American-born Jeremy Gimpel, the No. 14 candidate on the Jewish Home list, has been “exposed” by a Friday night broadcast of Israel’s Channel 2 news that discovered a speech he carried before a Fellowship Church gathering in Winter Springs, Florida, Nov. 13, 2011. The broadcast clipped 1:12 minutes out of the hour plus video, in which Gimpel speaks hypothetically about putting down the cornerstone for the Third Temple, if, somehow, the Golden Dome mosque which is currently on the mount, were “blown up.”
Gimpel says on the tape that he can’t say “blown up” because he’s being recorded, but them says it anyway: “Imagine if the Golden Dome – I’m being recorded so I can’t say ‘blown up’ – but let’s say the Dome was blown up, right? And we laid the cornerstone of the Temple in Jerusalem.”
The gist of his words is not the removal of the mosque as much as the building of the Temple, which would generate enormous excitement among good Christians everywhere.
We’re enclosing both the minute with the quote and the entire tape, so you can decide for yourselves just how “subversive” Gimpel’s message is. If you ask, me, it’s a simple lesson in physics – if you wish to build one new temple, you will probably have to remove the one that’s standing there. As to the method of instituting this change – I’m open to suggestions.
Naftali Bennett, chairman of Jewish Home, told Israel TV that he is “proud” of Jeremy Gimpel just as he is proud of everyone on his list.
“The lecture was given to a Christian group as I was teaching about the Book of Ezra, a story that happened over 2,000 years ago,” Gimpel told Arutz Sheva Saturday night. “In order to make the story more lively I made a few jokes, and you clearly hear the audience laughing. This is a cheap political attack and I would urge anyone to watch the video in its entirety and decide for yourselves.”
Amnon Abramowitz, the Channel 2 News reporter who is one of the most vehement enemy of the National Religious camp, says he’s committed to exposing the Bennett list as a group of extremists. Except that, just as in the case of Netanyahu and the Likud campaign machine jumping on Bennett for his statement that he would never obey an order to remove a Jew from his home—resulting in a 2-seat boost for Bennett, I suspect that Jewish Home can only benefit from Gimpel’s year-old statement.
Some of us, you see, have been fearing that Bennett is not extreme enough on preserving Judea and Samaria and renewing Jewish services on Temple Mount.
