Christian Attitudes

Link: http://jta.org/page_view_breaking_story.asp?intid=286

Today, five innocent Israeli victims were murdered by a Palestinian terrorist in Natanya. An unconvincing ‘condemnation’ was voiced by Mahmoud Abbas, who makes no attempt to curb terrorists in the PA. At least this Muslim Holocaust denier, who allegedly financed the Munich Massacre, tried to give an appearance of disapproval. Will there be any similar condemnation by Christian Arab leaders?

How about Patriarch of Terror, Michel Sabbah? In 2002 he said:

Ours is an occupied country, which explains why people are tired and blow themselves up. The Israelis tell Palestinians: Stop the violence and you will have what you want without violence. But one has seen in the history of the last ten years that the Israelis have moved only when forced by violence. Unfortunately, nothing but violence makes people march. And not only here. Every country has been born in blood.

Will he say anything different now?

Or how about the Anglican Bishop of Jerusalem, Riah Abu El-Assalis,* who said last month, in answer to the question, "Suicide bombing – is that terrorism?"

I, personally, am against any form of violence. Occupation is an act of terrorism. Humiliating people at checkpoints is an act of terrorism. ... I'm not justifying [terrorism], don't misunderstand. The easiest thing for people who are Christians to help them understand is to go to the Bible and read the story of Samson. When I was a kid in Sunday school, I applauded Samson for what he did. I didn't realize he was the first suicide bomber. Nobody spoke of Samson as a terrorist. Everybody speaks of Samson as a hero.

Or the Greek Orthodox priest, Attallah Hanna, who supports suicide bombing?

Or the new Greek-Orthodox Patriarch of Jerusalem Teophilos III, who
has just promoted the above-mentioned suicide-bomber-sympathist Attallah Hanna, by making him a bishop?

How about other Christian Arabs, like Christian Arabs & Middle East Christians for Peace, who claim to “support moderate voices of Christians throughout the Middle East.”?

We oppose violence and view suicide bombings as terrorism. We view Israeli military provocations and settler militancy as terrorism.

In other words, they see Israeli self-defence as ‘terrorism’. And just how many ‘settlers’ have blown themselves up among crowds of Arab women and children?

This site links to the weasel words of Sabeel’s Naim Ateek in his essay Suicide Bombers in which he claims to condemn them, while at the same time writing of them with warm sympathy and making it clear who he thinks are the real terrorists.

As a Christian, I know that the way of Christ is the way of nonviolence and, therefore, I condemn all forms of violence and terrorism whether coming from the government of Israel or from militant Palestinian groups

After blaming Israel and the ‘occupation’ he then goes on to claim, like the Anglican Bishop of Jerusalem, that the Jewish Samson was a terrorist.

Meanwhile, here is a Muslim organisation which condemns terrorism and anti-Semitism. I have yet to read anything as forthright from a Christian Arab source, but will keep on looking.

*If you need to to register for a site this might help.

Link: http://www.hcef.org/hcef/index.cfm/mod/news/ID/16/SubMod/NewsView/NewsID/1387.cfm

Forget the message of peace and good will which is supposed to come with Christmas – this is one of hate and ill-will from a group of Palestinian ‘Christians’. It is a long, whining screed, packed with every dishonest cliché they can find in the Palestinian propaganda handbook.

BETHLEHEM the glorious birth-place of Jesus Christ has been witnessing very difficult and harsh conditions ever since the Israeli Occupation. This sacred city of peace has turned to be a huge prison full of misery, agony and anger.

The Israeli occupation has desecrated the land of Bethlehem through long closures, checkpoints, the devastation of roads the uprooting of thousands of olive trees and land destruction. These extreme measures have been practiced to beat the spirits of the Bethlehemites.

And so it goes on, full of self-pity, especially about the ‘apartheid wall’. Innocent Jewish lives count for nothing before Palestinian inconvenience, or the frustration caused by not being able to carry out the occasional massacre of school children on buses. Their olive trees seem more important than those children. Also, lies about the destruction of olive trees play an important role in Palestinian propaganda.

Tops all these catastrophic inhuman violations is the New Terminal of Bethlehem, which is the recent tribulation to all Palestinians. The Israelis are implementing strict and humiliating searching procedures on Palestinians, tourists and pilgrims. Is this what occupiers claim to be a means of their safety and security? Israel is denying the Palestinians human rights without thinking of the consequences. This is because we the Palestinians are forgotten and ignored by the international Christian community.

Why do Palestinian Christians keep claiming that they are forgotten and ignored by the rest of the Christian world? I read Catholic newspapers and an assortment of Christian news websites, and a disproportionate amount of space is given to the bitter whinges of these people. They blame the Jews for all their troubles and try to resurrect the old Christian anti-Semitism while so many others are trying hard to bury the monster.

Something about the authors of this poisonous nonsense:

Laity Committee in the Holy Land (LCHL) is an interest group of Palestinian laity Christians from all denominations seeking to activate the Christian role in the general aspects of the Palestinian life.

So what have lies, hatred, simmering resentment got to do with ‘activating the Christian role’? These people bear a terrible witness to Christianity.

Link: http://www.agi.it/english/news.pl?doc=200511301343-1096-RT1-CRO-0-NF11&page=0&id=agionline-eng.oggitalia

The Holocaust was a "vile, murderous operation, that remains as an indelible disgrace in the story of human kind." Pope Benedict XVI does not mince his words when describing the deportation of Jews to the death camps. Commenting on the 136 psalm which evokes the tragedy experienced by the Jewish people during the destruction of Jerusalem, in 586 BC and the subsequent Babylonian exile, the pope recalled the tragedy of the Shoah, seeing the first part of the psalm as a "symbolic forerunner". "The first part of the psalm has as its background the land of exile, with its rivers and canals, those that irrigated the Babylonian plains, where the exiled Jews lived." To the more than 25,000 faithful in St. Peters' Square, the Pope assured that "God, who is the final judge of history, will know how to understand and meet, in his mercy, the cries of the victims despite the bitter tones this sometimes assumes."

The Vatican's own news site provides a few more details:

The Holy Father commented on the biblical composition which begins: "By the rivers of Babylon." The psalm evokes the tragedy of the Jewish people, exiled in Babylon after the destruction of Jerusalem in 586 B.C...

...The background of the psalm is the land of exile, with its rivers and canals, which watered the plain of Babylon, headquarters of the deported Jews.

The Jews' suffering is illustrated with the voices of the Babylonians asking them to sing to amuse them. And the psalm exclaims: "But how could we sing a song of the Lord in a foreign land?"

"It is as a symbolic anticipation of the extermination camps in which the Jewish people -- in the century that just ended -- were led to an infamous operation of death, which has remained as an indelible disgrace in the history of humanity," said the German-born Pope.

Other news sites translates his words as an indelible human shame or indelible stain on human history.

It is clear that he is determined to continue following in the footsteps of the late John Paul II in his condemnation of anti-Semitism and efforts to improve Catholic attitudes to Jews.

Link: http://www.asianews.it/view.php?l=en&art=4754

Thanks to Mystery Achievement for drawing attention to the prejudice which bubbles over in every article about Israel in Asia News. No, Asia News is not a secular news outlet from China, but a Catholic one from the Pontifical Institute for Foreign Missions.

If you look carefully at the masthead, you'll notice that Asia News is a service of the Pontifical Institute for Foreign Missions (known by its Italian initials as P.I.M.E.) In other words, this is not an online tabloid of some SSPX RadTrads. This is the news service of an arm of the Catholic Church publishing this anti-Semitic claptrap.

The article linked in the heading, Bethlehem’s Christians appeal to all pilgrims to visit Nativity, happily repeats every slander against Israel it can find in a hate-filled appeal it received, while sprinkling scare quotes liberally around the worst of them, to maintain an appearance of propriety on their own part.

A “demand” that each and every pilgrimage includes a visit to Bethlehem, which has now turned into “an open-air prison” in which Christians are confined, “robbed” of their lands by the wall Israel is building, “strangled economically” by the closing off of the city. Priests, religious men and women and lay Christians in Bethlehem have launched an appeal to “Christian pilgrims”, urging them to renew pilgrimages to the town where Jesus was born in the lead-up to Christmas, to bring concrete solidarity against this “modern barbarity”.

“However, ahimé, Bethlehem’s Christians are closed in an open-air prison by an eight-meter wall, which is robbing them of land essential for their survival. The closure of the traditional route to reach the Basilica of the Nativity and the opening of a new checkpoint which forces even pilgrims to wait for hours to leave Bethlehem, is a form of modern barbarism to strangle a town economically, to impose daily insecurity on a people and to give a semblance of legality to gross religious discrimination: while Jewish believers are allowed to visit Rachel’s Tomb in peace, Christians of the Holy Land and the rest of the world meet obstacles to enter and leave Bethlehem.”

This article is typical. Asia News devotes a special page to the subject of The wall between Israel and Palestine but no space at all is devoted to subjects like terrorism or incitement.

On that page there is even an article in which an attack is made on Elie Wiesel for daring the criticise the Pope’s remark about the ‘wall’.

In his interview appearing in Corriere della Sera, the chief spokesman for Diaspora Jews, Elie Wiesel, criticized the pope’s words on the barrier dividing Israelis and Palestinians. “I expected something quite different from the spiritual leader of the one of the world’s greatest and most important religions. Or (at least) a declaration condemning terror and the murdering of innocent people, without mixing in political considerations,” she said.

Asia News makes sure we read the following angry response:

Fr. David Maria Jaeger, an Israeli Franciscan from the Holy Land, is embittered by statements made about the pope by Elie Wiesel in the Italian daily Corriere della Sera (Nov. 17 2003). He defined them as “embarrassing” and advised Weisel to “seek forgiveness”.

In his written comment to sent to AsiaNews, the Franciscan priest and spokesman for the Custody of the Holy Land commission said: “The statements against the pope –attributed to Elie Weisel in today’s Corriere della Sera –are embarrassing. May he repent and seek forgiveness. Moreover, may she be aware that any anti-Catholic invective must not be any less unacceptable than those aimed at Jews. We, as Catholics and Jews, must join together in combating against prejudice and misinformation, and not one another.”

“She”? Perhaps a typing error, but that the editorial staff haven’t bothered to correct it is insulting. Or perhaps they are so ignorant that they don't know that Elie Wiesel is a man.

Two other pages are devoted to articles on Israel which are largely negative.

There is more evidence of their willingness to repeat any snide remarks made about the Jewish state in this article, Israel slams swearing-in of Theophilos III as a “serious impropriety”

The new Patriarch commented about Israel’s attitude the day after his coronation, in an interview with the daily newspaper, Haaretz. Theophilos said Israel “was reminiscent of the Ottoman era, when the patriarchate was subject to the arbitrary discretion of the ruling sultans”.

Wait until there is Palestinian rule in ‘Palestine’, Patriarch – then you’ll find out how ruling sultans really behave towards Christians. Meanwhile, for all the recent improvements, the Catholic Church still has some house-cleaning to do

Link: http://www.acbc.catholic.org.au/bishops/200511257.htm

The Australian Bishops have published a statement to mark the 40th anniversary of Nostra Aetate.

The statement was a turning-point in the long and tortured history of the relationship between Christians and Jews. Since 1965, Nostra Aetate has had a great impact on that relationship, and that is cause for thanksgiving after so much sorrow and suffering.

In Australia, it has meant that the Catholic Church has become increasingly involved in dialogue and collaboration with the Jewish community, and in this anniversary year we commit ourselves to developing still further the friendship that has been struck and the mutual respect which this implies.

It's good to know that there are mainstream Catholics, especially among their leadership, who support this - unlike sad trad 'Catholics' like the Society of St Pius X and the equally anti-Semitic trendy variety in Caritas, who indulge in the old prejudice under its new disguise of anti-Israelism and a pretended concern for justice, although that doesn't extend to justice for Israelis.

Oh yes, and I mustn't forget this excellent article by Charles Moore (a Catholic): How did we forget that Israel's story is the story of the West?. Not all Catholic bishops or laity see so clearly, but it's reassuring to know that some of them do.