Burning Question: Is a Torah Less Holy Than a Koran?

By: Eli Verschleiser

If you had to list the reasons why Israel should exist as a haven for the Jewish people, freedom from the burning of holy Torah scrolls would have to rank pretty high on the list.

This act of hate is closely associated with the Holocaust, when the psychotic Nazis would relish the destruction of the Jews’ book of inspiration and knowledge. On occasion, we’ve seen it happen elsewhere, such as in New York shuls desecrated by hateful vandals or in modern-day Europe at the hands of neo-Nazis.

Torah scrolls under Israeli control should theoretically be safe. But last month vandals believed to be Palestinian entered a synagogue in the Jewish community of Karmei Tsur, piled the Torah scrolls together and set them afire. If you missed the international condemnation of that vengeful act of hate, it’s not because you weren’t paying attention. It was nonexistent.

Media coverage wasn’t very heavy, either. From what I can find there was only an AP dispatch and some Jewish media coverage. The Times covered Jewish attacks in the area on Arabs, but didn’t notice the burning Torahs.

Yes, I know. In the eyes of most of the world Jews don’t belong in the territory they call the west bank (and in the eyes of some, anywhere in the Middle East), and so, whatever happens to them, they had it coming. Let them count their blessings that no person was hurt in this particular incident (even as countless stabbings and other murders terrorize Jews in Jerusalem and elsewhere in Israel.)

It would be encouraging to hear statements along the lines of, regardless of how you feel about the politics of Israel’s control of territory, violent attacks and desecration of holy places are somewhat polarizing and must be stopped and condemned in the highest levels of the Palestinian government.

Israeli leaders never seem to have a problem condemning the bad behavior of right-wing Jews. On January 31, a group defaced some property, including a mosque in the village of Hawara. It was removed by Israeli authorities. Two weeks earlier, when vandals set fire to a mosque in Der Istya an IDF spokesman called it “deplorable on every level.”

And yet we’ve heard little on the Torah burning aside from the outrage of the Anti-Defamation League and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s vow that he find the perpetrators. “I expect the international community to condemn the desecration of a synagogue, an act that is the result of incessant Palestinian incitement,” Netanyahu wrote in a Facebook post.

Compare the silence to President Barack Obama’s denunciation in April, 2011 when a U.S. pastor burned the Koran. “The destruction of any holy text including the Koran is an act of extreme intolerance and bigotry,” the president said then, according to CNN. He called the display by the Dove World Outreach Center an event that could help al Qaeda recruitment.

Tony Blair, the former prime minister of the United Kingdom declared that the act of burning the Koran is “disrespectful, wrong and will be widely condemned by people of all faiths and none.”

And the secretary-general of the United Nations, Ban Ki-Moon, notoriously nonchalant about attacks on Jews said burning the Koran “contradict[s] the efforts of the United Nations and others to promote tolerance, intercultural understanding and mutual respect between cultures and religions.”

“Abhorrent and simply wrong,” said Germany’s chancellor, Angela Merkel.

Is not the desecration of Torahs an equally intolerant and bigoted act, abhorrent, antithetical to tolerance with the potential to inspire more extremist violence? It doesn’t seem to take much at all to do that.

It’s important for world leaders to take a more consistent position when it comes to public statements on the Mideast. Just because Israel is the more powerful side of the dispute with the Palestinians does not mean it is always wrong and that hateful acts, contrary to Ban Ki-Moon’s recent justifications, are understandable, if not inevitable.

Acts of hatred call out for condemnation because silence implies consent.

Take a close look at the act of burning the Torah in an Israeli synagogue. It reveals a mindset. Vandalism of construction equipment or power lines or other infrastructure might suggest a protest against the building of settlements on land the Palestinians claim as their own (despite never having had sovereign control over it, and Jordan losing it in a war).

The burning of a Torah is something different entirely — an attack on Judaism itself, and what makes the Jews a people and the very document that attaches us to the land. It is the steadfast refusal of Palestinians for over a century (not just since 1967) to acknowledge the ancestral Jewish claim to the holy land of Israel that is the biggest stumbling block to peace.

Progress will come only when responsible leaders assert not only that Israel has a generic “right to exist” but that it is the land of the Torah, and deserves to be protected as such. This would go a long way toward encouraging its enemies to give up their dream of chasing us away.

Originally Published by: The Times of Israel 

Trump Is No Hitler

By: Eli Verschleiser

It is always valuable to study history for contemporary lessons. There is much to be learned from the period between World War I and World War II and the rise of history’s most brutal psychopath, Adolf Hitler. But perspective is equally important.

There has only been one Hitler and, God willing, there will only ever be one. Numerous tyrants have arisen since and, awful as they were, none of them were Hitler. There is no one alive today who comes close to the threat level of the former painter who manipulated his way into becoming one of the deadliest men who ever lived.

Are there parallels between the use of demagoguery and scapegoating today and Hitler’s rise to the top? Yes, there always is but it exists mostly in the Middle East, where some leaders continue to depict Jews and the state of Israel as an enemy that must be destroyed. This is a means of deflecting from the oppression within their own borders.

Donald Trump is not Hitler in the making, not even close. Making that comparison is not only an insult to every Nazi survivor, their children, but suggests those who make the comparison are shallow, ignorant and oblivious to history.

This is not a defense or endorsement of Trump. One doesn’t have to be a supporter to object to this characterization.

Donald J Trump

Hitler rose to power at a time when Germany, the Austrian’s adopted land, faced deep humiliation over their World War I defeat and suffered staggering hyperinflation, with one dollar equal to 4.2 billion marks in 1923. Germans literally needed a wheelbarrow full of cash to buy a loaf of bread.

Americans are not facing anything like that level of despair. The economy shows strong signs of recovery and job numbers are on the rise. Trump is not playing class warfare or off economic fears. What he is doing is touching on real issues,, that are the source of considerable angst for millions of Americans:  The impact of illegal immigration and the threat of terrorism from Muslim extremists.

Unlike Hitler’s demagoguery against the Jews and other non-Aryans who were not to blame for Germany’s 1920s predicament, Trump did not invent these problems. Undocumented immigrants can and have included violent people who attack American citizens, and radical Muslims have more than once infiltrated our borders with intent to harm us.

A border wall and an all-out Muslim ban represent an obvious appeal to anger. But they do not make Trump, who had no problem with his daughter marrying a Jew and converting, into a Nazi.

Still, comedian Louis CK sends out an email blast trying to promote his TV show, warning that “the guy is Hitler. And by that I mean that we are being Germany in the ’30s … Hitler was just some hilarious and refreshing dude with a weird comb over who would say anything at all.”

Stick to your comedy Louis, and leave history to the scholars as Hitler is far from a funny topic.

But he’s not alone with the egregious comparison. When Trump asked supporters recently to raise their right hands and promise to vote for him, many news sources described the scene as “eerie,” evoking the right-hand-up Nazi salute.

So I guess every presidential inauguration, every swearing-in of a witness, every oath-taking of a police officer, lawyer or boy scout is a racist Nazi-fest, too.

It doesn’t end there. Ever since a Wall Street Journal reporter tweeted the first known references to Hitler in the New York Times, from November, 1922, numerous sources lately have tied it to Trump.

Quotes from an analyst in that prewar article suggest that Hitler didn’t really mean all that nasty stuff about Jews; he was just using it to further his agenda. "You can't expect the masses to understand or appreciate your finer real aims. You must feed the masses with cruder morsels and ideas like anti-Semitism. It would be politically all wrong to tell them the truth about where you really are leading them."

Again: This isn’t Germany. It’s not the 1920s. The American people aren’t nearly as desperate as the Germans then.

Yes, I know Trump stumbled over the chance to denounce David Duke and the KKK when asked, although he later did, which showed his inexperience and perhaps arrogance because he didn’t want to be maneuvered into a soundbite without saying it on his own terms.

This does not make him a white supremacist.

If elected, Trump might be a good or bad president. But if the case of the latter America will survive him, and we will not devolve into Nuremberg laws, invading our neighbors or concentration camps for Mexicans or Muslims. Our Congress, our courts and our Constitution, but most of all our spirit wouldn’t allow that.

Americans may be obsessed with celebrity and prone to quick answers to complex problems, and overall sick and tired of a political system that does not speak to their interests.

But we are still proud and decent people, a beacon of freedom and democracy. I believe our system of government has the ability to turn an inexperienced leader into a strong one who will grow into the seriousness of his responsibilities.

If not, it is strong enough to preserve that office intact for the next leader.