.
We Are Wrong
You shall remember what Amalek did to you on the
way, when you went out of Egypt, how he happened
upon you on the way and cut off all the stragglers
at your rear, when you were faint and weary, and
he did not fear God.
—Devarim (Deuteronomy) 25: 17-19
It turns out we’ve always been wrong.
We thought that our blood was no longer
To flow under knives. Couldn’t be wronger.
We thought we’d become good and strong.
We thought we could change human minds
By giving and never demanding,
By helping—but look how it’s ended:
We’re hunted. We’re easy to find.
No matter how you and I live—
The hounds, they are ever pursuing.
They “only want peace”—hate is stewing,
To force us to die or to leave.
To die now, wherever we are.
To leave the land that is G-d-given—
Because inasmuch as we’re living,
We must go away, stay afar.
Afar from the fire and sharp steel,
And savages with or without
Kind words that would mask the beast’s snout—
While it’s getting ready to kill.
… But wrong as we’ve been, we’ve arrived
To what our ancestral remembrance
Tells us at the Promised Land entrance.
We know what to do to be right.
.
.
Michael Vanyukov is a Professor of Pharmaceutical Sciences, Psychiatry, and Human Genetics at the University of Pittsburgh. He immigrated to the United States 30 years ago as a refugee from the Soviet Union.
@Mia. Thank you, Mia, for that. Your encounter is a proof that, indeed, heart and conscience, which your friend likely possesses, are not enough for making judgment. Knowledge is also critical. Next time you see that friend of yours, you could tell her that those 22 you mentioned are only *Arab* countries, which, of course, are all Muslim and all anti-Israel, despite Egypt’s and Jordan’s peace agreements and the Abraham Accords (“normalization” with UAE, Bahrain, and Sudan). That number, 22, is unique: no other nation has anything close. The *Muslim* world consists of more like 50 countries, and that is not counting countries like India, where there are 200 mln Muslims. By themselves those numbers would not mean much. For the topic we discuss, however, they are important: scriptural Islam is explicitly anti-Christian and anti-Jewish. Considering that Islam prohibits “innovation” (despite the existence of different schools of jurisprudence within each of the main sects; the latter, Sunni and Shi’a, being in a permanent war with each other), what is written as a direct command in the Koran and the sahih (“authentic”) ahadith is not changeable (e.g., Koran 5:51: “O you who have believed, do not take the Jews and the Christians as allies. They are [in fact] allies of one another. And whoever is an ally to them among you – then indeed, he is [one] of them. Indeed, Allah guides not the wrongdoing people.” That constitutes the basis of constant reemergence of militant “conservative” or “reformist” (about the same; both promise nothing good to non-Muslims) movements in Islam. One of those ahadith, the so-called Gharqad tree hadith, promises the genocide of all the Jews at the hands of Muslims. It is that hadith that is quoted in the Hamas covenant. Except nobody in the West mentions that this proof of Hamas’s savagery is a mainstream part of Islam.