The Bible and Terrorism

Interesting article at MSNBC/Newsweek from Rabbi Marc Gellman on the topic of combating terrorism and the Bible.

Some selections:

On both sides of any war debate, both pacifists and provocateurs can use the Bible's authority. The same is true for the Qur'an and for the Vedas. God's will and God's ways, we must always remember if we are to be true to the message of faith, are not our own. As Abraham Lincoln cautioned, the important question is not whether God is on our side but whether we are on God's side....

In Deut. 25:17-19 we read: “Remember what Amalek did unto thee by the way, when ye were come forth out of Egypt; How he met thee by the way, and smote the hindmost of thee, even all that were feeble behind thee, when thou wast faint and weary; and he feared not God.... [T]hou shalt blot out the remembrance of Amalek from under heaven; thou shalt not forget it.”

What made Amalek so dastardly was... [that he] the elderly and the infirm and in so doing avoid engagement with the soldiers at the front.... The moral problem the Bible addresses is that this is not warfare, it is the slaughter of innocents—it is terrorism.

We are commanded only to remember Amalek. I believe this is because the planned and plotted slaughter of innocents even during wartime cannot be condoned and must be remembered as a bright moral line which can never be crossed.

But what if, in fighting a modern day Amalek, we bomb and kill 'the innocents'? Are the innocents killed by Al-Qaeda or Hezbollah any different from the innocents killed by the US or Israel? Is it enough if we don't intentionally kill the innocents? Or is the fact that we know when we drop bombs in Baghdad or Beruit we will kill innocents a moral problem? Important questions raised, indirectly, by a thoughtful article. I don't think I agree with what the author of the article seeks to imply (seeming to support what's going on in the 'war on terror', but it is a thoughtful article none-the-less.

GP