Photo: Moshe Shai / FLASH90
Journalist Akiva Bigman tweeted a joke last week at the expense of the ultra-Orthodox sector, was attacked by a flood of harassment messages and today (Sunday) he responded in “Here is Heritage.”
As you may recall, at the height of the vaccination campaign in Bnei Brak, when Chunt was promised to every vaccinated person in the city, Bigman wrote: “Come on, next week we will carry out a boil and taxes. We are progressing slowly.”
The ultra-Orthodox response was not long in coming. Bigman’s phone number was circulated on WhatsApp groups under the name “Graceful Distribution of Slips” alongside a screenshot of what he wrote and hundreds and thousands of messages began to land on his cell phone.
Some of the applicants asked for details about the coupons, and some were reluctant to insult and insult him for what he wrote.
The next day Bigman responded by saying he did not apologize. “I tweeted a joke about the ultra-Orthodox yesterday, last night they distributed my number as a person handing out gift tags of Yesh Chesed,” he wrote on his Twitter account.
“Since then I have been inundated with inquiries from people, family owners, institutional managers, the needy, the poor and the distressed population,” he added. “Everyone wants gift certificates, and maybe they have expectations of me because someone created a cynical and repulsive misrepresentation towards them.”
“This practice, to deceive the weakest people in society, those who pay the heaviest price for the ultra-Orthodox way of life, the victims of the detached ideology of the fat leadership – and all for some exercise or harassment against a journalist, is the essence of all evil in this society.”
“The ultra-Orthodox society is based on arrogance and hatred towards anyone who is not ultra-Orthodox – and more than that, towards those who are not ultra-Orthodox from the right current or the right yard,” he wrote. “They are allowed to hate, defile, incite, curse and slander entire sectors in a systematic and institutionalized way. But we – the infidels, the Orientals, the slandered – are not allowed to criticize or tell a joke.”
This morning, Bigman told Dov Eichler and Zuzu Abutbul on the radio ‘Here Heritage’: “I expressed a sense of criticism of the ultra-Orthodox public’s lifestyle that I also write about it a lot, and I expressed it humorously in the context of the operation. It is legitimate to pass criticism. “
He defined his point of criticism: “for the fact that the tax burden in Israel is unfairly divided in a situation where ultra-Orthodox and Arabs pay the least of the entire population while they benefit most from the welfare state.”