Warrant for Genocide: Netanyahu urges Israeli troops to regard the Palestinians as "Amalek", by Michael Hoffman - The Unz Review
Itâs Sunday, not normally a good day for gaining peopleâs attention on news or analytical current eventsâ columns. The ongoing emergencyâthe massacre of children and other civilians in Gaza howeverâtrumps all other considerations, at least for this writer, so here goes.
Part One: Netanyahu Channels Amalek
In their ignorance (or malice), Old Testament haters will have a field day with Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu having channeled âAmalekâ as he ordered the Israeli army to invade Gaza on October 28.
This fact is so incendiary that a quick search of the New York Times today reveals that the ânewspaper of recordâ hasnât dared to mention it thus far.
The Israeli Prime Minister stated: âYou must remember what Amalek has done to you says our Holy Bible, and we do remember and we are fighting. Our brave troops and combatants who are now in Gaza or around Gaza and in all other regions in Israel are joining this chain of Jewish heroes, a chain that started 3,000 years agoâfrom Joshua to the heroes of 1948âthe Six Day War, the 1973 October warâand all other wars of this countryâare hero troops. They have one supreme main goal, to completely defeat the murderous enemy and to guarantee our existence in this country.â
In 1 Samuel 15:3 we find the judgment of God on the Amalekites, in the form of the divine command to Saul, the first King of Israel: âNow go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass.â
These are patently the marching orders Netanyahu is giving to the Israeli military (âthe most moral in the worldâ): S lay all the civilians of Gaza and spare them not.
Not even Clarence Darrow could parse it otherwise. Thereâs no lawyerâs loophole here; no moderating clause, which is why, as of Sunday, October 29, the New York Times and other major media have not dared to report Netanyahuâs genocidal directive.
Theyâll get around to it after they have concocted a defense of the indefensible, which is their job. The delay is due to the fact that even the skilled spin doctors at the Times are having difficulty coming up with an explanation that has plausibility: the Israeli Prime Ministerâs insinuation to the Israeli Army to commit genocide against the Palestinians of Gaza, by invoking the Biblical war with Amalek, is not a warrant for genocide becauseâŠ
Because what?
A day later and the corporate media havenât managed to cook up a cosmetic exculpation.
Juan Cole got it partially right: âNetanyahu may have gestured to, and defiled the Bible by excusing his genocide against the civilians of Gaza with reference to 1 Samuel. But his real bible is..Zionism with its Fascist and explicitly colonial ideology.â
I say âpartially,â because Mr. Cole succumbs to the humdrum of Leftspeak when he ends his summation of Zionism by describing it as a colonial ideology, which it is, but that is not the most accurate summation of its inspiration and motivation. Zionism is Talmudic.
True, a distinction has to be made between Talmudism in and of itself, as practiced before the ascendance of Zionism in the 19th century, and Talmudism as weaponized by Zionism, a task we undertook in our October 17 column, âThe Disaster of Israeli Zionism.â
Only a Biblical illiterate would tell the Israelis, âYou must remember⊠Amalek,â and then ascribe that memory to the Hebrew Old Testament.
To remember Amalek is to nullify the Old Testament!
Yahweh not only ordered the complete extirpation of the Amalekites; thatâs only half the story. He ordered every faithful Israelite to blot out the memory of Amalek, so that the name of Amalek would never again be mentioned:
âYou shall blot out the memory of Amalek from under Heaven. Do not forget!â (Deuteronomy 25:19).
Netanyahu âforgot.â
Kindling the memory of Amalek is in express defiance of the command of Yahweh, and as such it is Talmudic, not Biblical. It is of a piece with the Pharisee Hillelâs prozbul-nullification of Yahwehâs Sabbatical year.
The Pharisee Talmud destroys the meaning of the Old Testament, rips it to shreds and stomps it into the gutter.
Rabbi Jacob Neusner, translator of the Yale University Press edition of the unredacted Mishnah (the sacred Pharisee text which comprises the supreme halacha (law) of Orthodox rabbinic Judaism), stated:
âWe have already seen substantial evidence that any notion of Pharisaism (or later rabbinic Judaism), as the true and direct descendants of the Old Testament, is contradicted by the most fundamental assumption of one Mishnah-tractate after another. These stand wholly separate from the Priestly Code⊠And generally contradict it!â (A History of the Mishnaic Law [Brill Academic, 1974], p. 7).
As for why Yahweh ordered Amalek destroyed three millennia ago, thatâs a hermeneutic for another day.
Part Two: The Gaza Massacre in 40 Words of Power
Our critics in Europe opine that Americans are slogan-mad, seeking in our haste and frenzied pace to reduce everything sublime to a bumper sticker.
Thereâs some truth in the observation. On the other hand, compared to our loquacious kindred in the Old World, we occasionally exhibit the laconic virtue of conveying the most meaning with the least amount of words.
Some of the head-scratching over the whys and wherefores of the dehumanization of the thousands of Palestinian children butchered in Gaza with American tax dollars this month of October â the sheer shoulder-shrugging indifference in the face of the carnage, by everyone from John Kirby to Joe Biden and their legion of epigonesâcan be understood with a few dozen words of power which compel obedience from the Department of Defense to the White House and most of the Western world.
Neither the Neocon Right nor the progressive Left will traverse this territory. Hence, the obligation to utter a proscribed truth which is the key to grasping why the massacre in Gaza is not being opposed by the Biden administration, the Republican-controlled House of Representatives, NATO, or the European Unionâ falls to us, in this obscure column of ours.
From the Babylonian Talmud, tractate Sanhedrin 57a, we read:
âRegarding bloodshed, the following distinction applies: if a non-Jew killed another non-Jew, or a non-Jew killed a Jew, the killer is liable for execution; if a Jew killed a non-Jew, he is exempt from punishment.â
My dear kiddies, you who have been infantalized by the refusal on the part of every major news source, whether Muslim, Christian, atheist, Marxist, Conservative or Liberal, to cite this halachaânow you know the real reason why the International Court in The Hague will not be prosecuting Netanyahu or his generals for war crimes. Now you know why the children of Gaza have been murdered, are being murdered and will be murdered in this annus horribilis.
If Mr. Netanyahu wishes to quote ancient passages from holy books, let him quote from Sanhedrin 57 in the Talmud of Babylon, the holiest book of Israeli theology. [BT Eruvin 21b: âBe more careful in the observance of the words of the Scribes than in the words of the Torahâ].
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