comments reflected this sentiment, there was a small minority who defended the student.
One woman came to the defense of the student, saying, “Unbelievable: Jewish students of medicine, law and all fields, write every day on their Facebook pages and in talkbacks that they are happy that Arabs died in car accidents or natural disasters or by IDF fire or any other reason! Even deaths of Arab children and babies.
“We contacted universities where they study and where they work to ask for a response... oh that’s right, we didn’t, because it is not an item at all,” she wrote.