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Entry: The Dream team Link: http://www.takimag.com/blogs/article/the_dream_team#16741 Post contents: With due respect to Kari, what I find in his comments is the foreign policy position heard among my leftwing Anabaptist colleagues. I can't think of any phrase in the Old or New Testament that obliges a believer to let enemies occupy one's country and threaten one's family without offering resistance. Jesus does not urge anything as weird as this position. He teaches the individual how to be saintly and how to prepare for the Kingdom of Heaven. He is not constructing a foreign policy for the Jews, Greeks, or anyone else. Unlike Jesus, however, the Old Testament never teaches the Jews to love their enemies. Although Jesus's precept may be commendable, it is not a Jewish one, anymore than it is an attempt to reconfigure American foreign policy. Speaking for myself,although I doubt that Leon would dissent, it is quite possible to justify force as a defensive weapon if one's country is really being threatened,while opposing the Jacobin or Trotskyist imperialism preached by the neocons. The two are not the same. For while I despise ideological warmongers as a public nuisance, I would not disapprove of the Poles for failing to welcome the armies of Hitler or Stalin into their country. Their resistance deserves our praise and should not be vewed as as a dereliction of their religious duties. Sent at: 2008 11 22