I try to give religious fundamentalists the benefit of the doubt, innocent until proven guilty, and the like.  I have members of my family who hold those beliefs, and they are good people in their personal relationships.

But by the Gods I get tired of the crimes and wickedness of their leaders, and their more robotic followers.  Nor am I only referring to the ‘Christian’ Right.  

McClatchy News Services performed admirably in reporting the truth under the Bush II regime, even while most of the corporate media might as well have been government controlled.  Now they have done so again, this time regarding Israel’s attack on Palestine.

In a story dated March 20, McClatchy reports

Rabbis affiliated with the Israeli army urged troops heading into Gaza to reclaim what they said was God-given land and “get rid of the gentiles” — effectively turning the 22-day Israeli intervention into a religious war, according to the testimony of a soldier who fought in Gaza.

Literature passed out to soldiers by the army’s rabbinate “had a clear message — we are the people of Israel, we came by a miracle to the land of Israel, God returned us to the land, now we need to struggle to get rid of the gentiles that are interfering with our conquest of the land,” the soldier told a forum of Gaza veterans in mid-February, just weeks after the conflict ended.

The report also stated

One soldier, identified only as “Aviv,” said he was bothered by open fire orders given to his unit for an operation that was later canceled.

“We were supposed to go in with an armored vehicle called an Ahzarit, break into the door and start to shoot inside and simply go up floor by floor. . . . I call this murder . . . to go up floor by floor and every person that we see we were to shoot,” he said. “Aviv” served as a squad leader with the Givati unit in the Gaza neighborhood of Zeitoun.

“At first I said to myself how is this logical? Higher authorities said this was permissible because everyone left in the area and in the city of Gaza is condemned, is a terrorist, because they didn’t run away.”

When the orders were changed, Aviv said that another soldier protested: “Everyone in there is a terrorist, that’s known.” His comrades joined in, “We need to kill every person found there; everyone in Gaza is a terrorist.”

If any people on earth should be sensitive to indiscriminate killing, it is Jews.  And many are.  Rabbis like these are a minority, wielding their authority due to their political alliances.  Like our own Christian version of the same.  But in the name of Judaism and Israel mass killings have taken place, justified by reference to the first recorded occasions of genocide, when the Old Testament says Israelites slaughtered entire peoples, children included.  If, as some scholars say, these crimes never occurred, the wickedness of fundamentalism is even greater.

Fundamentalism in all its forms is demonism.  I know of no other way to put it.  Sometimes the Fundamentalists’ good personal qualities insulate them from the worst implications of the doctrine in which they believe, in a interesting reversal of ‘original sin.’  They then live as decent people.  

But when I read about the rantings of a Dobson or of these Rabbis, I wonder when their decency will spill over into their religion