antisemitism – Page 46

Christianity stands accused

The Catholic Church did not initiate diplomatic relations with the state of Israel until 1993 and, according to the Italian writer Giulio Meotti, things haven’t been all rainbows since then either.

The creation of a thriving Jewish state creates a theological conundrum for the Catholic Church, Meotti writes in The Vatican Against Israel: J’Accuse (Mantua Books, 2013), because it is a refutation of the theological view that Judaism should wither and die in the shadow of a successor religion, Christianity. The theological imperative of Jewish disappearance is now accompanied, he writes, by a geopolitical imperative that Israel should vanish.

“Replacement theology stated that Christians had inherited the covenant and replaced the Jews as the Chosen People. The concept of replacement geography similarly replaces the historical connection of one people to the land with a connection between another people and the land,” Meotti writes. “The existence of a restored Israel in the land of the Bible, proof that the Jewish people is not annihilated, assimilated and withering away, is the living refutation of the Christian myth about the Jewish end in the historical process.”

The necessity of rejecting Zionism and, in its time, Israel, bested even the liberalizing influence of the Second Vatican Council, the near-revolutionary reconsideration that took place within Catholicism in the early 1960s. This period, which saw the Church recognize Judaism and Christianity as familial theologies and renounce the millennia-old deicide charge against the Jews, nevertheless has a stream that abhors Zionism. Meotti writes that two conflicting Vatican tendencies developed at that time and still dominate: “theological dialogue with Judaism, and political support for the Arabs.” (The gushing lamentation offered by the Vatican on the death of Yasser Arafat is particularly striking.)

Meotti contends that this process has involved the Catholic Church differentiating between “good” and “docile” Jews of the Diaspora and the “bad” and “arrogant” Jews of Israel.

The book is a litany of indictments. The Church had relations with the PLO before it had relations with Israel. Top Church leaders have repeatedly accused Israel of behaving like Nazis. They routinely use crucifixion motifs in the Israeli-Palestinian context, with Jews playing the Romans and Palestinians, of course, playing the beatific victim. Israel, said one archbishop, was imposing “the sufferings of the passion of Jesus on the Arab Christians.” Another, at the time of the Palestinians’ seizure of the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, declared: “Our Palestinian people in Bethlehem died like a crucified martyr.” Arafat himself jumped on the bandwagon, declaring: “Jesus Christ was the first Palestinian fedayeen who carried his sword along the road on which today the Palestinians carry their cross.”

The first translation into Arabic of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion was courtesy of the Catholic Church. One archbishop was convicted of using his immunity to smuggle explosives to Palestinian terrorists and served just four years of his 12-year term after intervention by the Pope and a promise to make no more trouble. (He turned up again in 2010 on the fatal “Freedom Flotilla” that sought to bring aid to Hamas terrorists and has goaded Palestinian Christians to violence, insisting it is the only thing that will move Israelis.) Today, Catholic-affiliated nongovernmental organizations are among the leaders in the anti-Israel boycott, divestment and sanctions movement.

The Vatican’s relationship to the Holocaust is particularly dissolute. Pope John Paul II, in 1979, spoke at Auschwitz, noting that “six million Poles lost their lives during the Second World War, one-fifth of the nation,” failing to note that these were almost all Jews. Instead, he called Auschwitz “the Golgotha of the contemporary world,” Golgotha being the place in Jerusalem where Jesus is said to have been crucified.

More perversely, after visiting Mauthausen, the Pope said that the Jews “enriched the world by their suffering,” He seemed to be echoing the thoughts of John Cardinal O’Connor, then archbishop of New York, who a year earlier had visited Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust museum, and asserted that “the Holocaust is an enormous gift that Judaism has given to the world.”

John Paul also infuriated Jews, among others, by conferring a papal knighthood on Kurt Waldheim, the former Austrian president, United Nations secretary-general and Nazi war criminal.

When Jews objected to a proposal to build a Carmelite convent at Auschwitz, the mother superior of the order asked: “Why do the Jews want special treatment in Auschwitz only for themselves? Do they still consider themselves the Chosen People?”

The “J’Accuse” part, which channels the moral outrage of Emile Zola, is fair enough, but this book is only partly about the Vatican. Meotti dredges up equally egregious affronts perpetrated by countless other Christian denominations.

The book is a searing indictment of the Catholic Church, but it is also deeply flawed. At the least, the title is deceptive. The “J’Accuse” part, which channels the moral outrage of Emile Zola, is fair enough, but this book is only partly about the Vatican. Meotti dredges up equally egregious affronts perpetrated by countless other Christian denominations. By no means is Meotti’s condemnation limited to the Vatican, and it is difficult to discern why the title should suggest it is.

Meotti frequently puts uncited statements in quotations. For example, during the 1967 war, when Israel faced annihilation from the Arab states, Meotti claims the Vatican gave the order: “Cheer for the other side.” The quote marks suggest someone literally said this, but whom? On another occasion, he attributes, in quotes, the statement “Jerusalem must be Judenrein.” But who is alleged to have said it? One can also frequently sense comments being stretched out of context to fit the thesis.

Too many times to count, Meotti declares one Christian assertion or another “a blood libel.” The term’s over-usage diminishes whatever power the accusation carries. And nowhere is his over-usage more disturbing than in his casual, often flippant invocation of Nazism.

He writes, “Like Hitlerism, Palestinianism is not a national identity, but a criminal ideological construct…. Worse, the Netanya Passover bombing that killed 30 is a “mini Holocaust.” And, “The dark irony is that the Europeans who are supporting the Palestinians’ ‘right of return’ are living in homes stolen from Jews they helped to gas.”

Meotti’s book has the potential to make an important case against Christian antisemitism and anti-Zionism. While it doesn’t fail completely – the evidence being compendious – the charge to the jury is so overwrought that one feels resentful at being manipulated. The facts would speak for themselves if the author would step back a bit.

Pat Johnson is a Vancouver writer and principal in PRsuasiveMedia.com.

The elite aren’t who you think they are

At any given time, but especially in recent weeks when Israel’s conflict with Hamas has been front-page news, a perusal of the comments under any story involving Jews almost inevitably devolves into some variation on the theme of Jewish control. It is notable how frequently, even in 21st-century Canada, Jews are depicted as manipulating the media and puppet-mastering the powerful, like the United States.

The advent of the electronic age has brought the phenomenon to even greater levels of intensity. We are now all broadcasters. We are all publishers. We are all curators of the news.

A few years ago, the vast majority of North Americans gathered their information from the same couple of sources. While every city and town had its own newspaper, these mostly received international news from the same few press agencies. On television, Canadians were offered CBC or CTV. We now have access to hundreds of English-language TV stations and millions, if not billions, of other sources for whatever information we seek. News, which was once a staid medium, has morphed into infotainment, in which beheadings in Iraq mingle with Kardashian marriages.

Time was, one could count on the fact that most of the people at your dinner party would have heard what Barbara Frum had said the previous night or would catch the reference to a Wayne and Shuster skit. Now, if you don’t “get” the references, an electronic device will promptly be provided so that you can watch the original source of the reference itself.

There is certainly something democratizing about this panoramic access to information. Yet there may be something contra to healthy democracy in this situation, as well. The underpinnings of a successful civil society rest partly on a shared foundation of knowledge. As we have become more individualized in our choices of what we know or ignore, those shared foundations are crumbling. That a great number of young people get their news from sources like Jon

Stewart’s The Daily Show is slightly reassuring in the sense that at least they’re getting some knowledge of world affairs, similar to the transition in the 1960s when attitudes changed from viewing comic books as something akin to pornography to a resigned attitude that “at least the kids are reading.”

It is true that social media has helped young people – all people – take up causes and devote themselves to social change if they seek to do so. One of the greatest examples was this summer’s ubiquitous Ice Bucket Challenge, which has raised millions of dollars for ALS research and advocacy. Still, there is a diminishing of comprehensive, shared, reliable news and information upon which all people form their opinions.

In a democracy, everyone has the same voice at the ballot box. But a democratic society is not formed only on one day every four years. A thriving democratic society requires the engagement of an informed population every day. From that perspective, democracies risk losing an important element of viability and vibrancy when a huge proportion of the population is choosing the garden channel over Newsworld, TMZ over the New York Times.

For centuries, there has been the conspiracy theory that a tiny minority somehow controls knowledge and everything that goes with it. In a strange way, this myth may be approaching reality. But it is not Jews who are the elite increasingly controlling what transpires in the world – it is the diminishing number of people who are actually paying attention.

This is not, like the conspiracy theory, the effect of a minority seizing control from the masses. It is the opposite: it is masses of people abdicating their right and responsibility to be informed, active participants in democratic society. And, as more people look away from the uncomfortable realities of the world, a smaller and smaller elite – those who choose to remain informed – will have an outsized influence on public opinion and what governments do worldwide.

Ukrainian incidents concerning

In Europe, it has often been dangerous for Jews to be Jews. And Easter in particular has led to frenzied antisemitism, as priests commonly riled up parishioners with a selective retelling of the crucifixion story, after which throngs would emerge from churches and attack Jewish fellow residents.

This is a generalization, of course. Many Easters have passed peacefully in many parts of Europe. But Jew-bashing was a common occurrence with formal and informal sanction. Children sometimes came home from school with arts and crafts mallets to be used symbolically to hammer the Jews on Easter weekend. Predictably in such an environment, on many, many occasions, the hammering was not symbolic.

So it was this past weekend, when firebombs were reportedly thrown through the windows of the main synagogue in the Ukrainian city of Nikolayev. Thankfully, prayers were not taking place at the time and no one was injured. But the traumatized and beleaguered community must certainly have heard echoes of the past in this act of contemporary vandalism and hate.

Ukraine, of course, is the centre of global anxieties, verging as it does on something between a civil war among ethnic Russian and Ukrainian citizens and an incipient full-scale invasion by Vladimir Putin’s Russia, which has already invaded and annexed Crimea.

It may be an unofficial aspect of our tradition to always expect the worst even while hoping for the best, so it may not have come as a complete surprise to some of us that Easter weekend did not pass without an unfortunate incident. Particularly in the aftermath of another chilling incident in the days before the firebombing. A photocopied sheet was spread throughout parts of Ukraine during Passover declaring that Jews over the age of 16 must register at the (Russian-occupied) government building in Donetsk, paying a $50 registration fee and listing all real estate owned. The echoes of the past this poster elicited were obvious and outrage went viral.

From the start, there was uncertainty about the provenance of the sheet and whether it was being distributed on behalf of an official/ government agency. By the weekend, media were reporting that the poster had been “debunked,” that it was not issued by authorities. If true – because the “debunking” report is no more certain than the original belief that it came from whatever counts as a government in the region now – it would be a bit of a relief. But there should be no great celebration. In recent weeks, as Ukraine and Russia have become more and more conflicted, Jewish citizens of Ukraine have found themselves in an historically familiar and dangerously undesirable position. As has been so often the case in Europe, sides in the conflict are either demanding Jewish allegiance or scapegoating Jews.

Ukraine has a small but overt, visible and thriving neo-Nazi movement – with the support of about one in 10 Ukrainians – which is trouble enough. Putin did not help matters when he suggested recently that Russian influence in Ukraine would be good for the Jews because of rampant antisemitism there. There could hardly be a more dangerous position for Ukrainian Jews than to be seen as a justification for Russian incursion (as if Russia or Putin have records worthy of Jewish admiration).

Leaders of Ukraine’s Jewish community, which traditionally has been more Russian-speaking than Ukrainian-speaking, stood firm with their Ukrainian fellow citizens against Putin’s assertions that Ukraine is a hotbed of Jew-hatred.

“Your certainty about the growth of antisemitism in Ukraine, which you expressed at your press conference, also does not correspond to the actual facts,” rabbis and other leading figures in the community wrote in an open letter to the Russian president. “Perhaps you got Ukraine confused with Russia, where Jewish organizations have noticed growth in antisemitic tendencies last year.”

All these decades and centuries later, our coreligionists still struggle to find a place of welcome in their home countries, amid the nationalist and racial conflicts of Europe. Of course, we should not assume this is a far-away problem. The murders at two Jewish institutions in Kansas City last week is proof that antisemitism exists in our own backyards, as well, and we will continue to watch developments in the region and closer to home with wariness and hope, prepared to speak out and act on behalf of Jews – and anyone – who is endangered.