Once again extremism rears its ugly head. This time two professors have expressed reprehensible views.
In one case it was a Bar-Ilan Hebrew literature professor Hillel Weiss. The Jeruslam Post reported the following:
Weiss wished death to Hebron Brigade commander Col. Yehuda Fuchs, who aided in the evacuation of two Jewish families, including Weiss's own daughter, son-in-law and six grandchildren, from the Arab market in Hebron on August 8.
I can understand the professor’s feelings. He obviously did not take kindly to his family being evicted from Chevron. But he wasn’t the only one with an extremist attitude:
In the latest incident, Dr.Yair Wiseman, of the university's computer science department, rebuked and punished a student for taking part in the Gaza disengagement. Wiseman initially refused to grant the student a technical request. As part of the rejection response, Wiseman also harangued the student because he perpetrated the ethnic cleansing of Gaza.
One does not have to agree with Israeli government policy. One can and should be allowed to express their views without fear of repercussions. But to take out one’s religious frustrations on a student goes beyond freedom of speech… as does publicly wishing death upon a military officer who was only carrying out the legal orders of a duly and democratically elected government.
These people are so blind to that reality that they see the government as criminal, comparing them to Nazis by using terms like ‘ethnic cleansing’. It doesn’t matter to them that other Poskim do not agree with their Poskim. Are those Poskim guilty of supporting these Nazi-like tactics too? That would certainly follow from statements like:
I find it difficult to differentiate between the crimes committed in Vietnam in 1975 and the ethnic cleansing perpetrated by the IDF in the summer of 2005. A moral human being does not behave like a robot and realizes that there are limits to military authority.
And:
I am sorry to see that you still do not understand the severity of the crime you perpetrated," wrote Wiseman. "I assume that you would never murder or rape settlement residents and you would never follow such an order.
If that's how they feel then they must look at other Poskim as aiding and abetting the government (and by implication rape and murder) by not joining them in thier protests.
These extremists either have no clue that there are differing opinions about these matters or if they do, they don’t care. That is the nature of extremists. They have a severe case of myopia and tunnel-vision. They see only what they want to see and know only what they want to know… and nothing else.
The truth is that they are messianist Jews. They are on the far right of the Reshis Tzmichas Geulasenu’niks. They actually believe that that they have a religious obligation to retake and settle all of biblical Israel at all cost including the cost of their own lives and those of their families. And they put themselves in harms way to prove it. When the duly elected government of the people tries to stop them, they consider it tantamount to rape and murder. It doesn’t matter to them that there are other rabbinic leaders who say otherwise.
To take upon onself matters involving Pikuach Nefesh based on the Shitah of only a part of one Orthodox faction… the extreme right of the Religious Zionists makes them no better than Neturei Karta in this regard. Because even though they have opposite agendas, their tactics are to undermine anyone and anything that gets in the way of those goals.
The only difference between them is that they are far more dangerous than Neturei Karta. They have guns.
They have all been trained by the military and know how to use weapons. And anger can turn into action. Actions like murder. This is what happened to Yigal Amir who is considered a hero by many of these people! And then there is mass murderer Baruch Goldstein. He is buried in or near Chevron and is considered a great hero and martyr by them. His gravesite has become a shrine… an illegal one… and visited regularly!
I do not support stifling free speech. But neither do I support a climate that produces people like Yigal Amir who was a student at Bar Ilan when he assassinated Itzhak Rabin. And to that end I fully understand Bar Ilan’s actions. I don’t know what happened to professor Weiss. But at least Professor Weisman is not being re-hired for next year.
Good for them.
