My hat's off to a master!

I grew in a religious tradition in which proof-texting was a favorite in-door sport; so when Rabbi Mordechai Eliyahu announced that he had discovered proof-texts that justify indiscriminate killing of civilians in Gaza, I grew nostalgic for my religion-saturated childhood and for all those formative years I endured listening to recitations of proof-texts about unrepentant, Christ-killing Jews burning forever in the lake of fire they so richly deserved.

A proof-text, if you don't know, is a passage of the Bible which is twisted, distorted, and mangled by someone who wants to use that passage as a weapon against people he dislikes so that he may disparage, defame, and denounce them with the stamp of ostensible divine approval. Every word, every phrase, every clause in the Bible is fair game for the proof-texter, and really adroit proof-texters can weave webs of proof-texts so tight that even God himself could be ensnared.

Our rabbi, alas, is not adroit. He claims that the Bible sanctions collective guilt; that, for example infants and toddlers in Gaza are guilty for the rocket attacks on Israel perpetrated by agents of Hamas just because the infants and toddlers live in Gaza. But collective guilt is a two-way street. Collective guilt was the device Nazis used to justify the extermination of six million European Jews. Some Jews (the Nazis alleged) committed sex crimes; therefore, all Jews were guilty. Some Jews killed Christian children; therefore, all Jews were guilty. Some Jews stole the wealth of hard-working Germans; therefore, all Jews were guilty. Some Jews conspired for war; therefore, all Jews were guilty. Such is the logic of collective guilt. One might think that collective guilt would be the last thing a rabbi would use to justify anything, but Rabbi Mordechai Eliyahu obviously wants to see Gazans die so any old excuse will do. One wonders why anybody this vicious even bothers fishing for plausible excuses. Why not be truthful and say that you support killing certain classes of people simply because you want them dead? If you're going to be brutal, why not be brutally honest, too? Nobody is fooled by piety without conscience. We can always spot murderers by the blood on their hands even when the murderers are clergymen.

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