"When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle." ~ 
Any world is an illusion, but within illusion, another world, a better world, seems possible. In the material world, the one we think is real, the divide between the 'left' and 'right' is an artificial one. This divide serves to keep us separate from each other and prevents us from seeing clearly that we in fact have shared interests and a common enemy. A better way to approach economy, politics, culture and society would be to take note of the ways in which our societies are divided horizontally: the interests of the few (the elite) and the many (ordinary people). The elite wants to oppress and exploit the rest of us. In a material sense, they are our enemy. They are working to establish a One World Company, aka a totalitarian New World Order. World government is the last thing ordinary people need. We need free and open communities with equal rights for everyone and a profound respect for the many differences between us. We want freedom rather than security. We want peace, not war. Above all else, we want truth, dignity and justice. ~ The Editor
XML FeedsThe Jewish Ayatollahs
Rabbi Shapira, no grounds for remand (Photo: Noam Moskowitz)
The Archbishop of New York announces that any Catholic who rents out an apartment to a Jew commits a mortal sin and runs the risk of excommunication.
A protestant priest in Berlin decrees that a Christian who employs a Jew will be banished from his parish.
Impossible? Indeed. Except in Israel – in reverse, of course.
The rabbi of Safed, a government employee, has decreed that it is strictly forbidden to let apartments to Arabs – including the Arab students at the local medical school. Twenty other town rabbis – whose salaries are paid by the taxpayers, mostly secular, including Arab citizens - have publicly supported this edict. A group of Israeli intellectuals lodged a complaint with the Attorney General, arguing that this is a case of criminal incitement. The Attorney General promised to investigate the matter with all due haste. That was half a year ago. “Due haste” has not yet produced a decision.
The same goes for another group of rabbis, who prohibited employing Goyim.
(In ancient Hebrew, “Goy” just meant a people, any people. In the Bible, the Israelites were called a “holy Goy”. But in the last centuries, the term has come to mean non-Jews, with a decidedly derogatory undertone.)
This week, Israel was in uproar. The turmoil was caused by the arrest of Rabbi Dov Lior.
The affair goes back to a book released more than a year ago by Rabbi Yitzhak Shapira. Shapira is, perhaps, the most extreme inhabitant of Yitzhar, which is perhaps the most extreme settlement in the West Bank. Its members are frequently accused of carrying out pogroms in the nearby Palestinian villages, generally in “retaliation” for army actions against structures that have been built without official consent.
The book, called Torat ha-Melekh (“the Teaching of the King”)[1] deals with the killing of Goyim. It says that in peacetime, Goyim should generally not be killed – not because of the commandment “Thou shalt not kill” which, according to the book, applies to Jews only, but because of God’s command after the Deluge (Genesis 9:6): “Whoso sheddeth man’s blood, by man shall his blood be shed, for in the image of God made he man.” This applies to all Goyim who fulfill some basic commandments.
However, the situation is totally different in wartime. And according to the rabbis, Israel has been at war since its foundation, and probably will be for ever more.
