I read two articles this morning that make an interesting contrast–or, rather, there’s not that much contrast in the mindsets exhibited.
1. At NRO: An Ill Season: The Arab spring unleashes Islamists on Egyptian Christians by Andy McCarthy.
2. At The American Prospect: The Strange Alchemy of the Settlements by Gershom Gorenberg.
From one of the settlement’s veteran residents, I’d acquired a copy of The Law of the King, written by two of the academy’s rabbis, Yitzhak Shapira and Yosef Elitzur. The book purports to elucidate Jewish religious law about when it is forbidden or permitted for a Jew to kill a gentile. The book’s themes are that a Jew’s life is worth more than a gentile’s and that for a Jew to kill a gentile is a lesser sin than killing another Jew. In a war between Jews and non-Jews, Shapira and Elitzur assert, Jews may kill anyone from the opposing side who poses the most indirect threat — even enemy civilians who show emotional support for their troops. There is no moral problem, the authors state, with causing the death of civilians who live near an army base or weapons plant, because they stand in the way of a legitimate target.
It would be easy enough to locate an account of some delusional Christians, even Catholics, but these two articles jumped out at me this morning. The difference, of course, is that these settlement people are wagging the US dog and all politically involved Americans should be aware of the facts of what’s going on. And for those like McCarthy who are concerned about an Islamist threat, it’s time they woke up to the reality that the mindset of Zionists is not fundamentally (!) different from that of Islamists/Salafists. The US is playing with fire in its foreign policy.
Yossi Gurvitz makes the comparison very explicit: Nobody mentions the Jewish Brotherhood.
While Israelis pay plenty of attention to the fear of the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, they steadfastly ignore the rise of the Jewish brotherhood in their own country.
