When rabbis issue kosher certificates for genocide

Expecting condemnation of the Gaza genocide from a majority of the rabbis appears to be an exercise in futility.

In 2016, Heraa Hashmi, a Muslim student at the University of Colorado compiled a list that ran into 712 pages. Sick of a classmate’s remark about Muslims not condemning acts of terror committed in their name, she went ahead and compiled a list of thousands of organisations condemning everything from domestic violence to the 9/11 attacks. Her efforts that initially took the form of an Excel sheet eventually spawned a now defunct website, muslimscondemn.com.

Heraa’s effort was borne out of frustration as an ordinary Muslim being held responsible for the actions of a few with no mass Muslim support behind their actions. If anything, critical investigative reporting on most acts of depravities committed in the name of Islam and Muslims has increasingly shown that nearly all of them were false flags to be used as pretexts to serve American imperial interests. For example, the Taliban was spawned by the USA, ISIS is a US-UK construct created in the aftermath of the American invasion of Iraq which was in large parts the fulfilment of a policy document written by a bunch of Zionist Jews while they worked for Netanyahu in Tel Aviv, and everything about the official 9/11 story is a lie, to count just some of the barbaric imperial operations for which blame has been pinned on Muslims.

Despite actions that haven’t been planned and executed by Muslims, their representative organisations have taken it upon themselves to issue statements condemning those acts and underlining over and over again that they do not condone such acts and that such atrocities have no ground in Islamic theology. They have been quick to point out that Islam’s holy book explicitly prohibits the killing of innocents and equates even one such murder to the killing of all mankind.

(None of this is to say that no Muslim ever commits crime, but it is only to highlight that Muslims have been innocent of most of the large-scale atrocities that they have been charged with over the decades. In effect, they have been apologising for crimes they never committed. Inhabiting resource-rich, strategically-located lands appear to have been their misfortune.)

I was thinking about Heraa’s efforts from eight years ago when I saw clips of the highest Jewish authority in France praising the Israeli occupation forces for their genocide of the Palestinians in Gaza and imploring them “to finish the job.”

“Everyone would be very happy if Israel finished the job and we could finally build peace in the Middle East without people who, permanently, only want one thing — the destruction of Israel,” said France’s Chief Rabbi Haim Korsia.

When asked if he was uncomfortable with Netanyahu’s policy in Gaza, the rabbi replied: “I have absolutely no reason to be ashamed of what Israel is doing in the way it conducts the fighting. I’m never uncomfortable with a policy that consists of defending one’s citizens.”

It’s hard to imagine how any human being, let alone a religious head, could be egging on a genocidal bunch of maniacs, who have been committing numerous daily massacres of innocent children, women, and men; beheading babies; gang raping men to death; systematically dismantling hospitals and kidnapping doctors; destroying water sources and other civilian infrastructure; using innocent civilians as human shields; destroying aid meant for the hungry after engineering a famine; stealing organs from dead bodies; blowing up buildings as birthday gifts to their children; blowing up buildings while dedicating them to their spouses; bombing ambulances full of patients; killing journalists; and bombing churches and mosques, all the while filming their barbarism for social media consumption.

Yet this is where we are.

To be sure, Rabbi Korsia is not alone. The highest Jewish authority in England made similar remarks about the Israeli genocide in Gaza back in January. At a synagogue no less, Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis said: “May Hashem bless the state of Israel that our soldiers will succeed in their mission to put an end to the threat to the state of their citizens and also to bring home every single one of our hostages.

“We have so much to be proud of. We can be proud of the state of Israel what it represents how it has continued to exist with its hands tied behind its back. We can be proud of… our valiant, heroic soldiers.”

No condemnation of a literal genocide by the highest Jewish authorities, only praise.

It is also worth noting that the foot soldiers of this genocide aren’t hiding their Jewishness either. The Israeli soldiers have been filmed carrying in and reading from Torah scrolls in the mosques they have destroyed. They have graffitied the mythical Third Temple — which the ultra-Orthodox Jews want to build at the site of Al-Aqsa Mosque (the third holiest mosque in Islam) — on the walls of the mosques they have destroyed and desecrated in Gaza. They have desecrated the Qur’an in the mosques they have torn down. They have been pictured wearing the yarmulke and tefillin and reciting from the Torah and the Talmud as they go about dismantling all semblance of life in Gaza.

Their behaviour is only natural when the highest political authorities in Israel have invoked Biblical language in the service of their genocide. None other than Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu himself was very clear when he instructed his soldiers to “Remember what Amalek did to you.”

The Bible makes it quite clear what it wants done to the Amalek: “Now go, attack the Amalekites and totally destroy all that belongs to them. Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys.”

While the Gaza genocide has laid bare the reality of Israel to everyone, open calls for genocide and the utter contempt for non-Jewish lives (especially those of the Arabs and Muslims) have been a reality of life in Israel since its inception in 1948.

There are laws in the Jewish supremacist country that make it explicit that crimes can be excused if they can be justified by citing Jewish religious texts. As Israeli journalist David Sheen explained, “If you use quotes from the Torah or the Talmud to justify your incitement to racism, if there is a religious justification for it, you are exempt.”

Rabbis with massive following in Israel and the Jewish diaspora have made egregious remarks over the years with barely any pushback from the Israelis. This lack of pushback is understandable when the rabbis have religious justifications for their bigotry.

Consider these quotes from a 2010 sermon by Ovadia Yosef, a hugely respected rabbi, which The Jerusalem Post informs us was “the head of Shas’s [a Haredi religious political party] Council of Torah Sages and a senior Sephardi adjudicator” at the time of his comments:

“Goyim were born only to serve us. Without that, they have no place in the world – only to serve the People of Israel,” he said in his weekly Saturday night sermon on the laws regarding the actions non-Jews are permitted to perform on Shabbat.

According to Yosef, the lives of non-Jews in Israel are safeguarded by divinity, to prevent losses to Jews.

“In Israel, death has no dominion over them... With gentiles, it will be like any person – they need to die, but [God] will give them longevity. Why? Imagine that one’s donkey would die, they’d lose their money.

“This is his servant... That’s why he gets a long life, to work well for this Jew.”

“Why are gentiles needed? They will work, they will plow, they will reap. We will sit like an effendi and eat.

“That is why gentiles were created.”

Ovadia Yosef, “The Torah Sage,” died in 2013. Such is his celebrity status in Israel that Israeli media outlets ran live blogs for his funeral, which has the distinction of being “the largest funeral in Israeli history.”

Ovadia’s son, Yaakov Yosef, has carried forward his legacy. Yaakov endorsed a book titled The King’s Torah written by two settler rabbis, Yitzhak Shapira and Yosef Elitzur, who make the argument for killing babies:

“There is justification for killing babies if it is clear that they will grow up to harm us, and in such a situation they may be harmed deliberately, and not only during combat with adults.”

Journalist Sheen has described Yaakov as someone who is “loved and praised and held up as a hero in his community. He is not marginalised.”

It should come as no surprise that the supporters of these rabbis celebrate the killing of Palestinian babies. One particularly egregious case, that of a 1-year-old Palestinian baby named Ali Dawabsheh, has become symbolic of the dark heart of Israeli society.

A Mondoweiss headline. Read the full story here.

From a Mondoweiss story:

There’s something particularly disturbing about celebrating the burning alive of a baby.

This is precisely what Israeli Jewish settlers were doing yesterday, outside the court in Lod. “Ali was burned, where is Ali? Ali is on the grill!”, they chanted, in reference to the 18-month old baby Ali Dawbsheh, who was burnt alive by Jewish terrorists in the West Bank town of Duma in 2015. Ali’s mother Riham and father Saad died of their wounds a few weeks later. Of the family of four, only 5-year-old Ahmad survived the arson with severe burns.

The article goes on to say:

In December 2015, a video showing dozens of wedding guests celebrating the arson went public via Channel 10. The guests are seen dancing with Molotov cocktails, knives and guns, and stabbing a photo of baby Ali Dawabsheh.

Here’s a video from the said wedding with guests celebrating the nuptials by stabbing the picture of a 1-year-old murdered baby:

Notice the preponderance of yarmulkes in the video. These are not secular, but religious Jews.

Ovadia’s grandson, Yonatan Yosef, is no less deranged than his predecessors. As a Jerusalem city councillor, he was at the forefront of stealing the El-Kurd ancestral home — which gave the world the legendary “If I don’t steal it, someone else is gonna steal it” Jewish settler motto courtesy of Yonatan’s friend Yaakov Fauci.

The Yosefs constitute just one family tree, there are many such trees in Israel. These rabbis are mainstream of Israeli society.

Make no mistake, there are plenty of Jewish voices raising their voices against the genocide being committed in their name, including rabbis in the West. Jewish organisations have been out on the streets, mobilising protestors and raising their voices against the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians. Several of the resignations from the US government have also been from conscientious Jews.

However, none of this discounts the fact that a vast majority of Israeli Jews and a significant number of them in the diaspora appear to be all in in this genocide. What else explains the polls that show 65 percent of Israeli Jews support the soldiers who gang rape the Palestinians and 73 percent of them support the ongoing genocide (a stunning 34 percent of them say Israel has “not gone far enough” in its barbarism), and the chief rabbis of France and England giving it their unabashed backing?

By the look of things, if a Jewish equivalent of Heraa were to exist, it’s hard to imagine her filling 712 pages with the names of Jewish organisations that condemn the genocide in Gaza despite it being live-streamed in all its gruesome details for nearly a year now. On the other hand, if she were to fill it with the names of those who support it, she would quickly run out of space on her Excel sheet.

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