UK bans one of ‘Torat Hamelech’ authors

Elitzur told his presence ‘would not be conducive to the public good.’

By JONAH MANDEL
torat hamelech (photo credit: Courtesy)
torat hamelech
(photo credit: Courtesy)
One of the two authors of Torat Hamelech has been prohibited from entering the United Kingdom in accordance with “the British government’s measures for excluding or deporting extremists,” while the other is professing that the recent uprisings there are actually proof of the validity of the controversial book’s claims.
Rabbi Yosef Elitzur of Yitzhar was recently informed by the UK Border Agency that under the Unacceptable Behavior policy, he should be excluded from the UK “on the grounds that your presence here would not be conducive to the public good.”
RELATED:My Word: Law and disorderReligious extremism and the Jewish state
The decision, which was made public by the Hakol Hayehudi website on Wednesday, was reached due to Elitzur’s “fomenting and justifying terrorist violence in furtherance of particular beliefs and seeking to provoke others to commit terrorist acts.”
The representative of the Secretary of State for the Home Department notes that Torat Hamelech, which was published in 2009 and is currently printing a third edition, “details circumstances in which [Jewish law] permits the killing of non-Jews... the book also advocates Jewish discrimination against gentiles and defends the killing of gentiles by Jews.”
“You are instructed not to travel to the UK as you will be refused admission on arrival,” the letter to Elitzur states.
But to Rabbi Yitzhak Shapira, co-author of the book, the principles of racial separation they promote are valid not just in Israel, but in the same kingdom that banished Elitzur from its boundaries. Shapira says the UK could have prevented the current riots by taking measures against its Muslim population.
“Every state has a certain character,” Shapira told Hakol Hayehudi, “that derives from hundreds of years of cultural development... as part of that, a state can refuse to accept a person who arrives but does not intend on being absorbed into it.”
“Even after a person reached the state, it doesn’t mean that the state has to treat an individual who doesn’t wish to be part of its culture equally. If France or Britain, for example, suffer from a large Muslim minority, they can discriminate against that minority by casting special taxes, or preventing them from turning into a majority that would change the national character of the state,” Shapira said.
“If Britain doesn’t do that, it will pay a heavy price – up to the total loss of the state – and it’s already beginning to pay it, as we can all see now.
“What is happening today in Britain, as in other European countries, is that because of the private interest of human rights, the national interests are erased, and at the end of the day – the private interests will be gone too,” said Shapira.
“If British nationals will be forced to live in a state governed by Muslim law, will their human rights be retained?”