Gunman kills 3, injures 11 at gay club in Tel Aviv

JERUSALEM — Israeli police say a gunman entered a youth club for gay teens in central Tel Aviv on Saturday night and sprayed the interior with automatic rifle fire, killing three people and injuring 11.

Police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said it was "most likely a criminal attack and not a terror attack." Tel Aviv has been a target for Palestinian militants in the past.

He said the gunman burst into the basement of the Tel Aviv Gay and Lesbian Association and opened fire on a support group for gay teenagers.

Police are searching the area for the gunman, who fled the scene, he said. Roadblocks were set up.

Rescue services said six of the wounded were badly hurt.

"This was a hate crime, a premeditated attack," witness Yaniv Weisman told Channel 10 TV. He said Cafe Noir, the basement club, was popular with youth.

"Those hurt were very young," he said.

Openly gay Knesset lawmaker Nitzan Horowitz said it was "without a doubt the biggest ever attack on the Israeli gay community, we are all in shock."

Witnesses told Israeli media that the gunman was dressed all in black, and described the scene as a "bloodbath."

Comments

[laminators]

I hope the injured are stable.

[the mean in meaningless]

"most likely a criminal attack and not a terror attack"

Of course it's not a terror attack. If it cannot be expIoited by the far right, it's by definition not a terror attack.

[shorelive]

Well we don't know what kind of attack it was, and maybe we never really will. In a state that leads the world for technological know-how in monitoring "terrorism", how for instance do you know that they didn't fabricate this entire incident themselves? It's plausible. They desperately need to turn the public relations tide in favor of the settlers and Netanyahu's recently stated positions on settlements because Obama rightly is standing up to them. At last the tail isn't being allowed to wag the dog anymore.

[the mean in meaningless]

They insisted on calling last year's buIIdozer attack by that ins ane dru g add ict a terror attack. Dubya even caIIed them up to offer his condolences for that "ter rible terror attack".

[JerryLevy]

It seems hundreds in the streets demonstrated in support of the gay children's center. Is Israel great or what? The only country in the Middle East that respects gay rights as well as women's rights and the rights of all religious minorities. There is a lot we can learn from Israel.

[shorelive]

It's a theocracy in all but name. It doesn't respect gay rights, just allows them in the military because it's a miltiarized state that needs every single human in the military out of pure strategic necessity.­. It's just a little more clever in how it presents itself to the world because it needs that annual 4 billion dollar handout from American officialdom.

[Yeah-Me]

http://www.gaytlvguide.com/start-here/gay-rights-in-israel

And in Feburary of this year, legislation has been proposed to all same-sex marriage

http://www.ontopmag.com/article.aspx?id=3320&MediaType=1&Category=24

[the mean in meaningless]

Too wonderful. The gunman was almost certainly a settler.

[azbird]

Could you possibly be a tad bias? I would read this as a hate crime. Why the leap to say it was a settler?

[hallowellboy]

This is a shocking hate crime perpertrated against LGBT youth. Let's hope the Israelis will find the murderer and bring him/her to justice promptly. Very sad day for Israel.

[MaxCohen]

This could only happen in Israel because Israel is the only country in the ENTIRE middle east that has a center for LGBT kids. It is also the only country that has a Gay Pride parade on the scale of those in the west. If this happened in an Arab country the shooter would be a HERO and the police would've run into the center to finish the job. Maybe this will start to show the world the difference between Israel and her neighbors.

[shorelive]

You must be desperate if creating an imaginary negative is all you have to justify murder on Israeli soil. Just as plausible is to say that the whole murder and attack was an inside job by the Netanyahu government and its religious backers as part of a wider PR campaign push in the West. Have they caught the "assassin"? Of course not.

[Yeah-Me]

Not just in Israel...
http://www.gaymiddleeast.com/index.html

[CarlyHope]

Since we don't know who did it or why, all of you assuming the person was religious, and religiously motivated are just as prejudiced as the shooter.

[Coloradem]

Predjudiced? Possibly.

As prejudiced as the shooter? Not nearly.

Were the people who are making the assumptions to go into a church and start shooting, then yes, they would be as predjudiced as the shooter. They've not done that.

[bsc]

I dont think so. Its a reasonable guess to think the shooter was motivated by religion or prejudice disseminated by religious sources.

[toxicbrainpoison]

israel has some major problems..­. whenever i think we have it bad here all i have to do is look over there.

[CarlyHope]

are you joking?

We've had to major attacks on gay bars this year in the states. One perpetrated by the POLICE!

[ChelseaC]

This is heartbreaking.
Pray for the victims and their families.

[NewReconstructionist]

Violence is always wrong.

[the mean in meaningless]

Really?

[fmz]

REALLY.

[rf dude]

What, it wasn't " terrorism" because it wasn't perpetrated by a non-Jew against a Jew?

Taking semantics a bit too far here - I would think the survivors were, are, and will be pretty terrorized after this " crime"...
--

[jamiso]

I'm sure this has nothing..N­othing, I tell ya...to do with religion.
Nope nope nope...jud­aism, christianity, and islam are all about peace and loving for everyone, yep yap yap....

[PlaceboStudman]

of course it doesn't. Religion is just a harmless little story about how one is supposed to live their lives and how to treat others

as we learned by The Crusades, The Inquisition, and The Holocaust

[frankg3400]

Take a look at this stories comments on AOL. AOL, has pretty much been taken over by the Fundamentalists. While they can't understand while people fell the way they do about Fundamentalists.

http://news.aol.com/article/shooting-at-gay-youth-club-in-tel-aviv/599329

[the mean in meaningless]

Way to go with the pro-Israeli censorship on HP. Sad.

[StevenKeirstead]

Haaretz newspaper is reporting that there were big demonstrations in Tel Aviv against the attack on the gay teen center. See http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1104611.html

They also have some other stories about the crime on their front page.

[PlaceboStudman]

and, yet here in the USA, Israels staunchest ally who are facing our own civil rights movement for gays

We get

cricket chirping in media silence

[StevenKeirstead]

The reporting is not quite absent. NPR reported it and the AP, but the Boston Globe does not have it on their main web page or main world news page, you have to do a search to even find the AP article. It is quite sad that you would have to already know the news to find it there.

[wdw505]

it is a local story that's all

[Yeah-Me]

Quoted for the linked article:
"The fact that there are wounded children lying in the hospital whose parents won't visit them says everything­."
==================
This right here is one thing that struck me, which which makes this situation all the much worse...

This isn't just isolated to Israel either, it's felt here and around the rest of the world. This is where the real heartbreak comes in the story, beyond those who lost their lives... the loss for those who have been disowned by family members.

[PlaceboStudman]

Tens of thousands, if not millions of American LGBT kids out on the streets thrown out by their christofascist parents or family whose devotion to the invisible man in the sky and his zombie ghost son is more important than their devotion to their own son or daughter

[useyourbrain]

Let's get some quotes on video from Alan Keyes, that brilliant nothing that threw his daughter out of his home when he learned she was gay. Also, get Dobson and all thoses other Jesus freaks who are anything but Christian to talk about the family and family values.

They creamed in their jeans when Palin dragged her "slut" of a daughter (by Christian standards she's a slut and by the Bible's word, should be stoned to death) all over the country parading her around.

[wereeverywhere]

That's some consolation at least that people are in the streets over this massacre.

[Tom95134]

Becareful with this link. It forces you into some kind of anit-virus scan (or so it says).

[Driver125]

Ain't this a bitch? It's not bad enough, the sheet that gays and lesbians have to go through in their everyday, normal existence.­....now radicals are going to start targeting them too? Too much.

[Yeah-Me]

Well... I'm sure our own American radicals (Fred Phelps/WBC) are praising this as "Gods divine wrath".

[SelenicMagick]

Radicals have been targeting them since at least the advent of the 'big three religions'­... this type of terrorism is nothing "new" ... what IS new is that we no longer have to rely JUST on ourselves but rather can come together as a community across local, state, national and international borders in support for one another.

[azbird]

Bravo

[SFSierra]

So the police think it was just a criminal act, not terrorism? No matter who did this, it was terrorism in its purest form: intimidation, a political statement whether overt or latent....­.etc. Was it just a coincidence that those young people were gay, maybe they were being robbed! The word terrorism has been hijacked to mean a brutal act committed by whomever a society decides is the enemy of the state. In the case of Israel, it evidently can only be terrorism if it was committed by an Arab! And oh yes, somehow those young people are less brutalized or, for 3 of them, less dead, if it was a "criminal" not a "terrorist" act.

The media of course perpetuates the foolish misuse of the word terrorism because they are a very lazy lot with a herd mentality.

[PlaceboStudman]

It's a sad pathetic state of the world we live in when people don't understand that a hate crime IS terrorism. This is what happens when sexuality is not considered a protected class like race or religion

[Yeah-Me]

Agreed... :o/