Shmuley Boteach vs. Christopher Hitchens

Shmuley Boteach challenged Christopher Hitchens in connection with his portrayal of Judaism when he

wrote of Baruch Goldstein, in his book, God Is Not Great: "While serving as a physician in the Israeli army he had announced that he would not treat non-Jewish patients, such as Israeli Arabs, especially on the Sabbath. As it happens, he was obeying rabbinic law in declining to do this, as many Israeli religious courts have confirmed…" (pg. 208)

In our second debate on religion, held last week, I asked Hitchens to identify even one Jewish court that would uphold such blasphemy. As his source he cited not a court but his dear friend, the late Israeli writer Israel Shahak. Research on the incident reveals the following. In 1965, Shahak sent a letter to Haaretz saying he had witnessed an Orthodox man refusing to allow his telephone to be used to call an ambulance for a non-Jew because it would violate Shabbat. In the same letter Shahak also alleged that a rabbinical court in Jerusalem confirmed that the man acted according to the dictates of Jewish law. From the beginning the story was curious. What prohibition could there possibly be in allowing someone else to use one's phone on the Sabbath? Then, in 1966 the story was investigated by Immanuel Jakobovits, one of the worlds' leading medical ethicists who would later become the highly respected chief rabbi of the United Kingdom and a member of the House of Lords, and found to be a hoax.

Writing in the journal Tradition under the title, "A Modern Blood Libel," Jakobovits noted, "Dr. Shahak, challenged to substantiate his personal 'testimony' was eventually forced to admit that the Orthodox Jew he had 'witnessed' refusing the use of his telephone simply did not exist. The whole incident had been fabricated in true Protocols style. Equally overlooked was the circumstance that the Rabbinate, far from having confirmed Dr. Shahak's allegation, had in fact ruled that the Sabbath must be violated to save non-Jewish no less than Jewish lives."

Read the whole thing.

Hitchens, who is a Jewish, is known as a sharp writer.
As my mother says: sharp as a matzah and twice as crummy.

Update: Judeopundit left a comment that Shahak's hoax--perpetuated by Hitchens--can be found on Palestinian Chronicles in an article entitled Israel's Jewish Fundamentalism.

The article concludes:

Israel’s Jewish Fundamentalism ideology that preaches the “Redemption of the Land of Israel” and the disregard to the human rights and even the lives of the non-Jews is behind the pursuit of territorial expansion, the settlements activities, the so many laws and regulations that discriminate against the Israeli Arabs, the massacres of Arab civilians and POW’s and the inhumane treatment of the helpless Palestinians in the occupied land.

Territorial expansion? In an earlier post, Israeli Occupation? Moslems are Just Being Modest, I quoted Bernard Lewis about the long history of Muslim occupation:

In an article for The New Yorker back in 2001 entitled the The Revolt of Islam Bernard Lewis writes about the European counter-attack against Moslem invasion during the Middle Ages:

The Tatars were expelled from Russia, and the Moors from Spain. But in southeastern Europe, where the Ottoman sultan confronted first the Byzantine and then the Holy Roman Emperor, Muslim power prevailed, and these setbacks were seen as minor and peripheral. As late as the seventeenth century, Turkish pashas still ruled in Budapest and Belgrade, Turkish armies were besieging Vienna, and Barbary corsairs were raiding lands as distant as the British Isles and, on one occasion, in 1627, even Iceland. [emphasis added]

The material in the article appears also in Lewis' The Crisis of Islam (see page 51).

On page 34 of that book, he describes the beginning of Moslem Imperialism:

The then Christian provinces of Syria, Palestine, Egypt, and North Africa were absorbed and in due course Islamized and Arabized, and they served as bases for the further invasion of Europe and the conquest of Spain and Portugal and much of southern Italy. By the early eighth century the conquering Arab armies were even advancing beyond the Pyrenees into France. [emphasis added]

Lewis describes the European attempt to end the Moslem occupation in contemporary terms:

By this time the jihad had become almost entirely defensive--resisting the Reconquest in Spain and Russia, resisting the movements for national self-liberation by the Christian subjects of the Ottoman Empire, and finally, as Muslims see it, defending the very heartlands of Islam against infidel attack. [emphasis added]

Lewis adds how Moslems describe this period of Christian self-liberation:

This phase has come to be known as imperialism.

Apparently Zionism is not the first nationalist movement to be labeled 'imperialist' by the Moslem world.

Just saying, you know.

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