XPost: soc.culture.palestine, soc.culture.israel, talk.politics.mideast   
   From: al92653@xyz.com   
      
   Rabbis Who Bring Shame to Judaism   
   by Khaled Amayreh / August 6th, 2008   
      
   Religious extremism is very dangerous. It means that every thinkable vice   
   under the sun can be committed, "sanctioned" and "justified" in the name of   
   the Almighty. In Israel, rabbis with hundreds of thousands of followers,   
   many of whom serve in the Gestapo-like Israeli occupation army, openly teach   
   that non-Jews are only human in form but animals in substance. These racist   
   teachings can't be dismissed as "innocuous" or "esoteric." Very often, they   
   constitute "a manual for action" for many Jewish settlers roaming the hills   
   of the West Bank, searching for an Arab prey to kill, or attack or tie up to   
   a power pole.   
      
   The teachings also serve as a direct inspiration to numerous Israeli   
   soldiers operating in the West Bank who, thanks to the racist indoctrination   
   they receive from their rabbis, have come to view the estimated 3.7 million   
   Palestinians living under Israel's military rule, not as real human beings,   
   but rather as animals walking on two feet. The often barbaric treatment   
   meted out to the Palestinians in the occupied territories testifies to the   
   rampantly racist indoctrination soldiers and settlers receive at the hands   
   of religious Zionist rabbis. Last year, a Jewish immigrant from France, who   
   murdered an Arab taxi driver after luring him to his home north of Tel Aviv,   
   told police interrogators that he didn't kill a human being; he only killed   
   an animal.   
      
   "Merkaz Harav"   
   Merkaz Harav (the Rabbi's Center) is the ideological and theological central   
   nervous system of religious Zionism in Israel. Established in honor of Rabbi   
   Abraham Kook, Israel's first Chief Rabbi, the center, which is actually a   
   religious college, teaches students that God Almighty created the entire   
   universe for the sake of "the Jew," and that all non-Jews ought to be slaves   
   laboring for the "chosen people." As to the Palestinians, Merkaz Harav   
   teaches that "non-Jews living under Jewish law in Eretz Yisrael (Land of   
   Israel) must either be enslaved as water carriers and wood hewers, or   
   banished, or exterminated."   
      
   Some rabbinic authorities associated with Merkaz Harav have been preaching   
   the view that Palestinians are descendants of the Amalek, or Amalekites,   
   whom the Bible says must be totally exterminated. Such hateful views are   
   actually espoused by hundreds of thousands of Jewish settlers in the West   
   Bank. This is the religious doctrine of religious Zionism. This is the   
   theology taught in hundreds of Yeshivot (religious schools) throughout   
   Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories. Settlers as well as the   
   increasingly Settler-dominated Israeli army may very well act on these   
   doctrines in a more wanton manner if the world goes into a slumber. They are   
   only awaiting the opportune time to do it.   
      
   According to Rabbi Kook, "The difference between a Jewish soul and souls of   
   non-Jews-all of them in all different levels-is greater and deeper than the   
   difference between a human soul and the soul of cattle." The late Israeli   
   philosopher, Yisrael Shahak, pointed out that the teachings of Kook were   
   based on the Lurianic Cabala, one of whose basic tenets is the absolute   
   superiority of the Jewish soul and body over the non-Jewish soul and body   
   "so much so that the world was created solely for the sake of Jews."   
      
   In 2003, Rabbi Saadya Grama, an alumnus of Beth Medrash Govoha, the renowned   
   Yeshiva in Lakewood, N.J., wrote a book titled Romemut Yisrael Ufarashat   
   Hagalut, which can be translated as "the Majesty of Israel and the Question   
   of the Diaspora," in which he argued that non-Jews were "completely evil"   
   and that Jews constituted a separate, genetically superior species. The book   
   was condemned by many reform and conservative rabbis in the US as manifestly   
   racist and incompatible with normative Jewish religious thinking. However,   
   major Jewish organizations in Israel and North America, such as Agudat   
   Yisrael, refused to condemn the book.   
      
   In Israel, numerous Orthodox Zionist rabbis, many of them graduates of and   
   lecturers at Merkaz Harav, continue to teach the theologically dubious   
   concept that the ten commandments don't apply to non-Jews and that,   
   therefore, the Biblical commandments against committing murder, theft, and   
   lying don't cover non-Jews. For example, Rabbi Dov Lior, Chairman of the   
   Jewish Rabbinic Council, teaches that "there is no such thing as enemy   
   civilians in war time" "The law of our Torah is to have mercy on our   
   soldiers and to save them. This is the real moral behind Israel's Torah and   
   we must not feel guilty due to foreign morals," he was quoted as saying by   
   the Hebrew newspaper Ma'ariv in 2004.   
      
   "A thousand non-Jewish lives are not worth a Jew's fingernail."   
   Lior is not a marginal figure in the Zionist religious establishment. I   
   asked Rabbi Menachem Froman, who himself has taught at Merkaz Harav, about   
   Lior's religious credentials and he told me that the man "is considered   
   among the most learned sages of the Torah." Earlier this year, Rabbi David   
   Batsri told followers that "it is impossible to mix the pure with the   
   impure. They (the Arabs) are a blight, a devil, a disaster. The Arabs are   
   donkeys, and we have to ask ourselves why God didn't create them to walk on   
   all four. Well, the answer is that they are needed to build and clean. They   
   don't have any place in our school."   
      
   In May, 2007, Mordechai Elyahu, a former Chief Rabbi of Israel, issued an   
   edict that would permit the Israeli army to murder hundreds of thousands of   
   Palestinians . "If they don't stop after we kill 100, then we must kill a   
   thousand. And if they don't stop after 1,000, then we must kill 10,000. If   
   they still don't stop we must kill 100,000. Even a million. Whatever it   
   takes to make them stop."   
      
   I don't believe that this repulsive extremism represents true Judaism, the   
   Judaism that is based on the Ten Commandments. Jewish traditions relate the   
   story of a heathen who came to Shammai with the request to be accepted as a   
   convert on condition that he was taught the whole Torah while he stood on   
   one foot. Shammai drove him away with the yard-stick he was holding. Then   
   the man went to Hillel with the same request. Hillel told the man "what is   
   hateful to yourself don't do to your fellow human being. That is the whole   
   of the Torah and the rest is commentary."   
      
   Unfortunately, the rabbis of religious Zionism, including the so-called   
   Chabadim who have effectively replaced the Torah with a notoriously racist   
   manual called "Hatanya," pay no attention to such traditions. And when they   
   are reminded of them, they arrogantly claim that words such as "man" or   
   "human being" refer solely and exclusively to the "Jew."   
      
      
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    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)