Fundamentalist Islam is guilty

(September 17) - The most terrifying aspect of the terrorist attack last Tuesday on the twin symbols of America's financial and military might is the abysmal hatred which fueled it. After all, the sort of people who are capable of completing pilot training on Boeing 757 simulators are not your run of the mill mass murderers or maniacal suicides who are determined to take as many of the hated enemy with them as possible.

What could be the source of the profound hatred, that motivated those 19 suicide killers and those who sent them and gave them support? The answer today is as clear as can be: Islamic fundamentalism.

Fundamentalist Islam is clearly the culprit at the present moment in history, but a little humility is in order. Historically, the correct answer is not so much fundamentalist Islam but fundamentalist religion in general, and especially the purportedly humane monotheistic religions.

The fact is that even religions that preach humanity, such as Judaism, Christianity and Islam, if their charismatics and clerics insist on their exclusive connection to God and their possessing the one and only TRUTH, sooner or later turn bloody, if the circumstances permit them to.

Anyone who knows the Bible, before its bloody implications were substantially watered down by the rabbis, should know our own ancient war-filled history. What we call genocide today was practiced by many ancient empires and peoples. But because our ancient Israelite ancestors were the People of the Book, they enshrined genocide in our Bible, in which our God expressly commands us to extirpate the tribe of Amalek, to the last man, woman, and child.

The pithy biblical idiom for what the Islamic suicide mass killers did in New York and Washington is taken from Judges 16:30 when the blinded, imprisoned Samson brings down the temple of the Gazan Philistines on his head and those of thousands of their commanders, and cries out what every Israel schoolchild knows: "Tamut nafshi im Plishtim" (Let my soul die with those of the Philistines!). And the Bible tells us that in that final act, Samson killed more of the Philistine enemy than during his entire career of fighting them.

We Jews haven't been like that for the 3,200 years since Samson, or remembering our(?) later tyrant kings Alexander Yannai and Herod, certainly not for the past two millennia.

Or take Christianity. In the bloody Crusades, the Christians indiscriminately killed tens of thousands of Jews and Christians on their way, and even more Muslims once they reached this country. Christians outdid themselves as fanatical mass killers of hundreds of thousands in the religious wars meant to extirpate their own heretics, from the Cathars and Albigensians to the Protestants and Huguenots in the Counter-Reformation, and of course in the Spanish Inquisition against Jews, Muslims, and many suspect fellow Christians.

But Christians, too, are no longer that murderous in the 20th century (with noted exceptions such as the fundamentalist killers of abortion doctors in the US, the Protestants and Catholics in Ulster and the Eastern Orthodox modern tribal wars in the former Yugoslavia).

There is no doubt, however, that Muslim fundamentalists are behind most terrorism in the world today. The worst single case of ongoing terrorism in recent years is not in Israel nor in the US but in Algeria. Over one quarter of a million Algerian Muslims have been slaughtered in the most bestial fashion by Muslim fanatics who suspect them of collusion - not with Israel - but with hated Western secular modernism. And were it not for the Mubarak regime, Egypt could have gone the same way.

It should be pointed out that the reason the US has been targeted by these Muslim terrorists is not because of its support for Israel, as some apologists for the Arabs claim. The truth is the opposite. The ferocity of Arab and fundamentalist Muslim hatred for Israel stems to no small degree from Israel's being identified as the spearhead of renewed Western imperialism, modernism, and irreligious democracy in the very heartland of the Muslim Arab world.

The overwhelming majority of Muslims are clearly not blood-thirsty fanatics.

Thus the most effective way to fight the religious fanaticism that breeds such murderous terrorism is to seek to mobilize moderate, humane Muslims to repudiate their murderous co-religionists who bring shame on their supposedly common religion. After all, in the opening sura of the Koran, Allah is described as "el rahim, el rahman," the Compassionate and the Merciful.

In our joint fight against the terrorist international, which is today being fueled by Islamic fundamentalism, Israel and the US must demand from the mainline leaders of their respective Muslim minorities to clearly make their choice, by identifying themselves and their followers with the common cause of humanity rather than with those who would distort Islam into a religion of mass murder.