Arab activists (illustration)
Arab activists (illustration)Reuters

Arab students at Tel Aviv University desecrated a Memorial Day ceremony honoring the fallen soldiers and terror victims near the university's dorms, shouting out "Allahu Akbar (Allah is great)" and playing Arabic music at full volume in the middle of the event.

The shouting and blaring music clashed with the memorial siren on Sunday night, during a memorial event by students at the university's Einstein dormitory, reports news site 0404.

Following the incident, Jewish students complained of the desecration on the dorm's Facebook page, noting that the Arab students had interrupted the ceremony with the raucous noise from their apartments in the dorms, an act made more heinous by the fact that students at the event included bereaved family members.

According to screenshots posted in the report, Arab students from the dorm responded to the Facebook comments with insulting words, writing "you should be ashamed of yourselves and hold your ceremonies in silence."

They further wrote, "it's our full right to express our religious thoughts when we want to. ...Your ceremony isn't important and isn't worth remembering! Don't be surprised that I and my people aren't looking to be neighbors with racists like you."

Vandalism on memorial day

In a separate incident of desecration, anonymous vandals destroyed an Israeli flag and the flagpole it was on at a monument to fallen IDF soldiers on Monday, as Israelis remembered the fallen on Memorial Day.

The monument where the flag was desecrated is located in the Golan Heights, near Mt. Hermon. Golan police have opened an investigation into the incident.

Another memorial in the southern city of Be'er Sheva was defaced by anonymous vandals on Sunday. The monument is located at a local high school and commemorate graduates of the school who had fallen in the line of duty, reports 0404.

Commemorative plaques on the monument were broken in two. Police report that an investigative team has gathered evidence from the site, and that investigations will continue.

There has been widespread condemnation of the media for focusing on claimed cases of "price tag" vandalism targeting Arab residents, with Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and others swiftly condemning an alleged act "price tag" vandalism last week following a report from the US State Department defining the vandalism as "Jewish terrorism." 

Meanwhile an Arutz Sheva report in January revealed that in at least some of the cases, anti-Arab "price tags" were being systematically staged by Arab activists. 

There have also been numerous incidents of Arab "price tagging," such as the scrawling of Arabic graffiti praising terrorism in February on the Tomb of Elazar Hacohen, the son of Moses's brother Aaron from the Torah, as well as numerous incidents of desecration of Jewish graves on the Mount of Olives. Such cases have received remarkably less public and police attention.