Posted on 10/06/2006 4:41:27 AM PDT by US admirer
THESE days everyone is an expert on Islam. All it takes is to reach for your Koran and find a Sura to prove that Islam is exactly what Bin Laden says it is. Even Pope Benedict XVI has recently taken to quoting the word of Mohammed to address the prophet’s legacy, as has the Archbishop of Sydney, Cardinal George Pell, who discovered this line in his belated reading of the Koran: “Slay the idolaters wherever you find them, and take them, and confine them, and lie in wait for them at every place of ambush ...”
And there you have it. Islam on one foot, tailored to fit the clash of civilisations. Now if we Jews were to describe Judaism on one foot, we would follow the guidance of Hillel, who taught a would-be convert that everything is premised on the dictum, “Do not do unto others what you wouldn’t want done to yourself.”
Let’s ignore for a second that Hillel’s rival Shammai clobbered the supplicant with the biblical equivalent of a 10-foot pole, an apt metaphor for the way our own rabbinic courts often treat prospective converts.
The point is that every quotation in favour of Hillel’s humanism can be trumped by another promoting intolerance and violence.
Indeed there is a long history of malevolent readings of the Torah and Talmud. One of the best-selling books of the 17th century was called Endecktes Judentum (“Jewry Exposed”), which enlisted a string of rabbinic quotations from the Talmud to prove every Christian prejudice about Jews.
But what would someone without these prejudices make of us Jews if all they had to go by was our books? Imagine, for example, a Martian dropped on this planet and was welcomed to earth with a copy of our Testament. One can assume that this extraterrestrial being would be moved by our humanistic love, its values of justice, self-sacrifice and compassion. Yet how would our novice reader understand the tales of domestic dysfunction, fraternal murder, vengeance, and even the divine order to kill the women and children of our enemies?
If one were to draw a typology of Jews from biblical texts, one might be led to assume that the Jews bore the longest of grudges (against everyone from Amalek to the innocent child born out of parental lust), were unable to accept God at His word (after all they built an idol while the mountain was trembling) and didn’t know how to be gracious about a miracle performed on their behalf.
And let’s not get into the X-rated stuff of incest and rape. Call the Bible by any other name and it would be sure to be banned from the classroom.
Thank God, religions are always more complex than their scriptural texts reveal. As the rabbinic aphorism goes: “The Torah has 70 faces”, which is also a line that could be seized upon by a detractor to say that Jews are worse than two-faced. Yet what the rabbis meant to teach is that a verse is never exhausted by its own literalness it needs readers to breathe life into it, which is one reason we reread the same words each year. Even God, goes the Midrash, is busy interpreting the hidden depths of the Torah. Or as the rabbis say with Freudian prescience, a letter unread is like a dream uninterpreted.
YET we have allowed Islamic civilisation(s) to be stereotyped by plucking a couple of verses from the Koran, and concluded that nihilistic jihad is its core belief. That in fact is what the al-Qaeda brand would have their fellow Muslims believe, even though its credo is only one strand of Islam woven around a modern revolutionary ideology of mass murder.
Would we accept Judaism being personified by the ultra-Orthodox, anti-Zionist Neturei Karta? And what if the media only presented the extremists among us, those handful who would fly a plane into al-Aqsa Mosque to bring about the apocalypse, or those, such as Effi Eitam, leader of the National Religious Party, who demand the ethnic cleansing of the West Bank?
Lehavdil we say, it’s not the same. And it’s not, but the principle is – namely, no religion is essentially violent but each religion has the capacity for violence buried in its teachings.
Pope Benedict XVI, born in Germany, must certainly know how theology can be used for demonic ends and how a religion which preached pacifism was also capable of burning people at the stake. So too are we Jews now learning that after centuries of exile, our return to power can reactivate the violent narratives of our biblical texts.
So do not do unto others. All the rest is commentary.
There is no moral equivilence between islam and any other religion on the face of the earth. What an idiot.
BTW what does Guido have to do with this thread?
What I find extremely interesting is that no one ever includes the quotations from the Koran that show Islam is a religion of peace when they write these articles.
Good point.
I have used the following summary for comparison:
Convert, submit, or die. ~ mohammed
Whosever will may come. ~ Jesus Christ
One can scour the Talmud to find unkind descriptions of Gentiles - but one cannot find anywhere in the Talmud a blanket call to slaughter non-Jews.
The Talmud may make critical comments but it does not enjoin murder.
YET we have allowed Islamic civilisation(s) to be stereotyped by plucking a couple of verses from the Koran, and concluded that nihilistic jihad is its core belief.
So we've descended like martians and all we know of Islam is a few snippets from the Koran? C'mon, mr. strawman. We actually do know a few things about Islamic modern history such as hijackings, beheadings, and suicide bombings. In fact, most people know about those things but dont know a word from the Koran.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.