Modern Day Crusaders

Last week two newspapers in Israel printed eye-witness accounts by Israeli soldiers of other Israeli soldiers abusing their power and targeting female, elder and young civilians in the Gaza offensive. Most of these accounts single out religious soldiers who acted as self-appointed holy warriors, only they were not self appointed.  Several testimonies by Israeli soldiers spoke of rabbis coming to the camps and handing out religious pamphlets and literature and portraying the Gaza offensive as a religious war.

One soldier was quoted "the rabbinate brought in a lot of booklets and articles and their message was very clear: We are the Jewish people, we came to this land by a miracle, God brought us back to this land and now we need to fight to expel the non-Jews who are interfering with our conquest of this holy land. This was the main message, and the whole sense many soldiers had in this operation was of a religious war."

It is amazing how this story was swept under the rug in most American media, in fact with the exception of Reuters News and the New York Times, this story never really saw the light of day. We cannot accuse our enemies of being religious crusaders when our former president was one and our number one ally in the world is doing the same thing. It is moments like these that are burned into the conscious of youths who grow up to hate America.  

No matter how many angles you try and view this issue from, the analysis always comes back the same. In fact, the analysis is almost always the same with every other major problem in this world. Religion kills! Religion might not mean it, but it gives an opportunity for people to be crazy.  Religious extremism comes in all shapes and sizes, you can see it in Afghanistan and Pakistan, you can see it in the Israelis and Palestinians, you can even see it in our religious extremists at home.

We point and laugh when we hear about a religious extremist in some foreign country doing some crazy thing and we call them primitive, even though the Mormon Church baptized Hitler and they believe that all men are created white but those who God has cursed, they are born black, but if they live a good life, they might turn back to white during their lifetime. Or our leaders in one of the two major political parties today, jumping at the opportunity to show their constituents that they do not believe in evolution.