Some thoughts on Israel/Palestine

I am cutting and pasting some thoughts from commenters on Steve Ruis’ blog. He pretty much blames the Israelis for the mess and wants the US to stop supporting their armed forces, but not all of his readers agree, as you can see below. My writing is highlighted just like this paragraph.

I would like to emphasize that Hamas explicitly sees their campaign as a religious jihad or crusade or war to **kill Jews**. They explicitly state that do not want to live in peace with Jews and Muslims and Christians in any secular state, and they scorn any negotiations. They want total victory in battle. Unfortunately, they have millions of supporters.

And they have fooled many folks around the world who call themselves anti-racists: they are supporting the most brazen and openly anti-Semitic, i.e., racist force in the world.

========================Here start the quotes =======================

Old-time religion (and I’m not referencing modern-day terminology) is at the core of these “war-like” activities. The only desired “freedom” harks back to (supposed) promises made by a non-existent god.

Comment by Nan — November 6, 2023 @ 12:30 pm | Reply

• This religious core is certainly true of Hamas specifically and widely shared by Palestinian civilians. It’s the same existential threat Israel has to face every day but one the West seems incapable of recognizing. Harris and other New Atheists have been banging the warning gong on this for quite some time. From Coyne: The core religious belief is “what explains the suicidal and genocidal inclinations of a group like Hamas. The Islamic doctrines of martyrdom and jihad do. These are religious beliefs, sincerely held. They are beliefs about the moral structure of the universe. And they explain how normal people—even good ones—can commit horrific acts of violence against innocent civilians—on purpose, not as collateral damage—and still consider themselves good.
• When you believe that life in this world has no value, apart from deciding who goes to hell and who goes to Paradise, it becomes possible to feel perfectly at ease killing noncombatants, or even using your own women and children as human shields, because you know that any Muslims who get killed will go to Paradise for eternity.
• If you don’t understand that jihadists sincerely believe these things, you don’t understand the problem Israel faces. The problem isn’t merely Palestinian nationalism, or resource competition, or any other normal terrestrial grievance. In fact, the problem isn’t even hatred, though there is enough of that to go around.
• The problem is religious certainty.” — November 14, 2023 @ 10:42 am | Reply
  • And this goes back to claim of equivalency. As Harris points out, “Yes, there are (religious ) lunatics on both sides, but the consequences of their lunacy are not equivalent—not even remotely equivalent. We haven’t spent the last 20 years taking our shoes off at the airport because there are so many fanatical Jews eager to blow themselves up on airplanes.”Harris’ point is that we all live in Israel now. It’s just a lot of Westerners don’t realize it.“
  • Of course, the boundary between Anti-Semitism and generic moral stupidity is a little hard to discern—and I’m not sure that it is always important to find it. I’m not sure it matters why a person can’t distinguish between collateral damage in a necessary war and conscious acts of genocidal sadism that are celebrated as a religious sacrament by a death cult. Our streets have been filled with people, literally tripping over themselves in their eagerness to demonstrate that they cannot distinguish between those who intentionally kill babies, and those who inadvertently kill them, having taken great pains to avoid killing them, while defending themselves against the very people who have just intentionally tortured and killed innocent men, women, and yes… babies. And who are committed to doing this again at any opportunity, and who are using their own innocent noncombatants as human shields. If you’re both sides-ing this situation—or worse, if you are supporting the wrong side: if you are waving the flag of people who murder noncombatants intentionally, killing parents in front of their children and children in front of their parents, burning people alive at a music festival devoted to “peace”, and decapitating others, and dragging their dismembered bodies through the streets, all to shouts of “God is Great.”
  • If you are recognizing the humanity of actual barbarians, while demonizing the people who actually worry about war crimes and who drop leaflets and call cell phones for days, in an effort to get noncombatants to leave specific buildings before they are bombed, because those buildings sit on top of tunnels filled with genocidal lunatics—who again, have just sedulously tortured and murdered families as though it were a religious sacrament, because for them it is a religious sacrament. If you have landed, proudly and sanctimoniously, on the wrong side of this asymmetry—this vast gulf between savagery and civilization—while marching through the quad of an Ivy League institution wearing yoga pants, I’m not sure it matters that your moral confusion is due to the fact that you just happen to hate Jews. 
  • Whether you’re an anti-Semite or just an apologist for atrocity is probably immaterial. The crucial point is that you are dangerously confused about the moral norms and political sympathies that make life in this world worth living.Yup, we all live in Israel now. It’s time to wake up and call out the both-sides-ism as serving only the jihadists.
    • ===================
• Me (GFB) writing here: I think there is a big difference between being an outright anti-Semite on the one hand, and being naive about who the good guys and the bad guys are. In general, I think anybody reading these words agrees that slavery and racism are bad, and that includes anti-Semitism. My friends on the left who are demonstrating against the Israeli military response see themselves also as opposing colonialism and imperialism.
• The problem, unfortunately, is that MohammedAllah repeatedly calls for killing Jews and calls them all sorts of despicable, racist names, mostly because they refused to believe that he was the true messenger of god. Hamas quotes his murderous words many times in their declaration, which I have posted links to in a previous post.
• Most people who call themselves Christians and Jews today only practice a very small fraction of the laws set forth in Leviticus, and if someone (like me) was raised a Christian (Episcopalian in my case) and later decides that he/she no longer believes any of that fairy tale, they may lose family connections (or not), but generally nobody will try to kill you. Unfortunately, that is not the case in Islam:
• ================ Here I am copying and pasting from Quora. I don’t read Arabic, so I have to rely on what others say:
• Does the Quran clearly state that apostates, those who have given up Islam, should be killed? Are there Muslims on Quora who support this?
• To be fair there are no direct orders to kill apostates in the Quran.
• However, one of their most authentic and trusted hadiths – Sahih Bukhari – very clearly states multiple times:
• Sahih Bukhari (52:260) – “…The Prophet said, ‘If somebody (a Muslim) discards his religion, kill him.’ “
• Sahih Bukhari (83:37) – “Allah’s Apostle never killed anyone except in one of the following three situations: (1) A person who killed somebody unjustly, was killed (in Qisas,) (2) a married person who committed illegal sexual intercourse and (3) a man who fought against Allah and His Apostle and deserted Islam and became an apostate.”
• Sahih Bukhari (84:57) – [In the words of] “Allah’s Apostle, ‘Whoever changed his Islamic religion, then kill him.'”
• Sahih Bukhari (89:271) – A man who embraces Islam, then reverts to Judaism is to be killed according to “the verdict of Allah and his apostle.”
• There is also a consensus by all four schools of Sunni Islamic jurisprudence (i.e., Maliki, Hanbali, Hanafi, and Shafii), as well as classical Shiite jurists, that apostates from Islam must be put to death. The process of declaring a person to be an apostate is known as takfir and the disbeliever is called a murtad.
• The majority of all Muslims I’ve come across on Quora defend this practice and say that even today in Muslim-majority countries that it’s perfectly reasonable, acceptable and Ok under Sharia that someone should be executed if they publicly renounce their faith. In fact in Pakistan there are even “anti-blasphemy” laws where if you “insult the honor of the Prophet or Allah” then you can be put to death. Free Speech and Islam apparently don’t get along.
• Something which, frankly, is beyond a little worrying that Muslims don’t see as an issue.