Rabbi Yehuda Levin has long been an outspoken and controversial figure in the Orthodox Jewish community, and even more extreme than many of his allies—his unholy team-up with former Republican gubernatorial candidate Carl Paladino last year fizzled out after Paladino reneged on anti-homosexual remarks he had made. But now, Levin is really going out of his way to stir the pot: in his weekly internet broadcast, Levin blamed the murder of eight-year-old Hasidic boy Leiby Kletzky on Jews who supported gay rights, gay marriage, and abortion clinics. Check out the excerpt and watch the video below (skip to 7 minute mark):
Why was this [death of Kletzky] allowed to happen? Let’s think about it. If we go back to the cause, the effect was he was the victim, but the cause was a Jew [Yiddish] that the evil will come to destroy you within your midst. [...] For too long we have been turning our cheek, we have been turning away and ignoring the agenda of the descendants of Amalek [evil] — first they [Gay's] wanted rights, then they wanted adoption, they wanted special protections, and ultimately they wanted marriage — and we all know that we did precious little. If those three or fourth thousand people [who searched for the boy when we went missing], at the direction of the greater Israel and their leaders and their common sense, would have come out, maybe, against the marriage, against this final nail in the coffin of morality…maybe we wouldn’t have had to had this episode of Amalek [evil] replay itself. This is a time for introspection…This came in the very aftermath of the marriage bill, my dear friends, and not doing anything.
Levin has made no secret of his disgust toward homosexuality, and he has argued in the past that he is justified because he is "standing up for his religion." The National Organization for Marriage (NOM), who are also adamantly anti-gay marriage, recently invited Levin to join them at a rally protesting New York’s same sex marriage bill, which will go into effect this Sunday.
