Here is a short
summary of the Pope’s visit to Israel. Today is the 47th anniversary
of the reunification of Jerusalem. This is a testimony to the faithfulness of
the GOD OF ISRAEL to watch over his word and perform it.
"I will make Jerusalem and Judah like an intoxicating
drink to all the nearby nations that send their armies to besiege Jerusalem. On
that day I will make Jerusalem a heavy stone, a burden for the world. None of
the nations who try to lift it will escape unscathed." Zechariah 12:2-3
(NLT
Several reporters below pick up things about the Pope’s
trip that an average viewer might have missed yet in the economy of God make a
huge difference.
Pope Francis’s Unfriendly Visit
Wednesday, May 28th, 2014 Caroline Glick
Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and Foreign Minister
Avigdor Liberman were right when they blamed the noxious anti-Israel incitement
rampant in Europe for Saturday’s murderous shooting attack at the Jewish Museum
in Brussels and the assault and battery of two Jewish brothers outside their
synagogue in a Paris suburb later that day.
Anti-Israel incitement is ubiquitous in Europe and is appearing in ever-widening circles of the Western world as a whole.
Until this week, the Catholic Church stayed out of the campaign to dehumanize Jews and malign the Jewish state.
Pope Benedict XVI was perceived as a friend of Israel, despite his childhood membership in the Hitler Youth. His opposition to Islam’s rejection of reason, eloquently expressed at his speech at the University of Regensburg in 2006, positioned him as a religious champion of reason, individual responsibility and law – Judaism’s primary contributions to humanity.
His predecessor Pope John Paul II was less willing to confront Islamic violence. But his opposition to Communism made him respect Israel as freedom’s outpost in the Middle East. John Paul’s visit to Israel in 2000 was in some ways an historic gesture of friendship to the Jewish people of Israel.
Both Benedict and John Paul II were outspoken champions of the Second Vatican Council and maintained doctrinal allegiance to the Church’s rejection of anti-Judaism, including the charge of deicide, and its denunciation of replacement theology.
Alas, the Golden Age of Catholic-Jewish relations seems to have come to an end during Francis’s visit to the Promised Land this week.
In one of his blander pronouncements during the papal visit, Netanyahu mentioned on Monday that Jesus spoke Hebrew. There was nothing incorrect about Netanyahu’s statement. Jesus was after all, an Israeli Jew.
But Francis couldn’t take the truth. So he indelicately interrupted his host, interjecting, “Aramaic.”
Netanyahu was probably flustered. True, at the time, educated Jews spoke and wrote in Aramaic. And Jesus was educated. But the language of the people was Hebrew. And Jesus preached to the people, in Hebrew.
Netanyahu responded, “He spoke Aramaic, but he knew Hebrew.”
Reuters’ write-up of the incident tried to explain away the pope’s rudeness and historical revisionism, asserting, “Modern-day discourse about Jesus is complicated and often political.” The report went on to delicately mention, “Palestinians sometimes describe Jesus as a Palestinian. Israelis object to that.”
Israelis “object to that” because it is a lie.
The Palestinians – and their Islamic and Western supporters – de-Judaize Jesus and proclaim him Palestinian in order to libel the Jews and criminalize the Jewish state. It seems like it would be the job of the Bishop of Rome to set the record straight. But instead, Francis’s discourtesy indicated that at a minimum, he doesn’t think the fact of Jesus’s Judaism should be mentioned in polite company.
Francis’s behavior during his public meeting with Netanyahu could have been brushed off as much ado about nothing if it hadn’t occurred the day after his symbolic embrace of some of the worst anti-Jewish calumnies of our times, and his seeming adoption of replacement theology during his homily in Bethlehem.
Consider first Francis’s behavior at the security barrier.
Reasonable people disagree about the contribution the
security fence makes to the security of Israelis. But no one can reasonably
doubt that it was built to protect Israelis from Palestinian terrorist
murderers. And Francis ought to know this. Francis’s decision to hold a photo-op at the security
barrier was an act of extreme hostility against Israel and the Jewish people.
As
the former Cardinal of Buenos Aires, Francis may have heard of the November
2002 massacre at Kibbutz Metzer. Metzer was founded by Argentine communists in
the 1950s. Metzer is located 500 meters from the 1949 armistice lines which made it an
obvious beneficiary of the security fence. But true to its radical roots, in
2002 members of the kibbutz waged a public campaign against the planned route
of the security fence. They feared that it would, in the words of Metzer member
Danny Dovrat, “ignite hostility and create problems” with the kibbutz’s
Palestinian neighbors.
Thanks to that concern, on the night of November 10, 2002, a gunman from the “moderate” US- and EU-supported Fatah terror organization faced no physical obstacle when he entered the kibbutz. Once there he killed two people on the street and then entered the home of Revital Ohayon and executed Revital and her two sons, Matan, 5, and Noam, 4 years old.
Fatah praised the attack on its website and pledged to conduct more assaults on “Zionist colonizers,” and promised to continue “targeting their children as well.”
Had he actually cared about the cause of peace and non-violence he claims to champion, Francis might have averred from stopping at the barrier, recognizing that doing so would defile the memory of the Ohayons and of hundreds of other Israeli Jewish families who were destroyed by Palestinian bloodlust and anti-Semitic depravity.
Instead, Francis “spontaneously” got out of his popemobile, walked over to a section of the barrier, and reverentially touched it and kissed it as if it were the Wailing Wall.
The
graffiti on the section of the barrier Francis stopped at reinforced his
anti-Semitic position. One of the slogans called for the embrace of the BDS
campaign.
Although the economic consequences of the campaign of economic warfare against Israel in the West have been negligible, BDS’s goal is not economic. The goal of the movement is to dehumanize Israelis and set apart for social ostracism anyone who refuses to embrace the anti-Jewish slanders that Jews have no right to self-determination and are morally inferior to every other religious, ethnic and national group in the world.
And that is nothing compared to the other slogan on the barrier. That one equated the Palestinians in Bethlehem to the Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto. In other words, it denied the Holocaust.
By standing there, kissing the barrier with its Holocaust denying slogan, Francis gave Vatican license to Holocaust denial.
And that was just the beginning.
Pope Francis met with Fatah chief Mahmoud Abbas at his presidential palace in Bethlehem. When Israel transferred control over Jesus’s birthplace to Abbas’s predecessor Yasser Arafat in 1996, Arafat seized the Greek Orthodox monastery next to the Church of the Nativity and turned it into his – and later Abbas’s – official residence.
Standing next to Abbas on seized church property, the pope called Abbas “a man of peace.”
Abbas returned the favor by calling for Israel to release all Palestinian terrorists from Israeli prisons. And the pope – who interrupted Netanyahu when he told an historic truth – said nothing.
At mass at the Church of the Nativity on Sunday, Pope Francis prayed with Latin Patriarch Fuoad Twal. In his sermon Twal accused Israelis of being the present-day version of Christ killers by referring to the Palestinians as walking “in the footsteps of the Divine Child,” and likening the Israelis to King Herod.
In his words, “We are not yet done with the present-day Herods, who fear peace more than war… and who are prepared to continue killing.”
Rather than condemn these remarks, Francis echoed them.
“Who are we, as we stand before the Child Jesus? Who are we, standing as we before today’s children?” the pope asked.
“Are we like Mary and Joseph, who welcomed Jesus and
cared for him with the love of a father and mother? Or are we like Herod, who
wanted to eliminate him?”
During his visit Monday to Jerusalem, Francis
embraced the Palestinian mufti of Jerusalem, Sheikh Muhammed Hussein. Departing
from his scripted remarks which called for the pope to refer to the mufti and
his associates as “dear friends,” Francis called them his “dear brothers.”
Hussein has been condemned by the US and the EU for his calls for the annihilation of Jews in the name of Islam.
In 2012, Hussein said it was the destiny of Muslims to kill Jews, who he claims are subhuman beasts and “the enemies of Allah.” He has also praised suicide bombers and said their souls “tell us to follow in their path.”
Francis didn’t condemn him.
Francis stridently condemned the anti-Jewish attacks in Brussels and Paris. And during his ceremonial visits to Yad Vashem, the Wailing Wall and the terror victims memorial he said similarly appropriate things. But all of his statements ring hollow and false in light of his actions.
Israelis and Jews around the world need to be aware of what is happening. Francis is leading the Catholic Church in a distressingly anti-Jewish direction
ISRAEL
TODAY
Sometimes nuances make little
difference, but not in this case.
Those who listened carefully to the
Pope couldn't miss the point that his holiness didn't once refer to Israel as a
Jewish state; and by continuously calling Israel "the Holy Land" he
reinforced the Vatican's traditional position that refuses to recognize Israel
as a Jewish state.
This is even more disturbing in light of the Pope's speech
in Bethlehem earlier in the day, in which he framed his presence not as a
pilgrimage to the Holy Land, but as an official visit to "the State of Palestine."
To highlight this difference once
again, Netanyahu put the "Land of Israel" first, and then "the
Holy Land." The Pope chose to emphasize that the Holy Land is the
birthplace of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. In doing so he erred on two
accounts: As of yet there is not a Palestinian state, and Islam did
not originate in the Holy Land.
Though the Vatican would like to
claim the Holy Land for itself, the truth is that the only place in the Bible where the
Land of Israel is referred to as the "holy land" is found in
Zechariah 2, where God fulfills His promise to the people of Israel, through
which all those faithful to God will be blessed as well.
In other words, if there is to be
peace, Israel as a Jewish state must exist. Though no one should doubt the
Pope's genuine desire for peace, it looks as if he to fails to realize that it
will not come by insistently labeling this country as "the Holy
Land." Peace will come when the people of the world, including the Jewish
people, will submit themselves to the God of Israel, who is never once biblically referred to as
the God of the Holy Land.
When Pope Francis penned his
theological dictum, "Evangelii Gaudium" (The Joy of the Gospel) calling for new levels of support for Jews and Judaism he
obviously was not contemplating his 2014 pilgrimage to the Holy Land. The cost
of those pontifical proclamations has come due, but after his time in the
Palestinian Territories it has become clear that the emperor is not wearing any
clothes.
When it was published, the Pope's book generated much enthusiasm
among Catholics, and Jews as well. "We cannot consider Judaism as a
foreign religion; nor do we include the Jews among those called to turn from
idols and to serve the true God. It confirms the continued contribution of
Divine truth that comes through the treasures of wisdom which flow from their
encounter with his word," he wrote.
In the book, Pope Francis went on to
express sorrow for the painful history of Christian persecution of the Jews. He
emphatically denounced the two theological positions which have resulted in
Jew-hatred for centuries: Replacement theology and Deicide. The former
maintains that the Jews have been "replaced" by the Church, the
covenants and promises in the Bible no longer apply to Jews, and so they have
no claim to the land. Deicide holds all Jews responsible for the crime of
killing God through the crucifixion of Jesus.
Early Church figures like Ignatius of
Antioch, Justin Martyr and John Chrysostom used these theological aberrations
to spread hatred of Jews throughout the towns and villages beholden to the
Church. The result was Crusades, pogroms and Inquisition that destroyed
hundreds of thousands of Jews.
Both of these positions were renounced by Catholics through the
teachings of Nostra Aetate, the Declaration of the Relationship of the Church
to Non-Christian Religions, written in 1965. In his book, Pope Francis declared emphatically that he, too,
embraces a renewed Catholic understanding of the Jewish people.
The new pontiff has been working hard to improve a disgraced
image of a defamed Church. But the Mideast will not be won over with
politically correct speeches or papal public relations. The stakes here are too
high. Palestinians and their Christian supporters have resurrected the
old theological poisons. Frustrated with their inability to defeat Israel
through warfare and terrorism, they are calling Zionism racism and the Jewish
people's return to an ancestral homeland anathema. Support for Palestinians, they
claim, is true biblical "justice" while the Jewish people's covenant
with God was canceled long ago and Jews have no right to settle their land.
While in Bethlehem this week, the
Pope had nothing to say regarding the foundational teachings of Palestinian Rev. Naim Ateek
of the Sabeel Ecumenical Liberation Theological Center, who declared, "Jesus is on the cross again with thousands of crucified
Palestinians around him. It only takes people of insight to see the hundreds of
thousands of crosses throughout the land, Palestinian men, women, and children
being crucified. Palestine has become one huge Golgotha. The Israeli government
crucifixion system is operating daily."
The Pope failed to challenge the
ideas being promoted by Ateek and his ilk that turn Jesus into a Palestinian, the Palestinians into Jesus, and the Jews once again
practicing deicide.
Why didn't the head of 1.2 billion Catholics decry the
Palestinian Christian Kairos Document with its denial of any Jewish place in
the Holy Land? Instead of denouncing their politically motivated Replacement
Theology on his visit to Bethlehem, we find him praying to bring down the security wall, a move that
would reopen the gates of hell upon Israel.
The author of "Evangelii Gaudium" is certainly aware
of Israel's enemies resurrecting these old anti-Semitic ideas intended to cut
off the Jewish people from the Land of Israel. Christian advocates of the anti-Israel Boycott, Divestment and
Sanctions (BDS) Movement are using Replacement Theology to prove that Jews have
no claim to their promised homeland. And this pleasant pope looks like just
another puppet of popularity.
Israel marks the end of the neophyte
Pope's honeymoon drive. Riding in his new economy compact will only get him so
far in this land. Israel is that stumbling stone of exposure revealing the true
nature of the man beneath the papal garments.
