We, the undersigned, protest the visit of the preacher Rabbi Yosef Mizrachi to the UK.
Rabbi Mizrachi is on record as expressing a variety of highly offensive, bigoted and hateful views:
A. That Downs Syndrome children and those with autism are being punished for their sins in a previous life for gossiping, “measure for measure” and are here to suffer.
B. That due to not being correctly religious, secular Jewish women acted without concern for their modesty at the gas chambers during the Holocaust.
C. Engaging in a [racist] form of Holocaust denial by challenging the Jewish status of five million souls who perished.
D. That Sephardic Jews were spared much of the Holocaust because Reform started in Germany, a demonstrably false claim in view of the decimation of the Sephardic population of the Balkans.
E. That children who are born with blindness are being punished for watching pornography in previous lives.
F. That women contract breast and cervix cancers as a result of sexual licentiousness.
G. That men contract prostate and brain cancers as a result of sexual licentiousness and what he calls “dirty thoughts”.
H. The racist accusation that crime has increased in America as the result of the emancipation of African-Americans.
I. That homosexuals are being punished for having chosen to be gay in a previous life.
J. That people cease to be religious because they are influenced by gay university professors.
K. That totalitarian laws should be imposed as a result of terrorism.
L. That the problem with the European far right is not their views, but that they detest Jews as well as Muslims.
M. The racist view that all Chinese people look the same.
We consider these views to be cultish, divisive and contemptible.
When criticised, Rabbi Mizrachi attacks his critics personally in the most intemperate ad hominem language, likening them to wicked Biblical figures such as “Amalek”, “Korach” and “Haman” or, sickeningly, as “worse than Hitler”. Videos of his more controversial statements are routinely removed in order to enable claims that they were “taken out of context”.
His remarks on the Holocaust and other matters provoked strong condemnation from the Novominsker Rebbe, the president of the ultra-orthodox Agudath Israel of America, resulting in a rare apology.
He was also forced to publicly disavow remarks he made about the Chabad movement, suggesting that they were hypocritical and greedy enough to praise a serious criminal, as long as they received a donation of $1,000.
Rabbi Mizrachi intends to visit the UK again on the 16th-19th of September. His last visit to the UK in 2014 was covered by the Jewish Chronicle and led to criticism of his views by two leading London rabbis, concerned at invitations to allow him to speak in a local synagogue and to school children.
The signatories of this petition condemn his views and, whether Jewish or non-Jewish, stand in solidarity with the Jewish community in its efforts to distance itself from extremism and condemn racism, ignorant bigotry and intolerance in whatever form it presents itself.
LATEST POSTS:
- The Comparator Test: Does Penn Apply the Same Standard?
- PragerU Salaries & Bonuses
- The David Pinsof Story
- Added Context to the Dennis Prager-Cedars Sinai Lawsuit
- The Criticism Was Right and It Did Nothing: Andrew Gelman, Seth Roberts, and the Limits of Being Correct
- What Andrew Gelman Doesn’t Write About
- Andrew Gelman: ‘Computer scientists today are like economists in the early 2000s and Freudian psychiatrists in the 1950s’
- Virtue Signaling and the Amy Wax case
- Revisiting Virtually You: The Dangerous Powers of the E-Personality
- The Great Delusion
- Why Do I Instinctively Dislike Erik Erikson?
- WSJ: The Uninvited Guest Who Crashed Our Family Vacation: My Mom’s AI Chatbot
- WEHT to Marc Weisblott?
- WEHT to Moxie aka Madison Slade?
- WEHT to Nicholas Polson’s Archive?
- Cohen Passes His Own Audit (V2)
- Andrew Gelman & the E-Personality
- ‘(1) “Do you think the culture of research has genuinely changed since the replication crisis became widely discussed, or has it mostly generated new compliance rituals around pre-registration and open data while leaving the underlying incentive structure intact?, (2) Regarding Columbia University, “is there a statistical or social scientific way of understanding how institutions lose the ability to accurately perceive their own situation?”’
- What a Public Audit Does (V4)
- Post: ‘Nathan Cofnas the Schlimazel’
BEST POSTS:
- * The Enlightenment Wasn’t Enlightened (6-23-26)
* Mr. Burge Draws The Line (6-23-26)
* 'Improving on Democracy' (6-17-26)
* People Leak To People Who Are Fun (6-11-26)
* Why Does Australia Produce So Many Great Journalists? (6-11-26)
* Steve Wynn and the Press: Power, Litigation, and the Contest Over Las Vegas (6-3-26)
* Sheldon Adelson and the Journalists (6-3-26)
* The Vigilant Animal: Thinkers Who Reject the Myth of Human Gullibility (6-2-26)
* The Cost of Refusing the Misunderstanding Myth (6-2-26)
* Show Me How It Travels (6-2-26)
* The Norm Explainers (6-2-26)
* Centering Marginalized Voices (6-1-26)
* What would it look like if the Washington Post put its reader first? (6-1-26)
* What would it look like if the Financial Times put its reader first? (6-1-26)
* What It Would Mean for the Los Angeles Times to Put the Reader First? (6-1-26)
* What It Would Mean for The New York Times to Put the Reader First? (6-1-26)
* Why Wembanyama Lives on the Perimeter (5-31-26)
* The Emotional Palettes Of San Diego, Los Angeles, San Francisco & Sacramento (5-27-26)
* The Administrative Capital: Sacramento Legal Culture (5-27-26)
* San Diego - The Quiet Republic (5-27-26)
* The Quiet Bar: San Diego Legal Culture (5-27-26)
* SF v LA Legal Culture (5-27-26)
* Why Talent Travels Poorly Between San Francisco and Los Angeles (5-27-26)
* San Francisco and Los Angeles as Rival Models of Urban Access (5-27-26)
* Social Cliques in New York, 2026 (5-25-26)
* Social Cliques in San Francisco, 2026 (5-25-26)
* The Rival Courts of Washington (5-25-26)
* The City of Private Rooms (5-25-26)
