"Living in a secular society, where you have to work to maintain your [religious] values, that's [a real struggle].


"[Religion] is a way of life. Ask anyone who practices.... A lot of people go to the church on Sunday, and that's their religion for their week. Mine is every single day, every minute of my day.


How can we believe the same things as them?



"I don't want any guy looking at me, except for my husband, provocatively. Why would I want that? Why do I want to be a piece of meat?


"I think the Western belief is that the more you have, the more prestigious you are and you compete with other people as to what you have. Who has a better car, who has a bigger house, who has the nicer purse. In [my religion], it's actually the total opposite. You're supposed to be humble...."


These sentences, and others like it, were uttered by a young native of Long Island, New York, and broadcast on an internationally-viewed television program. She prays daily, she is very spiritual, she has turned away from much of the West's "empty, materialistic" values with which she grew up, and she has traded them in for centuries-old truths based on the Bible. She exudes sincerity and the desire to do what's right in G-d's eyes.


No, she is not a young yeshiva high school graduate or baalat-teshuvah (newly observant), fresh off a year of study in Jerusalem. She is a Muslim.


Religious Jews watching the program - CNN's by now well-known G-d's Warriors by Christiane Amanpour - could not have been faulted for marveling to themselves, "Hey, she sounds just like us." Don't many of our families, like hers, shun TV, the pursuit of money for its own sake, and the constant encouragement of the pleasures of the flesh?


But at the same time, we feel an uncomfortable sense of discord. "We're at war with these people," we remind ourselves. "Many of them want to kill all of us. The whole world is waking up - to some extent, anyway - to the threat they represent; so how can we believe the same things as them?"


And the questions then keep coming, machine-gun style: Their religion is new, contrived, a distortion of what we received at Mt. Sinai. Have they merely taken it to its logical conclusion? Are they crazed - or are we not dedicated enough? Do we not care enough? How did Judaism's pure Torah values lead to the monster of today's extremist Islam?


Amanpour Provides the Answers
The answers are actually not as complex as they might seem, and are partially provided by Amanpour herself. She attributes the rise of modern-day militant extremist Islam to the writings of a Muslim thinker named Syed Qutb. Qutb was an Egyptian Sunni poet who came to the United States in 1948 to study, but was shocked by American culture, filled with secularism, male-female interaction, and materialism.


His solution? Destroy it by becoming a militant, murderous Islamist.


...another budding spiritual Muslim student seeking "truth and goodness" - Osama Bin-Laden.



Qutb returned to Egypt and preached a message of return to religion and violent jihad, even against Muslim governments. He set down in writing his sincere feelings of revulsion at American materialism, outlining in detail the ills of the West, the dangers it presented to the youth, and the ways in which it mortally threatened G-d's rule in the world.


Later cruelly executed by Gamal Abdel Nasser's government, his writings inspired hoards of Muslim radicals, including another budding spiritual Muslim student seeking "truth and goodness" - Osama Bin-Laden.


Thus arose a new religious duty: fight, bomb, murder, destroy. Anything or anyone out of sync with Islam's vision of a perfect world became a target.


And there you have it - the opposite of the Jewish Torah's approach. Judaism teaches us to recognize evil, to "depart" from it (Psalms 34:15), and to overcome it - but not to destroy G-d's world in the process.


The Golden Rule
"The truly righteous," Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook summed up, "do not rail against evil, but rather increase goodness." How many truly religious extremist Muslims would subscribe to that so-golden rule?


According to Jewish tradition, one of Judaism's most revered teachers, the second-century Rabbi Shimon Bar-Yochai, secluded himself in a cave for 12 years, studying the secrets of Creation. When he came out, it was with literally a burning desire to raise up the world. When he saw people farming and trading, he cried out, "Dealing in transient matters instead of eternal life?" His fierce gaze burned up whatever he looked at. A heavenly voice then declared, "Did you come out to destroy My world? Go back to your cave!"


Rabbi Shimon, author of the Kabbalah, learned that the religious duty of improving the world does not mean destroying it first - but rather relying on G-d to run His world as He wishes, while we work on ourselves.


How many extremist Muslims would be Kabbalists?


It is taught that a similar conclusion was reached in a discussion between Roman philosophers and Jewish scholars, in which the former asked why G-d does not simply destroy the targets of idol worship. The sages responded: "The evil ones worship the sun, the moon, and the valleys - shall He destroy the world because of the fools? Instead, He allows the world to run its natural course, and the evil ones will pay the price in the future."


This, then, seems to be the essence of true faith, as taught in the Torah - before being distorted by Qutb, Bin-Laden and other Muslim "holy men." It's G-d's world, He expects us to be good, and He'll take care of the rest.


Religious men of all faiths agree that G-d has no dearth of options for dealing with those He deems evil: He can destroy them via monsoon, meteor strike, or mysterious plague; He can illuminate their spiritual darkness with the unmistakable light of truth and goodness; He can wait until the World to Come to even the score; various combinations of the above; and more. But us mortals, we have to fight evil within ourselves, and share what we have found with others - not beat, burn or bomb them to death with it.

"The truly righteous," Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook summed up, "do not rail against evil, but rather increase goodness."



Yes, there are many instances where the Jewish directive is to "destroy the evil from your midst," and even to go to all-out war. But these are exceptions, not the rule. They are specific, local commands, with strict guidelines and precautions to ensure that only what must be fought is fought, and to guarantee that the spirit of hatred and destruction not take over our character in their wake (see commentaries to Deuteronomy 13:18).


Spiritual Goals - or Physical Pleasures?
Certainly, Islam is founded to some extent on many of the Torah's values. But the book of the Prophet Hosea (whose message was delivered well over 1,000 years before Mohammad) concludes, "G-d's ways are straight; the righteous will walk in them, while the sinners will stumble upon them." Osama Bin-Laden, Syed Qutb, and possibly tens of millions of would-be suicide mass murderers stumbled on the "improve My world" part. Or could it be that most of them are just banking on a pleasures-of-the-flesh world-to-come to replace this one?


In any event, in their zeal to "make the world safe for G-d" they have made it uninhabitable for Him. The ultra-catastrophic results will continue if the world continues to view extremist Islam as a natural offshoot of Jewish values - as CNN's G-d's Warriors could lead us to believe.