Tag: religious extremism

• February 21, 2012

  Price tag attack on J’lem church provokes religious condemnation

   

   

   

  Price tag attack on J’lem church provokes religious condemnation.

   

  
  Here is in excerpt from my latest article co-authored with Aziz Abu Sarah.

  …So now we have Christian funds from the United States that have effectively supported the misguided second and third generation settler youth who are actively attacking churches and referring to Jesus as a son of a whore. If this is what Pastor John Hagee and other radical Christians intended, then it suggests a rather bizarre theology of interfaith love and care. It seems in reality that these funds are intended to foment conflict, to promote a confrontational, apocalyptic and messianic end to the State of Israel….

  
  

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• April 24, 2010

  Rabbinic Text Calling for Terror: What Can We Learn?

  This introduces a kind of literary authoritative text in Judaism called a ‘P’sak’. A P’sak is quite similar to an Islamic Fatwa. Remember way back in the day, just a few years ago, when everyone in the West became obsessed with Fatwas that were supportive of harming civilians? What has emerged is a parallel development in the Israeli Jewish world. There are indications of some pretty terrible things emerging in the shadows of the radical Christian community that also parallel this. Protestants, for example, when they get nasty, don’t make legal decisions for a variety of theological reasons, but they do start ‘praying’, like praying for a president’s death. But that is not our subject right now.

  A P’sak and a Fatwa  have another thing in common, they are not as authoritative as they look from the outside because so many people claim this authority. On the other hand, it …

• November 12, 2009

  Jewish style Al Qaeda theology

  I know that some Jews on my list find this painful and embarrassing, but this is the Jewish version of Al Qaeda. Just as embarrassed Muslims have to face themselves, so do Jews. I would love to hear rebuttals of this story, with evidence in hand. Finally, not everything has to be balanced in the shame game. Sometimes Muslims need to ‘take it in the chin’ like 9/11. Gaza? It is a prison of millions of real human beings, and 99% of the casualties were Palestinian men, women, and children. So you have to take it in the chin and just deal. How else can people improve themselves.

  I would like to ask my Jewish listeners about the scandal in the past decades of child abuse and sexual abuse among Orthodox rabbis. So fine, it was and is a small minority, but the problem is that, as with the Catholic …