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SOME ARE COMING A LITTLE BIT CLOSE TO THE TRUTH ABOUT JEWISH RELIGION….

U.S. should not fund Israeli colonization, atrocities
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March 26, 2009

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
Recent reports of atrocities committed by Israeli soldiers in the course of the intervention in Gaza have described the incitement of conscripts and reservists by military rabbis who characterized the battle as a holy war for the expulsion of non-Jews from Jewish land. The secular Israeli academic Dany Zamir, who first brought the testimony of shocked Israeli soldiers to light, has been quoted as if the influence of such extremist clerical teachings was something new. This is not the case.

I remember being in Israel in 1986 when the chief army “chaplain” in the occupied territories, Rabbi Shmuel Derlich, issued his troops a 1,000-word pastoral letter enjoining them to apply the biblical commandment to exterminate the Amalekites as “the enemies of Israel.” Nobody has recently encountered any Amalekites, so the chief educational officer of the Israeli Defense Forces asked Rabbi Derlich whether he would care to define his terms and say whom he meant. Rather evasively — if rather alarmingly — the man of God replied, “Germans.”

There are no Germans in Judea and Samaria or, indeed, in the Old Testament, so the rabbi’s exhortation to slay all Germans as well as quite probably all Palestinians was referred to the judge advocate general’s office. Forty military rabbis publicly came to Derlich’s support, and the rather spineless conclusion of the JAG was that he had committed no legal offense but should perhaps refrain in the future from making political statements on the army’s behalf.

The problem here is precisely that the rabbi was not making a “political” statement. Rather, he was doing his religious duty in reminding his readers what the Torah actually says. It’s not at all uncommon in Israel to read discussions, featuring military rabbis, of quite how to interpret the following holy order from Moses, in the Book of Numbers, Chapter 31, Verses 13-18, as quoted from my 1985 translation by the Jewish Publication Society.

The Israelites have just done a fairly pitiless job on the Midianites, slaughtering all of the adult males. But, says their stern commander-in-chief, they have still failed him: “Moses, Eleazer the priest, and all the chieftains of the community came out to meet them outside the camp. Moses became angry with the commanders of the army, the officers of thousands and the officers of hundreds, who had come back from the military campaign. Moses said to them, ‘You have spared every female! Yet they are the very ones who, at the bidding of Balaam, induced the Israelites to trespass against the Lord in the matter of Peor, so that the Lord’s community was struck by the plague. Now, therefore, slay every male among the children, and slay also every young woman who has known a man carnally; but spare every young woman who has not had carnal relations with a man.'”

Moses and Eleazar the priest go on to issue some complex instructions about the ritual cleansings that must be practiced after this exhausting massacre has been completed.

Now, it’s common to hear people say, when this infamous passage and others like it come up, that it’s not intended to be “taken literally.” One also often hears the excuse that some wicked things are done “in the name of” religion, as if the wicked things were somehow the result of a misinterpretation. But the nationalist rabbis who prepare Israeli soldiers for their mission seem to think that this book might be the word of God, in which case the only misinterpretation would be the failure to take it literally. (I hate to break it to you, but the people who think that God’s will is revealed in Scripture are known as “religious.” Those who do not think so must try to find another name for themselves.)

Possibly you remember Dr. Baruch Goldstein, the man who in February 1994 unslung his weapon and killed more than two dozen worshippers at the mosque in Hebron. He had been a physician in the Israeli army and had first attracted attention by saying that he would refuse to treat non-Jews on the Sabbath. Now read Ethan Bronner’s report in the New York Times on March 21 about the preachments of the Israeli army’s latest chief rabbi, a West Bank settler named Avichai Rontzski, who also holds the rank of brigadier general. He has, according to the report, “said that the main reason for a Jewish doctor to treat a non-Jew on the Sabbath . . . is to avoid exposing Diaspora Jews to hatred.”

Those of us who follow these things recognize that statement as one of the leading indicators of a truly determined racist and fundamentalist. Yet it comes not this time in the garb of a homicidal lone-wolf nut bag but in the full uniform and accoutrement of a general and a high priest: Moses and Eleazar combined.

Peering over the horrible pile of Palestinian civilian casualties that has immediately resulted, it’s fairly easy to see where this is going in the medium-to-longer term. The zealot settlers and their clerical accomplices are establishing an army within the army so that one day, if it is ever decided to disband or evacuate the colonial settlements, there will be enough officers and soldiers, stiffened by enough rabbis and enough extremist sermons, to refuse to obey the order. Torah verses will also be found that make it permissible to murder secular Jews as well as Arabs.

The dress rehearsals for this have already taken place, with the religious excuses given for Baruch Goldstein’s rampage and the Talmudic evasions concerning the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin. Once considered highly extreme, such biblical exegeses are moving ever closer to the mainstream. It’s high time the United States cut off any financial support for Israel that can be used even indirectly for settler activity, not just because such colonization constitutes a theft of another people’s land, but also because our Constitution absolutely forbids us to spend public money on the establishment of any religion.

New York Times Syndicate

Be sure to enter Heeb’s fake Holocaust memoir competition!

“They suffer from a twisted mental disorder, which they’ll never admit”

Such an admission presupposes a willingness or ability to see things clearly. Where would they get the objectivity?

If they could see the truth they wouldn’t be twisted.

Brain disorders:

>>But whether a criminal or a white-collar con artist, all psychopaths share a profound lack of empathy and remorse for the harm they do to others. Researchers have long suspected that the condition stems from abnormal brain function in the processing of emotion and language, rather than environmental factors such as a traumatic childhood. Hare’s work is adding weight to that hypothesis. In his breakthrough 1991 study, Hare compared the brain waves of a group of normal subjects with those of psychopaths. The latter were selected from a prison population using the Psychopathy Checklist, a questionnaire Hare developed in 1980 for classifying psychopaths that has since been adopted by researchers, correctional authorities and police forces around the world.

The subjects were asked to perform a simple task: hit a button as soon as they recognized a word flashed on a computer screen. While monitoring the subjects’ brain waves, the researchers alternated nonsensical strings of letters with neutral words such as “table,” and emotionally evocative words like “maggot” and “cancer.” What they found was that normal subjects spent more time processing emotion-laden words than the psychopaths. “When you see a word like ‘cancer,’ you have all sorts of associations – fear, or you think of someone who’s had cancer,” says Hare. “But for psychopaths, the word ‘cancer’ and the word ‘table’ had the same emotional connotations – which is to say, not very many. It’s as if they’re emotionally color-blind.”

Even more staggering were the findings of a study conducted by New York City psychiatrist Joanne Intrator, with Hare’s collaboration, at the Bronx Veterans Administration hospital in 1993. The investigators employed the same language test, this time injecting the subjects with a radioactive tracer and scanning color images of their brains. As normal subjects processed the emotion-laden words, their brains lit up with activity, particularly in the areas around the ventromedial frontal cortex and amygdala. The former plays a crucial role in controlling impulses and long-term planning, while the amygdala is often described as “the seat of emotion.” But in the psychopaths, those parts of the brain appeared to remain inactive while processing the emotion-laden words. That, says Hare, helps explain why a psychopath’s conscience is only half-formed. “I showed the scans to several neurologists,” recalls Hare. “They said that it did not even look like a human brain. One of them asked, ‘Is this person from Mars?’ ”

http://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.com/index.cfm?PgNm=TCE&Params=M1ARTM0010570

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=psychopathy+small+amygdala&btnG=Search