ARE JEWS PIGS AND MONKEYS?

I have a very close Jewish friend who is conservative in many respects. Today he sent me a video of the Glenn Beck Show (on youtube.com) about the propaganda used by Muslim extremists to sway public opinion. In the video (among other things) young Muslim children are taught to hate Jews and associate them with monkeys and pigs. As evidence of the power of these teachings, some children (as young as three years old) were shown to recite their hate for Jews verbally. “Jews are monkeys and pigs”, a small child relented. The video noted that the basic means of teaching this hate was advocation by people the children looked up to - mostly their parents and religious leaders. I would surmise that my Jewish friend saw this teaching of false ideas to children as an aberration. But what struck me most about the way in which Muslim children are taught to hate Jews was not that this is in fact abhorrent, but rather that the technique used by hateful Muslims is the very same technique used by the Jews to teach their children their religious belief systems and values. And the same technique used by Catholics to teach their children religious beliefs and values. My conclusion is that what is glaringly missing from the learned process of acquiring a belief (which is not only lasting but which would propel someone in to insane acts of violence) is that it requires absolutely no rational examination. There is no examination of just how Jews are monkeys and pigs - these children are told they just are. The children usually have no personal contact nor experience with Jews. And the fact that such a strong ingrained belief can be taught without any real examination by the believer, such that he or she can use that belief to kill someone, is (to me) eye opening. I wonder aloud if the majority (if not all) of the Christians and Jews realize that the way they formed their religious beliefs (and their values) is in this very same way those small Muslim children learned to believe that they are monkeys and pigs. The parallel to me was something that over-shadows the intended message of the Beck episode. Here was a parallel example of a way people acquire their beliefs in every major religion in the world - used to insinuate just how insane those beliefs were. It struck me that the same thing could easily be said about people who believe that god exists. Except that the belief in god is more universally accepted than killing Jews because they are monkeys and pigs. Fundamentalism is essentially a firm belief in anything that has no basis in “reason” or “logic”. I would add that these fundamental beliefs often involve a total lack of any examination of the belief. There’s no real thought about what it is we have learned to believe. And for some there never is. By this definition the Muslim extremist who believes Jews are monkeys and pigs is no different in his chosen belief than the Jew who believes god wants him to eat only Kosher foods. They each were taught this to be a truth; they each practice the truth without any rational thought as to the validity of it; they each follow the belief blindly and it dictate their actions. What separates them is simply the acceptability of the end result. We are not shocked by the Jew who refuses to eat a pig. We are, however, shocked and outraged (morally) by a Muslim who kills a Jew because he believes he is a pig. It’s a strange world we live in indeed.