What people hold sacred: compare and contrast — Updated

**Posted by Phineas

Five members of the Fogel family were slaughtered by Muslims waging jihad last week in the village of Itamar: Udi 36, the father; Ruth (35) the mother; and three of their children Yoav (11), Elad (4), and Hadas (3 months). All were stabbed or had their throats slit.

Above Yoav’s bed hung the following Hebrew prayer:

May it be Your will, L-rd G-d and G-d of our forefathers, that I love every one of Israel as myself, and to graciously perform the positive commandment of loving your neighbor as yourself.

And may it also be Your will, Lord G-d and G-d of my forefathers, that you cause the hearts of my friends and neighbors to love me fervently, and that I be accepted and desirable to everyone, and that I be loving and pleasant, and that I be gracious and merciful in the eyes of all who see me. As water reflects face to face, so the heart of man to man. And all for the sake of Heaven, to do Your will, Amen.

Compare that to one of the famous “verses of the sword” from the Qur’an, the sacred book of he who stabbed a three-month old girl twice through the heart:

But when the forbidden months are past, then fight and slay the Pagans wherever ye find them, an seize them, beleaguer them, and lie in wait for them in every stratagem (of war); but if they repent, and establish regular prayers and practise regular charity, then open the way for them: for Allah is Oft-forgiving, Most Merciful.

And before someone argues that the Qur’an is filled with all sorts of peaceful verses — I agree, it is. But then familiarize yourself with the doctrine of abrogation, in which chronologically later verses of the Qur’an supersede and invalidate those that came earlier. In this case, classical Islamic scholarship considers the verse cited above to have abrogated 124 peaceful verses. It is those later, non-abrogated verses that represent the current ethos of Islam, just as the prayer above little Yoav’s bed represents that of Judaism.

“But,” one might argue, “that verse specifies ‘pagans,” and the Fogels were Jews, ‘People of the Book.’ Where is the command to fight and kill Jews?”

Okay, let’s take one of the hadiths, the sayings of Muhammad, considered a source second only to the Qur’an and necessary to understanding that book. This is one of the most famous antisemitic hadiths, from the Sahih Muslim collection, one of the two most highly regarded collections of hadiths in Sunni Islam:

Abu Huraira reported Allah’s Messenger (may peace be upon him) as saying: The last hour would not come unless the Muslims will fight against the Jews and the Muslims would kill them until the Jews would hide themselves behind a stone or a tree and a stone or a tree would say: Muslim, or the servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me; come and kill him; but the tree Gharqad would not say, for it is the tree of the Jews.

In other words, the Day of Resurrection won’t come until Muslims fight and kill the Jews.

But the prayer hung above Yoav’s bed by his parents asked for the grace to love his neighbor, not to hate them and kill them.

The comparison is revealing.

via Israel Matzav through Legal Insurrection

LINKS: An earlier compare and contrast, this time on forgiveness.

UPDATE: Andy McCarthy has a must-read article today on the massacre of the Fogels — Why They Celebrate Murdering Children:

As the Israeli press reported, jubilant Muslims crowded Gaza’s streets, handing out candy and sweets in the wake of the murders. Jennifer Rubin notes that the outpouring of joy over the slitting of an infant’s throat was, according to one resident, β€œa natural response to the harm settlers inflict” on Palestinians.

It is a natural response, if you are a monster. If you have been reared in a culture that worships suicide bombers, that dehumanizes Jews as the children of monkeys and pigs, and that insists Israel is not merely the enemy but does not have a right to exist. And these positions, it bears emphasizing, do not represent some fringe Islam of al-Qaeda terrorists who have purportedly hijacked an otherwise peaceful religion. This is mainstream Islam, the sorts of things you would hear in a classroom at al-Azhar University or a television show on al-Jazeera β€” the place where, according to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, people turn for β€œreal news,” the place where Muslim Brotherhood guru Yusuf Qaradawi lionizes suicide bombers in his popular weekly program, Sharia and Life.

McCarthy surveys the religious justification for terrorism in Islam and then tells the story of the Kaiser family, who in 1979 lost two children and a father to jihad-by-murder. Their killer, Samir Kuntar, was lionized as a hero by the Palestinians and Hizbullah on his release a few years ago.

And yet we’re the bigots when we draw the logical conclusion upon noting the common religious thread in atrocity after atrocity.

(Crossposted at Public Secrets)

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