Maof

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Sent: Saturday, February 19, 2005 6:48 AM
Subject: Islam
Blaming a whole faith-group for the actions of a small proportion, is incitement to pure and simple religious hatred. Isn't this the basis for Nazism?
Ira (believing Jew)

Dear Ira (believing Jew):
 
I keep a file named Tricky Questions where I store questions that are, for one reason or another, impossible to answer. I keep them arranged in the descending order by their trickiness. You may be interested to know that I have added your e-mail to my collection. It easily got ahead of #12 (How often should a decent person be faithful to his or her significant other?), but didn't quite make it to #11 (If you were a woman suffering from a mild case of penis envy, would you find your own penis enviable?). And you, probably, thought that you were asking me a fairly straightforward question. Or did you?
Here is what caused my doubt. I don't have the murkiest idea what the basis for Nazism is. I could ask you for a definition, but I am ready to bet my life that you don't have a clue either. You were simply trying to call me a Nazi, which is kind of hard to do without looking silly, especially when you are incapable of either thinking outside politically-correct clich?s or of standing up and giving it to me straight. Just look at your lame whole faith-group when we both know that you are specifically defending the Muslims rather than theorizing on followers of some abstract cannibalistic cult. Here's #92 from my collection: If saying what you believe is against your beliefs, then how can I believe what you are saying?
Correct me if I am wrong, but I am reasonably sure that you consider Islam just another religion; Communism, just another political philosophy; and Nazism, just a label to affix to those who disagree with you on the first two points. Let me offer to you a multiple choice question. What would you call a system that:
 
  • is based on absurd beliefs that couldn't withstand collision with commonly known facts;
  • demands absolute, unreasoning faith from its followers;
  • has created a powerful propaganda machine that promoted the most outrageous lies, brainwashed its followers to the point of total inability to critically regard reality, and attempted, often successfully, to create a benign image of itself among outsiders;
  • has elevated xenophobia to the rank of national policy;
  • has pronounced world domination its ultimate goal;
  • has attempted to achieve that goal by military force, killing millions in the process and leaving the conquered people no choice but to accept the beliefs of the conquerors or die;
  • has deprived its followers of the most basic human rights, consistently destroying even the faintest vestiges of democracy;
  • produced an essentially feudal society, an ultimately totalitarian regime, where rampant corruption has become the very foundation of social life;
  • has put forth mediocre leaders who rule uncontrolled and are worshiped religiously;
  • has been guilty of mass murder on an unprecedented scale;
  • sacrificed its own people — sometimes, millions of them on end — to the bloody struggle between various factions, violently rejecting out of hand the possibility of even the slightest, most loyal dissent;
  • has taken itself so seriously that even the friendliest joke about the regime or its rulers is treated as high treason and punished accordingly — often, by death.

Here's the list of answers:
 
  A. Nazism
  B. Communism
  C. Islam
  D. All of the above.

If your answer is anything but D, then you are guilty of using words whose meaning you don't understand. If you disagree with my conclusion, please feel free to explain what, in your opinion, distinguishes Nazism, Communism, and Islam from each other. Just don't try to tell us that Islam is a religion, Communism, a philosophical system, and Nazism... Well, you have already demonstrated that you don't have a clue about Nazism.
I would also like to ask you how a believing Jew like yourself decides which form of Nazism to support and which to oppose. How does a believing Jew choose whether his children should be slaughtered under the green banner of jihad, the red banner of the world revolution, or by the pursuers of an unpretentious quest for lebensraum?
Let me address the matter of a small proportion you mentioned in your letter. I believe that an Arab who puts on a bomb belt, sneaks into Israel and blows himself up in a crowd of Jews, like it happened yesterday in Tel Aviv, can be considered a typical representative of that tiny, evil minority among the proud, noble people you, along with all the other anti-Semites, call “Palestinians”.
Let's ask the easiest question of all: Does the suicide bomber act alone? Obviously, not. He did not manufacture the belt, nor did he fill it with explosives. Someone did it for him. That someone is not a person, but rather an organization. No, it's not what you would call a terrorist cell — four or six recent converts with unkempt beards waiting for a wake up call, not knowing whether it will come from Osama bin Laden or the FBI. Bomb belts are made at bomb belt factories. Those factories have workers, and managers, and suppliers, and financiers. All these people know that they are manufacturing death to the Jews. Therefore, I can confidently add them to the small proportion of suicide bombers. Your small proportion has just grown a thousand times bigger.
I am sure you believe that deep down those proud, noble people you call “Palestinians”, are not that different from you. In reality, of course, they are as different from you as any murderer is different from his intended victim. Nevertheless, for the sake of the argument, I am ready to accept your absurd point of view temporarily. Look inside yourself and tell me, what it would take to turn you into a suicide bomber. Most of them are young men in their late teens or early twenties. Try to remember yourself at that age. You had plans for the future. You had dreams. Considering that you have lived long enough to write your idiotic letter to me, you never seriously contemplated suicide. I don't think you ever seriously wanted to kill another human being either, not even the bullies who turned your every day at school into a chain of humiliations. What would it take to convince you to abandon your dreams and end your life a few decades prematurely, just to kill people you had never met? Even if you believe that the so-called “Palestinians” are justified in their efforts to destroy Israel, you must agree with me that converting a normal kid into a suicide bomber must require quite a formidable effort.
Such an effort is being made constantly and on an industrial scale. It is being made at all levels of what passes among your friends, the “Palestinians”, for an educational system, from kindergarten to university. It is being made in mosques where imams routinely preach genocide of the Jews. It is being constantly made in the “Palestinian” media.
A couple of years ago, an international court convicted three newspaper editors of genocide in Rwanda. Those editors did not kill anybody; they only published articles calling for the murder of Tutsis. I suppose we could use it as a precedent to indict and convict of the same crime against humanity every schoolteacher, every mullah, every newspaper editor in the future state of Palestine. Suddenly, your small proportion is no longer small. Add to it parents buying toy suicide belts for their babies. Add the staff and supporters of Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, and every other explicitly terrorist outlet that exists in Gaza, Judea, and Samaria. Who's left? A tiny minority of people who are slightly less enthusiastic about the murder of all Jews. These people are labeled collaborators and are liable to be mercilessly murdered in front of a crowd of onlookers, without even a semblance of a trial or a protest from human rights supporters like yourself. The rest of the proud, noble people you call “Palestinians” wholeheartedly support wholesale murder of Jews. These people whom you consider so necessary to defend from me, even though I haven't killed an Arab yet, routinely greet each other, saying, “May you kill a Jew before you die.” I expect you to be willing to defend their right to freely express themselves that way. I don't expect you to accuse them of Nazism.
 
And when you have nothing left to say in defense of the terrorist organization called the “Palestinian people”, you will probably tell me that they constitute but a small proportion of all the Muslims in the world, who are proud and noble and full of good will towards us. In response, I would remind to you that the “Palestinian people” was created in 1967 by Arabs, with full support of the entire Muslim world, as a murder weapon against Israel. The “Palestinian people” is the suicide bomber of the Muslim world. Please try to understand that terrorism is no more a crime than a tank attack. It's a tactic. It's a weapon. It's the preferred strategy of jihad in its current stage. And jihad is a war of all Muslims against the rest of the world, which constitutes the essence of Islam, its raison d'?tre This is why not a single observant Muslim has ever denounced any single act of Muslim terrorism against the “infidel”. They cannot do it and remain Muslims, just like you couldn't remain a Jew if you decided to worship the elephant-headed Ganesha.
You know what disgusted me worst of all in your letter? The fact that someone calling himself a Jew could so flippantly, so mindlessly, in two ignorant sentences, trivialize both the Holocaust that has already happened and the Holocaust that's unfolding before us right now. And you call yourself a “believing Jew”...
I met a man once who believed that Jews were entitled by God to the land of Israel. This man lived up to his convictions. For several years he had served in some super-special unit of the IDF doing stuff that he had sworn to keep secret till the day he died. He told me he had saved a few Israeli lives; I have a reason to believe that was a gross understatement. He wasn't an Israeli himself, but he was a much better Jew than you can ever hope to be. Even though he was an Irish Catholic.
Shame on you, Ira. Shame on you.
Yashiko Sagamori

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All rights reserved.  February 26, 2005

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