JTA: The Global News Service of the Jewish People

Boteach: Why won’t Muslims speak out?

By Ami Eden · March 10, 2008

Shmuley Boteach wonders in the Jerusalem Post why Muslims aren't speaking out against last week's shooting attack at a yeshiva in Jerusalem:

The sight of Gazans rejoicing at the cold-blooded murder of eight yeshiva students who had not hurt anyone was particularly jolting for me. I am a religious man and feel an immediate affinity with all who profess a love for God and strive to live a life of religious devotion. Meeting religious people of different faiths is always a great pleasure for me. I feel an immediate sense of kinship with them.

But what shakes me to my core is when some of my Muslim brothers and sisters rejoice at the deaths of innocent Jews, particularly those who are at prayer in their yeshiva. When Baruch Goldstein did the same thing, killing 29 innocent Arabs in a mosque, I told the press in England, where I was living at the time, that this religious Jew had committed an abomination before God and that this killer had betrayed his Jewish faith in the most horrible way imaginable. ...

I recognize that those who danced represent a small and extremist minority. The vast majority of Muslims are kind and God-fearing people. But why, then, do more Muslims not publicly condemn and repudiate these haters...