Religious intolerance

The Jerusalem municipality opened a public parking lot in downtown Jerusalem to alleviate the parking problem that exists in the city, thus allowing tourists and visitors; seculars, to be able to park on the Safra Parking lot.The situation developed into a violent protest by Ultra-Orthodox and settlers whom by claiming they are in a “Battle for Jerusalem”, clashed with police forces throwing bottles, rocks and even dirty diapers! at them.Once more ultra orthodox and settlers display their unwillingness to tolerate others, to “love your neighbor as yourself”, to understand that Torah means not only abiding by rituals but that a great, if not the greatest part of it, relates to communal behavior, respect for others, their property and their lives, respect for the State you live in and certainly “fight” for your beliefs, in the proper way; sadly these groups of Ultra-Orthodox fail to understand this and with their shameful behavior give religion a bad name; certainly not helping to bridge the divisions among the Israeli population that are fired even more with this kind of violent acts in which the general public fails to identify a small group of extremist-rioters, but see “religious” people in general as intolerant and disrespectful of the people and the country their living in.
It saddens me to think that this has greatly contributed to the widen rejection of religion by Israelis, leading ignorance regarding Jewish sources, which ultimately debilitates Judaism in general, no matter in which way one practices it.
As Uri Orbach points out in his article in Ynet, all the religious community is paying for this “recklessness”.
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3727972,00.html