”Now look at its consequences and the losses which it [anger] occasions. No plague has cost the human race more. You will see slaughter, poisoning, charge and sordid counter-charge in the law-courts, devastation of cities, the ruin of whole nations, persons of princely rank for sale at public auction, buildings set alight and the fire spreading beyond the city walls, huge tracts of territory glowing in flames that the enemy kindled [1:2,1].”

What accounts for it?

”{Anger is 'a burning desire to avenge a wrong' or, according to Posidonius, 'a burning desire to punish him by whom you think yourself to have been unfairly harmed' [1:2,3]. There is no need to chastise in anger if error and crime are to be repressed. Anger is a misdemeanour of the soul and one ought not to correct wrong-doing while doing wrong oneself [1:16,1]. Reason gives time to either side, and then demands a further adjournment to give itself room to tease out the truth: anger is in a hurry. Reason wishes to pass a fair judgment: anger wishes the judgment which it has already passed to seem fair [1:18, 1]”

”If we wish our judgment to be fair in all things, we must start from the conviction that no one of us is faultless For here is where indignation most arises - 'I haven't done anything wrong,' 'I haven't done a thing!' On the contrary you won't admit [emphasis in the original] anything! We grow indignant at any rebuke or punishment, while at that very moment doing the wrong of adding insolence and obstinacy to our misdeeds [2:28, 1].”

”How is it, then, that wrongs by enemies provoke us? Because we did not anticipate them, or certainly not on that scale. This is a result of excessive self-love. We consider that we ought not to be harmed, even by enemies. Each of us has within him the mentality of a monarch; he would like carte blanche for himself but not for any opposition. So it is either arrogance or ignorance of the facts that makes us prone to anger [2:31, 3].”

”'But there is pleasure in anger - paying back pain is sweet.' Not in the slightest! The case is not like that of favors, where it is honorable to reward service with service. Not so with wrongs. In the one case, it is shameful to be outdone; in the other to outdo. 'Retribution' - an inhuman word and what is more, accepted as right - is not very different from wrongdoing, except in the order of events. He who pays back pain with pain is doing wrong; it is only that he is more readily excused for it [2:32, 1].”

How about this moral clarity Mr. Bennett? Was this stoic pagan not more of a Christian than those of us who carry Jesus on their lips but ignore or pervert his real message?

But let's face it what is really behind most of the hatred against us? Is it not also in part our unqualified support of the state of Israel regardless of the conduct of its politicians? Even if it were just an excuse by the Arab world for their hatred of American policies (mind you they don't hate us, but merely what is done in our name), should we not remove this excuse from them rather than perpetuate it? Mr. Bennett had this to say about the state of Israel after he had on a previous page placed our "one-sided" support of that country in quotation marks, as if he really thought we were even handed in this matter. In the chapter "The Case of Israel," Bennett wrote :

”I want to put it positively. Our essential human kinship with Israel is something like our kinship with Great Britain, but it is also more particular and less blood-related than that. It is a deep-rooted feeling of linked destinies, a feeling that echoes back to our founding and to the earliest conceptions of the American experiment itself, that new birth of freedom which our fathers identified with the Biblical Israelite's emergence from the darkness of bondage. And I believe it also has to do with an understanding, almost religious in nature, that to our two nations above all others has been entrusted the fate of liberty in the world. That - the survival of liberty - is precisely what our efforts to eradicate terrorism are all about.

 Keeping faith with the people of Israel in their still unfinished confrontation with evil is, to me, a species of keeping faith with ourselves; breaking faith, a species of self-negation. It is exactly that simple, and exactly that difficult, and exactly that consequential.”

These are deeply disturbing passages, from a chapter which is full of them, especially when they come from a person who is widely respected and listened to by our administration. I don't believe that most Americans feel a "kinship" with the state of Israel, they might with the people, but not necessarily the state. Americans may also love the country, for biblical reasons, but this does not imply that they, therefore, have to endorse the policies which are carried out in that country at the present time. To link our "destiny" with the policies of a foreign state strikes me as absurd. The Bible should not be our guide to foreign policy, just as it should be impermissible to use the Koran for that purpose by some Arab fanatics. I also have a feeling that Mr. Bennett, who seems to be so enamored with the ancient Israelites, is unaware that the honor for having carried out the first jihad in recorded history belongs to Moses! Wars have, of course, always been with the human race but the ancients were more honest about them. They fought either to enlarge their lands, take prisoners for labor purposes, and enrich themselves; or in self defense. The introduction of religious war, ostensibly for the sake of religion, was Moses' idea.

In the book of Numbers we can read that there was serious discontent in the Israelite camp about intermarriage and the introduction of the worship of Baal. Moses' authority was challenged by a highly regarded individual, Zimri, who had married a Midianite wife and was loath to divorce her just on Moses' say so. Zimri and his wife Cozbi where then killed by faithful Phinehas who has subsequently become a role-model for religious zeal. Thereafter Moses launched a full scale attack against the Midianites. A fuller version of the dispute between Zimri and Moses can be found in Josephus' The Antiquities of the Jews. It would seem, however, that the punitive expedition had the additional purpose of diverting the people's attention from the internal problems and concentrating it on an external enemy. This is, of course, still common practice today when politicians are in trouble. Although Moses himself had been involved with at least two foreign women, the "Cushite" and Zipporah, this did not matter. Moses was in charge and intended to remain so. One may also wonder whatever happened to father-in-law Jethro - the priest of Midian - who had treated Moses so hospitably, when the latter had been a refugee from Egypt where he was wanted for homicide. This war was not against some foreign enemy whose land one wanted to conquer, but against Moses' in-laws and seems to represent the first purely religious war. It was fought with appropriate fury as Numbers 31: 1-18 testify to. First the Israelites killed every male. The cities were burned and the "spoil," which included women and children, as well as all the property, was brought before Moses. Instead of being pleased he was incensed: "Have ye saved all the women alive?" Those were the ones that brought on the trouble in the first place "now therefore kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman that hath known man by lying with him. But all the women children, that have not known man by lying with him, keep alive for yourselves." Thus the pattern for religious persecution was established and has been followed ever since. Mohammed used the Arabic word for "holy war," but the practice had been established and endorsed by the Jewish religion more than a millennium earlier.

And how does Prime Minister Sharon see the future of his country? Bob Novak, a conservative commentator, wrote in the National Weekly Edition June 24-30, 2002 of the Washington Times an editorial headlined, "Sharon rivets senators with his take on the Mideast." The Prime Minister "Speaking off the record to mostly uncritical American politicians, the old soldier-statesman was even more blunt. Mr. Sharon pointed to no Israeli-Palestinian deal for at least 10 years and talked of a hundred years struggles with Arabs. Warning of Egyptian and Saudi duplicity, he informed the senators that removal of Saddam Hussein from Iraq would be the best way to deal with the Palestinians." Sharon wants to keep the West bank and Gaza, because they were promised to the Israelites by God, expand the settlements therein and for that purpose hopes to get one million Jewish immigrants from France, Russia and Argentina. This is precisely the scenario I outlined in Whither Zionism? and why I wrote the book in the first place. It is updated in the January and April 2002 installments on this website Whatever Mr. Arafat or any newly elected Palestinian leaders may want or do is irrelevant and to be used only as a smokescreen for perpetuating and expanding Jewish presence on Palestinian soil. Americans are not only to condone this program but finance it as well.

There's moral clarity for you Mr. Bennett! You want us to fight this war on terror until victory is achieved, but you fail to define what this victory consists of. Since the war is also regarded as between "good and evil," there can be no end because evil and good are intermixed in every human being. You have condemned our children and grandchildren to an interminable religious struggle on foreign soil while we are losing our religious freedom here. Grade school children must not be exposed to the word "God" by their teachers, although they can be instructed in the joys of sex! This is the Western civilization we seem to be defending.

From one Catholic to another I would like to ask you Mr. Bennett please reconsider your stance, for the sake of God and our children. Go to the occupied territories, talk with Hanan Ashrawi, read her book This Side of Peace, spend a week with ordinary Palestinians, listen to them, and then write another book in the light of correct information rather than being swayed by religious sentiment and Israeli propaganda. You are a decent, intelligent person and can serve our country better than with the opinions expressed in Why We Fight.