Soccer Dad

Tom's slander of rav yosef

Thomas Friedman's column had one other major problem.

Because all the extremists are now doubling down. Last week, insurgents aligned with Al Qaeda boasted of killing 56 innocent Iraqis. On Tuesday, Palestinian gunmen murdered four West Bank Israeli settlers, including a pregnant woman; Hamas proudly claimed credit. In Israel, Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, who heads the largest ultra-Orthodox party, Shas, used his Shabbat sermon to declare that he hoped the Palestinian president and his people would die. "All these evil people should perish from this world ... God should strike them with a plague, them and these Palestinians," Yosef said.

The parallelism here is obnoxious. First of all, Hamas actually killed people. So to equate the two incidents is intellectually dishonest and offensive in the extreme. Second of all, as Yeranen Yaakov and Elder of Ziyon point out, Rav Yosef was misquoted. So yes it's true, that Rav Yosef wasn't calling for action taken against enemies of the Jews by people but by God, his call was limited to those Arabs who are enemies of Jews. Furthermore as Life in Israel observes Rav Yosef apparently has good relations with some Arab leaders. (Life in Israel asks why he would apparently have been on better terms with Arafat than with Abbas.) And as everyone - except Middel East expert Thomas Friedman knows - Rav Yosef was known for calling for territorial compromise if it would save lives. It doesn't appear that Rav Yosef was in any way referring to the upcoming negotiations.

So in order to demonize another Israeli, Friedman 1) mischaracterized Rav Yosef's remarks as being from his sermon on Shabbat - they were made after Shabbat 2) misquotes Rav Yosef 3) and provides a false context for the Rabbi's remarks in order to compare Rav Yosef to cold blooded murderers.

Nice going Tommy boy!