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since Wed, 26 Dec 2007 20:04:17.
Internalizing Jewish anti-Gentile Polemic
by Joachim Martillo (ThorsProvoni@aol.com)
On Feb 18, 2008 James Carroll published Reviving an old insult to the Jews in the Boston Globe (see below). This article demanded that the Catholic Church alter its liturgy because the current revived Latin version offends Jews. Not only did Carroll refrain from requesting any reciprocal modification of Jewish religious practices and texts, which denigrate Christians, but he admitted that his real concern resulted from fear of a potentially changing interpretation or possible future abandonment of the Nostra Aetate declaration, which he described as the high point of Vatican II.
Historic Jewish Denigration of Christians and Muslims
During the nineteenth century Christian governments and especially the Czarist government encouraged religious and social reforms among Jews. Usually, at least a part of the Jewish community welcomed change and often attempted to work with the non-Jewish government.
Even very conservative Jewish congregations often dropped that portion of the Aleinu prayer that insults non-Jews, i.e., Christians, by claiming they pray to vanity and emptiness. As a result of governmental or self-censorship, the common versions of the Talmuds and other Jewish texts dropped or modified passages that denigrated Jesus, accused Mary of prostitution and otherwise attacked Christian theology. (See Christianity in Talmud and Midrash by R. Travers Herford, Jesus in the Talmud by Peter Schäfer, and below for Hebrew Text with Translation and Transliteration.)
Ariel Scheib explains the change to Aleinu as follows.
Many different sects within Judaism have eliminated various verses in the prayer over time. Many Ashkenazi and Reform prayer books have removed the verse "la-hevel va-rik" (vanity and emptiness), because its numerical connotation equals that of Jesus and Muhammad. For centuries Jews in Eastern Europe were attacked by the Church if caught reciting this verse in the Aleinu prayer. However, most Sephardic and Israeli siddurim leave this verse in the Aleinu. Additionally, nearly all Reform congregations have eliminated the verse "for God has not made us like the nations of the land." During the establishment of the Reform movement, many Jews sought the complete integration of the Jewish people into their mother country. This verse was extracted as a result of the proclamation that the Jewish people were the "Chosen People" and unlike other citizens. In the Diaspora, Jews did not want to be singled-out in society, merely because they were Jews.
In point of fact, many Jewish congregations — even in Eastern Europe — removed the "vanity and emptiness" portion because of the influence of Enlightenment ideas and not because of Church intimidation.
Refocusing Reform
Refocusing Reform
With increasing secularization, assimilation, and the development of an Eastern European Jewish intelligentsia, a fairly large segment of the Central and Eastern European Jewish population lost interest in reform of Jews by the middle nineteenth century while increasing numbers of Jews became involved in radical movements to "reform" gentiles, gentile countries, and ultimately the gentile world.
Because such activities provoked a gentile and a Jewish reaction, by the latter half of the nineteenth century a smaller segment of Central and Eastern European Jewish population decided to pass on reforming gentiles, seize a territory and make it their own with no consideration whatsoever of the gentiles that lived there or of the violence such a program would do to Rabbinic Jewish theology.
The radicals found their opportunity in the Russian Revolution and became the quintessential Soviet class. (See The Jewish Century by Yuri Slezkine.)
In "reforming" the gentiles of the Soviet Union, Soviet Jews produced some of the most notorious planners and perpetrators of mass murder, ethnic cleansing and genocide of the twentieth century. (See Stalin's Jews and The Pattern of Ethnic Ashkenazi Genocidalism: The Jewish Century by Yuri Slezkine.)
Somewhat later Zionist Jews "reformed" Arab Palestine out of existence by uprooting the native population and for all intents and purposes murdering the indigenous Arab culture in order to create a Zionist state. (See The Unrepentant Genocidaires and More Jewish Genocide Denial.)
Both Soviet and Zionist Ashkenazim also had programs of Jewish "reform."
Because the quintessential Soviet class could not belong to a national group, whose membership mostly resided outside of the USSR, the Jewish Section of the Soviet Communist Party worked hard to eradicate Yiddish culture within the Soviet Union and to make sure the Jewish population conformed to Soviet ideals.
With the establishment of the State of Israel, Soviet Jewish communists could no longer maintain the fiction there was no Jewish nationality outside of the USSR, and Soviet Jews lost their privileged status within the Soviet hierarchy.
Zionist Jews had their own problems with Jewish culture that did not correspond to Central and Eastern European Zionist ideals. Yet, because the Zionist invaders in Palestine did not have the numbers to hold stolen Palestine in the face of Arab hostility, the Zionist leadership created conditions to force Jewish Arabs and other Oriental Jewish communities to leave their homelands for the new State of Israel, where the Zionist government made a systematic brutal effort to "reform" the new immigrants of by stripping them of their Arab and oriental culture that European Jewish Zionists viewed as primitive. (See Attacking Shohat: Falsifying Jewish History.)
Meanwhile, even though the project of Jewish self-reform lasted longer among American Jews than it did in Europe, probably out of a feeling of confidence with Zionist or imagined Soviet Jewish success and because of concerns related to the Holocaust, various groups American Jews developed their own program to "reform" general American society.
Jewish radicals focused on economic change and civil rights. The organized Jewish community later appropriated the latter project, which tended to help Jews move into the American elite. With McCarthyism and the Rosenberg Trial, American Jewish radicalism began a long decline and has been for the most part written out of official Jewish histories of the American Jewish community. (See American Judaism, A History, by Jonathan D. Sarna.)
In response to now defunct Jewish radicalism with which he grew up, Milton Friedman developed a free market capitalist ideology. (See The Shock Doctrine, The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, by Naomi Klein.)
Friedmanism has successfully promoted its own form of withering away of the state via privatization in the USA, South America, Eastern Europe, and East Asia with a brutality that can only be compared with Stalinism. In the twenty-first century Friedmanism has effectively become a modern version of the Polish arenda system that led to the Chmielnicki Rebellion in the Ukraine. From the standpoint of the new globalist lords and estate managers, Friedmanism is superior because they are protected by Blackwater-style mercenaries with overwhelming firepower or because they are too remote for the anger of their serfs to reach them.
While Friedmanism has needed fifty years of cultivation to reach full fruition, the organized American Jewish community had its first major success with reforming gentiles by introducing a new fundamentalist interpretation of basic American principles. Irving Kristol provides the following analysis in On the Political Stupidity of American Jews.
In general, the political handling of controversial religious and moral issues in the United States prior to World War II was a triumph of reasoned experience over abstract dogmatism. Unfortunately, since around 1950, it is abstract dogmatism that has triumphed over reasoned experience in American public life. As everyone knows, this unwarranted and unfortunate reversal has provoked a constitutional crisis where there had never been one before. And much as I regret to say this, the sad fact is that American Jews have played a very important role--in some ways a crucial role--in creating this crisis.It is a fairly extraordinary story when one stops to think about it. In the decades after World War II, as anti-Semitism declined precipitously, and as Jews moved massively into the mainstream of American life, the official Jewish organizations took advantage of these new circumstances to prosecute an aggressive campaign against any public recognition, however slight, of the fact that most Americans are Christian. It is not that the leaders of the Jewish organizations were anti-religious. Most of the Jewish advocates of a secularized "public square" were themselves members of Jewish congregations. They believed, in all sincerity, that religion should be the private affair of the individual. Religion belonged in the home, in the church and synagogue, and nowhere else. And they believed in this despite the fact that no society in history has ever acceded to the complete privatization of a religion embraced by the overwhelming majority of its members. The truth, of course, is that there is no way that religion can be obliterated from public life when 95 percent of the population is Christian. There is no way of preventing the Christian holidays, for instance, from spilling over into public life. But again, before World War II, there were practically no Jews who cared about such things. I went to a public school, where the children sang carols at Christmastime. Even among those Jews who sang them, I never knew a single one who was drawn to the practice of Christianity by them. Sometimes, the schools sponsored Nativity plays, and the response of the Jews was simply not to participate in them. There was no public "issue" until the American Civil Liberties Union--which is financed primarily by Jews--arrived on the scene with the discovery that Christmas carols and pageants were a violation of the Constitution. As a matter of fact, our Jewish population in the United States believed in this so passionately that when the Supreme Court, having been prodded by the aclu, ruled it unconstitutional for the Ten Commandments to be displayed in a public school, the Jewish organizations found this ruling unobjectionable. People who wanted their children to know about the Ten Commandments could send their children to heder.Since there was a powerful secularizing trend among American Christians after World War II, there was far less outrage over all this than one might have anticipated. Of course, it has not always been so, and Americans have always thought of themselves as a Christian nation--one with a secular government, which was equally tolerant of all religions so long as they were congruent with traditional Judeo-Christian morality. But equal toleration under the law never meant perfect equality of status in fact. Christianity is not the legally established religion in the United States, but it is established informally, nevertheless. And in the past forty years, this informal establishment in American society has grown more secure, even as the legal position of religion in public life has been attenuated. In this respect, the United States differs markedly from the democracies of Western Europe, where religion continues steadily to decline and is regarded as an anachronism grudgingly tolerated. In the United States, religion is more popular today than it was in the 1960s, and its influence is growing, so the difference between the United States and Europe becomes more evident with every passing year. Europeans are baffled and a little frightened by the religious revival in America, while Americans take the continuing decline of religion in Europe as just another symptom of European decadence.And even as the Christian revival in the United States gathers strength, the Jewish community is experiencing a modest religious revival of its own. Alarmed by a rate of intermarriage approaching 50 percent, the money and energy that used to go into fighting anti-Semitism, or Israel Bonds, is now being channeled into Jewish education. Jewish day schools have become more popular, and the ritual in both Reform and Conservative synagogues has become more traditional. But this Jewish revival does not prevent American Jews from being intensely and automatically hostile to the concurrent Christian revival. It is fair to say that American Jews wish to be more Jewish while at the same time being frightened at the prospect of American Christians becoming more Christian. It is also fair to say that American Jews see nothing odd in this attitude. Intoxicated with their economic, political and judicial success over the past half-century, American Jews seem to have no reluctance in expressing their vision of an ideal America: A country where Christians are purely nominal, if that, in their Christianity, while they want the Jews to remain a flourishing religious community. One can easily understand the attractiveness of this vision to Jews. What is less easy to understand is the chutzpah of American Jews in publicly embracing this dual vision. Such arrogance is, I would suggest, a peculiarly Jewish form of political stupidity.
Not only did Neoconservative Jews like Kristol eventually manage rather opportunistically to use opposition to such Jewish-sponsored or favored secularization reforms to ally themselves with socially conservative generally Zionist Christian evangelicals by supporting a pro-religious Christian political agenda, but as the secularization program progressed, American Jewish leaders worked on creating Christian-Jewish interfaith dialogue, which probably became more feasible as American society became less religious.
Vatican II, Nostra Aetate and the Jewish Reform of the Catholic Church
Some of the most important Catholic Jewish discussions — especially those between Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel and German Roman Catholic Cardinal Bea — overlapped with the Second Vatican Council, which represented an attempt of the leadership of the Roman Catholic Church to respond to the numerous changes throughout the world in the aftermath of WW2.
Some of the most important Catholic Jewish discussions — especially those between Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel and German Roman Catholic Cardinal Bea — overlapped with the Second Vatican Council, which represented an attempt of the leadership of the Roman Catholic Church to respond to the numerous changes throughout the world in the aftermath of WW2.
Reuven Kimelman discusses the goal and reservations of two important American Jewish scholars with regard to interreligious conversation in Rabbis Joseph B. Soloveitchik and Abraham Joshua Heschel on Jewish-Christian Relations. Kimelman reports (pp. 6-7) that R. Heschel called an early draft of Nostra Aetate "spiritual fratricide" because it did not renounce conversion of Jews. Heschel declared that "faced with the choice of conversion or death in the gas chambers of Auschwitz, he would choose Auschwitz."
Heschel essentially asserted the identity of traditional Christianity and German Nazism. It is the fundamental equivalence principle of Holocaust Religion and is meant to make Christians feel so guilty about the Holocaust that they will refrain from criticizing Zionist crimes in Palestine. The final draft of Nostra Aetate expresses this idea implicitly.
Furthermore, in her rejection of every persecution against any man, the Church, mindful of the patrimony she shares with the Jews and moved not by political reasons but by the Gospel's spiritual love, decries hatred, persecutions, displays of anti-Semitism, directed against Jews at any time and by anyone.Praeterea, Ecclesia, quae omnes persecutiones in quosvis homines reprobat, memor communis cum Iudaeis patrimonii, nec rationibus politicis sed religiosa caritate evangelica impulsa, odia, persecutiones, antisemitismi manifestationes, quovis tempore et a quibusvis in Iudaeos habita, deplorat. (See below for ADL's "Interfaith" Enmeshment by Karin Friedemann with Joachim Martillo.)
Kimelman provides on pp. 13-14 a summary of the result of the Christian-Jewish dialogue in which Heschel participated.
Finally, we should ask whether R. Heschel's approach continues to bear fruit in the twenty-first century. In 2003, the Statement by the Christian Scholars Group entitled "A Sacred Obligation: Rethinking Christian Faith in Relation to Judaism and the Jewish People" offered the following ten statements for the consideration of their fellow Christians:
Except for item 7, which undermines fundamental Catholic theology of the incarnation of Christ, the mission of the Church and the sacrifice of Jesus, this new Decalogue (Ten Commandments) is implicit in Nostra Aetate and its official translation.
Item 1 is Zionist slicing-and-dicing of scripture and misidentifies the Covenant with Israel in a way that leads to pro-Zionist misinterpretation.
Item 2 is historical nonsense. Jesus most certainly was not a Jew in any modern sense. He was a Galilean, who practiced a form of Second Temple Judaism that most probably approximated modern Islam. (See Islamic Marcionism in Malaysia.)
Item 6 is true in that misinterpreting the Covenant with Israel makes a total hash of any Christian concept of salvation.
Item 9 is simply Zionist propaganda. Peretz Smolenskin describes the historical Jewish view of the land of Israel in "Let Us Search Our Ways" (1881), which Arthur Hertzberg included in his anthology, The Zionist Idea, A Historical Analysis and Reader (pp. 148-153).
Eretz Israel! Just a few short years ago this word was derided by almost all Jews except those who wished to be buried there (p.151).
In his article Kimelmen observed, "Now [1964-5] Judaism through the State of Israel is at the apex of its temporal power, whereas the Church is at its nadir" (p. 9).
If anything, because the Christian Scholars Group showed parrot-like willingness to repeat Zionist propaganda at American Jewish command, the new Decalogue demonstrates that in 2003 the power relationship even more disproportionately favors Jews over Christians in the USA.
No one should be surprised that nowadays practically all Orthodox congregations have restored the deleted passage of Aleinu, and the non-Orthodox have shown similar tendencies while modern editions of Jewish texts almost invariably restore all passages potentially offensive to Christians. Yet, the Christian Scholars Group, which obsequiously offered to eviscerate fundamental Christian theology to please Jews, made no reciprocal suggestion to Jews that they reconsider disrespectful Jewish practices and texts.
In fact, even though Christian Scholars are ready to renounce their mission to the Jews, Jewish groups continue to work on reforming gentiles according to the Jewish Regendering Project, which will bring American society into greater conformity with historic ethnic Ashkenazi social cultural norms of male sexual ambiguity and female social or economic aggressiveness.
From Jewish Alliance for Law and Social Justice (JALSA) Email
Initiating Jewish Coalition
Equal marriage is not a civil rights issue
but represents a very specific type of identity politics
that is often used for incitement against Palestinians,
Arabs, and Muslims. See Feb. 11, Harvard: Joseph Massad.
but represents a very specific type of identity politics
that is often used for incitement against Palestinians,
Arabs, and Muslims. See Feb. 11, Harvard: Joseph Massad.
Because the new Latin version of Catholic prayers indicates that traditional Catholicism might be waking up from the moral and spiritual funk of which the new Decalogue is a symptom, the organized Jewish community has entered disaster control mode and trotted out its most effective Catholic saya`nim (sleeper or helper agents always ready to serve the Zionist cause).
In the project to reform gentiles, James Carroll, who cannot even correctly translate "Et cum spiritu tuo," works to mire Christians in guilt and confusion, for they certainly will not be able to confront Jewish or Zionist racism, fanaticism, extremism, and genocidalism if they lose the ability to stand up for their own personal salvation in the face of American Jewish whining.
In the project to reform gentiles, James Carroll, who cannot even correctly translate "Et cum spiritu tuo," works to mire Christians in guilt and confusion, for they certainly will not be able to confront Jewish or Zionist racism, fanaticism, extremism, and genocidalism if they lose the ability to stand up for their own personal salvation in the face of American Jewish whining.
His book entitled Constantine's Sword, which invariably confused genuine historical data with religious wishes, displayed Carroll's total internalization of the pogrom and persecution version of Jewish history as well as primordialist essentialist Zionist propaganda. Carroll writes on p. 86:
But soon enough, after the Gospels had jelled, Rome's murderous assault on the Jews of Judea would make Nero's violence seem benign, and explode the boundaries against which Christian-Jewish stresses had begun to press. The trauma of bloodshed on an imperial scale unprecedented for the Jews, is the necessary context for understanding what was happening in those years among the Jews. Christian anti-Judaism, in other words is not the first cause here; the Roman war against Judaism is.
There are so many false and misleading statements packed into the above single paragraph that a fairly long article would be necessary to address all of them. Carroll's use of the term "Jew" for the first century CE simply cannot be reconciled with Harvard Professor Shaye Cohen's thesis that Jewishness begins in the fourth century in response to the Constantinian formulation of Christianity (see The Beginning of Jewishness: Boundaries, Varieties, Uncertainties), and if Judea had really been as devastated in the first century as Carroll is trying to imply, he has to explain how the Judeans and Galileans managed in the early second century to mount an even larger rebellion.
Carroll is just regurgitating that same sort of material that Ruth Wisse included in her book Jews and Power, which served as her preemptive strike against Mearsheimer and Walt's The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy.
The Magnes Zionist, who is a Hebrew University professor maintaining an anonymous blog, replies to Wisse in Tough Jewess -- Wisse's "Jews and Power" .
The Magnes Zionist, who is a Hebrew University professor maintaining an anonymous blog, replies to Wisse in Tough Jewess -- Wisse's "Jews and Power" .
Most of the historical errors reveal the secular Zionist prism through which she views the data. Every Israeli knows where the city of Yavneh is located, but for Wisse it is "abroad" (p. 29), where Ben Zakkai took the first steps "to reconstitute Jewish religious and political authority outside the Land of Israel" (emphasis added.) Yavneh, no less than Jerusalem, is within the Land of Israel, and it became for a short time the center of the Jewish communities of the Land of Israel and the Diaspora. Of course, this mistake is telling: for the Zionists, the tragedy of 70 ce was the loss of political sovereignty and exile, to which the development of rabbinic Judaism was a response. But it was not the loss of sovereignty and exile that bothered the rabbis at Yavneh. Virtually none of the tannaim even mention "exile", and for good reason, they lived in Israel. Rather, it was the loss of the cult of the Temple, which stood at the center of Palestinian Judaism up until time.
As I have written elsewhere, there was no exile following the destruction of the Temple or the Bar Kokhba revolt; there was, according to Baron, increasing voluntary emigration of Jews over centures because of the depressed economic state of the country. The Zionist narrative of exile, founded on Christian and Jewish myths, is like them -- a myth. This is not to say that later there was not a consciousness of living in exile, or a messianic hope for a restoration which waxed and waned. But to reduce Jewish history to: first, the Jews put their faith in Divine power, and then they decided, before it was too late, to bring about their own rededemption through their own power is Zionist poppycock. And what's worse; it is stale poppycock, the sort of propaganda that one finds emanating from Zionist circles a half a century ago.
Because the myth of Jewish powerlessness and pure victimhood is so necessary to the rationalization of Zionist crimes against Palestinians, Arabs and Muslims, Zionists and their saya`nim work tirelessly to create the amnesia Paul Kriwaczek describes Yiddish Civilization, The Rise and Fall of a Forgotten Nation, pp 5-6.
We have forgotten that Yiddish-speaking Jews were no mere religious or linguistic minority but formed one of Europe's nations, ultimately more populous than many others -- eventually to outnumber Bosnians, Croats, Danes, Estonians, Latvians, Slovaks, Slovenians and Swiss, not to mention the Irish, the Scots and the Welsh. What is more, their contribution to central and eastern Europe's economic, social and intellectual development was utterly disproportionate to their numbers. The Yiddish people must be counted among the founder nations of Europe. (Please take note Ireland, Spain, Italy and Poland, who have pressed for "the Christian roots of the continent" to be proclaimed in the constitution of the European Union.)
Today, American Jews and Israel advocates have broadened their goals from simply reforming Christianity and rewriting Jewish history for the sake of Zionism to include a similar reform of Islam and rewriting of the history of Jews and Muslims to correspond more closely to traditional Eastern European Jewish anti-gentile polemic.
In his current Zionist efforts Daniel Pipes has been attacking Islamic fundamentals with the same gusto that Jewish anti-Christian chauvinists sought the roots of Nazi anti-Semitism in Christian scripture. He writes in Westerners must mount a united front against Islamic law:
Westerners opposed to the application of the Islamic law (the Shari'a) watch with dismay as it goes from strength to strength in their countries — harems increasingly accepted, a church leader endorsing Islamic law, a judge referring to the Koran, clandestine Muslim courts meting out justice. What can be done to stop the progress of this medieval legal system so deeply at odds with modern life, one that oppresses women and turns non-Muslims into second-class citizens?
Pipes, who must know that Islamic Sharia hardly differs in any major way from Jewish Halakhah, clearly has a primary goal of whipping "Judeo-Christian" civilization into a frenzy of Islamophobia. If Americans and Western Muslims do not get the secondary message, Jewish groups periodically put Matthias Küntzel and similar speakers on the lecture circuit to tie unreformed Islam and Islamic politics to German Nazism rather as Heschel implied the equivalence of unreformed Christianity and German Nazism.
Matthias Küntzel, German Arab scholar Bassam Tibi, and similar "researchers" have raised their incomes tremendously as they began to write historical and political analysis of Islam and Muslims more in synchronization with American Jewish prejudices about non-Jews. The announcement below provides information about Küntzel's upcoming visit to New York City.
Hear Matthias Küntzel, author of the controversial Jihad and Jew-Hatred: Islamism, Nazism and the Roots of 9/11, speak at two New York City events in March:Thursday, March 6
6:00 pm
Columbia University
301 Uris Hall
(Uris Hall is directly north of Low Library, to the left of the Campus Walk as you enter from Broadway at 116th Street)
www.columbia.edu
Saturday, March 22
6:00 pm
Cooper Union
Great Hall (Foundation Building)
(Located at 7 East 7th Street at Third Avenue)
www.cooper.edu
Just as wealthy Zionists and Israel advocacy groups turned John Hagee, who helped found Christians United for Israel, into a sort of pop star among evangelical fundamentalists, they are working on promoting a similar group of fake Islamic scholars to market Zionist ideas and Holocaust religion among Muslims. Some examples are:
- Sheikh Prof. Abdul Hadi Palazzi, who is leader of Italian Muslim Assembly as well as a co-founder and a co-chairman of the Islam-Israel Fellowship
- Stephen Schwartz (Sulayman Ahmad Schwartz al-Kosovi), who is the executive director of the Center for Islamic Pluralism and who recently attacked Columbia Professor Nadia Abu el-Haj for diverging from Zionist primordialist propaganda,
- Irshad Manji, an outspoken Muslim Lesbian, who suddenly qualified as an expert on Islam to place op-eds in the NY Times, the Washington Post, and the LA Times because of her incredibly silly and ignorant book initially initially entitled The Trouble with Islam and later renamed The Trouble with Islam Today, in which she confirmed Zionist propaganda that the youngest Muslim children are indoctrinated in anti-Semitism as they are taught the Islamic religion, and
- Khaleel Muhammad,
- who is an associate professor of religion at San Diego State,
- who like a number of South Asian scholars appears to have some sort of problem with Arabs, and
- who has developed (actually parroted) a reformed and ridiculous Zionist interpretation of the Quran. (See The Koran and the Jews and private correspondence with Professor Muhammad).
Because a reformed Islam in the reformed regendered Zionist globalist world of the future must integrate with Holocaust Religion, Robert Satloff, who is executive director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, has already conveniently produced a book about Muslim Holocaust saints to complement the plethora of righteous gentile books about Christian Europeans. The title of Satloff's book is Among the Righteous: Lost Stories from the Holocaust's Long Reach into Arab Lands.
So far the Jewish reform of Islam has not achieved much traction among Muslim Americans, who may yet prove to be the last defenders of American ideals under attack by collective force of Jewish prejudice and Israel advocacy.
The behavior of far too many American Jews, American Zionists, and Israel advocates goes far beyond annoying but reformable. Too many are engaged in massive civil and criminal infractions (see Judonia Rising Working Paper Part 1 or Judonia Rising Working Paper Part 1 [pdf]) while Israeli Zionists routinely engage in war crimes and perpetrate massive atrocities. Both Ariel Scheib above and Leonard Rubin below have identified the key to solving the New Jewish Problem.
Because American and Israeli Jews are singled out for a collective grant of complete immunity from punishment for numerous civil and criminal Israel-related violations of US and international law (as Nostra Aetate confirmed), tremendous anger has arisen world-wide against Jewish special privileges.
By any reasonable equally-applied standard Israel is a racist terrorist state. Individual Israel supporters that provide material support for Zionist terrorism must be arrested and their assets seized as should be assets of all organizations that have engaged in Israel lobbying or advocacy in any way, shape or form. In this way, the USA can recoup some of the massive costs incurred by the USA as a result of Zionist manipulation of US foreign policy.
Because Zionist and Jewish Neocons have put regime change, state dismantlement and massive attacks on inoffensive civilian populations on the agenda for Arab and Muslim states, such policies must also be on the agenda for the State of Israel, whose Zionist population is thoroughly enmeshed in the commission and benefits of genocide and terrorist crimes.
By any reasonable equally-applied standard, Shimon Peres, Binyamin Netanyahu, Ehud Olmert, Ehud Barak and many other Zionist military or political leaders deserve hanging far more than Saddam Hussein ever did.
Only by opening up a genuine discussion of Zionism and by forcing the US government to enforce law equally can non-Jewish and anti-Zionist Jewish Americans free themselves of the Zionist monkey on their backs and achieve national salvation from the economic and political disaster to which American Zionists have brought the USA.
AS THE priest began his sermon, he had trouble with the sound system, and muttered, "There's something wrong with this microphone." To which the congregation automatically replied, "And also with you."
That joke, told to me by a priest, takes off from the ritual exchange between priest and Mass-goers: "The Lord be with you," answered by "And also with you." It assumes a certain level of communication between clergy and congregation - the use of a common language.
The second most important change to take place in the Catholic Church in my lifetime was the substitution of vernacular tongues for Latin in the Mass. When it is the whole people saying, "And also with you," instead of a solitary altar boy reciting "Et cum spiritu tuo," nothing less than the democratic principle is being affirmed. The liturgy is not the private property of the clergy, with the laity mere observers. Instead, this worship is an action of the entire community, one of whom is the priest, who serves as its facilitator. From a seemingly incidental shift in language followed profound theological adjustments, as well as the start of a new structure of authority.
The Latin Mass is at issue again, with the Vatican having last week formally reauthorized the so-called Tridentine Mass, a Latin ritual the rubrics of which were set by the Council of Trent in the 16th century. Any open-minded person can affirm a diversity of practices in a worldwide organization like the Catholic Church, and, as the classic musical compositions show, there was a stark beauty to the ancient liturgy. But more is at stake in this return of Latin than mere aesthetics. Those pushing for a reauthorization of the Tridentine Mass want to roll back the whole Catholic reform, from nascent democracy to the theological affirmation of Judaism.
The first significant vote that the fathers of the reforming Second Vatican Council (1962-1965) took concerned the use of Latin. The Council of Trent had emphasized Latin precisely because the Protestants had repudiated it, especially in biblical texts. The Reformation was defined by nothing so much as the capture of sacred texts and worship by the vernacular - Luther's German, Tyndale's English. So conservatives at Vatican II knew what was at stake in the proposal to abandon Latin. But when the document on the liturgy was put before the council, including approval of the use of the vernacular, the vote in favor was 1,922 to 11. One theologian said, "This day will go down in history as the end of the Counter-Reformation." Pope John XXIII, watching the proceedings in his apartment on closed-circuit television, said simply, "Now begins my council."
And so it did. The Eucharist was no longer understood only as a "sacrifice," enacted on an altar by the priest, with the laity present as mere spectators. It was a meal, like the Last Supper, to be shared in by all. The altar was refashioned as a banquet table and moved away from the far wall of the church, into the center of the community - "facing the people."
Great questions were at stake. Could any thing in Catholic life or belief change, or was the Church changeless? Historical consciousness itself was at issue. It was as if Jesus were remembered by conservatives as speaking Latin, when, of course, he spoke Aramaic.
The most important change in Catholic belief involved recovering the memory that Jesus was a Jew, and that his preaching was an affirmation, not a repudiation, of Jewish belief. Vatican II's high point was the declaration "Nostra Aetate," which condemned the idea that Jews could be blamed for the murder of Jesus, and affirmed the permanence of God's Covenant with Israel. The "replacement" theology by which the church was understood as "superseding" Judaism was no more. Corollary to this was a rejection of the traditional Christian goal of converting Jews to Jesus. The new liturgy of Vatican II dropped all such prayers.
But the Latin Mass published by the Vatican last year resuscitated the conversion insult, praying on Good Friday that God "lift the veil" from "Jewish blindness."
Catholics and Jews both objected. In last week's formal promulgation of the Latin Mass, the Vatican stepped back from that extreme language, but Catholics are still to pray that God "enlighten" the hearts of Jews "so that they recognize Jesus Christ, Savior of all mankind." This is a drastic retreat from the most important theological development of the modern era. Something is wrong with that development, now say Vatican reactionaries. To which the people reply, "No. What's wrong is you."
James Carroll's column appears regularly in the Globe.
ONCE AGAIN, James Carroll has found the glass half empty when it is half full ("Reviving an old insult to the Jews," Op-ed, Feb. 18).
Carroll complains about the new Good Friday prayer for the Latin Missal. He seems unable to understand that Catholics believe Jesus is a very good thing, and faults us for praying that Jews will come to see that. What is wrong with praying that all people share a good thing?
We are not praying that God force Jews to become Christian; we only ask that He move their hearts. He may or may not listen to us.
Is Carroll afraid the prayers will work?
ANTHONY DI RUSSO
Nashua
ANTHONY DI RUSSO, in his rebuttal of James Carroll's Feb. 18 op-ed about the Latin Mass, "Reviving an old insult to Jews," writes that "Jesus is a very good thing," and asks "what is wrong with praying that all people share a good thing?" ("The generosity of Good Friday prayer," Letters, Feb. 22) The fact is, the Good Friday prayer is not directed to "all people." If it's a "very good thing" to pray for Jews to accept Jesus, then why not pray for Jesus' acceptance by Hindus? Or Buddhists? How about Muslims? Shouldn't atheists be prayed for to accept Jesus as a "very good thing"?
But the Catholic prayer is specifically for Jews, and that singling out of Jews is the cause of the outrage in both the Catholic and Jewish communities.
LEONARD RUBIN, Marlborough
The following is the first half of the current Ashkenazi version of the prayer (there is also a second paragraph, which people sometimes omit).
| # | English translation | Transliteration | Hebrew |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | It is our duty to praise the Master of all, | Aleinu l'shabeach la'Adon hakol | עָלֵינוּ לְשַׁבֵּחַ לַאֲדוֹן הַכֹּל, |
| 2 | to acclaim the greatness of the One who forms all creation, | latet gedulah l'yotzer b'reishit, | לָתֵת גְּדֻלָּה לְיוֹצֵר בְּרֵאשִׁית, |
| 3 | For God did not make us like the nations of other lands, | sh'lo asanu k'goyei ha'aratzot, | שֶׁלֹּא עָשָׂנוּ כְּגוֹיֵי הָאֲרָצוֹת, |
| 4 | and did not make us the same as other families of the Earth. | v'lo samanu k'mish'p'chot ha'adamah, | וְלֹא שָׂמָנוּ כְּמִשְׁפְּחוֹת הָאֲדָמָה. |
| 5 | God did not place us in the same situations as others, | shelo sam chel'qenu kahem, | שֶׁלֹּא שָׂם חֶלְקֵנוּ כָּהֶם, |
| 6 | and our destiny is not the same as anyone else's. | v'goralenu k'khol hamonam. | .וְגוֹרָלֵנוּ כְּכָל הֲמוֹנָם |
| Some congregations outside of Israel omit: | |||
| 7 | (For they bow to vanity and emptiness | (Sh'hem mish'tachavim l'hevel variq | (שֶׁהֵם מִשְׁתַּחֲוִים לְהֶבֶל וָרִיק, |
| 8 | and pray to a god which helps not.) | umit'pil'lim el el lo yoshia) | וּמִתְפַּלְּלִים אֶל אֵל לֹא יוֹשִׁיעַ.) |
| 9 | And we bend our knees, and bow down, and give thanks, | Va'anaḥnu qor`im, umishtaḥavim umodim, | וַאֲנַחְנוּ כֹּרעִים, |
| 10 | before the King, the King of Kings, | lif'nei Melekh, Mal'khei haM'lakhim, | לִפְנֵי מֶלֶךְ מַלְכֵי הַמְּלָכִים |
| 11 | the Holy One, Blessed is He. | haQadosh barukh Hu. | הַקָּדוֹשׁ בָּרוּךְ הוּא. |
| 12 | The One who spread out the heavens, and made the foundations of the Earth, | Shehu noteh shamayim, v'yosed aretz, | שֶׁהוּא נוֹטֶה שָׁמַיִם וְיֹסֵד אָרֶץ, |
| 13 | and whose precious dwelling is in the heavens above, | umoshav y'qaro bashamayim mima'al, | וּמוֹשַׁב יְקָרוֹ בַּשָּׁמַיִם מִמַּעַל, |
| 14 | and whose powerful Presence is in the highest heights. | ushkhinat uzo begav'hei m'romim, | וּשְׁכִינַת עֻזּוֹ בְּגָבְהֵי מְרוֹמִים. |
| 15 | He is our God, there is none else. | Hu Eloheinu ein od, | הוּא אֱלֹהֵינוּ וְאֵין עוֹד, |
| 16 | Our King is truth, and nothing else compares. | emet mal'kenu, efes zulato, | אֱמֶת מַלְכֵּנוּ אֶפֶס זוּלָתוֹ. |
| 17 | As it is written in Your Torah: | kakatuv baTorato: | כַּכָּתוּב בַּתּוֹרָה: |
| 18 | "And you shall know today, and take to heart, | v'yada'ta hayom, vahashevota el l'vavekha. | וְיָדַעְתָּ הַיּוֹם וַהֲשֵׁבֹתָ אֶל לְבָבֶךָ, |
| 19 | that Adonai is the only God, | Ki Adonai, hu haElohim, | כִּי יי הוּא הָאֱלֹהִים |
| 20 | in the heavens above | bashamayim mi ma`al, | בַּשָּׁמַיִם מִמַּעַל |
| 21 | and on Earth below. There is no other." | v'al ha'aretz mitachat. Ein od. | וְעַל הָאָרֶץ מִתָּחַת. אֵין עוֹד |
ADL's "Interfaith" Enmeshment
by Karin Friedemann with Joachim Martillo
12-14-2005
by Karin Friedemann with Joachim Martillo
12-14-2005
"New Direction" Sponsored by the Anti-Defamation League — Wednesday, Dec. 7 at 9:30 a.m. in Lower Level McKim A. In keeping with the 40th anniversary of Nostra Aetate, the Vatican II document of 1965 that set Catholic-Jewish relations in a new direction, this interfaith, interactive workshop will focus on helping Christian religious educators to prevent the "fires of hate" both inside and outside the classroom. This workshop will be presented by the New Directions project, a Catholic-Jewish educational initiative co-sponsored by the New England Region of the Anti-Defamation League and the Office of Religious Education of the Archdiocese of Boston.
===
My husband and I took part in the above Catholic Jewish discussion at the Boston Public Library of Nostra Aetate and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) Exhibition "Fighting the Fires of Hate: America and the Nazi Book Burnings" that was hosted at the Copley Square Public Library in Boston.
Nostra Aetate is Pope Paul VI's major declaration that summarizes the relationship of the Catholic Church to non-Christian religions. He issued it Oct. 28, 1965.* This document refers to the Jewish people (populus iudaicus). The term Jewish people comes from Zionist ideology and is unknown in Catholic theology. In the past, Catholic documents employed terms like iudaei (Jews, Judeans) communitas iudaica (Jewish community) or occasionally natio iudaica (Jewish brotherhood — I know it looks like Jewish nation, but the Latin texts refer to shoemakers as a natio, and I consider the closest modern English usage to be phrases like the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers).
The use of Zionist terminology in the Nostra Aetate leads one to suspect that key parts of the proclamation itself were written by the ADL or other American Zionists and simply translated into Latin. By employing such terminology, the Catholic Church accepts the Zionist conceptualization of an unchanging Jewish ethno-national group (Volk) that has existed from time immemorial and that maintains blood-and-soil historic rights to Palestine. This primordialist essentialism is the exact Zionist counterpart of the German Nazi idea of an unchanging German people that has existed from time immemorial and that maintains blood-and-soil historic rights to places where German peoples (including ancient Teutonic and Germanic tribes) live or have lived in the past even if no or very few modern Germans have lived there in recent times.
Jewish groups tend to construe Pope John Paul II's 1998 affirmation of "We Remember: A Reflection on the Shoah" as an apology for inadequacies of Catholic response to the Holocaust. In reality the document is ambiguous on the issue of the Church's responsibility.** One really must ask for what should the Church be expressing contritition. At the time when German Catholics were resisting Hitler, the Zionists entered into an extensive collaboration with the German Nazis. While leading Polish Catholics politicians were considering a preemptive strike against Germany after Hindenberg appointed Hitler Chancellor, Zionist ethnic Ashkenazim worked to undermine the worldwide boycott of Germany under the Haaverah Agreement, which supplied the Zionists with necessary capital in their program to murder Arab Palestine. Hitler facilitated the Zionist acquisition of the necessary capital to expand racist Zionist settlements in Palestine, then ruled by the British. The Haaverah Agreement also transfered the extensive property holdings of the German Colony in Palestine to the Zionist Jewish National Fund.
Until 1938 the German Nazi party maintained Jewish adjunct organizations in which German Jews were active. American Jews generally skip over such shameful elements of the history of the 1930s. Zionists want the rest of the world to treat the mass murder of Jews during WW2 as a unique unspeakable event in order to drown out the legitimate grievances of the Palestinians against them. Now that Soviet archives have become available, we now can state with strong grounds that 1920s and 1930s Soviet crimes, in which Soviet ethnic Ashkenazim played a leading role, were far worse than the crimes of Nazi Germany.
The ADL loves the Nostra Aetate because it deplores hatred of Jews without qualification. Of course, ethnic Ashkenazim have been widely hated throughout the century and will become even more hated in the 21st century, but they reap what they have sown. From a Christian standpoint one could argue that hatred against anyone is wrong any time, but the papal declaration effectively gives Jews a license to commit any atrocity because the Church would according to the plain meaning of the text condemn any animosity toward Jews as a manifestation of unforgivable "anti-Semitism" even if widespread Jewish or ethnic Ashkenazi misdeeds were provoking the reactions of hate and anger. It is a mistake for the Catholic Church to pander them in documents like Nostra Aetate.
The past few years, the Zionist lobby groups have been pouring huge amounts of money into cash-poor Christian organizations in order to enmesh them as accomplices to the genocide of Palestinians. Many if not most of the Catholics attending this discussion had been flown in from other cities, for a nice tourist vacation in Boston. The ADL's general purpose for inviting Christians to participate in these interfaith discussions is to promote Zionism among Christians and to make Christians hesitant about divesting from Israel for fear of offending "Jewish sensitivities." This was evident as I spoke to the woman who represented the Catholic Archdiocese of Boston. While she was willing to blame the Germans as a whole for the Holocaust, she was unwilling to blame the ADL as an organization for its work to ban books and undermine the Constitution in America, for fear of "stereotyping Jews," even though the ADL was instrumental in lobbying for the Patriot Act.
While Pope John Paul publicly apologized for historical Catholic anti-Jewish sentiment, no Jewish leader has ever expressed regret for the slander of the Virgin Mary that exists in the Talmud. It is actually very confusing to try to understand the Jewish outrage at being blamed for killing Christ because the Talmud takes the position that the Sanhedrin was right to kill him. Jews react in the same way to open discussions of such scriptural polemic as they do to any debate of the Zionist theft of Palestine. They become offended and fling accusations of "hate speech" when anyone tries to refer to the meticulous Zionist planning of the genocide of the native Palestinian population as is documented even in Zionist archives, by Zionist writers and in Zionist newspapers.
There is no evidence that the Catholic Church's new friendship with the Zionists is sincerely returned. Ethnic Ashkenazim have generally treated Nostra Aetate with contempt, and Goldhagen, a prominent racist ethnic Ashkenazi pseudo-scholar, effectively stated in A Moral Reckoning : The Role of the Catholic Church in the Holocaust and Its Unfulfilled Duty of Repair that the Catholic Church could only show true contrition by completely subordinating itself to Zionism.
It was painful to watch sincere Christians being humiliated for their beliefs by Ashkenazi Americans, who are using the Catholic tendency towards repentance even for things they had nothing to do with, to promote their own opportunistic political agenda which includes wiping out the oldest Christian community in the world in Palestine. While Catholic teachings encourage penitence and sensitivity to the feelings of others, ethnic Ashkenazim never apologize for anything, but feign moral superiority while talking down to the Catholics.
INTERFAITH DISCUSSION OR ZIONIST INDOCTRINATION?
The discussion program was carefully crafted and aimed at encouraging the Catholic school system to incorporate the ADL's fictional Holocaust propaganda in their curriculum. The program began as the ADL discussion leader, Naomi Tovim, introduced the Talmud as the book of Jewish law and mentioned that Catholics had a history of burning this book. She of course did not mention what was in that book that may have offended Catholics, nor did she mention that Catholics at various points of history burned a lot of books, not limiting themselves to the Talmud. Bringing up the Catholic Church's alleged "anti-Semitism" as an introduction to the historically unrelated Nazi book burnings was in accord with the traditional ethnic Ashkenazi anti-Catholic polemic, which assigns collective guilt to all Christians for letting the Holocaust happen.
This anti-Christian bigotry is sometimes given a scholarly veneer in the works of racist ethnic Ashkenazi pseudo-scholars like Hyam Maccoby. In this polemic, Auschwitz is inherent in Christianity from the first composition of the Gospels. As a result of indoctrination with such nonsense American Jews reacted with outrage to Mel Gibson's film "The Passion." The anti-Christian polemic never addresses the question why the Catholic Church for 1000 years after Constantine permitted the existence of successful Jewish communities in Catholic regions, without forcing them to convert, even though the Catholic Church executed Protestants and other "heretics."
Yes, the Catholic church has railed at the Talmud and burned it now and then. Yet the burning of Maimonides' Mishneh Torah by local Rabbis, who considered Maimonides' writings to be heretical, preceded the first Talmud burning by Catholics in Provence. This was followed by occasional burning of the Talmud in Italy for about 100 years because some Catholic scholars claimed that the modern Jews were not practicing the same form of Judaism practiced by the ancient Judeans (as Jewish Karaite scholars then and now would also claim). The Catholic church at that time period did not have much more tolerance of Jewish heresy than it had of Christian heresy. The last Talmud burning took place in Poland in the context of political clashes between Jewish Frankists and anti-Frankists.
After the shaming of the Catholics for Talmud burning, the Catholic discussion leader, Celena Sirois, sent the group to tour the "Fighting the Fires of Hate" exhibition, which was completely empty of historical content, for in terms of killing authors and banning books by ethnic Ashkenazim in the Soviet Union of the same time period was orders of magnitude worse than Nazi Germany. Obscuring the facts about the Soviet Union serves the purposes of ethnic Ashkenazi Americans, who want to create a collective victim-status stereotype of Jews to cover up the racist criminal behavior of some Jews. In the Soviet Union during the 20s and 30s ethnic Ashkenazim dominated the policies of book banning, collectivization, and alienization. These policies resulted in massive internal deportations and murders that totaled at least 8 million non-Jews.
While ethnic Ashkenazim try to seize a moral high ground by collectively blaming all Germans for the acts of a tiny minority and by accusing all non-Jews of inadequate reactions to German Nazi anti-Semitism, the vast majority of ethnic Ashkenazim do not apply similar standards to themselves. They do not blame themselves collectively for Soviet crimes made possible by their ethnic group. While large numbers of Germans condemned German Nazis for anti-Jewish actions during the 30s, ethnic Ashkenazi Americans identify at 90% levels with Zionist Israel, a modern nation state that commits very similar or worse crimes against the native Palestinian population. It is hard to identify any human population on the planet more hypocritical or racist than ethnic Ashkenazi Americans.
The traveling US Holocaust Memorial Museum "Fighting the Fires of Hate" Library exhibit was an expensive photo gallery complete with video clips demonizing Germans for their censorship and public burning of literature that Hitler found offensive. No mention was made that Hitler did not burn books written by Jews who promoted the Zionist idea of "the Jewish people." There was no mention of the excellent relations between Zionists and German Nazis from 1933-1938, a time period that Hannah Arendt has called the Zionist phase of German Nazism. There was no suggestion that not all Germans were Nazis. In short, the message was simple. "Jews are innocent victims. Germans are evil incarnate. America to the rescue!" A little anti-Islamic bigotry was thrown in for spice with an out-of-context reference to Salman Rushdie.
The exhibit glorified American Jewish protests against the German Nazis even as it neglected the extensive principled calls by German Americans like Theodor Seuss Geisel (Dr. Seuss) for American opposition to Nazi Germany. The exhibit was not a statement against book burning in general, or they could have given examples of literature which had been banned or burned in America, and how about the recent US bombing of the oldest library of the world in Baghdad? Since most people have little historical knowledge, this exhibit serves to create the idea that the Jews are the defenders of American free speech. Nothing could be further from the truth. Holocaust propaganda serves to shield the most privileged group in America from just criticism of many of its members and of its collective conduct, especially as relates to the ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people and the destruction of America's Constitutional liberties.
The "Fighting the Fires of Hate" exhibit was a very stylish finger-pointing exercise to distract public attention from the fact that in our times, the ADL was one of the biggest lobbies pushing for the Patriot Act, which monitors the reading history of library patrons. Zionist organizations are heavily involved with Homeland Security and the State of Israel. They use book banning and far worse methods to squelch criticism of Israel. While there is no limit to the amount of hate speech against Muslims or Christians that is tolerated now in the western world, the mere suggestion that Muslims and Christians should have equal rights with Jews in the Holy Land, or that the Hollywood version of the Holocaust is not entirely accurate, have in recent times resulted in the deportation, imprisonment, and even assassination of the speakers, writers, or publishers, and in the banning of their books or films because of Zionist pressure on western governments to abandon the principle of freedom of expression. Therefore it was extremely ironic that the ADL was using this library exhibit to present itself as America's ally in the fight against intellectual censorship.
After viewing the "Fighting the Fires of Hate" exhibit we returned to the Conference room but we were not given a chance to brainstorm as a group about our personal impressions. We did not get a chance to reflect how the issue of book burnings might apply to our times. I found it very interesting the subtle way the Catholic schoolteachers were encouraged to absorb the historical propaganda and then guided away from rational thought on the matter. Without any logical transition, the topic shifted to the concept of faith education. The ADL leader read a portion of the Jewish Sabbath Amidah prayer that refers to "our God and the God of our fathers." Then we read a commentary by the Baal Shem Tov (the Besht), the founder of Hassidism that explains the phrase as classifying two separate approaches to religion. The "our God" approach requires searching analysis while "the God of our fathers" is based in tradition and in following the practices and beliefs of our parents and grandparents. The Besht argues that neither approach is sufficient for strong faith and that the two beliefs must be combined. The ADL's pre-approved discussion question was, "How does the Ba'al Shem Tov's observation about faith formation apply to religious education?" However, they lost control of the discussion after my husband mentioned that the Besht was addressing the basic question of knowledge and faith and had left out of his discussion two of the tools identified by medieval Jewish scholars to determine truth. Saadya Gaon lists four basis tools: the senses, logical reasoning, reliable tradition and "intrinsic insight or empathy." Saadyah Gaon considers that knowledge that it is better to do good than to do ill as an example of intrinsic insight. My husband suggested that the group consider the question, "How would you feel if you were a Palestinian and someone stole your country, murdered your family and bulldozed your home?" The ADL leader then became flustered and told us that we were not to discuss that topic.
The ADL and Zionists in general want Christians to accept the traditional but incorrect belief that modern Eastern European Ashkenazim are physical descendants of ancient Judeans and Galileans of Palestine. Christians who believe such primordialist nonsense often consider the theft of Palestine from the native population by racist ethnic Ashkenazim to have been a legitimate action even though it contradicts Christian ethics and international law. Yet, the ADL and Zionists in general worry that connecting modern Rabbinical Jews with ancient Galileans and Judeans is linked with the traditional conceptualization of Jews as Christ-killers. Because of fear of this linkage the ADL tried to ban screen representations of the suffering and crucifixion of Christ even though they form the core of Christian theology. Thus, Zionists want Catholics to maintain flawed primordialist beliefs about modern ethnic Ashkenazim but only if such traditional beliefs ("the God of our fathers" approach) are combined with the dispensation that Nostra Aetate (supposed to be a result of searching analysis by Catholic theologians) gives to modern ethnic Ashkenazim to commit atrocities with impunity. Zionists want Christians to accept essentialist primordialist Zionist ideology as long as Christianity drops all doctrine that assigns permanent pariah status for Jews.
After synthesizing Christian Zionism from Nostra Aetate with traditional Catholic beliefs, the program then focused on the presentation of modern Jews as marginal people in the "Fires of Hate" exhibition. We read the parable of The Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25-37), which had no clear connection to the exhibition topic. A man is mugged by robbers and brigands, but the Priest and the Levite do not help him. Yet the Samaritan, who comes from a marginal despised group, helps the victim without a second thought. The intended result was a zero-intellectual content lesson that connected Catholics and Jews in a bond of mutual agreement not to discuss the elephant in the room.
While it is normal in Jewish theological tradition to discuss religion in the absence of any ethical considerations, this is not true for Christianity. Usually Christians strive to apply the lessons to themselves and current issues. "What would Jesus do?" So here, not only were the Christians being fed self-hatred by the ADL, and encouraged to do penance and apologize to Jews for something that was not their fault, and made to accept the Jewish lack of apology for their historical anti-Gentile polemic, and encouraged to remain silent and not come to the defense of Palestinian Christians and Muslims being ethnically cleansed from the Holy Land out of respect for their Jewish friends' feelings, but they were being taught a whole new way of looking at scripture: discussion of religious texts in a way that completely avoids the topic. In short, Christians were not only made to feel guilty for believing in their own religion, but encouraged to give up their religion. The "New Direction" Catholic Jewish discussion provided yet another example of the pervasiveness and thoroughness of the nation-wide program to indoctrinate Americans with Zionist ideology.
The next ADL pre-approved discussion question related to the Good Samaritan was, "What might this text say about what you saw in the "Fighting the Fires of Hate" exhibit?" However, because of my husband's previous comment about the Palestinians, the ADL leader was afraid to go around the room with this question as she had with the first question. So she only allowed one brief comment. Then it ended with the last discussion question, "What do you imagine the victim will think, say and do when he wakes up and finds out he's been helped by a Samaritan?" In a subtle way, American Catholics were going to be asked to come to the rescue of the Jews by supporting and financing the continued existence of the marginal despised country of Israel. Since the ADL leader had failed to lead the group where she was trying to lead them, because it was obvious that every one of the Catholics sympathized with the plight of the Palestinians, the last question was answered in many different ways, and the group discussion ended without the group having come to any clear conclusions.
Because of the success of a single pro-Palestine comment in undermining an expensive Zionist indoctrination interfaith effort, I strongly encourage all supporters of human rights to attend these interfaith discussions to add their two cents to the discussion.
(*) Zionists tend to focus most on the following two paragraphs (not contiguous in the text) of Nostra Aetate or We Remember.
The Church keeps ever in mind the words of the Apostle about his kinsmen: "theirs is the sonship and the glory and the covenants and the law and the worship and the promises; theirs are the fathers and from them is the Christ according to the flesh" (Rom. 9:4-5), the Son of the Virgin Mary. She also recalls that the Apostles, the Church's main-stay and pillars, as well as most of the early disciples who proclaimed Christ's Gospel to the world, sprang from the Jewish people.
Furthermore, in her rejection of every persecution against any man, the Church, mindful of the patrimony she shares with the Jews and moved not by political reasons but by the Gospel's spiritual love, decries hatred, persecutions, displays of anti-Semitism, directed against Jews at any time and by anyone.
AUTHORITATIVE LATIN TEXT
Semper quoque prae oculis habet Ecclesia verba Apostoli Pauli de cognatis eius, "quorum adoptio est filiorum et gloria et testamentum et legislatio et obsequium et promissa, quorum patres et ex quibus est Christus secundum carnem" (Rom. 9, 4-5), filius Mariae Virginis. Recordatur etiam ex populo iudaico natos esse Apostolos, Ecclesiae fundamenta et columnas, atque plurimos illos discipulos, qui Evangelium Christi mundo annuntiaverunt.
Praeterea, Ecclesia, quae omnes persecutiones in quosvis homines reprobat, memor communis cum Iudaeis patrimonii, nec rationibus politicis sed religiosa caritate evangelica impulsa, odia, persecutiones, antisemitismi manifestationes, quovis tempore et a quibusvis in Iudaeos habita, deplorat.
(**) Pope John Paul II stated in March 1998,
It is my fervent hope that the document: We Remember: A Reflection on the Shoah, which the Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews has prepared under [Cardinal Edward Idris Cassidy's] direction, will indeed help to heal the wounds of past misunderstandings and injustices. May it enable memory to play its necessary part in the process of shaping a future in which the unspeakable iniquity of the Shoah will never again be possible. May the Lord of history guide the efforts of Catholics and Jews and all men and women of good will as they work together for a world of true respect for the life and dignity of every human being, for all have been created in the image and likeness of God.
