Monthly Archive for January, 2010

Musings on the International Holocaust Remembrance Day

Published on January 27, 2010 in General and In the News by Gabriel. 0 Comments

As the world commemorates the International Holocaust Remembrance Day, marking the liberation of the Auschwitz death camp 65 years ago, it’s also important to understand, and remember, what was it that drove the Germans and their helpers in the various countries they invaded to perpetrate the Holocaust.

In Germany they evolved the ancient hatred toward Jews into something modern, secular, and pseudo-scientific, something the post-Enlightenment, highly cultured German people could accept as a replacement for the old Christian antisemitism. By the time Hitler came to power the racial underpinnings of his antisemitism were so strong no one in Germany thought of the old theological animosity. To 20th century Germans, the Jews were hateful for causing the loss of WWI, for being racially inferior, for Bolshevism and—simultaneously—for capitalism. To those Germans, however, any message of hatred that conformed with their worldview formed by almost two thousand years of Christian teachings about Jews made sense and was acceptable.

Elsewhere in Europe, particularly in the East where the genocide took place and where the Germans found no shortage of auxiliaries for the genocidal duties that took place behind the front lines, the situation was different. Neither the Poles, nor the Lithuanians, nor the Ukrainians, nor any of the others who willfully collaborated in the execution of the “Final Solution” had been brain-washed by Nazi racial propaganda. In those countries the locals hated Jews for the same reasons other Europeans had hated Jews since the time of Emperor Constantine: for killing Christ, for poisoning wells, for bringing about the Black plague, for killing young Christian boys to extract their blood to make Passover bread, for being minions of the devil, for being greedy money-lenders (conveniently forgetting it was Christian laws that pushed Jews into that profession to start with), and any number of other baseless accusations.

So, now that the world is paying attention at the result of this hatred when looking-in through the old electrified fence at Auschwitz-Birkenau, we should not forget where antisemitism came from, and recognize that part of that foundation is still in place in Christianity.

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Interview on “The Independent Voice” on Wed. 1/27 7pm EST

Published on January 26, 2010 in Announcements by Gabriel. 0 Comments

I will be interviewed on the radio program “The Independent Voice” on WNJC 1360AM Philadelphia next Wednesday January 27 at 7:00pm EST/4:00pm PST. The subject is “Antisemitism”. For those of you that want to listen in, it will be streamed live, but if you can’t “tune in” at that time I will have the recording on the “Six Million Crucifixions” web site a couple of days later.

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Pope Benedict upset at growing “aversion” to Christians

Published on January 26, 2010 in In the News by Gabriel. 0 Comments

Pope Benedict decried in a homily an increase in the level of opposition to the Christian faith. No student of history should be surprised at this growing aversion of the Christian faith. The fact that there are now many more incidents of complaints about Church policy or acts is not a function of an increase in things the Church does that are worth complaining about. Rather, it is a function of the much more widespread dissemination of information about those things, the inexorable movement away from religious obscurantism, and the demise of the Church’s repression apparatus.

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Catholic bishop claims Holocaust is a Jewish “invention”

Published on January 25, 2010 in In the News by Gabriel. 0 Comments

Tadeusz Pieronek, a Polish bishop, declared that the Holocaust was invented by Jews to garner support from the rest of the world. According to Bishop Pieronek the Holocaust is mere “propaganda.” This astonishing statement, however, comes from a Catholic bishop from a country with a notorious history of Christian antisemitism and in which millions of Jews perished. Many Poles collaborated with the Germans, and most looked the other way as their Jewish neighbors were dragged from their homes and shot in a nearby forest or gassed in a death camp down the road. Even after WWII and the defeat of Germany many Jews were victims of Catholic Poles.

None of this should be too surprising, though, given what the Catholic Church in Poland taught the faithful. Cardinal Augustyn Hlond, primate of Poland, said in a pastoral letter in 1936, three years before the German invasion and as part of an official Catholic endorsement of the Nazi boycott of Jewish business in Poland:

“There will be the Jewish problem as long as Jews remain. It is a fact that the Jews are fighting against the Catholic Church, persisting in freethinking, and are the vanguard of godlessness, Bolshevism and subversion. It is a fact that the Jewish influence on morality is pernicious and that their publishing houses disseminate pornography. It is a fact that the Jews deceive, levy interest, and are pimps. It is a fact that the religious and ethical influence of the Jewish young people on the Polish young people is a negative one.”

This was read from the pulpits of all churches in the country.

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Antisemitic Blood Libel Aimed at Israeli Defense Forces in Haiti

Published on January 22, 2010 in In the News by Gabriel. 1 Comment

A new allegation that the Israeli Defense Forces is stealing organs is proliferating on the Internet. This new slander got started when a Seattle man called “T. West” posted a video on YouTube making the suggestion the IDF medical contingent, the most high-tech in Haiti among all the nations helping there, was stealing the organs of earthquake victims. This comes a few months after a similar accusation by a Swedish journalist in the Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet (See post “Is the Israeli army killing young Palestinians to harvest their organs?”).

This is awful. The Blood Libel does not go away. I think the thing to do, for any organization combating antisemitism or any other form of prejudice and hatred, is to nullify the effect of these types of libels. We can complain about it (and organizations like the ADL do a good job of this), but these things keep coming back. The reason is because there’s always an audience receptive to this message. Hitler also found a population who already hated Jews and he had no difficulty in getting his genocidal message across. He could do this because his audience was already predisposed to any message in which Jews were portrayed in a way to conformed with the ingrained views of Jews prevalent among Christians at the time. Mr. West (and Bostrom before him), can say the things they say, and they don’t end up in a lunatic asylum, because there are many people to whom this kind of stuff “makes sense”.

I think this can be combated on two fronts: first and foremost, with education. We need to get to the point where if someone said Jews were harvesting the organs of Palestinians or Haitians, or killing Christian boys to make passover bread, they would naturally be considered equally as mad as if they had said that Israelis had four heads. The other front of this war should be legal. There has to be a cost to libel and slander. Slander like this needs to be confronted automatically with civil legal action, and this needs to be done consistently, openly, and very publicly. If people like Mr. Bostrom or Mr. West, Holocaust deniers, antisemites and other racists of all stripes, and other hate-mongers felt that there would literally be a high cost to saying the things they say, they would, if not refrain, at least think about saying it twice.

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Pope Benedict’s visit to Rome’s synagogue

Published on January 17, 2010 in General and In the News by Gabriel. 0 Comments

Pope Benedict just visited Rome’s synagogue, built on what was the edge of the Roman ghetto. This is a significant event, and an attempt by the roman pontiff to tighten Jewish-Christian relations. This is commendable.

The trouble is that this is just a band aid trying to patch a wound created by multiple axe blows. To start with, this was the only synagogue his predecessors in the papacy allowed Jews to have, and was built in the precursor to the concentration camps his predecessors built: the ghettos.

There has been quite a bit of negative reaction to this pope’s actions, which should not really surprise anyone. After all, he lifted the excommunication to a Holocaust-denying bishop, he spoke at Auschwitz but forgot to mention that the Holocaust was caused by pathological antisemitism, and of course neglected to mention where antisemitism might have come from. Also, he has been extolling Pope Pius XII’s “heroic virtues” and has been promoting his canonization. People should be even less surprised at any residual animosity toward the wartime pope, Pius XII. After all, that pope had the power, but not the will, to make a difference during the war yet he chose to remain silent.

It’s highly misleading to make so much hoopla about Pius XII’s putative actions in defense of the Jews during the war: they were meager, largely ineffective, and many times they were made to create precisely the type of appearance of action we are seeing defended today. As Pius’ close aide, Msgr. Tardini, explained in an internal Vatican memo after a tepid admonition to the Slovakian President-priest Tiso, “This will make known to the world that the Holy See fulfills its duty of charity.” Or, when Jesuit Father Tacchi Venturi made a symbolic inquiry about the fate of the Jews of Rome, he then informed his superiors that “A step like this by the Holy See, even if it does not obtain the desired effect, will without doubt help increase the veneration and gratitude toward the August Person of the Holy Father.” In a similar case a Holy See official mentioned some potential actions the Holy See could take on behalf of the Jews, knowing that they would be totally ineffective and they would fail. He did this knowing that “if nothing else, it will always be possible to say that the Holy See has done everything possible to help these unhappy people.”

So, what can Pope Benedict do to really mend things with the Jewish community, and perhaps more importantly for him and the Church as such, demonstrate high moral values? He can and should open the Vatican Secret Archives to scholarly scrutiny, unconditionally, and urgently. And the Catholic Church can and should stop the canonization effort of Pius XII until the examination of the documentary record of the wartime pope is completed and published. And, if historians determine that Pope Pius XII was indeed largely indifferent at the fate of six million Jews, then the Church should spurn him, the rest of the curia around him, and the thousands of priests who even as the Germans and their helpers were annihilating the Jews, continued to spread antisemitism among the murderous faithful.

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Why don’t Jews believe in Jesus as the Messiah?

Published on January 16, 2010 in General by Gabriel. 0 Comments

Jews reject Jesus as the Messiah because he didn’t fulfill Jewish expectations of the Messiah. In Judaism, the Messiah was supposed to bring peace to the world, and Jesus failed to do that. Moreover, his ignominious death at the hands of the Romans was further proof he could not have been the Messiah.

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What is the Ritual Murder accusation?

Published on January 16, 2010 in General by Gabriel. 0 Comments

This allegation was that Jews ritually murdered non-Jews, especially Christians, to obtain blood to make Passover bread. It was a complex of deliberate lies, trumped up accusations, and popular beliefs about the murder-lust of the Jews and their bloodthirstiness, based on the conception that Jews hated Christianity and humankind in general. It was combined with the delusion that Jews were in some way not human and had to have recourse to special remedies and subterfuges to appear, at least outwardly, like other men. The blood libel led to trials and massacres of Jews.

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What were the Christian views of Jews prior to the Second Vatican Council?

Published on January 16, 2010 in General by Gabriel. 0 Comments

The views changed over time. Christians believed Jews were Christ-killers, minions of the Devil, greedy, that they killed Christian boys to extract their blood to make Passover bread, that they poisoned wells and were responsible for causing the Black Plague, that they desecrated the Host, that they were spiritual defilers of Christian minds, that they were Bolshevik revolutionaries bent on destroying civilization and religion, or evil capitalist financiers committed to cause global depression and taking over the world.

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What is a “Passion Play”? Was Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ” antisemitic?

Published on January 11, 2010 in General by Gabriel. 0 Comments

Passion Plays were dramatic performances of Jesus’ Passion during his last agonizing hours as recorded in the Gospels. These Passion Plays were very popular throughout Christian Europe in the late Middle Ages. They gradually moved out of the church and monastery into the streets and the stage, where the dramatization of Jesus’ suffering became a very effective way of representing the tortures and pain inflicted on him. It was held every year in Lent and typically the devout audience, incensed by the literature and sermons intended to help them meditate on the Passion and the strong iconography and anti-Jewish message that helped them visualize it, went out after the performance on a violent rampage against Jews.

“The Passion of the Christ” was seen more people than all Passion Play productions put together, and was equally as pernicious as the worst of them. The film is based on the Gospels and other texts, and contrary to the teachings of the Catholic Church since Vatican II it portrays the Jews as vile, repugnant killers of Christ, and doing the work of the Devil who even walks among them. The film portrays Jews with stereotypical hook-noses and rotten teeth and as homogeneously evil and bloodthirsty, while Jesus and the apostles (who were also Jews) have nice, clean, Anglo-Saxon features. The film also portrays Pontius Pilate, a tyrant known for his ruthlessness and bloodthirstiness, as meek and undecided and easily swayed by a Jewish mob bent on persuading him to execute Jesus.

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