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Wednesday, August 09, 2006

What part of Jew-hater don't you understand?

As of yesterday, Triablogue was blogspotted by Holocaust Controversies.

http://holocaustcontroversies.blogspot.com/2006/08/how-to-justify-genocide.html

One of the contributors by the name of Sergey Romanov didn’t like my post on noncombatants, which he chose to characterize as an attempt to justify genocide.

Holocaust Controversies seems to be a blogged devoted to exposing holocaust-deniers.

The ironies are rich and varied:

1.Sergey didn’t bother to explain what was wrong with my reasoning. He contended himself with an expression of disapproval and left it at that.

If, however, Sergey is either unable or unwilling to explain himself, then his own position has no more intellectual warrant than the position of holocaust-deniers.

You have to do better than an expression of personal disapproval. After all, the Nazis disapproved of the Jews. And the jihadis disapprove of the Jews.

2.Sergey sees a modern application to my piece about ancient Israel and her enemies. Although it wasn’t written with that in mind, it does, indeed, have some contemporary analogues.

3.Apropos (2), Sergey sets up a moral equivalence between ancient Israel and her enemies.

So, by parity of argument, he must be setting up a moral equivalence between the modern state of Israel and her current enemies.

That’s pretty ironic coming from a blog devoted to exposing holocaust-deniers.

Does Sergey believe that Israelis and jihadis occupy the same ethical niche? Are Israeli soldiers and suicide-bombers morally interchangeable parts?

4.Then there’s the sloppy way in which the buzzword “genocide” is thrown around. In OT holy war, the pagans weren’t targeted because they belonged to a particular race. They were no targeted because of who they were, but what they did. Behavior, not identity, was the criterion.

5.Moreover, the scope of OT holy war was geographical rather than ethnocentric. The heathen were to be banished from the borders of the holy land proper (Eretz Israel).

Holy war did not target every pagan at every place and time.

6.So here we have a blog (Holocaust Controversies), devoted to the debunking of holocaust-deniers, which is critical of another blog (Triablogue) because the other blog is defending the right of Israel to exist—be it ancient Israel or the modern state of Israel.

This is a painfully ironic example of the muddled morality which ensures as soon as Biblical values are jettisoned. Those who are unable to distinguish their friends from their enemies lack elementary survival skills—a deficiency which their enemies are only too happy to exploit.

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