"Synagogues" and demagogues

George Bush has condemned the Palestinians for destroying the "synagogues" of Gaza. What complete and utter nonsense. Leaving those buildings standing, when the Israelis had demolished every other building they had occupied, was nothing more than a cynical ploy, which Bush fell for, or rather, took the opportunity to demagogue about, since not even Bush is stupid enough to have "fallen for" something so transparent. The deputy chairman of the French parliament claimed it was "reminiscent" of acts of Nazi anti-Semites, cleverly smearing the Palestinians without actually calling them anti-Semites. In fact, these buildings no longer had anything to do with Judaism, but they had everything to do with occupation.
In the U.S. (and, I guess, elsewhere), small suburban Jewish congregations will occasionally share a building with a congregation of another faith. What makes a building a synagogue isn't that it was built by Jews, or that Jews have on occasion worshipped there; what makes it a synagogue as far as I can determine is the presence of one or more Torahs. And I feel rather confident in saying that there were no Torahs left in the "synagogues" of Gaza.

If the buildings themselves had been so sacred, the Israelis could have torn them down brick by brick and rebuilt them elsewhere, or just jacked the building up and towed it away. Not only weren't they synagogues any more, they weren't even sacred -- some of them, at least, had most recently been used as fortresses from which the occupants could actually attack not just their fellow human beings, but their fellow Jews no less.