September 08, 2005
A leading Israeli rabbi has said that Hurricane Katrina was God's way of punishing President Bush for supporting the Gaza Strip withdrawal. In his weekly sermon on Wendnesday,Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, founder of the powerful religious political movement Shas, said "Bush was behind the Gush Katif (the main Gaza settlement bloc) expulsion" and that Katrina "was God’s retribution".
Noting that many of the hurricane’s victims were African-American, Yosef suggested they were punished for being irreligious. "What, Kushites study Torah?" he asked rhetorically, using a derogatory Hebrew term for people of African descent. "The Almighty said, 'Let´s bring a tsunami and drown them'." Yosef has regularly stirred outrage in Israel for comments targeting Arabs, Muslims, left-wing politicians, and more recently, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.
