What Now, Invade Israel?

One of the rationales that turns up over and over to justify invading Afghanistan and putting Iran on the list of possible targets for invasion is the practice of flogging and similar medieval punishments practiced in Islamic nations. But now a similar sentence was handed down in Israel. Should the West now invade Israel as well?

According to The Jerusalem Post, a so-called rabbinical court sentenced singer Erez Yechiel to 39 lashes for daring to perform before an audience made up of both men and women. The newspaper, unfortunately, doesn’t explain what’s so damnably criminal about that. The rabbis are probably convinced that it’s prescribed in the Bible, even though hundreds of millions of biblical scholars have never found anything remotely like that in scripture.

None of this is new, of course. Extremist-fundamentalist religious leaders haven’t just discovered such nonsense. Muslim versions of these spectacles are constantly paraded before us, our noses rubbed in it in order to justify the various wars being waged in the Middle East. It’s just that Jewish and Christian religious zealots display as many overblown elements as the Muslims do. A perfect example of that is this latest from Israel in reference to fundamentalist Jewish authorities.

Christians also have a good deal to offer in the same vein. Christian zealots in Michigan, for example, have pushed through a law making marital infidelity punishable by possible life in prison. Another example is the 10-year prison sentence possible in America for juvenile offenders (i.e., those under 18 years of age) who engage in consensual sex. The list can go on and on, but I’ll leave it at that for the moment.

The specific question now is: If practicing medieval punishment methods is a valid excuse for invading Middle Eastern nations (all the other rationales thus far having been quickly found to be bogus), will the West now invade Israel in order to liberate this poor singer from the clutches of medieval rabbinical law? The astute reader will no doubt realize that a camel would sooner pass through the eye of a needle before NATO, led by the United States, would invade Israel.

So all those reasons given to justify the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, plus the ones being put forth to justify a possible invasion of Iran, have been exposed as baseless.

The only thing left to do is to discover the real reason for such imperialistic attacks on poor nations. Does anyone want to bet that the term “crude oil” might be found in there somewhere?

One note for posterity: The sentence was carried out with a leather whip made by the father of one of Israel’s leading rabbis. No word as to how the convict is doing since the sentence was carried out, but people don’t really count for much when it comes to loftier ideals, do they?