In an effort to enhance Israel’s increasingly tarnished image as a racist and terrorist state, Israeli ambassador to the U.S. Michael Oren hosted a dinner on Thursday, 26 August, honoring the holy month of Ramadan. The event took place as Israeli troops were slaughtering Palestinian civilians in the Gaza Strip in full view of the international community. The Israeli occupation army killed as many as 30 Palestinians in the past few days. Many of the victims were innocent civilians, including several teen-age boys and girls. Israel has killed or the caused the death of thousands of mostly innocent Palestinian civilians since the apartheid state imposed a draconian siege on the Gaza Strip, after the Palestinian Islamic Liberation movement, Hamas, won internationally-observed elections in the occupied Palestinian territories in 2006. In 2008-09, the Israeli army carried out a virtually genocidal blitzkrieg against the coastal enclave, killing and maiming thousands of innocent civilians, including as many as 350 children according to conservative estimates. The Nazi-like onslaught, in which state-of-the-art of the American technology of death was used, also utterly destroyed thousands of homes, mosques, bridges, schools and other civilian infrastructure. The 21-day campaign, in which White Phosphorus was used against civilians, was compared to the worst Nazi onslaughts against Jews and others during the Second World War. Oren’s guests included officials from the Whitehouse, Congress and the State Department as well as several rabbis and low-ranking imams. “There’s a lot of misinformation about Israel and we want to show we’re open to dialogue and reconciliation,” Oren told CNN. “We can begin to build bridges on an interpersonal level.” The event was dismissed as “an exposed public relations stunt” that is aimed at diverting attention from Israel’s Nazi-like behavior, especially its increasingly fascist discourse against non-Jews in general and Muslims in particular. One North African diplomat, who was invited but declined to attend, called the event “a futile effort to make murderers and child killers in Israel look humane and civilized.” The diplomat, M. Makhlofi, said the world should pay more attention to what Israel is doing in Gaza and the West Bank, not to propagandistic public relation events aimed at enhancing Israel’s ugly image. “The Ramadan dinner in Washington is really mixed with the blood of Palestinian children. Israel hosts uniformed or misinformed American Muslims to a Ramadan dinner. At the same time, Israel rains one-ton bombs on the heads of Palestinian children in Gaza, killing them and incinerating their young, tender bodies.” In addition to its clearly murderous approach toward the Palestinians, including Israel’s own Palestinian citizens who make up nearly one fourth of the population, the Israeli government has been introducing decidedly-racist laws forcing non-Jewish citizens to pledge loyalty to Talmudic Judaism. Moreover, several high-ranking rabbinic leaders have been pressing and pressuring the government of Benymain Netanyahu and the Israeli parliament, the Knesset, to adopt brazenly racist laws that would effectively transform Israel into a state ruled by Halacha or Jewish law. According to Jewish religious law, non-Jews living in a Jewish religious state must be enslaved as “water carriers or wood hewers.” As to Palestinians in the occupied territories, fundamentalist Jewish groups, which more or less control the Israeli government, advocate the adoption of three pornographically racist alternatives in dealing with them: enslavement, expulsion or genocide. Advocates of genocide readily quote from the Talmud and Bible to justify their Nazi-like ideology. The harsh extremism characterizing this racist religious ideology stems mainly form the traditional Orthodox Jewish perception toward non-Jews in general. Many or most Orthodox rabbis view non-Jews as virtual animals or sub-human beings whose life has no sanctity, at least in comparison to Jews. One famous rabbi, Ovadia Yosef, recently declared that all non-Jews were like donkeys and that the Almighty created them solely to serve the master race, the Jews. Yosef is the religious and spiritual mentor of Shas, the third most powerful political party in Israel . Sometimes, anti-goyem racism assumes a truly ugly expression. One rabbi, associated with the powerful Chabad movement, ruled recently that a Jew may perfectly legitimately murder a non-Jew in order to extract his or her heart or kidney or any other organ if the Jew needs one. Reform, conservative as well as progressive Jews don’t accept their Orthodox brethren’s barbaric interpretation of ancient scriptures. However, objection to the manifestly racist interpretation of the scriptures is motivated, in many but not all cases, by fears that anti-goyem racism could generate anti-Semitism and harm Jews in the global village.