Those Who Hate Me Love Death

Dennis Prager, a talk show host and recovering lawyer out in San Diego, often has worthwhile commentary. He offers this on the Bombay attacks over Thanksgiving and asks, why would Pakistani terrorists seeking war with their hated enemies in India specifically target Jews? With the possible exception of the Chinese variant of totalitarianism, all the other instantiations of political God-hatred include specific programs designed to humiliate and then exterminate Jews. Go down the list: Hitler of course; the Soviet Union; the Sandinistas; Castro; Chavez in Venezuela, almost all the South American dictatorships left and right; and even "enlightened" Europe going back to the French Revolution only strengthened the traditional European bigotry against Jews stretching back though the Medieval era as it moved steadily into overt atheism.

One of the great lines in Fiddler on the Roof is Tevya plaintively asking God, "why can't you choose someone else once in a while?" It seems clear that it is the Jewish claim, and the Bible's claim, that they are the "Chosen People" of God that puts the target on their backs.

Political murder is the favorite tool in the shed reached for by those who would remake the world in their own image, whether that image has a religious guise or is outright in its denial of God. Either way, those who love death hate God (Proverbs 8:36), and the most explicit expression of that stance is to kill Jews. And Prager warns that these God- and Jew-haters rarely stop there:

For years I have warned that great evils often begin with the murder of Jews, and therefore non-Jews who dismiss Jew-hatred (aka anti-Semitism, aka anti-Zionism), will learn too late that Jew- and Israel-haters only begin with Jews but never end with them. When Israeli Jews were almost the only targets of Muslim terrorists, the world dismissed it as a Jewish or Israeli problem. Then it became an American and European and Filipino and Thai and Indonesian and Hindu problem.

Two final points:
One is that it is exquisitely fitting that the same week the murders in Mumbai were taking place, the United Nations General Assembly passed six more anti-Israel resolutions. As it has for decades, the U.N. has again sanctioned hatred for a good and decent country as small on the map of the world as the Chabad House is on the map of Mumbai.

Two: Statements from Chabad in reaction to the torture-murders of a 28-year-old Chabad rabbi and his wife called on humanity to react to this evil "with random acts of kindness." Evil hates goodness. That's why the terrorists targeted a Chabad Rabbi and his wife.

So--reach out in a non-random way, to an Indian, a Pakistani, or a Jew, if you know one, and offer some word of kindness. And think of it as a thumb in the eye of the Evil One and those who do his bidding.