tdaxp

My friends, the charade is over. For years I have been furitively poisoning easter wells, using the blood of gentile children for matzo balls, and of course smuggling aphrodisiac chewing gum to Egyptian teenagers. I have been able to do this because your foolish governments have not required me to wear a yellow star, thus allowing me to deceive good Muslims and Christians into believing I am not a Jew. I know my actions are evil and wrong, but they are the ways of my ancestors, the pigs and the dogs.

What is disturbing about LNM's comment, I also find it particularly disturbing for someone who is Jewish, and anti-Arab and anti-Muslim, to falsify his identity in order to defame others., is not that it is (apparently) Islamic hate-speech. I've been threatened with harm and condemned to Hell by Muslims on this blog before. Rather, it is that the comment combines serious criticism with paranoid ravings. Education and westernization no more detracts from Arab anti-Semitism than it detracted from German anti-Semitism.

When we face fanatics and anti-Semites, we are not dealing with back-water hicks. Rather, we struggle against modern ideologues who hold modern ideologies. This has implications for the long war against terrorism. Appeasing our enemies, avoiding outrages and allowing them to modernize on a steady tract, may not be a wise thing. The problem with the Arab world (and those it influences) is not that it is modernizing too slowly, it is it is modernizing in the wrong way.

Why was Jesus crucified? Why were the Christians thrown to the lions?

Douglas Adams began his epic Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by saying people didn't want to be kind

And then, nearly two thousand years after one man had been nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be to be nice to people for a change...

While Juanna Hates sees something in the Christian message that the Temple found obnoxious

Surely it was because of these outrageous claims that the leaders of the Jewish community succeeded in having Jesus killed. His real claims struck at the heart of their religion, the identity of their nation.

Both these answers are too easy. They make people feel good about themselves, knowing how foolish and short-sighted their opponents were. But Caiaphas was wise and far-sighted. Diocletian was one of the greatest Emperors in history. Why did they make their decisions?

Joseph Caiaphas, Hellenized Jew, Roman political appointee, and High Priest of the Temple for 18 years, agitated against Jesus to his fellow priests.

Then one of them, named Caiaphas, who was high priest that year, spoke up, "You know nothing at all! You do not realize that it is better for you that one man die for the people than that the whole nation perish."

"Forming a survival strategy: Conservative Jews plan bold new steps to stem tide of secularism," by Arlene Nisson Lassin, Houston Chronicle, 11 March 2005, http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/religion/3080795.

The "Conservative" branch of Judaism is facing obliteration

Dwindling congregations and increasing numbers of interfaith marriages are two issues Conservative rabbis plan to tackle following a four-day international gathering in Houston.

"With increased secularism on the part of Jews in this country, with diminishing support for Israel, and with the tough reality of diminishing demographics, it is more challenging than ever to hold our critical middle ground," said Rabbi Alvin Berkun, vice president of The Rabbinical Assembly, a Conservative organization.

...

"In the American Jewish Committee Survey of 2002, 39 percent of Jews were in interfaith marriages," Schorsch said. "Of that number, in the follow-up Phillips survey, they found of the ... interfaith marriages with children, only 8 percent of the mixed families described themselves as Jewish. Twenty-four percent identified themselves as Christian, and 68 percent identified no religion.

How can this be, at a time when "mainline" faiths are fading and socially conservative ones, such as Mormonism, Catholocism, and Evangalical Christianity, are blooming?

Well, Conservative Judaism isn't conservative, for one.

In other business, the rabbis reiterated support for stem cell research, the peace process in Israel and women's reproductive rights. The issue of same-sex marriages was referred to a special Law Committee.

The massacre of the innocents is not a conservative ideal. It is not a Jewish one, either.