There is a campaign being waged by the Israeli right and the extremist American Jewish right against Israeli universities. This is because the majority of professors and students there are liberal or leftist. Im Tirtzu, a group of far-right wing students, wants to purge the Israeli universities from anti-Zionist Jews, threatening to work on blocking funds to those universities. Meanwhile, the Institute for Zionist Strategies, which is also a rightwing think-tank, published a study mentioning that all the social sciences faculties in Israeli universities are characterized by “severe anti-Zionist bias”. I wanted to continue my review of the efforts of Israeli peace advocates, after having written about "Bereaved Mothers for Peace”, the group of Israeli women who lost their children in Palestinian suicide attacks, and yet admit that Palestinian mothers suffer more than they do, and hence want to put an end to the occupation. However, as I was sifting through the many materials available to me, I stumbled upon a report written by Max Blumenthal, whose name indicates that he has a Jewish background, published on alternet.org. I hence found myself reading another moderate Jew exposing the extremists from within, as no Arab writer possibly could. I can take no credit for the rest of my column today, except for my selection and translation from the article entitled “How to Kill Goyim and Influence People: Israeli Rabbis Defend Book's Shocking Religious Defense of Killing Non-Jews (with Video)”. Blumenthal says that the book Torat Ha'Melech, or the King's Torah, written by Rabbi Yitzhak Shapira, explains in 230 pages the laws concerning the killing of non-Jews, whom the books describe as being “uncompassionate” and must be killed in order to "curb their evil inclinations”. Shapira says, based on Jewish law, “"If we kill a gentile who has violated one of the seven commandments… there is nothing wrong with the murder”. He even adds that there are justifications for killing babies “if it is clear that they will grow up to harm us, and in such a situation they may be harmed deliberately, and not only during combat with adults”. Perhaps this book should be translated into English and distributed to Congressmen as MEMRI does with the fatwas of the Islamist fundamentalists. If an Arab side should undertake this effort, perhaps some information contained in Blumenthal's report could be mentioned in the preface. For instance, he says that the two rabbis Dov Lior and Yaakov Yosef endorsed the book. But after being summoned for investigation, they refused to comply, because they belong to radical religious groups that see themselves above the law and who constantly attack it, while Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the Attorney General Yehuda Weinstein remained silent out of fear. The fundamentalist rabbis paraded the extent of their influence last month, in a meeting of their supporters that also included the far-right Israeli Knesset member Michael Ben-Ari. The rabbis, in the name of the Holy Torah, rejected any attempt by the government to curb their political activities, including incitement of terrorist attacks against non-Jews. Rabbi Yehoshua Shapir, who is from Ramat Gan near Tel Aviv, said, “The obligation to sacrifice your life is above all others when fighting those who wish to destroy the authority of the Torah”. If we are to replace the word Torah here with the word Quran, this would exactly echo what the terrorists say in Iraq, Afghanistan and everywhere else. Extremism is one and the same in all cases, but it is the names that change. In truth, the book's author Rabbi Yitzhak Shapira, is well known by the Israeli police. He was arrested in 2006 after inciting his followers to murder any Palestinians above the age of 13, supported the attack on two Palestinian youths on Holocaust Memorial Day in 2008 and was accused of orchestrating a rocket attack against Palestinian villagers near Nablus, where he lives in a settlement. One of Shapira's followers, an American immigrant named Jack Teitel, was charged with murdering two Palestinians and attempting to kill the liberal Israeli historian Ze'ev Sternhell. As for Rabbi Dov Lior, a former chief rabbi of the Israeli army, he outdid everyone when he said, “There is no such thing as civilians in wartime… A thousand non-Jewish lives are not worth a Jew's fingernail!” Here, if we replace the word Jew with the word Nazi, the statement would have been exactly what the Nazis said when they killed the Jews. Lior also said he would spare the lives of Palestinian prisoners, so that they can be used as subjects for live medical experiments. Here again, we find that he is echoing what the Nazis did to the Jews in the past. Perhaps we should also add that Baruch Goldstein, who massacred the worshippers in the Patriarchs mosque in 1994, comes from Lior's settlement as well. At Goldstein's funeral, Lior said [that Goldstein] wanted “to sanctify the holy name of God”, and described him as being “a righteous man.” There is a shrine to Goldstein in Kiryat Arba, often visited by the extremists. Very briefly, I move onto Rabbi Yaakov Yosef, the son of Shas's spiritual leader Ovadiah Yosef, who is as extremist as his father, if not more. He said that the book does not say anything that is not already contained in the Torah about killing non-Jews. Non-Jews might come to mean Americans one day, if the need arises. This is not as unlikely as it sounds, since the rabbis who were mentioned in Blumenthal's articles already sanction the killing of secular Jews, and would thus not hesitate about killing an American or a Chinese person. [email protected]
