[middle-east] israel, canaan, palestine, apocalypse

You know, I was thinking: if I were one of two brothers and the other had received the birthright and all the plaudits and I found myself the one out of favour, I wouldn’t be such a happy chappy about this.

I might just be tempted to re-invent myself as the last divinely inspired prophet sometime around the 7th century, go up on a mountain, find a burning bush [to throw other scripture into the pot], scratch a few things in some stones and then come down and look for 72 virgins to help soothe the fevered brow.

Then, somewhere in my literature, I’d insert something along these lines to provide an outlet:

"And slay them wherever ye catch them, and turn them out from where they have turned you out; for tumult and oppression are worse than slaughter; but fight them not at the Sacred Mosque, unless they first fight you there; but if they fight you, slay them." [Surah 2:190-193]

"The gentiles are outside the protection of the law and God has exposed their money to Israel." [Baba Kamma 37b]

"No two religions are to exist on the Arab peninsula" [Ibn Kathir d. 1372]

If a Jew is tempted to do evil he should go to a city where he is not known and do the evil there [Moed Kattan 17a]

"Kill the disbelievers wherever we find them" [Surah 2:191]

"If a heathen (gentile) hits a Jew, the gentile must be killed." [Sanhedrin 58b]

"Not to make friendship with Jews and Christians" [Surah 5:51]

"Gentile girls are in a state of niddah from birth." [Abodah Zarah 36b]

"I will instill terror into the hearts of the unbelievers: you smite them above their necks and smite all their fingertips off them." [Surah, 8:12]

"All gentile children are animals." [Yebamoth 98a]

"Fight and slay the Pagans, seize them, beleaguer them, and lie in wait for them in every stratagem" [Surah 9:5]

"Kill [even] the good among the gentiles." [R. Shimon ben Yochai]

"O Prophet! Make war against the unbelievers [all non-Muslims] and the hypocrites and be merciless against them. Their home is hell, an evil refuge indeed." [Surah, 9:73]

"She who was the descendant of princes and governors played the harlot with carpenters." [Sanhedrin 106a]

"When we decide to destroy a population, we send a definite order to them who have the good things in life and yet sin. So that Allah's word is proven true against them, then we destroy them utterly." [Surah, 17:16-17]

On the other hand, I could include these instead:

Muslim: "Of the five fingers that Almighty G-d has given most of us on each hand, if we point one at Israel and another at America, what are the three remaining fingers pointed at? Will we point at least one of them at ourselves? Can we dare to have that happen? And if not, why not? Usher in an era of reformation through introspection. Being a refusenik doesn't mean I refuse to be a Muslim; it simply means I refuse to join an army of automatons in the name of Allah." [Irshad Manji, Random House, Toronto]

Jewish: "Our philosophy asserts that every human being is created in the image of the Lord and the primacy of integrity and honesty in all dealings without exception. I strongly repudiate any assertions in the name of Judaism that do not represent and reflect this philosophy." [Rabbi Malkiel Kotler, dean of Lakewood Yeshiva, Dec. 16, 2003]

Christian: "A new commandment I give unto you, That ye love one another; as I have loved you, that ye also love one another." [John 13:34]

"This is my commandment, That ye love one another, as I have loved you." [John 15:12]

"Seeing ye have purified your souls in obeying the truth through the Spirit unto unfeigned love of the brethren, see that ye love one another with a pure heart fervently" [1 Peter 1:22]

"And now I beseech thee, lady, not as though I wrote a new commandment unto thee, but that which we had from the beginning, that we love one another." [2 John 1:5] (

And so to the current situation. As Middle East historian Bernard Lewis explained, Essentially, the Middle East is dominated by totalitarian models that destroy traditional freedoms and stifle economic growth, while educating generations of Arabs to oppose commerce, pragmatic compromise and Western science.

"First, [on August 12th], there’s a high probability that the war between Israel and Hizbullah will persist for weeks, even escalate. The United States and France, which had a moment of diplomatic unity over the weekend, are now squabbling over the language of a preliminary U.N. Security Council resolution.

Among other things, France now wants to include Lebanese-requested language that will require faster Israeli withdrawal, and the Bush administration is resisting these changes. While negotiations flag, Israel’s cabinet has approved a wider, 30-day military campaign in Lebanon. “It’s going to be very bloody,” an Israeli official told me today. “The diplomacy is dead.”

And the confrontation to come could make this one look like a sideshow. As summer turns to autumn we are likely to see the Hizbullah proxy war morph into an even uglier fight between the United States and Israel, on one side, and Iran, on the other.

Israeli officials are increasingly forthright in saying that their current effort to neutralize Hizbullah, and Washington’s eager endorsement of this effort, is part of a larger strategic campaign being waged against Iran, one of Hizbullah’s chief sponsors, at a time when Tehran is getting fearfully feisty. " [Newsweek current online edition]

Finally:

"Whoever destroys the life of a single human being ... it is as if he had destroyed an entire world; and whoever preserves the life of a single human being ...it is as if he had preserved an entire world."