On July 30, Yishai Schlissel, an ultra-Orthodox Jew, stabbed six people attending Jerusalem’s gay pride parade. Sixteen-year-old Shira Banki later died from her wounds. The incident not only horrified the ultra-Orthodox community, it also caught it off guard.
The Jewish religion forbids murder and the harming of others. How, then, could a man from that community, a product of its educational system, attack participants at a gay pride event with a knife, not once but twice in 10 years? How could he claim that his motivations were religious?