Religion, Nationalism, and Terror

Sacrificing the Jews for Christianity - Haaretz, Nov. 14, 2008
By Sergio I. Minerbi

At the onset of the present discussion, the Vatican claimed that Pius XII did not know about the Nazis’ mass murder of the Jews. When this was proved false, and it was shown that the Pope was well aware of the Jews’ sufferings, the Vatican then claimed that the thousands of Jews who had been saved after being hidden in monasteries in Rome in 1943-44 could only have survived as a result of a direct order from Pius XII. But with the exception of a bishop in Assisi, no priest has ever claimed to have acted upon instructions from Pius XII. We must therefore conclude that these churchmen sheltered the Jews mainly for religious or humanitarian reasons, which were dictated by their own consciences.

Pius XII was mainly a diplomat, and he had no pastoral experience. The professional approach of a diplomat is to believe that complicated issues can be solved by a “note verbale,” a diplomatic letter. Hence, the Holy See sent a note to the Slovakian Legation deploring the regulations against people guilty only of belonging “to a particular race,” but to no avail. No other action was taken, though, such as, for example, issuing a threat of excommunication against the Slovakian president, Monsignor Jozef Tiso. No public statement condemning the deportation of the Slovakian Jews was ever issued by the Vatican, and only such a statement could have impressed the leaders of some European countries.

We do not need to wait for the opening of Vatican archives to know that never, neither during World War II nor afterward, did Pius XII call the Jews by their name. They were generally described as those “poor people” who suffer because of their national origin or race.

A few years ago, in response to the initial announcement of the candidacy of Pius XII for sainthood, I published, in a professional journal in Italy, a historical essay on the Pope and the Jews of Rome. On October 16, 1943, the Nazis rounded up about 1,200 Jews from their apartments there, and sent 1,024 of them to Auschwitz. All but 15 of them were killed.

As I demonstrate in my study, an ongoing negotiation took place at the same time, between the Nazi government, through its ambassador to the Holy See, Ernst von Weizsacker, and the Pope. The German foreign minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, agreed to recognize “the neutrality of the Vatican,” in exchange for a declaration from the Holy See regarding the “good behavior” of the German troops in Rome. On October 29-30, the Vatican’s semi-official daily Osservatore Romano published a front page article stating that, “the German troops have respected the Roman Curia as well as the Vatican City.” Was the deportation of the Jews the price for the liberty of the Vatican?

Three days after the deportation, on October 19, Pope Pius XII received the diplomatic representative of the United States, Harold H. Tittman, Jr. The only subject raised by the Pope was the defense of Rome against eventual communist attacks. Not only did the Vatican refrain from taking a public stand decrying the murder of the Jews during the war, but even after the end of hostilities, when the Nazi danger had disappeared, the Vatican saw fit to actively assist former war criminals, such as members of the Croatian units of Ustasha and their leader Ante Pavelic, in emigrating to safe haven in Argentina. After the war, the Jews asked Pius XII to return to their families Jewish children who had been hiding in Catholic institutions, even if their parents were dead. The Vatican’s response to this demand was to send an order to Nuncio Roncalli (later Pope John XXIII), then in Paris, ordering him not to give back children who had been baptized during the war without their parents’ knowledge or consent.

Gideon Levy, ‘The ebb, the tide, the sighs’ Haaretz, Nov. 13, 2008, Friday Magazine

The young fisherman is now in hospital, feeble and pale, one leg in a cast held in place by iron screws. He is awash with pain. His mother does not leave his bedside. A blind Palestinian physician takes him for a brief physiotherapy session in the corridor. Mohammed Masalah leans on a walker. The blind orthopedist encourages him to take one step and then another, but the pain defeats him and he asks to be taken back to bed.

The sea is the same sea and the Arabs are the same Arabs, as an Israeli prime minister once said. Only the cease-fire is no longer the same cease-fire. On land and in the air it is generally maintained, but not at sea. There, Israeli forces continue to shoot at fishermen from besieged Gaza, who are trying to wrest from the sea a living that is so difficult to make on land.

Gaza’s 40,000 fishermen have been deprived of their livelihood. Before the siege, they caught 3,000 tons of fish a year; now it is 500 tons. The fishing season begins with the advent of winter, when schools of fish migrate from the Nile Delta and the waters off Turkey toward the Gaza area. But few of them are now entangled in the nets of Gaza’s fishermen. Today, most of the fish can be found about 10 miles offshore, in an area that is off-limits to the fishermen. Israel has restricted them to a six-mile limit, though sometimes navy boats attack at three miles - just to keep the fishermen honest.

The siege makes it hard to obtain fuel for the fishing vessels, and also the sea is polluted with 50 million liters of sewage every day, following the collapse of the sewage infrastructure in the Gaza Strip. Israel’s fish markets are also closed to merchants from Gaza.

Palin looks to God over 2012 bid, BBC, Nov. 11, 2008

Sarah Palin admitted having gone off script

Defeated Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin has said she hopes God will “show her the way” on any future bid for the White House.

The Alaska governor said 2012 was too far off for her to decide whether she would run for the US presidency.

Mrs Palin, who was accused of going rogue during the election campaign, also admitted veering “off script”, but denied harming the Republican ticket.

She has been touted as a possible White House candidate in four years’ time.

In a wide-ranging interview with Fox News, the 44-year-old said: “I’m like, OK, God, if there is an open door for me somewhere, this is what I always pray, I’m like, don’t let me miss the open door. Show me where the open door is.”

‘Open door’

The mother-of-five added: “And if there is an open door in [20]12 or four years later, and if it is something that is going to be good for my family, for my state, for my nation, an opportunity for me, then I’ll plough through that door.”

Mrs Palin admitted occasionally not having toed the line during the campaign, but added: “If I went off script once in a while, I can’t for the life of me remember any one time where it would have harmed [Republican presidential nominee Sen John McCain], or the ticket.”

She also said she neither wanted nor asked for the wardrobe costing at least $150,000 (£96,000) that the Republican Party controversially bankrolled for her during the campaign.

‘The Time Has Come to Say These Things’ - The New York Review of Books, Dec. 4, 2008
By Ehud Olmert

On the eve of the Jewish New Year, Israel’s most popular daily newspaper, Yedioth Ahronoth, published an extended interview of lame-duck prime minister Ehud Olmert by journalists Nahum Barnea and Shimon Shiffer. Olmert is a former mayor of Jerusalem (1993–2003), member of the Knesset, and cabinet-level official. In 2005, he left the right-wing Likud party and joined the Kadima party, a centrist alliance formed by then prime minister Ariel Sharon in the wake of Israel’s “disengagement” from the Gaza Strip. Olmert, who served as deputy prime minister in the Kadima-led government, assumed the premiership in 2006 when Sharon suffered a stroke. He announced his intention to resign this July amid a growing corruption scandal and a dismal public approval rating that never recovered from his failed 2006 war against Hezbollah in southern Lebanon.

On September 21, upon tendering his official resignation, Olmert became head of an interim government and will hold that position until a new prime minister is sworn in. Under Israeli law, the prime minister–designate, Kadima’s Tzipi Livni, had forty-two days from the resignation to form a workable ruling coalition. On October 26, Livni announced that she had failed to do so. A general election will take place next year.

The following are excerpts from the Yedioth interview, which Olmert gave hours after handing in his letter of resignation.

—Avi Steinberg

Yedioth Ahronoth: You must have done some soul-searching before your resignation?

Ehud Olmert: At the moment, I’d like to do some soul-searching on behalf of the nation of Israel…. In a few years, my grandchildren will ask what their grandfather did, what kind of country we have bequeathed them. I said it five years ago, in an interview with Yedioth Ahronoth, and I’ll say it to you today: we have a window of opportunity—a short amount of time before we enter an extremely dangerous situation—in which to take a historic step in our relations with the Palestinians and a historic step in our relations with the Syrians. In both instances, the decision we have to make is the decision we’ve spent forty years refusing to look at with our eyes open.

We must make these decisions, and yet we are not prepared to say to ourselves, “Yes, this is what we must do.” We must reach an agreement with the Palestinians, meaning a withdrawal from nearly all, if not all, of the [occupied] territories. Some percentage of these territories would remain in our hands, but we must give the Palestinians the same percentage [of territory elsewhere]—without this, there will be no peace.

Yedioth Ahronoth: Including Jerusalem?

Ehud Olmert: Including Jerusalem—with, I’d imagine, special arrangements made for the Temple Mount and the holy/historical sites. Whoever talks seriously about security in Jerusalem, and about not wanting tractors and bulldozers to crush the legs of his best friends—as happened to a close friend of mine, who lost a leg when a terrorist ran him over on a tractor—must be willing to relinquish parts of Jerusalem. [In July 2008, Jerusalem saw two separate attacks involving construction vehicles operated by Arab East Jerusalemites.]

Whoever wants to maintain control over the entire city will have to absorb 270,000 Arabs into the borders of Israel proper. This won’t do. We need to make a decision. This decision is difficult, awful, a decision that contradicts our natural instincts, our deepest yearnings, our collective memories, and the prayers of the nation of Israel for the past two thousand years.

I was the first person who wanted to maintain Israeli control over the entire city. I confess. I’m not trying to retroactively justify what I’ve done for the past thirty-five years. For a significant portion of those years I wasn’t ready to contemplate the depth of this reality.