Category Archives: Judaism & Jews

Martyrdom In Mumbai Un-Jewish

Iraq, Islam, Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, Judaism & Jews, Terrorism

Rabbi B. Isaacson, my father—also a scholar of Judaism—imparted a bit of Jewish Halacha (law) during the bi-weekly telephone conversation I put through to South Africa, where he (sadly) resides.

The topic: Chabad Jews and their outpost in India, which is a hotbed of Jihad, anti-Hindu and other.

But first, with society’s unfaithful watchdogs (media) pretending that the larger population is statistically as likely as are Jews to be the target of Islamic terrorists—Mark Steyn’s wry reminder of the reality of anti-Jewish Jihad is warranted (via Jihad Watch):

At the Chabad House, the murdered Jews were described in almost all the Western media as “ultra-Orthodox,” “ultra-” in this instance being less a term of theological precision than a generalized code for “strange, weird people, nothing against them personally, but they probably shouldn’t have been over there in the first place.”

Are they stranger or weirder than their killers? Two “inflamed moderates” entered the Chabad House, shouted “Allahu Akbar!,” tortured the Jews and murdered them, including the young rabbi’s pregnant wife. Their 2-year-old child escaped because of a quick-witted (non-Jewish) nanny who hid in a closet and then, risking being mowed down by machine-gun fire, ran with him to safety.
The Times was being silly in suggesting this was just an “accidental” hostage opportunity – and not just because, when Muslim terrorists capture Jews, it’s not a hostage situation, it’s a mass murder-in-waiting.

[Snip]

Dad, who considers Chabadniks a dubious sect, avers that they should not have set up a post in India.

For long—since the 8th century—Jihadis have waged pitched battles against the “infidels” of India. India is a dangerous place, especially for Jews.

Jews don’t missionize; Mormons do. The object of the outpost was to provide a kosher meal for Jewish travelers.

More significantly, Jews don’t martyr themselves. Jewish law forbids the wanton endangerment, or squandering, of life. Giving one’s life unnecessarily is a sin in Judaism. The Palestinian culture of death banks on the Jewish culture of life to sustain its murderous momentum.

According to the Talmud, “To save one life is like saving the world.”

SIDEBAR: As a matter interest, this verse was later on claimed by the Quran, which quickly qualified the otherwise-universal Jewish credo. The Qur’anic ayah states:

On that account: We ordained
For the Children of Israel
That if anyone slew
A person—unless it be
For murder or for spreading
Mischief in the land—
It would be as if
He slew the whole people… (Verse 5:32)

“Mischief in the land” gives the Muslim wide discretion in killing Jews.

Back to Mumbai’s Jewish martyrs: Had they followed Jewish law, demurs dad, they would not have endangered themselves and their child.

Jewish law calls for martyrdom under these three contingencies only:

MURDER: If a Jew is instructed to kill another human being on pain of death, he must refuse, and prepare to die.

The Talmud states (in Sanhedrin 74a): “It happened with Rava: A man came to Rava and told him that the governor of the city had ordered that he (the man) slay a certain man or himself suffer death, and Rava said to him: ‘Rather than slay another person, you must permit yourself to be slain, for how do you know that your blood is redder than his, perhaps his blood is redder than yours?'” [Beautiful metaphor]

IDOLATRY. If a Jew is threatened with conversion to an idolatrous deity or death, he must choose death.

There is a famous example that can be found in the Babylonian Talmud Gittin 57b, the apocryphal II Maccabees 7, and other sources about Hannah and her seven sons, a story associated with the holiday of Hanukkah. Rather than prostrate before an idol of Zeus placed in the Second Temple, Hannah defies the Greek-Assyrian King Antiochus IV and allows her sons to be killed one by one before she herself is killed.

[Wikipedia]

SEXUAL IMMORALITY. If a Jewish woman is threatened with rape on pain of death, she must prepare to die.

[Source: Monty Python, “The Life of Brian.” Brian the Hebrew is told by his mother that his father was a Roman. Brian cries, “Tell me you were raped, Mother.” She/he replies, “Well, at first.” Sorry dad, I couldn’t help that.]

These teachings are expounded on in Wikipedia (bar “The Life of Brian” citation.)

Unexplained is their proper application. No other rabbinical authority that I know of has applied the teachings to the strange specter—and subsequent martyrdom—of members of a Chabad mission in Mumbai.

In any event, according to Rabbi Isaacson, had the unfortunate Chabadniks adhered to the letter and spirit of the Jewish law, they would not have decamped to India and died there.

'Hindus, Jews, And Jihad Terror in Mumbai'

Iraq, Islam, Judaism & Jews, Terrorism

“Hajj Amin el-Husseini, ex-Mufti of Jerusalem, and Muslim jihadist, who became, additionally, a full-fledged Nazi collaborator and ideologue in his endeavors to abort a Jewish homeland, and destroy world Jewry, was also a committed supporter of global jihad movements. Urging a ‘full struggle’ against the Hindus of India (as well as the Jews of Israel) before delegates at the February 1951 World Muslim Congress, he stated:

We shall meet next with sword in hand on the soil of either Kashmir or Palestine.”

SO WRITES ANDY BOSTOM AT THE AMERICAN THINKER. The article, “Hindus, Jews, and Jihad Terror in Mumbai,” fills in the lacunae left by the media, which “offered no speculation about Islamic Jew hatred as an obvious potential motivation for the transparently selective attack on Mumbai’s Chabad House — a focal point symbol of the miniscule [sic] Jewish community of 5000 (or 0.03%) in a city of some 15 million inhabitants. More egregiously, this neglect of any hateful Islamic motivations for the targeted murder of such innocent Jews — including a young Lubavitcher Rabbi and his wife — was accompanied by consistently dehumanizing and demeaning references to these victims as ‘Ultra-Orthodox,’ and their entirely false characterization as ‘missionaries.'”

MOST POIGNANT WERE THE ASPIRATIONS OF “Sir Jadunath Sarkar (d. 1958), the preeminent historian of Mughal India,” who “wrote admiringly of what the Jews of Palestine had accomplished once liberated from the yoke of jihad-imposed Islamic Law. The implication was clear that he harbored similar hopes for his own people, the Hindus of India, and those of their Muslim neighbors willing to abandon the supremacist, discriminatory, and backward mandates of Islam”:

Palestine, the holy land of the Jews, Christians and Islamites, had been turned into a desert haunted by ignorant poor diseased vermin rather than by human beings, as the result of six centuries of Muslim rule. (See Kinglake’s graphic description). Today Jewish rule has made this desert bloom into a garden, miles of sandy waste have been turned into smiling orchards of orange and citron, the chemical resources of the Dead Sea are being extracted and sold, and all the amenities of the modern civilised life have been made available in this little Oriental country. Wise Arabs are eager to go there from the countries ruled by the Shariat [Sharia; Islamic Law]. This is the lesson for the living history.

The complete article is “Hindus, Jews, and Jihad Terror in Mumbai.”

‘Hindus, Jews, And Jihad Terror in Mumbai’

Iraq, Islam, Judaism & Jews, Terrorism

“Hajj Amin el-Husseini, ex-Mufti of Jerusalem, and Muslim jihadist, who became, additionally, a full-fledged Nazi collaborator and ideologue in his endeavors to abort a Jewish homeland, and destroy world Jewry, was also a committed supporter of global jihad movements. Urging a ‘full struggle’ against the Hindus of India (as well as the Jews of Israel) before delegates at the February 1951 World Muslim Congress, he stated:

We shall meet next with sword in hand on the soil of either Kashmir or Palestine.”

SO WRITES ANDY BOSTOM AT THE AMERICAN THINKER. The article, “Hindus, Jews, and Jihad Terror in Mumbai,” fills in the lacunae left by the media, which “offered no speculation about Islamic Jew hatred as an obvious potential motivation for the transparently selective attack on Mumbai’s Chabad House — a focal point symbol of the miniscule [sic] Jewish community of 5000 (or 0.03%) in a city of some 15 million inhabitants. More egregiously, this neglect of any hateful Islamic motivations for the targeted murder of such innocent Jews — including a young Lubavitcher Rabbi and his wife — was accompanied by consistently dehumanizing and demeaning references to these victims as ‘Ultra-Orthodox,’ and their entirely false characterization as ‘missionaries.'”

MOST POIGNANT WERE THE ASPIRATIONS OF “Sir Jadunath Sarkar (d. 1958), the preeminent historian of Mughal India,” who “wrote admiringly of what the Jews of Palestine had accomplished once liberated from the yoke of jihad-imposed Islamic Law. The implication was clear that he harbored similar hopes for his own people, the Hindus of India, and those of their Muslim neighbors willing to abandon the supremacist, discriminatory, and backward mandates of Islam”:

Palestine, the holy land of the Jews, Christians and Islamites, had been turned into a desert haunted by ignorant poor diseased vermin rather than by human beings, as the result of six centuries of Muslim rule. (See Kinglake’s graphic description). Today Jewish rule has made this desert bloom into a garden, miles of sandy waste have been turned into smiling orchards of orange and citron, the chemical resources of the Dead Sea are being extracted and sold, and all the amenities of the modern civilised life have been made available in this little Oriental country. Wise Arabs are eager to go there from the countries ruled by the Shariat [Sharia; Islamic Law]. This is the lesson for the living history.

The complete article is “Hindus, Jews, and Jihad Terror in Mumbai.”

Updated: Your Godless Government At Work

Barack Obama, Bush, Christianity, Economy, Federal Reserve Bank, Government, History, Inflation, Judaism & Jews, The West

The excerpt is from my latest WND column, “Your Godless Government At Work“:

“…Your gut tells you that your government is not only economically bankrupt, but morally bankrupt too—detached from any ethical moorings.

Alas, ‘figures don’t lie, but liars can figure’:

The experts say the complete opposite: The values and virtues ordinary mortals hold themselves to don’t apply to government. The macroeconomic and microeconomic solitudes are governed by separate codes of morality. Never the twain shall meet. Or so the money mavens claim.

Whereas you’ll pay dearly for your profligacy; the government’s recklessness will be rewarded. Whereas your debt will wipe you out; government debt will lift us all up. The latter is ‘stimulating’; the former sapping. …”

The complete column is: “Your Godless Government At Work”

Update (Nov. 29, 2008): At the “Secular Right,” John Derbyshire, also the only interesting writer at National Review Online (there you go, Ilana, making friends again), has written a post about “Your Godless Government At Work.”

I like the way Derb neutralizes me with the “ravishing and brilliant” appellations. Duly subdued. As one of the few intellectually honest, brilliant, paleo-conservatives around, Derb, naturally, always has my attention. (There are quite a few brilliant paleos, but not all are intellectually honest.)

A couple of comments from one secular rightist (me) to another (Derb): Although not religious, I’m a defender of the so-called Judeo-Christian tradition. I’m not hostile to religion (except to Islam, which is a political system).

The main points of Derb’s post are:

Derb: “Any given theology is of zero interest to anyone outside the tribe.”
Ilana: You don’t need to be an able Talmudist to knock that logic down. Islamic theology, for example, is of considerable interest if only in showing naive westerners that it (and its adherents) is incompatible with their creature comforts and their very continuance. Therefore, Islamic theology is of some, limited interest to those outside the Umah.

Derb: Talmud “is all just tribal chanting.”
Ilana: The little Talmud I learned at school I liked and was good at. It’s fun, and doesn’t involve “elucidate[ing] what Rabbi So-and-so meant back in the 13th century.” At least not when studied in a secular school such as the Israeli secondary school I attended. It involved logic and law. A great deal of the logical method—pilpul—through which Talmudic scholars arrived at the law seemed to me to follow logic, and is thus more universal than tribal. Brilliant too.

For the reductionists who whittle down aggregate, Ashkenazi IQ to exogenous factors—breeding and natural selection—I venture that the study of Talmud must have contributed to innervating those dendritic connections in Jewish brains.

As a secular individual, Thomism and the Talmud interest me both as part of Western tradition. Talmud a little more, maybe, for tribal reasons (grin): in the context of my column, my readers (evangelicals) value the Jewish tradition. If I can show that the latter values freedom, why, then I can turn them against their leaders. I can also try and draw religious Jews away from leftism. That’s why I think JIMS’s impetus is important, because it might help save a few Jewish souls from the sins of leftism and convert them to the righteous philosophy of freedom.

So are Judaism’s texts—theological and other—merely a tribal affair? No. Are all the scholars who busy themselves with the respective texts members of the tribe?

(The same goes for the Hebrew Bible. I’m of a generation of secular Jews which knows and loves the Hebrew Bible as a tremendous literary, philosophical, and historical achievement. It’s unique. Those who have studied it in Hebrew, as I have, know the 39 books for the vital, lively (very Jewish), earthy, pioneering, and fascinating works they are. There is nothing stuffy or pompous about the Hebrew Bible, either. Paul Johnson (is he a member of the tribe?) agrees. In A History of the Jews, he writes: “The Bible is essentially a historical work from start to finish. The Jews developed the power to write terse and dramatic historical narrative half a millennium before the Greeks.”)

The central error of anti-religion crusaders is that they consider the Jewish and Christian traditions systems of ideas, denuded of historical context, to be accepted or rejected on the strength or weakness of their intrinsic logic (or lack thereof). Judaism and Christianity, however, are who we are historically (the same is true, unfortunately, of followers of Islam). One can no sooner denounce them than one can disavow history itself.

And that would be irrational.