Sunday, January 7, 2007

Tikkun Olam means a lot more than just doing "good deeds"

Tikkun Olam, the Jewish concept of "repairing the world," is not just about doing good deeds, like building habitats and feeding the poor, noble and important as those endeavors may be. It is also about fighting the good fight against the darker forces that vie for pre-eminence in the world. Today, some of those are Islamo-Fascism, world Jihadism, and the restoration of a non-pluralistic Muslim Caliphate bent on world domination.

As Yossi Klein Halevi has forcefully argued, the Jewish people have been at the vanguard of the battles against totalitarian, fascistic ideologies, going back to the last century when we were both the victims of communism/totalitarianism, Nazism/Fascism, and later the champions in the wars against them. Today it is Islamo-Fascist Totalitarianism that we find ourselves confronting.

"Three times in the last century, the Jewish people has found itself on the front line against totalitarian ideologies with aspirations to rule the world, and which defined the Jewish people as its primary obstacle in fulfilling that goal. For Nazism, the Jew was not only the source of racial impurity but inventor of conscience, crippling humanity's survival instincts in an amoral world. For Soviet communism, the Jew was the source of capitalism, and Zionism the front line of imperialism. And now, for fundamentalist Islam, the Jew is the satanic enemy, and the Jewish state an abomination against God that must be destroyed."
To read more, http://www.tnr.com/docprint.mhtml?i=w060724&s=halevi072606 by Yossi Klein Halevi posted on TNR.

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