On Aug. 7 — the day that Jews around the world celebrated Tisha B'Av, the traditional day of mourning for the disasters that have occurred throughout Jewish history — the state of Israel brutally slaughtered at least 44 people, including 15 children, in the besieged Gaza Strip. Beyond the horrible irony of this massacre, it is difficult for me not to see it as part of a larger global holy war.
Not in the sense of the Crusades of history or American and European fears of Islamic jihad. We don't have a name yet for this holy war, but its variants stretch far beyond Gaza into the American heartland. We refuse to recognize it because it would require us to look in the mirror. It is a holy war based on fantasies of power and "chosenness." Most troubling of all is how these fears and fantasies are grounded in a poisonous distortion of sacred scripture and religious tradition.
