Were you disturbed by the news that Donald Rumsfeld used biblical quotations in headlines of war reports to President Bush so as to command the commander-in-chief's shallow attention? It's so easy to bash Bush. Zionists do this stuff too. The smartest response I've seen to Jeffrey Goldberg's piece in the Times on Netanyahu's biblical thought process re Iran comes from Daniel Luban, who points out that in invoking Amalek, the villains of Deuteronomy in the Old Testament, Netanyahyu/Goldberg are citing a controversial section of the bible in which God orders genocide against a people. Luban:
Goldberg clearly does not wish to rattle his right-thinking liberal New York Times
audience, so he conveniently omits all this from his account of Amalek.
However, if Netanyahu’s advisors are right to say that Bibi sees Iran
as the new Amalek, this is a fact with profoundly disturbing
implications. After all, the biblically ordained way to deal with the
Amalekites is not through “smart but tough” diplomacy, “crippling”
sanctions, or even precise and targeted military strikes. Rather, it is
through root-and-branch extermination — that is, wiping Iran off the
map. Goldberg writes that “[i]f Iran’s nuclear program is,
metaphorically, Amalek’s arsenal, then an Israeli prime minister is
bound by Jewish history to seek its destruction, regardless of what his
allies think.” This is not quite accurate. If we take God’s command and
the Amalek analogy literally, then an Israeli prime minister would be
bound not to seek “its [the Amalekite arsenal’s] destruction,” but rather “their [the Amalekites’] destruction.”
I do not in fact believe that Netanyahu wishes to exterminate the
Iranian people, but the Amalek analogy is nonetheless an alarming
indication of the tenor of his thought about Iran. Furthermore, this is
the sort of rhetoric that, when uttered by someone like Ahmadinejad, is
taken quite literally and held up as proof of genocidal intent. When
Netanyahu does it, however, we are supposed to understand that of
course he doesn’t really mean what his advisor’s statement implies, and
that this bloody rhetoric is simply evidence of his hard-nosed and
serious approach to the Iranian threat.
