Where Is My Brother, My Keeper?

The sight of Gazans rejoicing at the cold-blooded murder of eight yeshiva students who had not hurt anyone was particularly jolting for me. I am a religious man and feel an immediate affinity with all who profess a love for God and strive to live a life of religious devotion. Meeting religious people of different faiths is always a great pleasure for me. I feel an immediate sense of kinship with them.

When I meet religious Muslims in the United States my feelings go beyond kinship to sympathy. I realize that many Americans are suspicious of religious Muslims, viewing them as a fifth column. I therefore go out of my way to express my brotherhood to them. I want them to know that as a Jew and as an American I stand with them in their desire to live a devout Islamic life.

I want them to know that I admire their love of God and their devotion to their ancestral traditions. I also want them to know that I see in them my brother, a fellow child of Abraham.

In the current presidential drama, much has been made of the fact that Barack Obama's middle name is Hussein. The Obama campaign has fought a rearguard action against rumors that he is a Muslim, forcing the senator to make public proclamations that he is a Christian and has never been a Muslim.

But, for my part, I could not care less if America had a Muslim president. Indeed, a president who feared God, from any faith, would be something that I would welcome. As long as his faith led him to a life of justice, righteousness, and love of humanity, I would welcome a Muslim president as much as I would welcome a Christian or Jewish - or indeed atheist - president who was similarly committed to rectitude, decency, and goodness.

But what shakes me to my core is when some of my Muslim brothers and sisters rejoice at the deaths of innocent Jews, particularly those who are at prayer in their yeshiva. When Baruch Goldstein did the same thing, killing 29 innocent Arabs in a mosque, I told the press in England, where I was living at the time, that this religious Jew had committed an abomination before God and that this killer had betrayed his Jewish faith in the most horrible way imaginable.

A few extremist Jewish acquaintances were aghast at my pronouncement. They told me, "Shmuley, don't you know that Goldstein had information that the Arabs in Hebron were planning a pogrom against the Jews, and Goldstein was able to stop it by shooting up the mosque?"

Their words caused me indescribable pain. "I can't believe you're saying this. We're religious Jews. We believe in the Ten Commandments, the fulcrum of which is 'Do not murder.' If Goldstein had that information, he could have taken it to the authorities. What he could not do is shoot up innocent men and children. Those people he killed are God's children.

"Have you been so scarred by the Arab-Israeli conflict that you have ceased to see the image of God in those innocent victims? Have you become so hardened by this conflict that you could somehow justify the taking of innocent lives at prayer?"

And to my Arab brothers and sisters, I ask the same question. I know many of you hate Israel. I know many of you believe that Israel is an occupying power. To be sure, I couldn't disagree more. Israel is a great bastion of democracy and humanity, the only place, aside from America-created Iraq, where Arabs actually vote in the Middle East. It is arguably the only country in the Middle East where Arab citizens can read the truth in a newspaper, can peacefully and fearlessly protest the government, and can petition impartial courts that very often take the Arab side against the Jewish side.

But, for argument's sake, even if you're right and Israel is a terrible place, does that justify the murder of innocent boys who were studying the Torah? Has your hatred of Israel reached a point where you can no longer see the image of God in a Jew? Have you been so scarred by the conflict that even as innocent families mourn their dead students, you can dance in the streets with joy?

And if you've come to that point, can you not see that your own humanity has been compromised?

I recognize that those who danced represent a small and extremist minority. The vast majority of Muslims are kind and God-fearing people. But why, then, do more Muslims not publicly condemn and repudiate these haters?

Baruch Goldstein's actions were condemned in the strongest and most public terms by 98 percent of all the world's rabbis. Should we not be hearing the same from our Muslim counterparts when yeshiva boys are murdered in cold blood?

I realize, my Muslim brethren, that you have many innocent dead that you mourn as well. I know that when Israel strikes back against terrorists who hide behind civilians, many completely innocent men, women, and children die. That is terrible, and I mourn those deaths with you.

The instruments of war are imprecise. Were it that bullets would only take the lives of those devoted to the deaths of innocents instead of the innocents themselves. But how can that justify the intentional targeting of innocent students?

The African-American community suffered the horrors of slavery in our country, the world's greatest democracy. Innocent men and women were put to the lash for no other reason other than that their skin was darker than a white's. Yet they never retaliated by setting up bombs in white communities and killing children.

The Jews were turned into soap and lampshades by the Germans. One million of our children were gassed to death. Prof. Jonathan Webber took me, outside Krakow, to a clearing in the woods where 800 Jewish orphans had their brains dashed against the rocks. You see, they were too small to obey orders, to stand in one place for the machine guns to shoot them in the head. So the Nazi soldiers were ordered to crack their skulls against a tree. And still, even amid this atrocity, the Jews never retaliated by walking into German schools and firing on teachers and students.

I believe the reason is that both the African-American and Jewish communities never wanted their humanity compromised by their oppressors. They did not wish to allow those who hated them to make their own hearts rancid. They wanted to remain moral even if their assailants were not.

I realize that we disagree totally on Israel. But Islam is a great world religion. It preaches love, kindness, and goodness. Its practitioners are similarly compassionate and famously hospitable people.

Surely you want to be exemplars of your faith's compassion rather than succumb to an unquenchable hatred that is not sated even when poor victims lie dead in their classrooms? Please join me, therefore, in condemning and mourning the loss of innocent religious students life. In our tears and, God willing, later in our joys, we will discover each other's humanity and become true brothers under God.

The writer's radio show airs daily on 'Oprah and Friends.' His newest book is The Broken American Male and How to Fix Him. www.shmuley.com

Comments

[maddogbitesback]

It is a myth that Jews were made into soap. The actions of the Nazis were horrific and included not just the Jews but the Gypsies, Slavs, mentally handicapped, homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses and political dissenters. The atrocities should not be demeaned by citing myth when talking about them.

[maddogbitesback]

Holocaust education from THE NIZKOR PROJECT

Deceit & Misrepresentation
The Techniques of Holocaust Denial

Apprendix 5
Deborah Lipstadt's letter to the LA Times

Here's the text of "Nazi Soap Rumor During World War II," a letter to the editor in Los Angeles Times, 16 May 1981, part II, page 2:

Rachel Patron's moving piece (Editorial Pages, April 30) about a childhood in Siberia during World War II highlighted the way in which war can make the most mundane of niceties, in this case soap, a luxury.

She survived four years of hunger, horror and brutalities meted out by a regime that treated the foreigners in its midst and even its own people with less than humane consideration. Patron and her family were among the thousands of Jews who were forcibly moved by the Russians from sectors of Russian-occupied Poland into the Siberian interior and held in a semi-state of captivity for the war's duration. As hard as their lot might have been, they were saved from the systematic annihilation the Germans visited on those Jews who had the miserable fate of living in German-occupied Poland.

At the war's end as the Patrons returned to Poland they stopped in the Ukrainian town of Dobra Matka. While waiting for the train Rachel discovered a shed full of soap and after joyously lathering herself and washing off the Siberia stench brought an armful back to her mother. The easy availability of this common household item seemed to indicate to Rachel and her mother that the war was over.

The child's joy quickly evaporated when her mother discovered the letters "RJF" on the bars of soap. The mother explained through her tears of horror that the letters stood for Rein Judisch Fett: Pure Jewish Fat. A childhood joy had become a nightmare.

Rachel Patron probably has many nightmares from that period. Had her family lived in a different part of Poland she probably would not have survived to have those nightmares. She would have become one of the millions of Jewish children who perished at the hands of the Nazi murderers. She would have become a statistic and not a storyteller. But she would not have been rendered into soap.

The fact is that the Nazis never used the bodies of Jews, or for that matter anyone else, for the production of soap. The soap rumor was prevalent both during and after the war. It may have had its origin in the cadaver factory atrocity story that came out of World War I. The letters "RJF" probably stood for the name of the factory that produced the soap. The soap rumor was thoroughly investigated after the war and proved to be untrue.

The Nazis performed innumerable acts of horror. Acts which, were there not definite and undeniable proof of them, could be dismissed as too unbelievable to be true. The hair of Jewish women was sent back to the Reich for use by the German people. The gold was extracted from the teeth of Jews and sent to German banks to be melted down.

In certain camps, e.g. Buchenwald, there were acts even more macabre. There, the young wife of the commandant used the skin of Jews to make lampshades and other bric-a-brac for her home. The greatest act of horror, of course, was the well-nigh successful plan of the Nazis to eliminate the Jewish people from the face of the European continent.

During the war the Nazis went to great effort to hide their actions from the public. They used all sorts of euphemisms to camouflage their actions in official reports: "eliminated," "finished off," "subject to special treatment," and "solution of the Jewish question." It would have been entirely at odds with their policy of subterfuge for them to have printed the abbreviation of "Pure Jewish Fat" on bars of soap that were distributed to the population of the Reich and Reich-occupied countries.

The necessity for exactitude when dealing with the horrors of the war becomes even more pressing today when there are those groups that would haveus believe that the Holocaust is a "hoax." The Torrance-based Institute of Historical Review (IHR) emerged as the American front for this argument. Similar groups exist in Europe. These groups contend that while many Jews may have died as a result of "normal" wartime privations, no one ever died in a gas chamber or as a result of systematic murder. The basis for their argument is that the only ones to benefit from the myth of the Holocaust are the Zionists.

The IHR would have you believe that Zionists propagated the story of the Holocaust and use the sympathy of the world to foster their own ends. In reaching this conclusion they ignore reams of detailed eyewitness accounts by both the victims and perpetrators of this crime.

Faculty and students at the University of California have become particularly sensitive to the dangerous antics of the IHR. In November 1981 the IHR will hold a conference on the "hoax of the Holocaust" at the University of California retreat center in Lake Arrowhead. They have leased the retreat center under the guise of being an educational entity. It should be noted that since the Arrowhead center is subsidized, the residents of the state of California whose tax dollars support the University of California are for all intents and purposes supporting the IHR and its attempt to make a mockery of all that is truth.

In the face of such frightening endeavors it is imperative that all those who write and speak of the annihilation of European Jewry do so with the greatest of care and precision. It is equally imperative that all those who value truth and honesty fight the attempts of the IHR to propagate their mendacious views.

Deborah Lipstadt
Los Angeles

Lipstadt is on the faculty of UCLA, where she teaches modern Jewish history.

[ Index ]

[WorkingClass]

The children in the occupied territories are fair game. So are the children of Lebanon, Iraq and Afghanistan. Why are Israeli children exempt from murder? Or American children? Are some children innocent and others not?

[BubbaC33]

First of all you have told a terrible lie about the children in the territories. It is not true.
The difference is when Arab children are killed it is an accident and due to the fact that Arab terrorists hide among the civilian population. And Israeli troops are often held to account for the accidental killings on non-combatants, some have been tried and jailed. The Arabs, on the other hand, target Jewish children. And that is the difference.

[Cathexis]

Doesn't matter who is right or who is wrong in the Israel land situation -- murder is murder and is especially egregious when it is perpetrated on young people/innocents.

It is so easy to lose perspective ... to prioritize the wrong things.

I am not a particularly religious man, but I do hope there is some final accounting ... some closure where God takes aside the extremist Palestinian "terrorist," the extremist Zionist militarist, the extemist US Religious Right Christianist ... and opens their eyes about what they've done and what the cost has been.

And whether what they have done "in His name" was desired.

[Dap]

Dear Rabbi Shmuley,

You wrote: "The sight of Gazans rejoicing at the cold-blooded murder of eight yeshiva students who had not hurt anyone was particularly jolting for me. I am a religious man and feel an immediate affinity with all who profess a love for God and strive to live a life of religious devotion."

Being a non-religious man, I too had a problem with the killing of the yeshiva students and the rejoicing.

While I understand you being a Rabbi, and your clear devotion to the State of Israel for religious and traditional reasons, there is something of interest I have come across which I also find troubling with regard to shalom in the "Holy Land" "Promised Land".

"The March 6 attack on Mercaz Harav Yeshiva, an elite religious college in the heart of Jerusalem that killed eight students is more than an act of revenge for the scores of Palestinians killed in Gaza a few days earlier. It represents an assault on a religious learning institution that : *supports the settlement movement* and further underscores the ominous danger of the escalating religious conflict between Israelis and Palestinians." - Alon Ben-Meir

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/alon-benmeir/ceasefire-to-what-end_b_91229.html

This explains what happened to a great degree, and is the exact reason there is a problem with shalom in the Jewish Home-Land, the Children are being taught to be bullies and thieves. Who's fault is that? What kind of Brotherhood does this promote?

Then to make a bad situation worse, the Israeli government announced that more settlement would be built on land that does not rightfully belong to them.

So my question is: How many more innocent children on both sides will have to die before we learn from this lesson?

Your eloquent and heartfelt post, falls on deft ears or rings hollow, without doing the hard work of changing ones actions, time for a true paradigm shift. Teach the Children well!

Agape. (Love in fellowship of our shared fragile humanity)

[NicoleAnonymous]

I had to stop reading after this:

"I know many of you believe that Israel is an occupying power. To be sure, I couldn't disagree more"

So the occupation doesn't exist? I wish someone had told everyone in Gaza and the West Bank that!

And Jews are supposed to refer to him as G_d.

I can't stay in this discussion anyway - the light colored font against a grey background is giving me a headache.

[NicoleAnonymous]

When Jews refer to G_d we don't spell out the name. You should know this already.

[S1m0n]

Now spend a moment and think of the Iraqi (or even arab) reaction to americans cheering over shock-and-awe.

[jrat]

Rabbi, no matter how they respond, it is impossible for anyone not to recognize the truth in what you wrote. Don't be dissuaded.

[maddogbitesback]

I don't recognize the truth in what he wrote. I recognize a piece of self serving propoganda which justifies an outrage that has terrible parallels in the history of mankind. The Torah teaches Jews have a right to the land owned by the people now called Palestinians. The Torah does not say how much land an old man could see from the top of a high hill. The Torah is a mix of myth and history. I do not believe in Zeus and the gods on Mount Olympus and their temper tantrums and I don't believe in the Torah or the Koran. Or the Book of Mormon. The Torah is idiotic. How can a community have the right to stone anyone. How can it have the right to say that a man may beat his slave. How can it say that it is wrong to eat a cheeseburger. I don't believe in witches or talismans so I don't believe in the witch of Endor or summoning the spirits of the dead. It is all hooey but it is hooey which is being used to justify a huge land grab from a whole people. The Nazis had a different hooey which justified seizing the property of the Slavs, the gypsies, the Jews and anyone who disagreed with them.

[BubbaC33]

You have no grasp of Judaism or the historical facts concerning Israel.
Arabs living in eretz Israel did not refer to themselves as Palestinians until after 1964. Prior to that time Arabs referred to themselves as Syrians or as citizens of the nations their fathers called home. Only after it became politically expedient did Arabs refer to themselves as Palestinians.
The first Aliya was undertaken following purchases of land from absentee landlords, few "Palestinians" owned the land or even lived in Palestine. And the Jews never left, a significant Jewish population has always existed in Jerusalem and i eretz Israel.
And here is an important question. If a "Palestinian" homeland was so important why did Jordan and Egypt resist creating one in the almost 20 years they held the West Bank and Gaza?

[maddogbitesback]

The instruments of war are imprecise. This is true of the crude and by and large ineffective Palestinian rockets. They are weak and do very little harm. On the other hand the Israeli army has precise weapons. And it uses them precisely. What is termed collateral damage is intentional when Israel bulldozes homes and destroys walls. What is termed collateral is not the strangulation of Gaza by turning off the electricity and closing the border so supplies cannot get in. That is murder.

It is known that many Jews believe they have a God given right to the land as far as the Euphrates though in the Bible I read it only states God gave the land visible to an old man's eyes. No rivers were mentioned. No latitudes and longitudes were given. Perhaps that is why Israel has no boundary (the only country in the world without one) and perhaps that is why Israeli settlers in seized land fire upon Palestinians on the other side of the fence so they cannot harvest their crops. And why they are willing to bomb their girls as they go into school in the morning.

The Nazis stole the property of the Jews and killed them. The Israelis have stolen the land of the Palestinians and killed them.

Blacks did not fight back for the simple reason that they would have been killed and in fact lynching is still a threat to blacks. Palestinians do fight back. Why not. They are dying anyway. They live in what is much like the Warsaw Ghetto.

The Jewish books are books of cruelty and wrath. Jews must obey or be punished. Babylon or Egypt.
It is all a primitive myth and whoever believes the Jews have a right to land they left two thousand years and more ago needs to see a psychiatrist. Some left on their own and others after the Romans defeated them. You see though the Romans had always respected the Jews they were fed up with the unrest. So take up the argument with the Romans and let the Palestinians return as is their right to return. In the mean time, do not think the death of eight students in a school which was teaching them they had a right to land stolen from people who now live in a ghetto near by was a deliberate affront. When the Americans declared war on Osama bin Laden for destroying two skyscrapers, did you think they had a right to be angry and to go after bin Laden? I guess it depends upon whose ox is being gored.

[BubbaC33]

This posting is weak on facts, political and historical.
The Israel has not stolen the land of the Palestinians, the early Zionists purchased land from mostly absentee landlords. Visitors to Palestine prior to WWI found the area to be relatively unpopulated. And the area was never free of a Jewish presence. Jerusalem had a significant Jewish population, that has always been the case. The Jews never left the area, Jews have always been in their homeland.
It is absurd to say Israel has no borders, it certainly does, established in 1967 at the end of the Six Day War. And those boundaries are legal, it would be suicidal for Israel to give up more of the territories. IN 1973 Israel would have been destroyed without the strategic depth afforded by the territories.

[mamacat]

It occurs to me that moderate and peaceloving people on both sides of the Jewish-Muslim conflict have emigrated out of the area long ago. Thus, the ratio of war-loving, hatefilled people, is higher the closer one gets to the conflict.
There are many people in Palestine-Israel who do not want peace, unless it is on their own terms. And, of course, their own terms means complete capitulation of the other side.
Those willing to engage in compromise need to become the majority, and those whose aim is to engage in needless violence and land theft need to be controlled by the new majority.

[Lon]

While I can't avoid being depressed by the Palestinian celebration it is not so hard to understand. From the Palestinian perspective there have been two periods of the occupation. There have been periods when innocent palestinians and innocent Israelis both die. And there have been times when innocent palestinians die, and no Israelis die. There have not been periods in which innocent Palestinians don't die. That is the nature of occupation.

If one reads the news accounts of the region, there will be reports of periods when nobody died, but these refer to Israelis, the Palestinians don't count in such reports. And during those times the Israelis have generally acted as if their tough measures have solved the problem and so time is on their side. Generally what one gets is expansions of settlements. And when the Israelis act as if time is on their side, it is equivalent to saying, time during which only innocent palestinians die.

Under those circumstances it is not so surprising that the Palestinians react not so much to the death of Israelis but to the fact that some Palestinians have the power to do damage to the Israelis and the Palestinians are not as impotent as they seem at other times.

[lynnn]

Bless you for writing such a thought provoking post, sadly I hope it does not fall on deaf ears!

[idontthinkthisishelping]

Did not millitant Zionists decide that innocent civilians were fair game since at least 1946?

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_David_Hotel_bombing :

"91 people were killed, most of them staff of the secretariat and the hotel: 28 British, 41 Arab, 17 Jewish, and 5 others."

This seems more civilized than "dancing in the streets," but that may be a negligible distinction:

"In July 2006, Israelis including former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former members of Irgun attended a 60th anniversary celebration of the bombing, which was organized by the Menachem Begin Centre. "

Begin led the attack. Is awarding him the Prime Minister's office anything like a celebration?

If what will become an entire nation of home-invaders shoot and kill some members of your family, herd the rest into a closet, and while walling off that closet tell you the rest of the house is theirs, their ownership was sanctioned by an international body whom will be ignored by the home invaders thereafter, and by the way, you never really owned the house to begin with -- would that taint your faith in the "God" in all of us?

[BubbaC33]

The King David Hotel was a military target, not a religious school. If you do not understand the difference you ought to refrain from further comment.

[idontthinkthisishelping]

It was a hotel. It was a hotel, (from wiki citation and link above) "part of which was being used as the base for the Mandate Secretariat, the British military headquarters and a branch of the police Criminal Investigation Division." If you are saying that the British military headquarters is a military target, they you clearly have no problem with attacks against the Pentagon. Most of the casualties were civilians. If a hotel janitor is acceptable collateral damage for you, from this (there is no other way to define it -- it was a bomb intended to kill members of the British government as well as those in the military, with the sole intent of intimidating the British into leaving the land that the Palestinians lived on that the Zionists wanted for themselves. This could not possibly have had any strategic military effect. It would be the exact same thing as a Palestinian or a British citizen secreting a bomb in the basement of the Israeli Embassy -- in that their Embassy is a central point for the Mossad (as all Embassies are central points for all respective intelligence agencies.)

If your 12-word argument is actually saying that citizens who are the vast majority of casualties of a bombing is different than simply targeting civilians, than that's your opinion, and I'm sure it's well considered. My suspicion is that the Palestinian gunman a) saw himself killing the illegal occupiers of his land, and b) counted on the target getting more press and causing more outrage than usual.

This doesn't seem like a good way to convince people to leave when it clearly results in more U.S. and Israeli-sponsored West Bank settlements of religious fanatics, regardless of how you may feel about targeting people who have literally kicked people people out of their homes to live in refugee camps because their interpretation of the Bible said it was okay.

But if this is the only form of protest people think others will notice, it is natural and probable to expect them to use it.

Not wanting to read before telling others they're not sufficiently educated to comment is completely understandable, as finding relevant information can be tricky. Which is why I provided the link to you, and on the other side of that link you will find references their information is based on, which will likely cite their sources... So basically lots of people have already done the work for you, but you still chose to go with a questionable description, firmly disagreeing with an analogy thought of only by you, and your belief that people who don't know as much as you, who don't have a stranglehold on the facts and an impressive facility with logic and reason, then they should not comment.

So if you get the time, you really might want to read at least the wiki entry; it's short, it's got pictures, and it's not going to bite -- it's not like it's a NIE or anything...

[maddogbitesback]

It was a terrorist attack. End of sentence. And it was not the only terrorist attack.

[idontthinkthisishelping]

All of this violence, by the way, in all directions, solely based on "God's will." Presumably the same God, unless we now have a minimum of Three calling the shots in the area.

Does She share any culpability?

[danceswithyids]

How about from now on, nobody uses wikipedia as a source for factual information.
I'm just saying, we as a people can't trust a website that has its information altered at the whim of anyone with a computer.
There just have to be better sources out there.

[RabidRightRebel]

While I despair over this senseless killings on both sides how can you honestly think that the Jewish communities have not compromised their humanity by their treatment of the Palestinians. Are you even remotely aware of how much death, pain and suffering has been inflicted upon them, all because of a land grab by Israel?

Let"s face it this conflict could be over tomorrow if Israel was willing to return to the 1967 borders under the protection of International community including membership in NATO. But no, this conflict continues because as a nation Israelis believe that land is more important than peace and the lives of Palestinians are apparently less important than those of Israelis.