5.05.2007 | "filthy Christ killer"

There was a brief report in the Wall Street Journal on a recent conference, topic: "What's He Doing Here?: Jesus in Jewish Culture." What caught my attention were these paragraphs relating to a common misperception about the role of Jesus in anti-Semitism:

"Here you are, you jewish intellectuals, with a small 'j,'" an elderly man stated from the front of the auditorium when he received the microphone. "I want you to know that I am not a cheder boy -- I grew up among Catholics, who called me a filthy Christ killer. I envy you that your generation can be so calm. I live in fear. And I grew up in Montreal, not in Poland. My grandfather was murdered in Jesus' name."

There was a tense pause. When a second hand went up, holding out hope that a new questioner might change the subject, you could almost hear the audience members breathe a sigh of relief. The situation, after all, was awkward -- something akin to a dinner guest loudly noting a chunk of lobster in a kosher whitefish salad. But upon the passing of the microphone, things only took a turn for the worse.

"I'm a New York Jew," a second older gentleman said, "whose entire life has been programmed by stories of my family who died in Europe because of Jesus, hiding in cellars from pogroms at Easter and Christmas. I don't see beauty in [Ezra] Pound, or [Louis-Ferdinand] Celine, or the great anti-Semites of the world. I don't see any great influence that they've had on the good of the world, with their vituperative pronouncements about Jews. I don't get it -- I really don't get it."

I, too, am a New York Jew, and remember having Catholic kids throw rocks and holler "Christ killer" at Jewish kids. Turns out that this is what their Irish priests had told them, in no uncertain terms: the Jews had killed Jesus, and that today's Jews bore the stain.

When I came to know Christ, I then also knew that those priests were not just wrong, but anti-Semites. We all, humanity that is, killed Jesus. It was all of our sins for which he paid the ultimate price. Jesus was a Jew, born a Jew, died the Jewish Messiah. Jesus was not, as some of those Irish priests told their flocks, a Catholic.

As a Christian, I have also come to know this: there is no possibility that a true disciple of Jesus Christ would harm a Jew for being Jewish. We must wish that all, including all Jews, would accept Christ as Lord. We must also never, ever, use force or any other coercion to bring this about.

Those that do, and those that commit violence to innocents in the name of Jesus are damned to Hell. This is something all Christians must know. Must. And if they do not, they have no claim to being Christian until they do.

2.27.2007 | "The Judaization of Jerusalem"

Now there's an odd phrase. Being old-fashioned, I always thought that Jerusalem started as a "Jewish" city: The City of David. As in King David. As in the unifier of Israel and Judah, around 1000 BCE. Jerusalem is where David's son Solomon built the first temple. For this reason alone the city has been central to the Jewish people ever since.

The phrase, from a United Nations functionary, is part of a complaint against there being any Jews in the Middle East. This is reported on by Anne Bayefsky at NRO with the only slightly exaggerated headline, "Jews Seek Racial Domination!". The Cliff's Notes version: The United Nations is an organization dedicated to completing the task of genocide. This time, by accusing the Jewish people of genocide because, among other things, Israel has built a wall to keep terrorists out. The money quotation from the UN functionary:

"The Wall being built in East Jerusalem is an instrument of social engineering designed to achieve the Judaization of Jerusalem…"

Perhaps "genocide" is too extreme. Yet this word routinely pops up when the "human rights" brigades start their goose-stepping.

[As an aside, it seems that whenever you see soldiers goose-stepping, as in, say, Iran's armed forces, you can bet your bottom dollar that they are in the service of a totalitarian regime.]

From Ms. Bayefsky's article, a sample:

The primary tool of the U.N.’s point-man for whipping up modern-day anti-Semitism is to pillory the Jew as racist extraordinaire. Israel is the evil equivalent to apartheid South Africa. Referring to apartheid 24 times in his report, he proclaims: “Israel’s laws and practices in the OPT certainly resemble aspects of apartheid.” He fails to mention, predictably, that one-fifth of Israel’s population is Arab — citizens who vote and hold seats in the Israeli parliament — while Arab countries are Judenrein. And Israel is the apartheid state?

I am pleased that someone else has noticed that when the Arabs scream about those racist Jews, they themselves are not troubled by having Jews living among them. For the simple reason that, with very limited exception, after the creation of Israel in 1948, Jews were kicked out of their ancestral homes in Arab nations, or left before being kicked out. Or killed.

I wonder if those Jews, and their descendants, can sue for a "right of return" in the various Arab lands that kicked them out? If memory serves, approximately the same number of Jews left Arab lands as Arabs left what became Israel. But, when it comes to Jews, who's counting?

From a Christian perspective, it is essential that all of Zion be in-gathered into what is the modern state of Israel. And within Israel, Jerusalem, the place of our Lord's Passion, death, and resurrection. Not to mention that Jesus was a lineal descendant of King David.

Finally, the care and keeping of the Jews is a holy task for Christians. They are our brothers, and we must be ever mindful that "he that keepeth Israel shall neither slumber nor sleep" (Psalm 121:4).

2.06.2007 | " the rest of mankind as well"

Ah, Richard Cohen. One of my favorite liberal columnists. While I usually disagree with him on political and philosophical grounds, every now and again he comes up with something right. No, not right as in conservative; but as in correct, even though it grates to admit it.

In his column today he reminds us that anti-Semitism is not a club to be used on any and everyone who criticizes Israel. As Cohen has done, on several occasions. But, for writing the following, all is forgiven:

At times, I [Cohen] have written coldly and provocatively about Israel, maybe once or twice in anger. This, in turn, has angered some readers who knew what I was thinking but not what I was feeling -- that, at bottom, I had a strong emotional attachment to Israel. It is a country whose survival is not only important for the Jewish people but for the rest of mankind as well. I can enumerate many reasons why I support Israel -- it's a legitimate state, a real democracy, etc. But it is also where Jews went to escape the killers; to ignore that is to extinguish the twin lights of morality and memory and leave the world even darker than it now is.

Anyone who opens a bible, whether a Tanach or a Christian bible, can read the story of how the Jews were chosen to keep God in the world. One may choose to believe, or not, the stories, and the history of the Jews. But there can be no mistaking that the moral grounding for our society is to be found in the pages that also tell the history of the Jews. And, that Israel today is the home for the remnant of Israel. The remnant that the rest of the world did not destroy.

Two things might be argued. First, other religions have come up with very similar rules for moral conduct. "Thou shalt not murder" comes to mind. Second, many Christians throughout history were taught by their priests and pastors that Christianity had superceded Judaism, that the Jews were no longer God's chosen people.

Neither of these things changes the essential truth that annoys many anti-Semites: for better or for worse, Western society uses the specific morality given to the Jews by God and recorded in scripture. That morality is tempered, for believing Christians, by God's son who died for all of our sins. As for those who confess neither Judaism nor Christianity, we Christians would like to invite them in. Whether they join us or not, the truth remains the truth -- it is not conditioned on time, place, or culture.

Jesus, when he walked among us, reminded us that until all passes away, until, that is, the end of the world, God's law remains in force (Matthew 5:18). And that is the law given to, and preserved by, the Jews.

1.24.2007 | "too fine to be perceptible"

David Pryce-Jones now has a blog at NRO. It is well worth the time. Today's entry concerns the just-departed Abbé Pierre, an acclaimed holy man of the Christian persuasion.

Perhaps he was holy, that is. As is sometimes the case, what you see isn't all of what you get. in Pierre's case, this is apparently the case. From Pryce-Jones:

Abbé Pierre who has just died at the age of 94 was perhaps a good, and even a saintly, man. Certainly he looked the part, a white-bearded sage, habitually wearing a comforting French beret and a dramatic black cape. He started Emmaus in 1949, a movement to provide shelter for the homeless, and now an organisation in some 30 countries. That is to his credit. Hearing of the death, Jacques Chirac called him, "an immense figure, a conscience, a man who personified goodness." And that’s quite enough to make anyone have second thoughts.

Beware of holy man wearing sackcloth and ashes, he could have written. So, why think that this Pierre fellow was anything other than a good and holy man? Just this:

...in 1996 he came out to endorse a book called "The Founding Myths of Israeli Policy." Its author was Roger Garaudy, a veteran Stalinist, who after the Soviet collapse converted to Islam (what else?), moved to Cairo, and became a Holocaust denier. Nobody who had ever saved Jews from Nazism could conceivably have come to the support of the disgusting Garaudy. But the Abbé did. Proud to claim fifty years of friendship with Garaudy, he compared the Holocaust to what the ancient Israelites had done, and referred to Zionism as an American-based worldwide plot.

Well, guilt by association, and, by their friends ye shall know them. God will judge Abbé Pierre. In the here and now, I've my doubts about anyone who is called "good and holy." Yes, that very much includes Mother Teresa and Gandhi, both of whom I suspect of being not quite as good as their publicity would have us believe. But Pryce-Jones nails it about Pierre:

Perhaps he was in his dotage. And perhaps in his case, as in so many in a century that smoothly converted morality into a branch of public relations, the distinction between a good man and a charlatan is too fine to be perceptible.

I suggest that this is a subtle way of saying that Abbé Pierre may not be very comfortable when he comes before the throne.

1.06.2007 | "most abhorrent"?

First, let me say that, although I think he is an idiot of the first water, I pray for Jimmy Carter. Pray that he will read the Scriptures he seems to have forgotten in his very public persona of piety.

Nice alliteration, there, John Luke, now get to the point. The point is that I love Jimmy Carter as a fellow human being and as a lost sheep. For some reason, our worst ex-president (we just lost our best; Gerry Ford, R.I.P.) hates Israel. And, apparently, does not believe that a Jewish state has any place in the ancestral home of the Jewish people: Palestine.

Fresh evidence of Carter's blindness appears in an excerpt from "On Faith" in today's Washington Post. The excerpt in question touches only in the most marginal way "on faith." Unless one's faith is secular liberalism. Carter does mention that his Carter Center

has promoted programs that fall under the broad umbrella of peace and human rights. I see these as compatible with my Christian faith.

That's as close as it gets. His real cri du coeur is the "plight of the Palestinian people." Which, according to Carter,

represents one of the most abhorrent cases of human rights oppression on Earth. Forced from their homes and land and surrounded by walls, they live under a system of mandatory segregation, with passes required to reach their jobs, schools, pastures and fields. A unique system of military justice deprives them of any legal ability to alleviate their suffering.

One should feel pity for the Palestinian Arabs, but not for the pro-terrorist reasons Carter writes of. What is absent, asides from a sense of wretched excess (more on this below), is any notion that the Palestinian Arabs, and their Arab cousins in the Middle East, have the greatest responsibility for the current "plight."

By not recognizing the state of Israel, by making war on Israel, and by supporting terrorism, unceasing terrorism against Israel, they have, as the saying goes, made their own bed. And must now lie in it. Contra Carter, it isn't the even-handed seeming "inability of Israel and its neighbors to live in peace" that is the root cause. It is the total denial of the right of Jews to live in peace in the Middle East, except under conditions of dhimmitude, that is the self-inflicted wound of the Arabs.

As for the notion that, even though self-inflicted, the Palestinian Arabs live under "one of the most most abhorrent cases of human rights oppression on Earth", this is nonsense on stilts. The "oppression" is necessary to protect innocent civilians from state-sponsored terror. The "state" in question being the fiction that is the Palestinian Authority, led now by Hamas, who is opposed by Fatah and several other terrorist factions.

The salient difference between Hamas and Fatah? Hamas is more honest about its stated intent to destroy Israel. Fatah lies in public, at least in the English media.

As for "most abhorrent," there are quite a few situations that are much, much worse. Darfur, for starters. Women under any place where sharia is in effect, for another. How about Saudi Arabia itself, where one is not even allowed to bring in a Bible? Then there's the problem of those pesky Jews who used to live in fairly large numbers in majority Muslim nations. Virtually all of the Jews had to leave places like Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt, and, of course, any place under the control of the Palestinian Authority.

When public moralists like Jimmy Carter libel the Jews and don't say very much at all about terrorists and the Arab mistreatment of Jews, there is truly only one plausible explanation for such a gaping double standard: anti-Semitism.