Joshua Whitfield: Benjamin Netanyahu’s Oct. 28 speech announcing retribution for Hamas’ terrorist attacks recalls other times when religious people asked Got...
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu used language related to an Old Testament holy war during a press conference in Tel Aviv on Saturday, Oct. 28. Contributing columnist Joshua Whitfield says history and faith warn us to be careful about asking God to bless violence.Arnaud Amalric was a Cistercian monk, an abbot and crusader against Albigensian heretics. A man of a different era, 13th century France, it seems he was wholly unbothered by the idea of holy violence.
Not that I believe the lie we pliant citizens of the liberal order repeatedly tell ourselves: that we’re different, better than our pious and bloodthirsty ancestors. The lie of liberal politics, of course, is that since our violence isn’t religiously motivated, it’s more moral than the violence of religious extremists, purer than the violence wrought by fanatics quoting sacred texts. It’s a distinction that I doubt has ever mattered to the slaughtered and the bombed.
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