A
Brooklyn-born
Jewish doctor who, in 1994, on February 25 (the Jewish
Purim festival, and during that year's
Ramadan) opened fire with an automatic weapon on Arabs praying in the
Mosque of Ibrahimi (known as
Cave of Machpela to Jews) in
Hebron, killing 29 and injuring 60, before he himself was killed.
He was promptly declared a holy martyr by various extremist Jewish groups (like the Kahane Chai group), and his grave in the Kiryat Arba community (apparently a breeding ground for fanatics) was turned into a veritable shrine and became a popular pilgrimage site where Yigal Amir, the murderer of Yitzhak Rabin, drew inspiration before his deed The shrine (except for the grave itself) was destroyed (against vehement protests from the settlers, of course) by the Israeli army on December 29 1999 after a Supreme Court ruling that it falls under a law that forbids monuments to terrorists.
Goldstein's defenders claimed that he justifiably (or, as most of them would be more likely to put it, rightfully) reacted to the praying Arabs' chants of "kill all Jews"; but even most orthodox Jewish scholars say that that is not nearly enough justification for indiscriminate killing, that it actually caused more violence against Jews and anyway, he would have had to ask his Rabbi first...
As an outsider, it's nigh impossible to understand this kind of blind, murderous hate and fanatism (which is, it should not be forgotten, just as frequently exhibited by the opposite side, like the Hamas), but when I see these guys calmly justify mass murder and declare it a glorious act of goodness, I really can't see any difference between them and, of all people, Adolf Hitler, other than the fact that Hitler managed to actually pull it off large scale.
For completeness sake, there are also some people who have built a weird conspiracy theory in which Goldstein was the innocent victim of a government plot to generate more Arab violence and enable the government to remove Jewish settlers from their settlements ostensibly for their own protection, in order to fulfill the Oslo treaties.