For the Torah to preserve its applicability, the human mentality must not have changed over the three thousands years. Indeed.

After the Church was no longer able to censor the books, the Left took its turn and censored everything from Tom Sawyer to hate speech. The three hundred Spartans who died at Thermopiles would have readily recognized Japanese defense at Iwo Jima or Russian defense of Moscow. The command to slew Canaanites reverberated with European settlers in America. The command to slew Amalek for ancient offenses finds approval among those Muslims who blame the West for the loss of Alhambra. The sight of French atrocities in Vietnam won't be unusual to ancient Hebrews returning from punitive expeditions; both nations, ideologically inspired, refrained from spoils. Children were sacrificed to Moloch; now parents send their children to die for national ideals. Human mentality didn't change but was exacerbated by technology. Fire-bombings of Coventry and Tokyo replaced stakes. Murder became unfashionable now that people can distance themselves from it and kill with a push of button. Affluent societies can afford sentencing criminals for decades instead of executing him; the efforts to prevent suicide in jails show that imprisonment is often worse than execution. Automatic rifles replaced swords, and soldiers don't need to do the grisly killing at close-up; killing is done from a distance. Mechanized, impersonal murder spells the absence of moral restraints; the twentieth century saw the history's largest massacres – many of them. From video game mentality of virtual murder to the screens of net-centric warfare, people are ready to wipe out those blips on the screens.

And the commandments apply to Ehud Olmert just as they applied to Joshua bin Nun.