Archive for the 'In the News' Category

Often, religious people cling to their religion because it provides them with solace and succor during times of despair or hardship. Many times religious people go to their priests, rabbis or imams for advice on matters related to morals and ethics. Given this background, anyone studying religion might conclude religion and its institutions are good things, and religion is a force for good in the world.

But, is that really so? Has religion in general been a force for good in the world? Has it made people more compassionate, more respectful of others, more tolerant of their beliefs? Has the advice given by the authorities of the various world religions been good and made people behave any better?

I would argue the opposite is true, and that any study of the effects of religion throughout human history would show for the most part a direct correlation between religiosity and intolerance, brutality, ignorance, discrimination, lack of compassion and immorality.

As one example out of many, we may look at the role religion played during what was likely the most horrific time in human history, the Second World War. At that time, we find man’s worst behavior toward man, at a level and scope unprecedented until that point. It will be interesting to see what role religion played during this cataclysmic event.

Unfortunately for religion, organized or otherwise, it doesn’t look very good. Clearly the Nazis went on their genocidal rampage motivated by secular reasons, but both the Germans and the vast numbers of helpers they easily recruited in the countries they occupied had all been brought up in the Christian tradition. What this meant is that when the Nazis began their anti-Jewish campaign they found that—like themselves—the population already felt deep antisemitism and already believed the Jews to be evil and enemies of everything that was good. Therefore the Nazis had very little to invent in their campaign against Jews and had no difficulty in persuading anyone to denounce, hunt down and murder their Jewish neighbors.

If the Nazis were not driven by religious zeal in the execution of the Holocaust, we must then ask the obvious question of what role religion played during that watershed event. Given that the perpetrators had been instructed by their Christian tradition to feel compassion and love for their neighbors, do we have any evidence the majority felt any moral qualms or refrained from murder when asked to kill Jews? Or did the perpetrators willingly and eagerly behave toward Jews in a way that was consistent with what they had been taught for almost two millennia, that is, with contempt and even hatred for them? The answer is also obvious.

For the sake of brevity, it will be interesting to focus on an aspect of the Holocaust that rarely gets the attention it deserves, and that is what happened in Croatia. In that country a puppet Nazi state was established in 1941, led by the terrorist group the Ustasha with its Poglavnik (leader) Ante Pavelić at its helm. From its inception until its demise in 1945 the Ustasha were responsible for the most barbaric acts of the war, making even the German SS pale in comparison. During the rule of the Ustasha regime, more than half a million innocent civilians were slaughtered, many of them using medieval methods: eyes were gouged out, limbs severed, intestines and other internal organs ripped from the bodies of the living. Some were slaughtered like beasts, their throats cut from ear to ear with special knives or saws. Others died from blows to their heads with sledgehammers. Many more were simply burned alive. Some Ustasha perpetrators wore necklaces made from the eyes or ears of their victims.

The actions of the Ustasha are important and relevant in this discussion because the Ustasha were ultra-Catholic and they killed in large part in an effort to rid Croatia of its non-Catholic elements, that is, the largely Orthodox Serbs, the Gypsies, and of course the Jews. Many of the perpetrators were actually Catholic priests. One of them was a Franciscan friar who continued to act as a member of his order as commandant of the notorious Croat concentration camp Jasenovac, where he committed the most heinous atrocities. Sometimes he even wore his Franciscan robes while perpetrating his crimes.

Did the perpetrators consult with their religious leaders before committing these crimes? Did their religious upbringing play any role in making them act the way they did? During the Croatian genocide the Vatican had compiled a list of Croatian priests who had participated in massacres of Orthodox Serbs and Jews with the intention of disciplining them after the war. They never did. Not only that, many perpetrators were protected and given passage to safe havens around the world by members of the Vatican who housed them in Vatican properties, clothed and fed them, and eventually helped them evade justice so they could regroup to fight Communism.

You’d think that during the war the Catholic Church would very publicly and loudly object to the genocide taking place in Croatia, given that the impetus behind the genocide was ultimately the propagation of Catholicism, but it didn’t. You’d think that the Catholic Church would attempt to stop the perpetrators, given that they were Catholics strongly loyal to the pope, but it didn’t. You’d think the Catholic Church would give advice and guidance to the Croatian Catholic faithful in an effort to rein them in, but it didn’t. You’d think the pope, Pius XII, would feel shame and embarrassment and distance himself from the Croat Catholics and their leader, but he didn’t.

Indeed, the leader of the Ustasha, Ante Pavelić was a mass murderer who revered Pope Pius XII, and was aware that Pius XII and his senior advisers thought highly of his militant Catholicism. In April 1941 Pavelić was received by the Pope, creating an uproar at the British Foreign Office who was dismayed that the Pope would even consider meeting with such a notorious mass murderer. They thus described the Pope as “the greatest moral coward of our age.” As the Foreign Office later told the British ambassador to the Holy See, the Pope’s reception of Pavelić “has done more to damage his reputation in this country than any other act since the war began.”

Maybe we should excuse the Pope and the Church for not acting during the war because of the fog of war, lack of communications, the desire to remain neutral, etcetera. But these are all hollow excuses. Moreover, even if we were willing to accept them, what could possibly explain the lack of acts of repudiation after the war for the genocide in Croatia?

In May 1945, after having learned of Hitler’s death, Cardinal Bertram of Breslau ordered that “a solemn requiem mass be held in commemoration of the Führer. . .” so that the Almighty’s son, Hitler, be admitted to paradise. A solemn requiem mass is celebrated only for a believing member of the Church and if it is in the public interest of the Church. Hitler was not a believing member of the Church and only a Church deeply steeped in their own anti-Jewish teachings and the grotesque twist to them that Hitler gave them could think that a solemn requiem for Hitler was a good, moral thing to do and that it was in the Church’s public interest. Did the Pope or the Catholic Church rebuke Cardinal Bertram, then or any time after that? No, it did not.

Given this background, we should not be too surprised to learn that just as the year 2010 was coming to a close a mass was celebrated in a Zagreb church honoring the 49th anniversary of the death of the Ustasha mass murderer Ante Pavelić. The mass was held by priests Vjekoslav Lasić and Stanislav Kos, who referred to Pavelić as a respectable man who made sacrifices for all of Croatia. You’d think the Catholic Church would take advantage of this opportunity to very loudly and publicly repudiate the actions of the Ustasha and its leader Pavelić, but you’d be wrong. What was the official reaction of the Catholic Church to this outrageous mass? So far their reaction is consistent with their reaction during the Holocaust: a deafening silence.

It seems that a clear parallel can be drawn between the former situation with Saddam Hussein and Iraq, and the situation in the 1930s with Adolf Hitler and Germany. Both were cases of megalomaniac dictators openly bent on destruction, and in both cases they openly disobeyed the agreements to disarm they signed after loosing a war (the UN resolutions and the Versailles Treaty, respectively).

If the most important world leaders in the 1930s—British Prime Minister Chamberlain, French Prime Minister Daladier and American President Roosevelt—had decided to enforce the Treaty of Versailles, if the League of Nations had had the strength and courage to react when faced by the reality of the demonization and dehumanization of the Jewish people taking place in Germany, if anybody beside Churchill had understood the real threat that Hitler posed after the staggering militarization of the country, then they would have stopped Hitler when he was weak, when it was legitimate to do so, and when they still had time. But no one had the guts to do that: world leaders thought that it was all right to look to the other side, wait for things to magically fix themselves, or plunge into the delusional quagmire of thinking they could negotiate with Hitler and be content that a paper bearing his signature promising to behave would be enough. They were wrong.

Another factor that needs to be taken into consideration at this time is that we now live in a different world than we used to. Many people argue that it’s not in the tradition of the US to preemptively attack another country, which is true. But, as I stated earlier, a preemptive strike against the Nazis would have prevented the Holocaust and WWII. Back then international law was on the side of the Allies because Germany had not respected the Versailles Treaty and rearmed itself: a few years ago we had exactly the same situation with Iraq and the UN Security Council resolutions.

But there’s an even more important factor: in the past an aggressive country could wage war against other nations, and that meant sending tanks over the border. It’s very different when an aggressive country can wage war against another country by sending someone with a box filled with anthrax and drop it in some water reservoir, or open a canister of VX gas into the air conditioning system of any building, or carry a dirty bomb in a suitcase and detonate it in a city’s crowded downtown area.

Also of note is the fact that the enemies of the past were in a way like us: people who may have hated us but had a high regard for at least their own lives. Not even the most demonic Nazi bastard was willing to die just to murder some Jews. The Germans that perished in the war died fighting, and surely after having tried to avoid their own death as much as possible. That is no longer the case. We are faced with a group of fanatics who have been brainwashed to the point of not having any regard for human life, be it their enemies’ (including babies!) or their own. This is the reason why the old tradition of waiting to be attacked before attacking ourselves cannot be sustained. If the Israelis had not preemptively destroyed the Iraqi nuclear reactor at Osirak in the 1980s then American troops would have faced an enemy with nuclear weapons in 1991.

These days the world faces the threat of Iran, a regime ruled by retrograde, fanatical mullahs who are eager to bring about the end of the world to fulfill their religious lunacies. Iran, like Iraq before it, is the leading exporter of terrorism. Iran is financially strong, and like Iraq, it sits on a sea of oil. Moreover, it can easily control the flow of oil from other Arab countries out of the Middle East, thus strangling the world. Iran is pursuing the manufacture of nuclear weapons, and already possesses intercontinental ballistic missiles capable of reaching Israel, and soon Europe. If they continue in their current path, it’s going to be only a matter of time before they can reach America. Iran openly and indisputably supports terrorist proxies in various places, and remotely leads them to wreak havoc in Israel and elsewhere. The question is not whether this modus operandi will spread to Europe and America, but rather when.

What the US did with Iraq back in 1991 was to merely push Hussein to the side by telling him not to bother the little kids anymore. The trouble is—and this is were the similarity with the 1930s situation is still pertinent—that there were back then and in 2003 treaties that were signed to ensure the bully remained contained, and that went unenforced in both in the 1930s and in 1990s, with the consequence that Hitler rearmed Germany and launched WWII and the Holocaust, and not too long ago Hussein continued to rearm Iraq, and today we have a fanatical, delusional regime in Iran pursuing nuclear weapons.

The danger is that both Iraq during the Hussein era and Iran under Ahmadinejad, or through proxies, are capable of murdering millions of people. Hitler had access to chemical weapons technology: after all, Germany had used them in WWI. But Hitler only gassed Jews because he knew that using those weapons against Allied armies was unacceptable, even in the context of the horrors of war, and even when he was desperate towards the end of the war. Unfortunately the same could not have been said of Hussein: he not only used weapons of mass destruction; he used them more than once. Surely Iran would have no qualms in using nuclear weapons. To the mullahs, millions of deaths are not a regrettable outcome of war; it’s a desired goal as in their twisted worldview nothing brings a Muslim closer to Allah than dying in the course of waging jihad.

It would be really stupid of Ahmadinejad to trigger a direct confrontation with military powers like Israel or the US, which he hates with a passion. Either of them can destroy Iran’s military and infrastructure if they are compelled to do so. It is a much better strategy for him to use proxies that hate Israel and the US as much (or more) than he does, proxies that (as opposed to himself) are willing to die to kill the infidel.

This is the crux of the problem: a small group of militant Islamic fanatics can create enormous destruction with just a little investment, if they have the organizational, monetary and infrastructure support of a big entity like Iran, Syria or Saudi Arabia. This is very important: a small group of Bedouins does not have the capacity to make uranium 235 or plutonium, but a large, powerful state like Iran does. In the immediate future their Russian-built nuclear reactor will be fitted with nuclear fuel rods, which could be later used to produce weapons-grade plutonium. So, it stands to reason that if Iran wants to do as much harm as possible to the West it will be better off inciting and supporting a bunch of ignorant, fanatical Islamic militants, like Hezbollah, Hamas or others. It only takes a small amount of radioactive material distributed to a few deranged suicidal psychopaths to attack many cities. No need for sophisticated ICBMs or even heavy bombers. Think about how easy this would be: I’m not talking about deploying dirty bombs in Washington or New York, but any medium-sized cities in the US, Tel Aviv or Haifa. The security at ports of entry in the US will not stop Iran from smuggling this stuff in: it’s easy enough to ship it in one of the many millions of unchecked containers that come into the US every day. Can we afford to allow this to happen? Can we afford to wait for the so-called “smoking gun”? Can Israel afford to wait until the international community of appeasers gets their act together?

Waiting to be attacked is no longer an option. We live in a different world.

Efraim Zuroff is the Director of the Israel office of the Simon Wiesenthal Center. I met him last March in his Jerusalem office and we discussed his ongoing efforts to bring to justice the perpetrators of atrocities during the Second World War. He recently visited Vilnius, Lithuania, where his great-uncle was kidnapped on July 13, 1941, by a gang of Lithuanians “roaming the streets of the city looking for Jews with beards to arrest.” We also discussed the efforts of Lithuania and other countries to whitewash their role in the Holocaust. And a pretty bad role they had.

As the German army went deep into Soviet territory after the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, special units went right behind them all along the front with the sole purpose of hunting down and killing every Jew in the numerous Jewish communities that lived there. As a result of their murderous work about 1.5 million Jews were killed. The process was slow, bloody, and was affecting the morale of the Germans. Not because they felt pangs of conscience that killing thousands of Jews every day was immoral, but rather because even for these murderers getting splattered blood and pieces of brain all over their uniforms, and dealing with agonizing screams as they murdered Jews at close range all day long, day after day, was simply too unnerving. To make this easier, and to make it feasible to gather, control and murder so many people, the German killing squads recruited people from among the local populations. These allowed the German overlords to take a supervisory role as the local auxiliaries did the dirty work.

One of the more interesting aspects of the role of the local populations of the Ukraine, Poland, Lithuania and other places is the underlying reasons of why they were so willing to participate in the extermination of the Jews. In those countries, as in other countries occupied by the Germans (or their proxies) such as Latvia, Belarus, Croatia, Slovakia, Hungary, France, etc., it was—for the most part—the local auxiliaries who willingly participated in denouncing their Jewish neighbors, helping Germans round them up, cordoning them off in the way to the murder site, bludgeoning them, jeering at them, and ultimately shooting them naked at the edge of a mass grave.

One needs to ask the question of why the locals were so willing to murder Jews, and why they showed such zeal. The reason why this is an important question is because, first, the claim that the Germans forced the locals to become auxiliaries in the extermination campaign is untrue, and second, because the local populations were not subjected to the relentless racial propaganda and brainwashing the German population had been exposed to. Thus, one needs to dig deeper into the psyche of these willing perpetrators to understand why they were so antisemitic. Actually, one needs to ask the question of what made these people antisemitic in the first place. Surely many hated Jews because they felt Jews were associated with the Bolsheviks, and surely some hated Jews because they felt they had too much money, and surely there were many other reasons. But why were the local Christian populations so ready to uncritically accept these and many other accusations against their Jewish neighbors? After all, it’s true some Jews were Bolsheviks, but so were some Christians. Some Jews were wealthy, but most were poor, even very poor.

The ancestors of these Ukrainians and Lithuanians taught their children that Jews were responsible for the social upheavals and revolutions of the 19th century. Their ancestors in turn told their children that the Jews were guilty of poisoning wells, of bringing the Black Plague, and of killing little Christian boys to extract their blood to make Passover bread. And their ancestors had told their children that Jews were Christ-killers, bent on defiling the Christian mind, of desecrating the host, of being minions of the devil, of usury, of blindness when faced with what they perceived to be the obvious theological truth, and on and on. These people asked themselves the question of what kind of person would reject Jesus, God, and what was to them self-evidently true Christian revelation. To European Christians, it was a simple Manichean dichotomy: either the Jews were wrong in their rejection of Jesus as the messiah, or Jesus was not the messiah. Clearly unable to accept the latter, they chose the former and realized that only an enemy of Jesus would be blind to him and his revelation. To Christians, the anti-Christ was associated with the Jews. From there, it should not be too surprising that European Christians syllogistically arrived at the conclusion that since only agents of Satan would fight Jesus, and the Jews were enemies of Jesus, then the Jews had to be agents of Satan. As preposterous as this may sound to us today, in the past Christians saw Jews as demons complete with horns and tails and that emitted a foul, hellish odor. Having demonized the Jews, European Christians then proceeded to dehumanize them, which of course was not hard to do at all given that Jews were thought of as demonic creatures, not human beings. Medieval Christians all across Europe conceived of Jews as poisonous serpents, vipers, hells-spawn and rats. Hitler simply had to update the lexicon and transformed the Jews into vampires, germs, bloodsuckers and parasites. When the Germans presented eastern Europeans with the opportunity to exterminate these “pests,” they eagerly complied.

It’s really not that difficult to understand why Eastern Europeans already deeply hated Jews at the beginning of WWII when one understands the previous 18 centuries of relentless vilification and persecution of Jews in Christian teachings. It’s really not that hard to understand why all those Ukrainians and Lithuanians signed up to kill their Jewish neighbors, and why they did it with gusto, all day long, day after day, when one understands that to these people those Jews were the killers of Christ, evil, demonic and allegedly responsible for all the ills of the world, concepts they heard all their lives from the New Testament to the writings of the Church Fathers going through popular folklore and priestly sermons. Moreover, no one should be too surprised that these people killed with a clean conscience, given that they never heard from their pope, bishops, or parish priests that murdering Jews and stealing their property was a crime and a mortal sin, and that participation in mass murder would condemn their souls to hell. Not receiving any instruction to the contrary, no one should be too surprised they continued to slaughter Jews given they thought that what they were doing was the right thing to do, while the leaders of the Lithuanian Catholic Church “forbade the priests to help Jews in any way whatsoever” or priests in Poland were instructing the faithful in their sermons that “No trace of a Jew is to remain. We should erase them from the face of the earth.”

A recent article on Zenit, written by Gary Krupp from Pave the Way Foundation, describes how Pope Pius XII’s supposed strategy of “silence” saved thousands of Roman Jews who would have otherwise perished at Auschwitz. There are a number of problems with this article.

First of all, the article states that the Pope intentionally avoided a public denunciation of the deportation, and it was precisely this lack of public action that saved the Jews. Well, this is problematic because, as the author correctly states later in the article, the Pope threatened the German authorities with making a public denunciation if they didn’t stop the ongoing arrests. This means the Pope could not have had a strategy to keep quiet. Second, irrespective of what the Pope’s plans were, it is misleading to claim that these plans were what “saved their lives and enabled their rescue”. It is misleading because on the one hand, the Jews of Rome were alerted of the imminent deportations ahead of time, which enabled the greatest majority of them to find shelter in the homes of their friends and neighbors, as well as in Church properties. Most of them were given refuge out of Christian charity, and not under orders from the Pope. On the other hand, over a thousand Jews were indeed deported and murdered in the gas chambers of Auschwitz, so at least those Jews were not among those the Pope supposedly “saved their lives and enabled their rescue” as the article suggests.

Then Mr. Krupp tells us that General Wolff correctly deduced that a German invasion of the Vatican and any attempt to kidnap or kill the Pope would have led to a massive worldwide revolt. This is true, and Hitler knew it. If he had even touched the Pope, the Germans would have found themselves with hundreds of millions of Catholics worldwide, and possibly many millions of Protestants, against them. This would have included the millions of Catholic German soldiers fighting Hitler’s war. No amount of SS and/or Gestapo intimidation would have been able to stop that tidal wave. Hitler was very evil but not stupid. He knew this without needing convincing by General Wolff or anyone else. Given this, the claim that Major General Stahel and Ambassador Weiszäcker both lied to their superiors in an attempt to make them suspend the plan to invade the Vatican makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. These men were very smart, and there was no need to feed their superiors with any sort of lies, tactical or otherwise. Besides, there was no possible military justification not to invade: the Germans had the means and know-how to do that. No, the Germans only feared a public condemnation from the Pope, a condemnation that never came.

The article also makes the grandiose claim that the Pope “ordered all ecclesiastical institutions to hide the Jews wherever they could” using his network of trusted priests and confidants. All? He ordered all of them to do that? Why didn’t all do it, then? But the Pope had access to a system of encryption that would have allowed him to safely send written instructions to all priests, nuns, monks and members of the clergy to do that, but the record does not show these orders. It is possible however that this documentation is hidden in the Vatican Secret Archives, but the public record so far does not show the Pope instructing even most ecclesiastical institutions to give shelter to Jews, let alone all. I am definitely among those who don’t believe the Pope orchestrated the rescue of 7,000 of Rome’s Jews, but I do acknowledge that it was done with his knowledge and approval, and I also acknowledge that in the future I may be proven wrong when and if documents not yet uncovered show this to have been the case. But I also criticize him for not saving the over one thousand that were deported and then murdered at Auschwitz. At the very least, the Pope could have stood in front of the train deporting these Jews as, even if the Germans had forcibly removed him from the tracks, the very gesture would have electrified the faithful, restored the respect the Pope had lost among the Allies, and cemented the Church’s moral standing.