Genocide is NEVER acceptable in Judaism, NEVER!!!

Hi all,

Here again with a very good article from a Jewish author about genocide. What Israel is doing in Gaza, is genocide, there is no doubt about it. The Zionist State of Israel kills the civil population in Gaza. There is a whole army killing civilians, and in particular innocent children.

And many Jews, in particular orthodox Jews, also see this…

They see this conflict exactly from the right perspective: it is colonialism, it is unjust, and it has nothing to do with the religion of Judaism. It is ZIONISM, and ZIONISM is inconsistent with the real and authentic JUDAISM of the Torah.

There are still many supporters of the Zionist genocide against Gaza in Israel, but with these intelligent and rational, ethical and religious voices about what Genocide means in Judaism and why it is absolutely wrong and there are not exceptions which could justify it, the association ProMosaik e.V. is convinced that these Jews we have presented on our blog and on the website during this month and the Jews protesting against this war in Tel Aviv can really change not only Israel as it is at the moment, but also the relations between Judaism and Islam.

I strongly believe that the real Judaism is against what Israel is doing against Palestinians. Real Judaism is against a blind and unjust genocide, as Judaism is a religion based on ethical principles guiding Jewish behaviour.  

And what we see in the Israeli army has nothing, absolutely nothing to do with Jewish morality… even if I am not an expert of Judaism and have just read a couple of chapters of the Torah, when I studied theology years ago, and I loved Jewish writers like Emanuel Levinas, I can tell you this for sure:

Judaism says that only GOD can exit the Jewish people from exile… GOD decides, GOD is the judge, GOD is also the only ONE who can take revenge.

No believer in Judaism tolerates what is going on in Palestine now…. And no Jew believes that this is the right way to go!

What we urgently need now is EMPATHY… the author is talking about it in her article… this EMPATHY is exactly the interreligious and intercultural empathy of ProMosaik e.V.

For ProMosaik e.V. intercultural and interreligious communication and dialogue are just the start… the final goal is EMPATHY in both respects. I have to be able to put myself into the other’s position. This is exactly the position which says: GENOCIDE is unacceptable in all cases, and always.

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STOP THE GENOCIDE – stop KILLING civilians! Stop killing children!

Wake up Israel…and as Erich Fried says in his wonderful poetry: HÖRE ISRAEL!! (Listen Israel!!)

In the sense of the Torah, I want to tell all supporters of this barbaric war:

‏שְׁמַע יִשְׂרָאֵל

Thanks in advance for your comments to this article written by Sarah Wildman,

Peaceful Regards

Shalom! Salam!

Dr. phil. Milena Rampoldi

The Editiorial Team of ProMosaik e.V.

August 1, 2014, 3:32pm

Genocide Is Always Wrong

By Sarah Wildman

 It seems impossible to me that I am typing this line: Genocide is never permissible. Full stop.

That one would even need to type such a line destroys me. That an author proposed such an idea? A horror.

But It is also his newspaper. It is also the world he – they? We? – live in where anyone could have possibly believe it was morally acceptable, that it was even remotely possible, to not only conceive of, but to write, to propose, to recommend, genocide. And then to post a story that endorses this destruction of humanity, to let that story run, unadulterated, to allow it to be out there in the world, the smiling face of its author next to it, as though this was not an abomination. For that is what it is: an abomination.

For that is what it is: an abomination.

Times of Israel. For shame. Yes they took it down. But no. It should never have been there.

Were we not children of genocide, it would still be unacceptable. Were we not descendents of pogroms, of murder, of hate, it would still be unacceptable. Were we not people who insist upon the humanity of all those around us.

Are we not that people? Are we not believers in the future?

To propose genocide is to permanently dehumanize us. To propose murder, to propose destruction, is to have cemented over our own humanity in the creation of a faceless enemy, is to have failed to see the basic humanity in us all.

No. We must stand up now and be counted and we must say: We revile this thought. We must say: We reject your demand for destruction. Rabbis: you have your sermon for Shabbat. Call upon your congregations to rise up, to declare their revulsion.

Yesterday Rabbi Jill Jacobs issued a call for “radical empathy”: “During the current war between Israel and Hamas, we desperately need radical empathy,” she wrote. “By this, I mean opening ourselves to the pain of the other exactly at the moment when we are terrified of this other, and exactly at the moment when fear for our lives and for our loved ones pushes us inward.”

For weeks now we have been watching Israel and Gaza, hearts in mouths, images of the deaths of children on our Twitter feeds, our Facebook scrolls, our television monitors. The destruction is overwhelming, the fear reaches out across the seas, takes hold of our throats.

“Where is this leading?’, we whisper, late at night, after we’ve switched off NPR after learning another school has been hit, more children are dead, another dozen people are buried. After another soldier has died, a parade of burials continues, ad infinitum, day after day.

The power of these bombs already threaten to take all of us down with them. Do not let these radical destructionists speak for you. We must, as Rabbi Jacobs wrote, cry for all those lost.

As Rabbi Aryeh Cohen wrote for the organization T’ruah, “there is no basis in halachah,” in Jewish law, that gives “blanket permission for the murder of innocents.”

“We must cry out for the honor of Torah,” he wrote. “The Torah that puts on sackcloth and ashes when this barbarity is ascribed to her.”