Sunday 10 August 2014

"God said to Abraham, kill me a son"

The Guardian is running this advert tomorrow:


The 'human shield' slander against Palestine has been dispatched elsewhere. The echoes of the historic anti-Semitic blood libel in the 'child sacrifice' claim have been noted. Let me, then, draw your attention to some lines from the advert:

More than three thousand years ago, Abraham had two children. One son had been sent into the wilderness and was in danger of dying. God saved him with water from a spring.
The other son was bound, his throat about to be cut by his own father. But God stayed the knife.
Both sons – Ishmael and Isaac – received promises that they would father great nations.
With these narratives, monotheism and western civilization begin. And the Canaanite practices of child sacrifice to Moloch are forever left behind by the descendants of Abraham.
Except they are not.
You may be unfamiliar with the Abraham story. Here's an interesting thing - on the Jewish and Christian version of the story, the one you'd find in the book of Genesis, the son who is not nearly sacrificed is Ishmael. So, if you like, the rejection of child sacrifice begins with the other son - Isaac, who is the father of Jacob (also known as Israel), and a foundational figure in the history of Judaism. Ishmael becomes associated with ethnic arabs and is an important figure in Islam (for whose characteristic traditions  Ishmael, rather than Isaac, is the son who escapes the knife).

Let me spell out the message here. One son - because these sons really stand for entire ethno-religious groups - has stopped killing its children. Over to you, the other son.

Or to put it more briefly: those Muslims, they kill their children.

This, apparently, is the kind of stuff that liberals think they should use their newspapers to disseminate.

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