Benedict is right

Jews, Christians should join forces to fight common enemy

Yisrael Rosen|Published: 09.17.06 , 23:34

Islam is a religion that espouses violence, said the Pope, and he's right! We all know that all those who qualify the statement or condemn it – priests, world leaders, academicians etc. – are all scared of Islam's vengeful sword and of "pouring oil on the fire."

I do not agree with Rabbi Shlomo Amar, who last week told an interfaith conference in Kazakhstan that these days the tendency is to tie events to religious matters. Israel's war mustn't be tied to the Jewish and Muslim religions, he said. I assume that his motives for saying that, as are the motives of most objectors, is the fear of fanning the flames and a desire to escape from the truth in the hopes it would not chase them.

And I, the little one, from where I sit at Gush Etzion, am standing up and yelling out, and to my regret I must rely on the words of the…Pope: The entire world is facing existential danger! We're in the midst of a one-sided religious war. As opposed to the days of the crusades, where Christianity and Islam fought for control of the Holy Land, this time around Islam's fundamentalist faction is resorting to murderous religious zeal in order to fight the West's hedonistic culture.

Any denial of this reality, even if its motives are clear, will lead to destruction and surrender.

Hitlerism sprouted in the flowerbed of "race theory" and grew based on this "belief". The whole world tried to make excuses and kept silent in the hopes "it will pass" and that the ideology that feeds the flames will die down. The results are known. Just the same, radical Islam offers an ideological-religious challenge to half the world, and the "free world" is quick to downplay this and convince ourselves "it will pass."

Taming the tiger

Now, just as then, the world may awaken too late and realize it fooled itself that it can tame the tiger by convincing it that it's merely a cat. These ruminations are reinforced on the eve of the New Jewish Year, where we pray: "…who by the sword and who for peace, who by hunger and who in a plague."

From our point of view, it is convenient for the Western world not the read the real map and view Muslim terrorism as a response to "the Israeli occupation" and a struggle against the mere existence of the State of Israel amidst the sea of Muslims. We'll be paying the price for denying the Pope's declaration. We may succeed, God forbid, to convince the enlightened world we're the reason for international terror and not the Islamic religion in its radical image, which aspires to materialize its famous verse calling for spreading Muhammad's religion by the sword.

I'm calling on all people of spirit and culture in the world, including rabbis, on free world media outlets, on those seeking democracy and human rights and on all those who seek life, to join the Pope's declaration and face the reality emerging before our very eyes. The Iranian genie is out of the bottle, the Afghan-Pakistani genie is hiding deep in its caves, the Hamas genie is growing stronger, and the sword of Islam will not stop at the Shaba Farms or the 1967 borders.

Despite all the calamities we have suffered at the hands of the Christian world during the years of our long exile, including Nazi anti-Semitism, which is a result of the Christian religion, I believe there is room to join forces with Christian leaders in order to fight the common enemy: Radical Islam.