Rabbi Leo Dee offered role of special envoy by Foreign Ministy

The fear of Hashem is the beginning of knowledge; Fools despise wisdom and discipline.

Proverbs

1:

7

(the israel bible)

May 18, 2023

3 min read

Israel’s Foreign Minister Eli Cohen offered the role of special envoy to Jewish communities worldwide to Rabbi Leo Dee, whose wife and two daughters were recently murdered by Palestinian terrorists, it was announced Wednesday.

While Dee impressed many with his grace in his time of distress, his first job as envoy may be to get an apology from news outlets that misrepresented the murder of his loved ones, equating the horrific Palestinian terrorist attack to the deaths of terrorists killed while carrying out attacks against the IDF.

Rabbi Dee’s wife, Lucy Dee, 48, and his daughters, Maia, 20, and Rina, 15, were murdered on April 7 during the intermediary days of Passover on the Route 57 highway near the Hamra Junction in the Jordan Valley. The terrorists forced their car off the road and fired more than 20 bullets at close range at the occupants. 

About 10,000 people attended Maia and Rina’s funeral, where Rabbi Dee called for Israel to unite in the face of mass protests for and against proposed judicial reforms. 

“I heard his eulogy for his wife, and you could not help but be moved by it,” Cohen said to the J-Post“Everyone who heard him had to feel the same way.”

Rabbi Dee displayed a remarkable level of grace throughout his difficult mourning period. On April 10, he inaugurated “Dees Day,” calling on people across the globe to share photos on social media showing themselves draped in Israeli flags.

“Today, we differentiate between good and evil, right and wrong,” he said. “We will never accept terror as legitimate. We will never blame the murder on the victims. There is no such thing as a moral equivalence between terrorists and victims. The terrorist is always bad.”

His comments underscored the narrative presented by many media outlets equating Israeli victims of terrorism to armed Palestinians killed while attacking the IDF.

“The Israeli flag is the sign of good. It’s the side of building something worthy,” Dee continued. “Do it for your soul. Do it for the souls of Maia, Rina, and Lucy Dee. Do it for all of humanity, and do it now.”

Last month, Rabbi Dee recited the Yizkor memorial prayer at Israel’s main ceremony at Mount Herzl Military Cemetery, marking the state’s 75th Independence Day.

Two weeks ago, the IDF eliminated the Hamas terrorist who murdered Rabbi Dee’s wife and daughters.

Despite the clearly horrific nature of the terrorist attack that killed the Dees, some media misrepresent the attack. Honest Reporting posted an article criticizing CNN newscaster Christiane Amanpour who, in her opening remarks in an April 10 interview with Palestinian Prime Minister Mohammad Shtayyeh, equated the death of a 15-year-old Palestinian who was killed while shooting at the IDF with the deaths of the Dees who, Amanpour claimed, were “were killed in a shootout.”

Two weeks later, ITV News London reporter Daniel Henry repeated the “shootout” lie. 

In response to the Honest Reporting article, Henry and ITV both apologized and admitted that a mistake had been made. Amanpour and CNN never responded to inquiries from Honest Reporting. 

The Israeli Consulate in Atlanta plans to send a letter of complaint to CNN about the incident. Rabbi Dee also demanded an apology from CNN, describing Amanpour’s comments as “terror journalism.”

“This is the perfect example of ‘terror journalism,’ where you have moral equivalence between the terrorist and victim,” Dee said. “This type of journalism perpetuates the conflict in the Middle East,” he said. “The real cycle of violence is a comment like this followed by a terrorist atrocity and then more of the same.”

Amanpour garnered criticism for her anti-Israel bias in 2013 when she interviewed then-Economy Minister Naftali Bennett. She referred to Judea and Samaria as the “occupied West Bank,” claiming that the term was “an international term.”

Bennett objected, insisting “one cannot occupy his own home.”

Again in 2022, Amanpour interviewed Prime Minister Bennett, saying that “the West Bank has been occupied since 1967”.

Her bias comes close to Holocaust denial. In 2020, she compared the presidency of former US President Donald Trump to the Nazi Kristallnacht pogroms in 1938.

Rabbi Dee was born in London, England, where he studied chemical engineering at Cambridge University, later taking a position as an English teacher in Israel. After that, he returned to the UK, where he worked in finance for a decade and was a senior community rabbi. He finally settled in Efrat in Gush Etzion with his family in 2014. 

“Lucy … said we cannot bring up Jewish kids in England; we can only bring them up in Israel,” he told The Jerusalem Post in an interview in April. “She said we need to sell the house in England and that we had to buy a house in Israel – and we did.”

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