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NOT KOSHER
Semitic Supersitition
Efrat
rabbi says defilers are performing mitzvah* By DANIELLE HAAS JERUSALEM—The rabbi of the West Bank settlement of Efrat said settlers who claimed this week to have defiled a Palestinian suicide-bomber with pig skin had fulfilled a biblical commandment by desecrating his body to deprive him of eternal paradise. Rabbi Shlomo Riskin told the JC that he believed reports that settlers had defiled the body of a Palestinian building worker, who tried to blow up their supermarket last week, by covering him with pig skins. "I understand they did indeed do this and if so, it is a mitzvah* for someone to bury the suicide-bomber with pig skin if it can help prevent the future loss of innocent lives by deterring attacks," Rabbi Riskin said. The idea of attempting to discourage potential bombers by placing the bodies of dead Palestinian attackers near products derived from pigs, which are considered unclean in Islam as well as Judaism, has been circulating in settler circles for several months. Settlers in the Gush Katif settlement last week placed the body of a Palestinian, who had killed two soldiers and a settler, near pig parts, in the belief this would rob the bomber of the riches of martyrdom, traditionally said to include 72 virgins. Muslims dismissed the claims as a "myth" in the absence of photographic evidence or an admission by anyone that they had supplied the pig skin in which Mohammed Smali was allegedly covered after trying to detonate explosives in the settlement. "The keys to heaven are not in the hands of settlers," said Moslem cleric Sheikh Hassan Youssef, of the Hamas movement, in response to the claims. * A mitzvah is Hebrew for "holy commandment." |
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