Jews in Israel and internationally, please Stand up to your government. You know this is wrong. Kill the babies? Listen to what they are saying.
Your government is fucked up. You have let fear and revenge drive your country to madness. Look in your hearts, would a loving and just God want this? I don't care what any book says, look in your heart. You know this is wrong.
Every western government has been complicit in this genocide. USA most of all. None of this could have occurred had it not been for the funding and the diplomatic cover provided by our governments. It's up to all of us to make it stop.
Lets not include Spain and the Republic of Ireland on it, who have even tried to get the EU to sanction Israel for this.
But yeah, the rest are a disgrace, after the US especially Germany, who once again because of the etnicity of the aggressors, unwaveringly supports their committing of genocide along etnic lines and were the political and media "elites" even deploy Goebbels-style propaganda on this against its own populations. It was pretty dissapointing for me to see that whilst the national socialist party of the german worker is gone (though at the hands of others, not because it was kicked out by the Germans themselves), their cold violent racist ways are alive and well, at least amongst the German "elites".
Oh yeah? Pray tell, how do we do that? And mind you, you've also got Iran in play, Egypt is doing its thing, and they would both react in their own way.
Like would you suggest NATO troops on the ground? How do you think Hamas would react to that?
Well, I think the US public has been pretty vocal about this compared to most issues. People are really pissed at Biden. So don't change the subject.
I think it's time we start publicly shaming Israelis and Jews who don't make strong statements condemning the murder of civilians and protesting the reckless-at-best and seemingly genocidal actions of their government.
Not exactly like every Jew is Israeli, in fact Israel is the one trying to force the narrative that they are, because it reinforces that narrative to those Jews when people actually do antisemitic shit
Not to mention the view that being anti-genocide is antisemitic - a deeply stupid, dishonest, antisemitic position that gives the best possible justification one could give for the extermination of the Jews.
If it came from an arab or muslim religious figure, western media mainstream media wouldn't shut up about it for weeks. but an Israeli figure calling for extermination of an entire ethnic group passes under their radar and keep giving moral and legal ammunition to Israel to carry on its genocide in Gaza.
Really? Because searching with the roles reversed I definitely see similar statements had been made but only see coverage by ideologically aligned sites:
So it just looks more like the mainstream press isn't interested in reporting what religious zealots say outside of very narrow windows of relevance to major recent news stories (and even then rather sparingly).
There were (and are) many Holocaust survivors which refused to go to Palestine to kill people and steal their land. And actively speak out against israel
People calling for genocide and murder of children are those who are far removed from humanity. They're a nasty burden that the modern society hasn't learned to deal with yet.
Oh we know how to deal with it, the problem is such psychopaths have a tendency to climb power structures easily to protect themselves from consequences.
Israeli laws outlaws hate speech and "expressing support for illegal or terrorist organizations".[9] Section 173 of the legal code makes it a crime to publish any "publication that is liable to crudely offend the religious faith or sentiment of others."[29]
According to Wikipedia. The problem, of course, is that it won't be enforced as long as hate speech is directed against specific groups of people.
A few guys saying similar things got jailed and busted as a terrorist organization in the 90s, the thing is - Israeli institutions have degraded a lot. They have bloodthirsty imbeciles at helm.
... who teaches at a yeshiva that gets its funding from the Israeli government.... guess he's not so extreme he can't get government funding. Embarrassing. Even in the relatively thoughtless USA we would cancel that sponsorship in a second.
Israeli democracy often resembles more of a Jewish "theocracy" I say that as a former Israeli voter. There is a huge coalition of religious politicians that work together to keep money flowing to the orthodox haredi voters whonare invaluable to them.
I have taken pains to point out that Zionism does not equate Judaism. Three of the men from whom I have learned the most about this conflict are all Jewish, Noam Chomsky, Norman Finkelstein and Ilan Pappé.
It’d be like asking Hamas the same question, clearly we shouldn’t judge the Palestinian innocents on Hamas’ views, nor should we judge Israel on this guys views
Majority held views among the population are in support of Gazan genocide and withholding all food from entering Gaza. The settler society at all levels understands its interests demand genocide.
Ok, well if that's the case what is your community going to do to ensure he does not receive support from you, and that he can not recruit from within you, and that your community does not produce more extremists like him?
Usually in this type of situation the answer is to act outraged on social media.
Not the OP, but sadly, the israeli state has a vested interest in supporting rabbis like him who act as an arm of extreme statist propaganda.
Even though the "disciples" of these kinds of rhetoric are not likely to serve in the military, they will egg on the existing population and do their spiel of making bullshit stories up.
And while I'd love to be in a position to go all "not all of us are like that", and while I'm aware there are some Israelis who fight to get food in gaza, my entire family and most of my friends and colleagues spout this kind of extreme rhetoric, and i honestly feel like I'm slowly losing my mind over it.
There is not much willing in any community, and not much hope anything will change internally for the time being.
Every firstborn son in Egypt will die, from the firstborn son of Pharaoh, who sits on the throne, to the firstborn of the slave girl, who is at her hand mill, and all the firstborn of the cattle as well.
Well, the prime minister, the finance minister and the head of defense all have said similar things over there in Israel. At some point you have to believe that what they are saying and their actions are speaking for themselves and their words and actions are saying "no one is innocent and even if they were we are still going to kill them all so we can get the land."
I mean, it's kinda like judging America based on Pat Robertson, the Westboro Baptist Church, Steve Bannon, Steve Miller, and Trump.
Yes, we should beleive people like Trump when they say how awful they are. The fact that he was elected and is the presumptive Republican nominee says a lot about the American right, right now. But it definitely doesn't mean that Americans in general are awful people.
Yeah, although if the American state were sponsoring said crazy preacher it would be an issue. The Rabbi and his Yashiva are sponsored by the Israeli government as the article makes clear.
I never understood why some people would say it was anti semitic to criticize Israel in certain ways, like people say the BDS movement is racist, but it's exactly things such as this that made me start to see it, and now I can't unsee it. People rabidly hold Israel to a different standard and only one explanation consistently makes sense.
One Jewish nutbag bloviating his hatred into the void is asserted by some as evidence the the whole of Israel has evil, genocidal intent.
Targeted bombings of tunnels, valid military targets, with cell phone warnings, pamphleting, and roof knocking is described as indiscriminate.
Not giving foreigners the same rights as natively born or naturalized citizens is called literal "apartheid."
Israel must stop bombing immediately or America should burn our alliance and feed the Jews to Iran, only Israel though, for Hamas it's all "keep up the good work! Death to America!"
To be fair to the old testament it's not factual history. Those no proof of a Unified Kingdom of Israel and no proof for any of Joshua's conquests. Even though we have evidence of much older kingdoms in the area such as Yamhad.
If anything the old testament has history reversed. In 722 BC the Assyrians destroy Israel (circa 1000 BC with capital always in Shechem). The refugees move to Judah (circa 900 BC). The Israelites took their religion and rebased it on Jerusalem AFTER Israel got sacked. This means a "Jewish" identity for Israel could not have taken off until the 600 BCs at the earliest. 4000 years of Judaism history my 🍑.
Maccabee came in the 200 BCs and forced people into what we now call Judaism. The reason why a complete Bible cannot be found from the BC era is because the Bible wasn't finished yet.
The oldest fragment of the old testament says that the mountain around Shechem is the holy place.
The Bible says that a lot of the Judahites were bad but all of the Samaritans are bad.
The book of Joshua is archeologically completely anachronistic and false in the Southern Levant.
The early Israelites have only been found to have been peacefully cohabitating with the Canaanites and Philistines in the early Iron Age after they emerged as a population.
Personally, I think like a number of the pre-Judahite stories, that this was coming from an Aegean/Anatolian sea peoples forced relocation into the Southern Levant that ends up absorbed into the Israelite history.
'Yeshua' in Greek can go as either Jesus or Jason.
The Argonauts allegedly had a prophet Mopsus that died in the desert as they traveled by foot from a conflict in North Africa (not long before one of their elite warriors was killed by a shepherd casting a stone from a sling, actually).
There's no walls at the Biblical Jericho at the time these events were supposedly taking place, but Mycenae around 1200 BCE has its walls fall down (and it seems not to have been an earthquake, which was a recent surprise).
There's no evidence of the Israelites being a bunch of tribes conquering nearby cities and certainly not several across an ancestral homeland, but the sea peoples were a confederation of different tribes conquering their various home cities (at a time of various natural disasters were conveniently undermining powerful kingdoms, which was likely a factor in why they were so successful and why this period ends up mythologized with divine interventions).
At one of those battles the sea people were described as being without foreskins. This seems to be the same one day battle against Egypt that Odysseus claimed to have fought right at after the Trojan war.
The parallels get really incredible when you dive deeper into some of them. The recent Aegean style pottery made with local clay in Tel Dan, the only apiary in the "land of milk and honey" importing bees from Anatolia and worshipping an unknown bee goddess, and the song of Deborah ('bee'), prophet and leader of the Israelites, talking about "Dan stayed on their ships" is super fucking interesting for example.
I think a lot of what we think we know about the Mediterranean at the fall of the Bronze Age is due to be turned on its head as the historians of antiquity like Herodotus, Hecateus of Adbera, Atrapanus of Alexandria, Tacitus, and Manetho end up validated with a number of things modern historians have been making fun of with an air of superiority (bizarre given the relative access to documentary and oral traditions and the relationship of that to the likely impacts of survivorship bias).
Why is it that followers of holy books always have a section or two that should be ignored when it's convenient?
'the word of God', but you can toss out whole sections without a second thought, meanwhile, if you break what's said in the other section you're definitely evil
This is what one guy said. It is not representative, as a lone data point, of all Jews, all Israelis, or the Israeli government. If you have more data points, feel free to share them, but this one Rabbi's statement doesn't prove any generalisation.
Serious question - where would we see signs of broad Israeli opposition to the genocide? I know Netanyahu is unpopular, but I don't think the genocide is a major factor in that unpopularity.
Unfortunately, I don't think you'll find that as much anymore. One of understated but equally awful side effects of Hamas' very successful pogrom is, in targeting who it did among the Israeli population, it pushed a lot of Israeli society currently in Israel hard right even beyond standard rally around the flag effects. The Israeli left and peace activist movement effectively died last year.
I don’t think we should sensationalize one rabbi talking out his ass but there’s a lot of other data points. Itamar Ben-Gvir (Minister of National Security) and Yoav Gallant (Minister of Defense) say genocidal shit all the time. They’re not random rabbis. South Africa’s case before the ICJ included a lot of direct quotes from leading government officials.
And look: I know that Hamas and probably every other Islamic fundamentalist group’s leadership has said equally awful shit (and worse shit, for that matter). Some of the Israeli quotes came at an extremely traumatic moment. But this is bigger than one rabbi. I don’t think it’s be hard to establish intent if Netanyahu, Ben-Gvir, and Gallant end up getting tried for war crimes.
Edit: I just want to add that most Israelis (and the Jewish diaspora) do not support the current government at this point. They were having mass protests before Hamas attacked.
It takes willful ignorance at this point to not recognize that both Likud and Hamas have influential representation frothing at the mouth at the idea of ethnic cleansing of the other side.
It certainly isn't all Palestinians or Israelis, it might not even be all of Likud or Hamas.
But the fact there's agents advocating genocidal actions within the governments of each side of the conflict is pretty much indisputable at this point.
The fact a humanitarian crisis has become such a tribalistic litmus test is pretty ridiculous and gross. (And I'm referring to both 'sides' of that tribalism in case anyone thinks this is a unilateral criticism.)
I don't think he speaks for all Jewish people or all people in Israel...as far as the government goes...he might not speak for them, but he's definitely harmonizing. As far as data points go, I submit everything that had happened since 1967, with a very specific focus on the last ~5 months.
That rules out most of the Middle East, including Saudi Arabia.
While it would be nice to live in a world where strategic defense partnerships could be selected from better bedfellows, it's not like there's a plethora of good options to choose from in the area.
Judaism in theory is not one (like there's no religious leadership, no central authority, and no clear idea who should be burned as a heretic). But in Israel they have the main rabbinate (maybe even two, I don't remember) and have built a pretty hierarchical structure, not really resembling Jewish religious organizations anywhere else.
Just because it is not the RCC doesn't mean it isn't organized. There is a spectrum between random people building ancestor shrines and the pyramid structure the Catholics have. Judaism lies much closer to organized side of the spectrum.
And I'm this particular case, with the government directly funded this shaman with tax dollars, we can be even safer to say that.
There's a story in the Talmud about Hillel the elder, a rabbi who died in 10 CE:
There was another incident involving one gentile who came before Shammai and said to Shammai: Convert me on condition that you teach me the entire Torah while I am standing on one foot. Shammai pushed him away with the builder’s cubit in his hand. This was a common measuring stick and Shammai was a builder by trade. The same gentile came before Hillel. He converted him and said to him: That which is hateful to you do not do to another; that is the entire Torah, and the rest is its interpretation. Go study.
The Golden Rule predates the New Testament by a significant margin... In fact nearly every culture has this concept of mutual reciprocity, even if not explicitly stated.
Israelites enforcing the word of EL? The Canaanite God of War? Yep. Same exact philosophy that has been handed down since The Bronze Age Collapse. Used against their cousins again.
Just accept that you're Israelite "history" from Exodus on is mythology, as in the authors lied, which was common at the time, and you'll see how these ideas are exactly the same, as are the people espousing such hatred for their fellow humans.
Israelites enforcing the word of EL? The Canaanite God of War? Yep. Same exact philosophy that has been handed down since The Bronze Age Collapse. Their blood may, or may not, be different. Their ideology is exactly the same. Genocide of their cousins.
Just accept that Israelite "history" from Exodus on is mythology, as in the authors lied, which was common at the time, and you'll see how these ideas are exactly the same, as are the people espousing such hatred for their fellow humans.
"The difference" is that Israel's formal position is not the elimination of Palestinian Arabs. Zionism as we know it primary exists because of widespread genocidal attitudes towards Jews.
I'm not defending Israel's heavy hand here by any means. I am just tired of everyone on the internet feeling free to just ignore all the historical context wrapped up in this conflict.
The last us president advocated for nuking people. I don't think nukes can selectively avoid babies. Surely that guys worse than even this disgusting rabbi. Unless you think we make the rabbi president?
the losers are the both the palestinian and israeli citizens turning our back on israel doesn't help anything. weve long had two state solution policy. it's a shame that the Israeli government has long since forgotten rabin's courage and the palestinian/gazan government cares more about killing israelis than it does helping their people
Sigh. As much as I hate Zionists, I'll be the first to say this is not indicative of everyone in Israel nor should all Israelis be criticized for statements like these.
It's the same thing as if an American pastor said shit. They do it all the time and it doesn't matter (much).
Whenever some Christians are engaging in hate, they avoid people condemning the whole religion thanks to Jesus's very anti-hate teachings. Judaism doesnt have that. All of the Old Testament's calls for violence against enemies stand without revision, and no sin is forgiven without sacrifice.
Yea, Judaism has no such thing as a deep and extensive set of rabbinical discourses that are as fundamental as the Torah. Really solid and thoughtful observation.
With like 50 pages arguing about how much a woman is worth based on the state of the hymen. No one ever likes to mention what the Talmud has to say on the subject.
Care to share with the people at home the argument about why the Talmud says you can't marry on a Friday and the counter argument and the counter counter argument?