The Knesset ministerial committee on legislation is due to discuss a bill calling for banning the use of loudspeakers to recite the daily mosque adhan (call to prayer) in Arab neighborhoods where Jews also live.
Habayit Hayehudi MK Moti Yogev and other right-wing lawmakers claim in their bill that the Adhan through loudspeakers produces noise pollution disturbs Jewish citizens and affects the quality of life which they said is more important than freedom of religion.
“Hundreds of thousands of Israelis in the Galilee the Negev Jerusalem Tel Aviv-Jaffa and other areas in the center of the country experience regular daily suffering from the noise resulting from the muezzin calls in the mosques” their bill say.
“The bill presents a worldview by which freedom of religion should not constitute a factor damaging quality of life and proposes prohibiting houses of prayer from using loudspeakers to call worshippers or to broadcast religious and nationalistic statements and sometimes incitement” Yogev wrote in the new bill according to Haaretz newspaper.
The bill which needs to be first approved by the ministerial committee before it is tabled for vote before the Knesset would give the Israeli police the right to detain and interrogate Palestinian muezzins ( people who recite prayer calls) take legal measures against them and impose financial penalties on them.
This is not the first time such a proposal has been tabled. In late 2014 right-wing Yisrael Beiteinu MK Robert Ilatov proposed a similar ban but it failed to win the support needed to pass various Knesset readings and be voted into law.
