Islam’s problem with Jews goes back millennia
by Gavin Ashenden, Catholic Herald:
The events in Israel and Gaza have presented the world with a clash of political ambitions of the most intense kind, bathed in the deeply emotive murder and rape of civilians, extending to the burning and slaughter of babies.
But they have also presented the world with a clash of ethical systems. The Muslim protagonists in Gaza have long been willing to use their own civilians as human shields, with the intention of provoking Israelis to rage, and to provoke them also into the collateral killing of Gazan women and children.
The latest incursion into Israel implemented a strategy of doing the maximum inhuman harm to Israeli civilians, and particularly to women and children, with the intention of pushing the Israeli army into revenge attacks on the civilians in Gaza.
When Israel warns the civilians in Gaza to abandon the city in order to pursue the terrorist leaders of Hamas, Hamas strenuously urges them to stay. This whole strategy depends on the Israelis killing Palestinian civilians in revenge as they level Gaza. The intention is to enrage the Islamic world and galvanise a pan-Islamic response to wipe out Israel.
While the politics have a stark simplicity to them, neither the ethics nor the religious background shared the same simplicity. The ethics of Islam and Judaism, particularly relating to forgiveness and revenge, differ considerably. The religions also understand the nature of God very differently, with Yahweh being knowable and Allah unknowable. The religions appear not only complex, but inaccessible to the different/other sides in this war of attrition, information and religion.
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