Full of hatred, Israeli rabbi Ovadia Yosef dead

JERUSALEM: Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, an Iraqi-born sage who turned an Israeli underclass of Sephardic Jews of Middle Eastern heritage into a powerful political force, died on Monday at the age of 93, plunging masses of followers into mourning.
Dubbed Israel’s Ayatollah by critics who condemned many of his pronouncements as racist — he likened Palestinians to snakes and said God put gentiles on earth only to serve Jews — Yosef was revered by many traditional Sephardic Jews as their supreme religious leader.
Through the Shas (Sephardic Torah Guardians) party he founded in the early 1980s, Yosef, regal in his gold embroidered robes and a turban, also wielded unique political influence from his modest apartment in Jerusalem.
“The people of Israel lost one of the wisest of a generation,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a statement. “Rabbi (Yosef) was a giant in Torah and Jewish law and a mentor to tens of thousands.”
At its height, Shas — now in the opposition — held 17 of Parliament’s 120 seats. For years, Yosef, as its leader, served as political kingmaker whose party could make or break Israeli coalition governments.
Yosef’s political messages were sometimes mixed: He viewed the occupied West Bank, captured in the 1967 Middle East war, as part of the Biblical Land of Israel, but in a challenge to mainstream rabbis, he said it was permissible to cede land to prevent bloodshed.
Yosef also drew fire from Israelis when he once suggested that six million Jews died in the Nazi Holocaust because they were reincarnated souls of sinners.
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, regularly demonized by the rabbi, meeting Israeli legislators in the West Bank after news of Yosef’s death, asked them to convey his condolences to the rabbi’s family, said a Reuters reporter who was present. Outside Yosef’s home, weeping Jewish seminary students, in a traditional sign of mourning, tore their white shirts with a razor blade. Hundreds of thousands are expected to attend his funeral later on Monday in Jerusalem.