Sunday, March 04, 2012

Yedidya Atlas: Purim All Over Again


By: Yedidya Atlas

Some 2,000 years ago, the Jewish people in Exile in the vast empire of Persia faced a plot engineered by the king’s chief minister to annihilate the Jews. The salvation of the Jews at that time is commemorated since then by Jews everywhere as the Jewish holiday of Purim. The story, as is recorded in the Biblical Book of Esther – “Megillat Esther”, or “Scroll of Esther” - relates how Jewish national deliverance took place.

As the story is told, Haman, the evil minister, a surviving descendant of Amalek, convinced and bribed King Ahasuerus to issue an irrevocable decree that all the Jews were to be killed on one day thoughout the Empire, and their property would be up for grabs. Without going through the entire story, Mordechai, a member of the Sanhedrin (“Great Assembly of Sages”) in Jerusalem and the leader of the exiled Jews in Shushan, capital of the Persian Empire, and his niece Esther who was chosen by Ahasuerus to be Queen of Persia (without knowing her Jewish identity at first), proved to the King that Haman was out for himself and disloyal. The King then issued another decree allowing the Jews to arm and defend themselves (a unique concept in and of itself, since even today, verbosity aside, very few Western leaders really subscribe to the concept of Jewish/Israeli self-defense). The end result: over 75,000 of the attackers of the Jews were killed and the Jews were victorious. And then to prove their being different, as usual, no spoils of war were taken.

Today the Jewish People in their historical homeland, the Jewish State of Israel, are once again being openly threatened by an evil Persian Empire of Terror known today as Iran. Today’s Hamans – Iranian “Supreme Leader” Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Hizbollah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah, to name just a few, are no less committed to the destruction of the Jewish People as were Haman and his ten sons of old. They openly and clearly call for Israel’s destruction and make no secret of the nuclear weapons, the type that can wipe out the Jews in one day.

Read the whole thing.

The author is a veteran journalist specializing in geo-political and geo-strategic affairs in the Middle East. His articles have appeared in such publications as The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Times, Insight Magazine, Nativ, The Jerusalem Post and Makor Rishon. His articles have been reprinted by Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and in the US Congressional Record.

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