Police remove MK from Breaking the Silence event
Oren Hazan: ‘Enlightened leftists are just bullies’
Likud MK Oren Hazan was forcibly removed by police Tuesday night from an event of Breaking the Silence, an organization that gathers negative testimony about the IDF from soldiers.
Hazan has boasted in the past that he has made prank calls to Breaking the Silence and deliberately misled the organization by feeding it anonymous, false information.
He said he showed up at a Breaking the Silence event in Kiryat Ono “in order to protest against its lies about IDF soldiers and the State of Israel.”
In a video Hazan posted to social media, Breaking the Silence activists surrounded him and chanted slogans. He claimed he was also attacked physically.
“If it was an MK from the Left who arrived at a rightwing event and he was surrounded by an inciting mob, dozens of right-wingers would have been arrested,” Hazan said. “For some reason, when it is the opposite, the police preferred to distance me and prevent me from doing my job as a Knesset member to act according to my conscience.”
Hazan said those participating in the event saw themselves as enlightened but the event proved that they were “bullies who would harm a Knesset member who comes to tell them the truth.”
But left-wing activists who came to the event said it was Hazan who attacked the activists and not the other way around and that the police removed him when he tried to go up on stage.
“MK Hazan took advantage of his stature and immunity to break in to an event, attack people and attempt to get on stage using violence,” said Meretz MK Michal Rozin, who was one of the event’s organizers.
“His behavior shames the stature of the Knesset and I intend to issue a complaint in the Ethics Committee. For public relations, he resorted to fake news.”