In a speech in Hebrew on October 28, Netanyahu justified the Israeli slaughter of civilians in Gaza with a biblical reference to Amalek.
You must remember what Amalek has done to you, says our Holy Bible. And we do remember. And we fight. Our brave troops and combatants who are now in Gaza and in all other regions in Israel, are joining the chain of Jewish heroes, a chain that has started 3,000 years ago, from Joshua ben Nun, until the heroes of 1948, the Six-Day War, the October 73 War, and all other wars in this country. Our hero troops, they have one supreme main goal: to completely defeat the murderous enemy, and to guarantee our existence in this country.
In Netanyahu’s Holy Bible, God gives his chosen people Palestine, and the same God commands them to exterminate the Amalekites, an Arab people that stands in their way. Yahweh asks Moses to not only exterminate the Amalekites, but to “blot out the memory of Amalek under heaven” (Deuteronomy 25:19).
It was left to Saul to finish them up: “kill man and woman, babe and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and donkey,” Yahweh instructs him (1Samuel 15:8). Because Saul spared the Amalekite king Agag, Yahweh withdrew the kingship from him and drove him mad: “I regret having made Saul king, since he has broken his allegiance to me and not carried out my orders” (15:11). The holy prophet Samuel, who had a direct line of communication with Yahweh, had to butcher Agag himself (“hewed Agag in pieces,” in the Revised Standard Version). Yahweh then gave the kingship to David, who proved a more obedient exterminator, for example when he put the people of Rabba “under saws, and under harrows of iron, and under axes of iron, and made them pass through the brick kiln: and thus did he unto all the cities of the children of Ammon” (2 Samuel 12:31).
I hope this essay will inspire Abrahamic readers to reflect on the actual words and meanings in the Old Testament. I respect all moral religious peoples of all faiths but am also aware that for many religion is a cult, sometimes a dangerous cult of Satanic violence. The ancient Greek, then Christian, and sometimes Jewish term that most unites the Abrahamic traditions with Buddhism is logos. If we see God as logos we can also see the Buddha as logos realized on earth and the Buddhist path a kind of worship or reverence for logos. ‘Theologically’, Buddhists are sentient beings who are attracted to the Tathagata-logos. It is their good karma to be drawn toward logos. Others are blind to logos and sometimes repulsed by it.
A core Buddhist teaching is clinging to words is dangerous. The Buddha prohibited writing his teachings down because he did not want them to turn into scriptures that would be worshipped without being understood. This is why Buddhism defines itself as a mind-to-mind teaching. Buddhists who understands the Dharma well enough transmit it mind-to-mind to others who want to learn it. Buddhists do not proselytize or believe others are lost for having different practices. Buddhists respect and support all traditions and practices that encourage wholesome, ethical thoughts and behaviors because they all lead to logos. ABN
American Buddhist Net 