I have a soft spot for the Jewish people. (Not necessarily mean the modern state of Israel.) Many of my teachers as an undergraduate and graduate student were Jewish. One of my best friends at Cornell was Orthodox and lived at a Jewish coop house.
For years I have believed that the instant someone on the public stage expresses an anti-Jewish sentiment (not necessarily a critique of modern Israel) one should no longer trust (perhaps even no longer respect) that person. Period. (Granted one must be careful about judging what is truly anti-Jewish. Is that person anti-Jewish? or are they disagreeing with Jewish people on solid grounds?)
How large a city is Mumbai? How many terrorists came to this huge economic capital of India to kill thousands of Indian citizens? And yet how and why did they take the time and the trouble to target no not the Christians not the Hindus but the tiny little and only outpost of Judaism in a city with a population of millions? To torture and kill a 28 year old rabbi and his wife.
Are we permitted to learn anything from this? Or are we concerned too much for the sensibilities of others?
Are we in fact allowed to describe this – the actions and the mindset behind them – evil?
Dennis Prager explains why a terrorist attack on the Indian city of Mumbai specifically targeted the tiny Jewish minority:
For years I have warned that great evils often begin with the murder of Jews, and therefore non-Jews who dismiss Jew-hatred (aka anti-Semitism, aka anti-Zionism), will learn too late that Jew- and Israel-haters only begin with Jews but never end with them. When Israeli Jews were almost the only targets of Muslim terrorists, the world dismissed it as a Jewish or Israeli problem. Then it became an American and European and Filipino and Thai and Indonesian and Hindu problem.
Read the whole thing here. You do not have to register.
I would take very slight issue with Prager concerning his mention of “anti-Zionism”. I believe there should be some room for debate concerning modern Israel. (Which – for the record – I generally support. I do not equate concern for Jewish people with unqualified support for modern Israel. But Israel for all its flaws is the most sane and democratic nation in that region.)
I vaguely recall one of my teachers (a Jewish scholar) at university saying, “You can always tell the health of a society by how it treats its Jews”. They are in a sense the barometer of any given society.
