Students at the Technion said Wednesday that they did not accept an “apology” by Murad Abu al-Hija, whose infamous Facebook post praising the murderers of Israeli teens Eyal Yifrah (19), Naftali Frenkel (16), and Gilad Sha’ar (16) got him in into hot water. Technion student Moshe Stern said that there had been “thousands of negative reactions to what al-Hija wrote, and many students have asked the administration to eject him from the school. We need to act against people like this who seek to harm us.”
Al-Hija posted on his Facebook page a status praising the kidnappers and murderers of the Israeli teens, with the kidnappings resulting in “3 goals for Palestine without taking part in the World Cup.” He posted photos of the three murdered youths next to the status.
Speaking to Arutz Sheva, Stern said that “especially for a medical student, as al-Hija is, you need a certain ethical code, with the motivation and desire to save lives. How could patients rely on a doctor like this who has so little regard for human life? I certainly would not want to undergo treatment by this person. We truly hope that he will be ejected from the Technion and that no other university in Israel will accept him.”
In a new post, al-Hija tried to explain away his earlier activity. “The media reported that after the bodies of the three murdered boys were found, I posted my Facebook status which allegedly mocked the incident and uploaded a picture of the murdered boys,” he said, according to Israel Hayom. “This is a crude and manipulative distortion, which caused a wave of criticism and threats towards me. This is the truth: I posted the status the day after the kidnapping, on June 13, and it did not include the pictures of the boys. It was a kind of black humor, a bad joke, so I deleted the status a few hours later on my own initiative,” said al-Hija.
Danny Manger, head of the Technion Students’ Union, said that he and all students “condemn the damaging posting of a student who expressed joy at the terror attack. We expect the Technion administration and all students to remove from its midst all expressions of support for terror, incitement, or racism. Our hearts are with the families of the murdered teens.”
