Elie Wiesel. Auschwitz and Buchenwald survivor, prolific author, Nobel Peace Prize winner.
Featured in a full page ad in USA Today placed by This World: The Values Network, “…promoting universal Jewish values in culture, media, and politics.”
The ad decries Hamas using children as human shields and claiming that because Abraham had two children and God stopped him from sacrificing one that the Jews thereby rejected child sacrifice 3,500 years ago and Muslims haven’t yet.
Hamas will of course also use religious reasoning to justify their recruiting children into terrorism (they will get to heaven) and using them as shields (they will go straight to heaven) in retaliation to Israel’s stifling blockade of Gaza that contributes to the crushing poverty and all too real continued sacrifice of how many Palestinian children due to malnutrition and disease year after year after year?
The ad proclaims “God stayed Abraham’s knife” before he almost killed Isaac…despite the fact it was God that told him to do it in the first place!
Maybe God shouldn’t have commanded such insanity to begin with? What if God hadn’t countermanded his own order at the last moment, would some Jews still be sacrificing children…following God’s orders…just like some Muslims follow the commands of their god, their religion?
But the absurdity gets worse.
The ad then goes on to say… incredibly: “the two cultures that brought us the Psalms of David and the rich libraries of the Ottoman Empire…”
The Psalms of David? Are you kidding me?
Are they ever wonderfully enlightened with regards to child sacrifice!
Get a load of David’s admonition in Psalm 137:9-
“Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones.”
Gave it up with Abraham huh? Then how is it that David is attributed as penning this disgusting admonition…centuries later?
Sure sounds like child killing, “sacrificing” to me. And with glee!
Aw, but only to kill thine enemies and his infants of course, and it is not the first or only time children are killed with God’s approval in the OT.
Of course this disgusting Psalm passage is hand-waved away by Jewish and Xian apologists alike as being an aberration, if a justifiable one, as such child “sacrifice” would have been done solely in retaliation to the Babylonians doing it first to Hebrew infants, so it was OK to do it to those wretched Babylonian kids.
If Palestinian children continue to die either through the policies of Israel defending itself from terrorism while simultaneously taking more land they fervently believe is granted to them by their OT Covenant with Yahweh and thereby inflaming even more Muslim hatred and retaliation, or through Hamas’ desperate attempts to end the Gaza suffering but using kids as recruits and shields…at least both religions, those wonderful sources of solace and comfort and inspiration and guides to “right living” so needed by so many, will continue on in righteousness, even if a few children don’t, right?
Both sides have to drop their absurd religions. Full stop. Or kids continue to die.
Both sides are equally sacrificing children’s lives in service of unfounded insane mythologies, revealed scriptures, commands of their god.
As much as I admire Wiesel for his strength and eloquence in describing his Holocaust experiences in “Night” and other works, I cannot help but observe how deluded one can be when blinded by religious belief. Does he really think the Jewish religion has the higher moral ground? Isn’t that exactly what the Muslims are so equally sure they have?
“Promoting universal Jewish values…”
There are no “Jewish” values nor “Muslim” ones.
Only human values.
And they don’t include being happy dashing infants heads on rocks…
Throw that damn ugly book away.
It doesn’t help. It will never help.
Ditto the other book.
Of course so many will claim the perpetual Mideast conflict is mostly due to economic and political issues and not religion.
Really?
Ask yourself then, if the respective religions of Judaism and Islam are not a major factor, if not the single most contributing factor to the horrific idiocy, what if everyone in one country suddenly converted to the other religion?
What if all Israelis were Muslim?
And the only differences left were ethnic, cultural, national, regional, political issues.
Would they continue to take more land from their neighbors across the wall? Would they continue to keep them isolated in perpetual poverty?
Or if all Palestinians converted to Judaism instead, would they still teach their children that their neighbors on the other side of the wall were descended from pigs and monkeys and call for the annihilation of the Israeli state?
Religion has everything to do with it.
Wanna save children from sacrifice?
End Religion Now.
(1216)
