Excusing Hatred Against Jews

 Here's a solid chunk of the first piece of the Pillar's newsletter about attitudes toward Jews in this war between Hamas and Israel. This is what strikes me too. I am praying for peace. I am going to fast on the Oct. 17 day of fasting and prayer that has been called for. While all that's happening, do go read the whole thing that this extended excerpt came from.

My view is undoubtedly colored by all of this, but there are still some things I think can be seen clearly enough.

You can have your own opinions on the proportionality and even morality of Israeli policies and actions in Gaza over the decades.

And you can pray, like me, that somehow the Israeli government and military might be dissuaded, even now, from visiting total and indiscriminate revenge on the people of Gaza.

But no one celebrates the deaths of civilians in Gaza. When a bomb claims the life of a Palestinian mother or child, crowds do not gather in the streets of Paris and Vienna to revel in their deaths. After the attacks last weekend, in which murder and rape and carnage were livestreamed on social media, no one demanded a worldwide “day of rage” to legitimize and support Israeli violence.

They do gather and celebrate and seek to legitimize it all, though, when Jews are killed. Not Israelis, Jews.

People who celebrate such things are not motivated by grievance, or a frustrated sense of justice, but by hatred — hatred not of a system, or a circumstance, or a government, or even a nation. It is hatred of a people.

It is a hatred so deep and fierce and bitter that it moves them to shout victory slogans at the violent desecration of women and the literal slaughter of actual infants.

And yet this goes largely excused among us - however much we might bluster about some things being supposedly unacceptable.”