This week's Torah portion -- which I will cover on Saturday -- happens to be the one in which the nation of Amalek attacks the Children of Israel as they are having Egypt. Jewish tradition holds that the Amalekites targeted children and the elderly.
That is the background for the commandment later, in Deuteronomy 25, that the children of Israel are to "remember" Amalek. It is that commandment that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu cited in several early speeches about the war to both soldiers and civilians.
A Jewish audience would recognize the reference. The story of Amalek -- from Exodus and Deuteronomy -- is told every year, with the reading of the relevant Torah portions. "Amalek" is a catch-all for anti-Jewish villains throughout history. It is interpreted as an injunction to remember, and to fight, evil -- never to mass murder.
But a clumsy translation, amplified by anti-Israel and anti-war voices on social media, claimed (falsely) that Netanyahu was calling for "holy war" and citing a different passage entirely, in I Samuel 15:3.
In that case, King Saul is commanded to wipe out Amalek entirely, from the king down to the children and animals. (Saul balks at this task, and as a result he is stripped of his kingship.) But Netanyahu's quote was specifically a reference to Deuteronomy, word-for-word.
At The Hague this month, South Africa's lawyers, who have probably never cracked open a Bible in their entire lives in that lawless country, used the Samuel citation in claiming that Netanyahu's reference to Deuteronomy was proof of intent to commit genocide.
Ironically, one of the South African lawyers making this absurd claim is also the lawyer for firebrand black nationalist Julius Malema, who likes a song called "Shoot the Boer." This same lawyer has argued that the song's inciting phrases are not meant to be taken literally.
At first I blamed laziness and ignorance for the misquote. I imagined that some anti-Israel activist did a word search on the Internet for "Amalek" and came up with the reference from Samuel. But my friend James Myburgh did some digging and found another source.
It turns out that Nazi propagandists were quite enamored of the Samuel quote and used it to accuse Jews of plotting the murder of all Germans. This, they said, justified killing Jews. Those are the roots of South Africa's case, which had other antisemitic features.
How fitting that today's Amalek -- Hamas and its collaborators, including the wicked South African government -- would seek to accuse others of what they themselves are guilty of: namely, the seeking of genocide. That is pure Amalek, and it must be stopped.
https://www.politicsweb.co.za/opinion/hitlerism-returns-to-the-hague
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This week's Torah portion includes several laws about conduct in civic and personal life, the common theme of which is boundaries -- setting bounds to what one may do at home, at work, and even in the battlefield.
One noteworthy passage concerns Amalek, the evil nation that attacked the Children of Israel as they made their Exodus from slavery to freedom. Deuteronomy 25:17-19 commands Jews to obliterate Amalek's memory.
The South African government accused Israel of genocide on the basis of a story about Amalek in the Book of Samuel, in which King Saul was commanded to wipe out the entire evil Amalekite nation.
Because Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu quoted this week's portion -- "Remember what Amalek did to you" (25:17), the South African government claimed he was commanding soldiers to commit genocide.
It was an absurd and malevolent misreading of the Bible and of Jewish tradition. The commandment, as observed by Jews today, is to remember the evil of Amalek and fight ...
