In the Grey Zone

Boker tov. The world is "back to basics" this morning: What is hate? What is a crime? What is sacred? What is right and what is wrong? And how do people decide? What you might think is black and white now falls into a huge abyss we'll call the Grey Zone. Come with me for a tour.

(IsraelNN.com) The Civil Lands Administration destroyed a one-year-old synagogue built on Mount Gerizim near the Samarian city of Shechem on Monday afternoon. The structure was built not far from one of the holiest sites in the Jewish world.

Government officials maintained that the building was erected without a permit, and was not a synagogue.

Dozens of Breslov Chassidim and other rabbis and students worshipped there daily, learning Torah between the services. The rabbinical students vowed not to give up the site without opposition. “If the synagogue is destroyed, it will be re-built,” vowed one student before the house of worship was razed to the ground.

The structure was built by the students in order to study as close as possible to the burial place in Shechem of the biblical Joseph, son of the Jewish matriarch Rachel and Jewish patriarch Jacob, following its capture and destruction by Palestinian Authority Arab hordes in October 2000. There have been many clandestine pilgrimages by Jews – and some not so clandestine – to the tomb since then.

Echoes of the past reverberate in the hills around the grave of the biblical Joseph, whose bones were brought to rest in Samaria by the Children of Israel when they escaped from Egyptian slavery thousands of years ago.

"The bones of Joseph which the Children of Israel brought up from Egypt were buried in Shechem in the portion of the field that had been purchased by Jacob." (Joshua 24.32)

The Tomb of Joseph, whose sons headed two of the twelve tribes of Israel, was to remain accessible to Jews under the terms of the Oslo Accords signed by Israel with the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), which represented the PA.

The area around it, including the city of Shechem, was handed over to the PA, then an administrative body whose leaders had promised to protect the site.

But Jewish access to the tomb was blasted away by PLO terrorists in October 2000 a scant few days after the start of the second intifada, which many refer to as the Oslo War.

Israel Border Police officers spent days fending off terrorist attempts to capture and destroy the tomb. Within a week, the government of then-Prime Minister Ehud Barak, currently Israel’s Defense Minister, caved in and ordered IDF troops to abandon the site.

Another Joseph was also abandoned that day in 2000 - a Druze Border Policeman named Madhat Yusuf (Joseph, in Arabic) who was left to bleed to death as soldiers waited for the order to rescue him. It took five precious hours for then IDF Chief of Staff Shaul Mofaz to negotiate with the PLO for his evacuation to safety, but by then it was too late. The government later told journalists the talks were necessary in order to avoid the risk of killing PA civilians.

The PA promise to preserve Joseph’s Tomb and allow Jewish access was violated within two hours after Yusuf’s body was carried away. A flood of PA Arabs entered the compound and razed the synagogue to the ground, burning furniture and holy books as the PA policemen who had vowed to protect the site stood idly by.

Two days later, the dome of the tomb itself was painted “evil eye green” as some people refer to the color, which in Arabic tradition wards off the evil eye. Bulldozers cleared away the remnants of the orgy of violence that had taken place there, transforming the holy Jewish monument into a Muslim religious site.

See also BtB DEC03:

7 Breslov hassidim were shot by an Arab terrorist near Kever Yosef, in Shechem. Two of the injured are listed in serious condition. Police arrested 9 other Jews for the crime of praying at the holy site, and upsetting the local Arabs. According to Israeli law Jews are forbidden to enter into territories which have been surrendered to the Arabs.

Note also that the actions of the Palestinian mobs at Kever Yosef (Joseph's Tomb) were lauded by tenure-seeking "archaeologist" Nadia Abu el-Haj in her book - ironically entitled Facts on the Gound.

Meanwhile, it's a felony hate crime in America to put a Koran in a toilet.

Comment from Catttt at LGF:

.... Hate is an emotion, and we should not have emotional laws. We're getting into a dangerous area here. We're not anywhere near as bad as the poor Euros, but it's (cliche coming) a slippery slope.

Another comment refers Bill O'Reilly to this YouTube video :

Comments

[Steve]

Shmulevich's arrest has chilled me to the bones. This is a political arrest, an arrest because of a "thought crime" and it has happened right here in America. For those who haven't read the book 1984 I suggest you do. I don't know whey there isn't more talk about how this symbolizes a scary turn for America. As for Bill O'Reilly, I can't forgive him for the opinion he expressed last night. That is how I feel about it. I would hope that all patriotic Americans would boycott his show and I am sure that would bring him down quickly. If you can't feel the chill then you don't understand history. America wasn't supposed to have politically motivated thought crimes in our governmental system but now we do. The liberals are turning us into a "Big Brother" totalitarian state.

[Steve]

We should put Bill O'Reily's book "whose looking out for you" in the toilet.

[Yael]

Just off the top of my head, I don't think we should focus on O'Reilly. Respond to him, certainly, but he's as entitled to his opinion as Shmulevich. IMHO, the focus should be on hate crime legislation and we should be looking at our respective states and taking the matter up with our legislators, especially the more "progressive" ones who want to regulate our emotions and forbid expression of the ones they don't like or that make them uncomfortable. I've heard the Koran flushing called both a hate crime and an act of intolerance. I see it rather as outrage and rebellion against Muslim intimidation. I won't be at all suprised if Korans show up in toilets all across the country.

[Irene]

To flush anyone's holy book down the toilet is a sin, period.