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February 12, 2009
Exclusive: The Selective Outrage of the Pope’s Critics
Bishop Richard Williamson, a former resident of Minnesota was one of four bishops from the ultraconservative Society of St. Pius X whose excommunication was lifted by the Vatican last month. The decision sparked outrage because Williamson is on the record with a series of diatribes against Israel and Holocaust denial. Recently, on a Swedish TV interview he reiterated his conviction that no Jews were gassed in any concentration camps.
In 1989, shortly after assuming the rectorship of a church in Canada he stated:
"There was not one Jew killed in the gas chambers. It was all lies, lies, lies. The Jews created the Holocaust so we would prostrate ourselves on our knees before them and approve of their new State of Israel ... Jews made up the Holocaust, Protestants get their orders from the devil, and the Vatican has sold its soul to liberalism."
Wow! He sounds just like Muhammad Sayyid Tantawi,, formerly the Grand Mufti of Egypt and now the Grand Imam of Al-Azhar University in Cairo, Egypt the nearest Moslem equivalent to a pope, who said in 2002:
"The accusation of anti-Semitism was invented by the Jews as a means to pressure Arabs and Muslims to implement their schemes in the Arab and Muslim countries, so don't pay attention to them."
It is clear that Williamson is a racist, extremist, a malignant force in the church, and, in fact, a nasty crackpot. It can also be argued that the Pope acted in haste and unwisely, and, in fact naïvely…. pretty much like some of the dupes who elevated a known sewer rat terrorist like Arafat to the role of leader and statesman.
However, there is selective outrage expressed by those who give anti-Semites, Jihadists and Holocaust deniers a pretty wide berth.
Frau Angela Merkel got her strumpfs in a knot (don’t get nervous – that’s stockings in German) and gave the Pope a harsh scolding. "The pope and the Vatican should clarify unambiguously that there can be no denial and that there must be positive relations with the Jewish community overall," Merkel told reporters in Berlin. She said the Vatican's efforts to explain itself were "not yet sufficient."
Merkel was the only chief of state to scold the Pope so openly and harshly, but there was not a word from Frau Merkel about the real and sinister anti-Semitism in Germany that is not coming from the Pope or the Vatican. As Clemens Heni, a researcher from Yale, and author of Anti-Semitism and Germany: Preliminary Studies of a “Heartfelt Relationship” written in German stated in the Jerusalem Post (February 9, 2009):
“If Arabs, other Muslims and their German friends scream "Death to the Jews," or "Israel - children killer", that's fine. If two lonely guys stick an Israeli flag in a bedroom window on a street where such anti-Semites pass, the police react immediately and confiscate the flag. That's what happened in the city of Duisburg on January 10.”
Did Fraulein Merkel react? Ach, nein.
William Donohue, the President of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, and one of the most devoted supporters of Jews and Israel had his own perfect smack down of Frau Merkel:
“No one has been worse than the Germans. Reeking with guilt over the Holocaust, we now have the spectacle of German Chancellor Angela Merkel telling the pope he needs to clarify his views on the Holocaust. Talk about hubris. This is a man who was forcibly conscripted at a young age into a Nazi group and saw his family suffer economically because he refused to attend the Hitler Youth meetings. This is a man who as Cardinal Ratzinger unequivocally condemned the Holocaust at a Jerusalem conference in 1994 and wrote about a book about it, Many Religions, One Covenant: Israel, the Church and the World. And he needs to ‘clarify’ his views to Merkel?...“There will be those who won’t believe the pope didn’t know about Williamson. Yet these same people no doubt believe that President Obama didn’t know about the thieves he’s been appointing. Moreover, there are approximately 3,500 bishops spread throughout the world. The pope is smart, but he’s not a seer.”
Frau Merkel the Pope spanker, hosted a very gemütlich security confab on February 10th 2009 in Munich where Joseph Biden climbed to a new low in buffoonery by averring the United States’ willingness to jaw-jaw with Iran where Holocaust denial is government decreed, and pressed for a “two state solution” with Mahmoud Abbas who is also a Holocaust denier, a fact that does not stress the Frau or the Herren who promote him as a “peace partner.”
Mahmoud Abbas/Abu Mazen wrote his thesis, subsequently published as a book in the Ivy League Lumumba University in Moscow. In his epic and monumental contribution to world peace The Other Side: The Secret Relations Between Nazism and the Leadership of the Zionist Movement, he repeatedly denies the atrocities and blames them on some Zionist conspiracy. He wrote this in 1983 after the Camp David Treaty. But that was then.
Another accepted guest at the Munich fest was Iranian Speaker of the Parliament Ali Larijani who rudely scoffed at Biden’s limp olive branch, declared that “it is an honor to support Hamas” and for the record threw in his support for Holocaust deniers.
Frau Merkel? Ach she was mellow. Perhaps she has warm memories of her visit to Ramallah, the fount of Palestinian Arab terrorism in 2007 where she fawned over President Abbas who fawned back by giving her a 100 terrorist salute.
In fact, Merkel has occasionally been fairly supportive of Israel, unlike her Eurabian cohorts. In France, lip service is always paid to the Holocaust but Sarko would never “diss” Abbas. Mais non! It might make the French Moslem/Arab “street” erupt into looting, car burning and violent riots. One couldn’t really blame the Vatican for that could one?
The Arabs, from the “moderate” nations such as Egypt where Holocaust denial and The Protocols of the Elders of Zion are daily fare in the mosques and in schools to the “less moderate” nations such as Syria where the Holocaust is a how-to primer, to the downright “peaceable” oily kingdoms where violent anti-Semitic messages are promoted, funded and beamed to the entire Moslem world don’t get a fraction of the self-righteous opprobrium heaped on Pope Benedict.
And, incidentally, as many observers have documented, the “Palestinian Authority” or Fatah as it is known, indulges in rewriting or denying the Holocaust depending on which stage of “peacemaking” they are processing.
Hypocrisy is the norm and I don’t even want to waste time on the (dis)organized Jewish response to Pope Benedict by groups who prefer slamming the church to being accused of Islamophobia.
Jewish relations with Catholicism have been charged to say the least and there was an unconscionable complicity with Hitler. However, many Catholic nations saved and rescued Jewish refugees; Franco’s Spain and Portugal’s Salazar offered forged passports, and ports of departure. Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic was the only delegate to the infamous Evian Conference who offered rescue to hundreds of thousands of Jews. Unfortunately only one thousand got there.
I was born in Bolivia where my family prospered and encountered no anti-Semitism. I attended a Catholic school in LaPaz where my brother and I were registered as Jewish. My husband graduated from St. Peter’s College in New Jersey, a Jesuit School after World War II. Again, there was not a single incident of anti-Semitism in a school of several hundred where there were only two Jews.
I watched a frail and sick Cardinal O’Connor attend a memorial for Kristallnacht where he stated that he always burned a candle in the window of the private quarters on the anniversary of that event. I was subsequently honored to be invited to a small dinner party in the Cardinal’s residence where I met high ranking members of the Church and Cardinal Jean Marie Lustiger, a Jewish convert to Catholicism whose devotion to Israel and Jews was unshakeable. I was dazzled by the courtesy and kindness and sensitivity to Israel’s plight.
Israel is also indebted to the hundreds of American Catholic legislators (including Nancy Pelosi’s father) and the late Paul O’Dwyer and Father Paul Drinan for their unflinching support for Zionism and Israel in the corridors of American power.
The Catholic Church has suffered many reversals….scandals, closing of schools, loss of adherents in a coercively secular America. They are continually affronted by the shrill demands for legalization of something they consider infanticide, satirized and mocked by arts and the media. And they are potential victims of Islamic jihad in every corner of the globe.
What group or what faith or what nation has done more than the Catholics to repair frayed relations; to right their faith driven libels; to promote dialogue and respect? None….absolutely none. We should choose our battles wisely.
FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributing Editor Ruth S. King is a freelance writer who writes a monthly column in OUTPOST, the publication of Americans for a Safe Israel. Feedback: editorialdirector@familysecuritymatters.org.
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