Dear Bill Moyers,
I have been a long time fan of Bill Moyers and an admirer of your work in many areas – including the Genesis series in which my wife participated.
For this very reason, I was deeply dismayed to read an excerpt of the transcript of your comments on the Gaza war on the Friday night Journal program. I believe that you made a serious moral misjudgment on the invasion and then compounded your error with two applications that are beyond the pale – even more so for someone of your stature and judgment. 1. You acknowledge Israel's right to defend its people but then allege that Israel's decision to invade Gaza constitutes "waging war on an entire population." You allege that "by killing indiscriminately the elderly, kids, entire families, by destroying schools and hospitals" Israel "spilled the blood that turns the wheel of retribution."
You ignore that Israel has bombed only Hamas military posts, command headquarters and points of origin of Hamas fire – and does so with pinpoint accuracy. You ignore that the UN school shelling was a return of enemy fire from that school or a shell that went astray in an exchange of fire with Hamas shooters stationed nearby. Israel has not fired on hospitals or schools deliberately – though Hamas locates headquarters, war supplies and rocket launchers in such places. You ignore the New York Times report (1/11/09) that Hamas tells civilian Palestinians to go up on the roofs of homes where their fighters are located because it knows Israel will not fire when its soldiers or planes see civilians. By leaving out these facts, you shore up the false equation which underlies your whole text: Israel striking back with military force as a last resort at a group pledged to its destruction -- and which has backed up that pledge by years of terror attacks, suicide bombers, and rocket showers -- is equivalent to Israel consciously targeting civilians and casually initiating these attacks, which is then morally equated to Hamas' deliberate terrorism, targeting civilians primarily.
Hamas' strategy for destroying Israel incorporates the expectation that inevitable misjudgments and accidents in the course of fighting will evoke the kind of one sided outbursts such as yours which undermine Israel's world standing. I, too, feel great pain and sympathy at the enormous suffering and losses of innocent Palestinians, but it is Hamas that has deliberately put them in harm's way, not Israel as your words imply.
2. Equally distressing is your use of the phrase '[Israel] spilled the blood that turns the wheel of retribution". Had you used the word revenge, you would have made your point that Israel's attacks inflame Hamas and others, a cause of grave concern to Israelis and to all who seek and love peace. But the word 'retribution' really means this: justified punishment for bad behavior. That tone of justification – terror [justifiably] evokes terror – is all over your next paragraph which subtly suggests that assaults on Jews in Europe are the to-be-expected outgrowth of Israel's attacks and not the excuse used by anti-Semites to continue attacks they have been carrying on for years.
3. Most disturbing of all: You describe Gaza "as the latest battle in the oldest family quarrel on record" – as if modern day Israel was motivated not by self-defense but by the Biblical account of Isaac conflicting with Ishmael; as if Israelis are following the ancient Israelite' "leaders [who] urged violence against its inhabitants;" as if Israelis are following Deuteronomy's instruction to wipe out idolatry. Does Israel smash the religious places of the Palestinians? There is not a political figure in Israel – not even a marginalized extremist – who invokes Deuteronomy as a motivation or justification for behavior toward Palestinians.
You ignore that more than two millennia have passed since Judaism, in its rabbinic development, declared that these Deuteronomic laws applied only to idol worshippers in those previous millennia; that Islam has been treated with great respect by Judaism and specifically honored as a monotheistic religion, never equated with idolatry; that in the Talmud it is ruled that the seven nations referred to in Deuteronomy's injunction to "wipe out their name from that place" no longer exist, and that these instructions may not be applied to any other nation. In short, perhaps out of ignorance, you besmirch Judaism as a blood thirsty religion -- using selected texts that have long been nullified. With your words, you strengthen the hands of contemporary haters who seek to portray Judaism and Jews as blood thirsty murderers – this, in order to legitimate their unspeakable desire to actually wipe Israel and Jews off the face of the earth.
4. This brings me to your climactic disturbing comment. You follow the Deuteronomy quote with the following statement. "So God-soaked violence became genetically coded." What that means in plain language is: that Jews are genetically coded to be violent and totally wipe out their opponents. Do you believe that?; that [all] Jews are genetically coded to violence, to assault civilian populations? I cannot believe that you believe that. Then you are all the more guilty, out of anger, of willfully degrading a whole people and lending your eloquent voice and stature for the cruel mission of those who seek the destruction of my people.
You may try to claim that your next sentence states: "A radical stream of Islam now seeks to obliterate Israel from the face of the earth" to argue that you were not speaking just about Jews. But in the context of the previous and ensuing paragraphs which are all about Israel's violence, you tear off that fig leaf. It comes out all Israel, all the time. You have made a shocking departure from the minimum standards of responsibility in your words – and all in the name of speaking up for victims.
I plead with you to rescue your moral standing and your record of working to improve the world . Reflect on your loss of balance. Restore your credibility. As part of your reparation, you certainly should apologize for labeling Jews as genetically encoded for violence.
Yours truly,
Irving Greenberg
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Interesting, and, of course, only a person believing in G-d would think this way. Aggie
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http://www.americanthinker.com/kyleanne_shiver/
Hating the Jews
By Kyle-Anne Shiver
A little over a month ago, I was sitting with my daughter in a darkened theater, watching with dozens of other horror-struck Americans as, on the giant screen, a little Jewish boy, accompanied by his new friend, a German boy of about the same age, were herded naked, in shocked confusion to their deaths in a Nazi gas chamber. Or the "ovens" as some slang would put it. The movie was The Boy in the Striped Pajamas.
For more than five minutes after the lights came on, no one in that theater moved. Barely a sound -- only the muffled sobs of a few -- could be heard. Then, one young man slowly stood, bowed his head, rose, and as if a signal had been given, others hesitantly followed. I heard not a single word passed between perhaps one hundred moviegoers, as somberly, one by one, we all filed out into the night to return to our warm homes and safe beds.
I'll never forget that night. In fact, for days after, I dreamt about it, waking in a cold sweat reaching for my own babies. I'm not Jewish; I'm human. Or at least, I like to believe I behave as a human should.
I grew up entrenched in a full-blown, segregationist, racist society. By the time I was ten, I had overheard more racist epithets than my own children will hear in their entire lifetimes. White, Southern racism, I understood by the time I was twelve, grew out of hundreds of years of a particular kind of slavery based upon skin color, and the people who continued to practice it in the nineteenth century were believing Christians. Enslaving other human beings and trying to classify them as less-than-human ran contrary to every belief, so dearly cherished by slaveholders and segregationists. Bible-belt, believing Christians all.
Now, one would think that even an idiot would have seen the obvious contradiction. I did, and I was a mere child. So, when Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King appeared on the scene, it took me all of two minutes to figure out who was right and who was wrong in the black/white race thing. Making sense of the Civil Rights Movement proved far simpler than the fractions I was forced to deal with in the fourth grade.
And, wouldn't you know it. It proved not all that difficult for nearly every other white person I knew then. Settled. They're right; our parents are wrong. End of discussion. Let's be friends. Let's be human.
The proof is in the pudding, and a mere forty-five years later, we've elected a black man President of the entire United States of America. In public or polite company, decent folk would no more utter a racial epithet aimed at blacks than they would blaspheme audibly in a Church.
It's simply not done. And no decent American would tolerate such in his presence.
It's stupid.
It's not Christian.
It's not human.
So, what is it about the Jews?
Last week, in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, a woman wearing a Muslim headscarf, could be seen in this YouTube video, standing among Pro-Palestinian demonstrators on a public street, bellowing at Jewish counter-demonstrators, "Go back to the oven" and "You need a big oven; that's what you need."
Clearly, she hasn't seen The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, the new version.
It's the one where the little Muslim boy and the little Jewish boy make friends and head unsuspectingly for the oven, hand- in-human-hand.
Quite regularly, various leaders of various Islamic terrorist groups, and even an ex-CIA agent that the NYT uses as an expert on Mid-East affairs, refer to Israel as a "cancer" on the world. Louis Farrakhan, America's best-known Jew-hater, is honored by the twenty-year church home of our first black President, and hardly more than a few bat an eyelash in disapproval. A black minister can stand in the full view of esteemed dignitaries and spew anti-Semitic tripe, and it causes barely a stir. CNN can air terrorist-inspired "news" footage, and it takes a determined conservative blog-press to highlight the truth before anyone even notices.
Well, any time Israel gets the chutzpah to fight back against nonstop, deadly rocket attacks with any determination, nearly every Muslim enclave the world over can be counted upon to take to the streets in their propaganda solidarity. And leftist newspapers and television outlets the world over can be counted upon to broadcast the terrorists' anti-Jew poppycock as though no one will notice that it's woven of the same cloth.
The more things change...and the beat goes on...
But, really, hating Jews is as old and entrenched as, well, as old as the Bible. Long, long, long before Africans enslaved other Africans and sold them to European and American traders, there was Jew-hatred. Jew-hatred is so much older than the State of Israel that it would take a historical scholar to date it.
Way, way, way, way before there was the Holocaust, there was Jew-hatred. Jew-hatred runs through the 7th century's Koran like a consistent thread. Karl Marx himself was a self-loathing Jew. George Soros is a modern day version of Karl Marx. Louis Farrakhan thinks Hitler had the right idea. So does David Duke. So does Ahmadinejad. So does that American woman in Muslim dress standing on the street in Fort Lauderdale.
Isn't it about time someone, somewhere explains exactly what it is about the Jews that inspires this vile, purely diabolical hatred. Why, if even a fair number of Jews utterly despise their own Jewishness, and as this is an ancient hatred, persisting throughout the ages, there must be something pretty substantial to it. Hate this vile doesn't just spring out of pure air.
Jew-hatred is the elephant in the room of humanity.
Can anyone, anywhere explain why this is so?
I'll have a whack at it, I think.
What if that whole wallop of a tale spun in the Bible is actually true. What if there is one, indivisible, ever-living God. What if that one, indivisible, ever-living God decided -- all on His own, without any consultation with humans -- to reveal Himself in a burning bush to Moses. What if this one God, creator of all that is seen and all that is unseen, took it upon Himself, unbidden by humanity, to pick a people, call them His own, and then set about to reveal His own nature to them little by little, over centuries, through dire punishments and heavenly rewards and provident manna. What if these people this One God picked were the Jews?
Now, supposing this is all true, then what other creature is there in the Bible that would just be madder than hell's fury at that one people, those chosen ones?
Oh my goodness, Satan.
Oh yeah.
Now, this is what I love about my Christian faith. It takes very big, very tangled, very difficult concepts that seem to ensnare whole societies, whole rooms full of scholars and luminaries and intellectuals, and makes them all look like fools. My faith gives me the advantage of seeing through tangled webs of deceit, woven through many centuries and seemingly different ideologies. My faith tells me simply that there is only one reasonable assumption on the matter of Jew hate.
It stems from God-hate. And I must admit that if I were Jewish, and I didn't even believe in God, then I would hate being Jewish more than anything I could possibly imagine. Because as long as there is God, there will be Jew hatred. And the only cure is loving God, which inspires loving every other human exactly the way one loves oneself.
I'm not the first to say that. Jesus, the Jew, said it first.
Interesting. Maybe, just maybe, God Himself has a litmus test. And maybe, just maybe, it's the Jews.
--
David Welsh
6329 Meadow Haven Drive
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