Turn! Turn! Turn! (to Everything There Is A Season)

A Time to Hate
Using a bereaved husband's reaction to the death sentence handed earlier this week to the man who raped and murdered the husband's wife and daughters, Rabbi Shmuley Boteach passes on an important lesson that many of us have forgotten: As it says in Ecclesiastes (Koheleth), there's a time to hate.

Over the past few years many of us have lost our moral bearings on the subject of evil and human suffering. Many of my Christian brothers and sisters take Jesus' teachings about forgiving our enemies completely out of context. Jesus said to forgive your enemies. Your enemy is the guy who steals your parking space. But God's enemies are men who can rape and slaughter two young women and their mother and torture them before doing so. In Ecclesiastes King Solomon famously says "there is a time to love and a time to hate." This is that time. We must love the Petit family and hate their murderers. Yes, hatred is a valid emotion when directed at the truly evil.

No, I do not believe in revenge. I believe in justice. But only a true hatred of evil compels us to fight wickedness with every legitimate means at our disposal.

When I lived in England during some of the worst years of the Northern Ireland troubles I once heard a man whose father was killed by the IRA for no reason other than he was a Protestant immediately say that as a Christian he is compelled to love his father's murderers. He said he forgave them for killing his father. But no human being, even the man's son, can confer such forgiveness. The act of taking a human life is a crime against God who created life and endowed it with infinite worth. And such acts of misguided magnanimity and forgiveness make a mockery of human love and a shambles of human justice. Murder in cold blood dare not be forgiven. Murderers who have erased the image of God from their countenance through savage acts of brutality have removed themselves from the human family. They are not our brothers and we are under no obligation to love them. Indeed, any love we have in our hearts must be directed at the victims of violence rather than at their culprits.

Yes, Jesus said 'turn the other cheek.' But is anyone so morally lost as to suggest that he meant if someone rapes your wife, give him your daughter to rape as well? Of course, what Jesus meant was to forgive the petty slights that people enact against you. If a friend pretends not to notice you at a party, forgive them. If your husband loses his temper and yells, yes he must apologize. But be quick to forgive. But Jesus never meant that we should not dedicate ourselves to fighting evil.

Psalm 97 makes it clear. "Let those who love the Lord hate evil." It's repeated again in Proverbs Chap 8: "The fear of the Lord is to hate evil." Yes, hatred has its place, but only under a single condition that was met in the terrible Petit murders: the human confrontation with extreme evil.

I believe there's an important lesson here for Israelis and how we relate to 'Palestinian' terror. There's nothing wrong with hating the terrorists and those who support them. They are extreme evil.

Islam on Capitol Hill

Narrated Abu Huraira:
Allah's Apostle said, "By Him in Whose Hands my soul is, son of Mary (Jesus) will shortly descend amongst you people (Muslims) as a just ruler and will break the Cross and kill the pig and abolish the Jizya (a tax taken from the non-Muslims, who are in the protection, of the Muslim government). Then there will be abundance of money and no-body will accept charitable gifts.

Yes, in Islam Jesus will come back at the end of the world, break all the crosses and Islamize the world. I am serious. This is the belief in Islam.

Abraham, Isaac, Noah, Moses, Jesus, and Muhammad were all Muslims. Don't gag. Moe was the final prophet.

Check out their logo, it's so Obama.

More on this:

I'm a Christian pastor in Connecticut and was intrigued and grateful to see your report on the Muslims on Capitol Hill. It is so much more ominous than it might seem to the casual observer

Many people do not know that this Muslim version of the return of Jesus features very heavily in their end-times beliefs. Many people have learned in recent years about their belief in the coming Mahdi, but less well known is the concept they have of Jesus returning, whom they call Isa, and who takes a subservient role to the Mahdi.

According to them this version of Jesus abolishes the jizya tax - meaning it is no longer accepted in lieu of a conversion to Islam. Supposedly they wage war against the Jews and Christians together. I know that you more than most can easily surmise what the idea of "Jesus, the Messiah of Jerusalem" would mean from an Islamic perspective.

Fist Fights Erupt in Jerusalem Church

Barenaked Pundits.com report
Israeli police had to break up a fist fight that erupted between Greek and Armenian Orthodox clergymen at one of Christianity's holiest sites.
The scuffles broke out at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem on Orthodox Palm Sunday.
Brawls are not uncommon at the church, which is uneasily shared by various Christian denominations.
In this case, witnesses say an Armenian priest forcibly ejected a Greek priest from an area near the tomb of Jesus.
They say the attacker felt the Greek priest had spent too long at the tomb.