- "New Direction" Sponsored by the Anti-Defamation
League -- Wednesday, Dec. 7 at 9:30 a.m. in Lower Level McKim A. In keeping
with the 40th anniversary of Nostra Aetate, the Vatican II document of
1965 that set Catholic-Jewish relations in a new direction, this interfaith,
interactive workshop will focus on helping Christian religious educators
to prevent the "fires of hate" both inside and outside the classroom.
This workshop will be presented by the New Directions project, a Catholic-Jewish
educational initiative co-sponsored by the New England Region of the Anti-Defamation
League and the Office of Religious Education of the Archdiocese of Boston.
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- My husband and I took part in the above Catholic Jewish
discussion at the Boston Public Library of Nostra Aetate and the United
States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) Exhibition "Fighting the
Fires of Hate: America and the Nazi Book Burnings" that was hosted
at the Copley Square Public Library in Boston.
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- Nostra Aetate is Pope Paul VI's major declaration that
summarizes the relationship of the Catholic Church to non-Christian religions.
He issued it Oct. 28, 1965. (*) This document refers to the Jewish people.
The term Jewish people comes from Zionist ideology and is unknown in Catholic
theology. In the past, Catholic documents employed terms like communitas
iudaica (Jewish community) or occasionally natio judaica (Jewish brotherhood
-- I know it looks like Jewish nation, but the Latin texts refer to shoemakers
as a natio, and I consider the closest modern English usage to be phrases
like the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers).
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- The use of Zionist terminology in the Nostra Aetate leads
one to suspect that key parts of the proclamation itself were written by
the ADL or other American Zionists and simply translated into Latin. By
employing such terminology, the Catholic Church accepts the Zionist conceptualization
of an unchanging Jewish ethno-national group (Volk) that has existed from
time immemorial and that maintains blood-and-soil historic rights to Palestine.
This primordialist essentialism is the exact Zionist counterpart of the
German Nazi idea of an unchanging German people that has existed from time
immemorial and that maintains blood-and-soil historic rights to places
where German peoples (including ancient Teutonic and Germanic tribes) live
or have lived in the past even if no or very few modern Germans have lived
there in recent times.
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- Jewish groups tend to construe Pope John Paul II's 1998
affirmation of "We Remember: A Reflection on the Shoah" as an
apology for inadequacies of Catholic response to the Holocaust. In reality
the document is ambiguous on the issue of the Church's responsibility.
(**) One really must ask for what should the Church be expressing contritition.
At the time when German Catholics were resisting Hitler, the Zionists entered
into an extensive collaboration with the German Nazis. While leading Polish
Catholics politicians were considering a preemptive strike against Germany
after Hindenberg appointed Hitler Chancellor, Zionist ethnic Ashkenazim
worked to undermine the worldwide boycott of Germany under the Haaverah
Agreement, which supplied the Zionists with necessary capital in their
program to murder Arab Palestine. Hitler facilitated the Zionist acquisition
of the necessary capital to expand racist Zionist settlements in Palestine,
then ruled by the British. The Haaverah Agreement also transfered the extensive
property holdings of the German Colony in Palestine to the Zionist Jewish
National Fund.
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- Until 1938 the German Nazi party maintained Jewish adjunct
organizations in which German Jews were active. American Jews generally
skip over such shameful elements of the history of the 1930s. Zionists
want the rest of the world to treat the mass murder of Jews during WW2
as a unique unspeakable event in order to drown out the legitimate grievances
of the Palestinians against them. Now that Soviet archives have become
available, we now can state with strong grounds that 1920s and 1930s Soviet
crimes, in which Soviet ethnic Ashkenazim played a leading role, were far
worse than the crimes of Nazi Germany.
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- The ADL loves the Nostra Aetate because it deplores hatred
of Jews without qualification. Of course, ethnic Ashkenazim have been widely
hated throughout the century and will become even more hated in the 21st
century, but they reap what they have sown. From a Christian standpoint
one could argue that hatred against anyone is wrong anytime, but the papal
declaration effectively gives Jews a license to commit any atrocity because
the Church would according to the plain meaning of the text condemn any
animosity toward Jews as a manifestation of unforgivable "anti-Semitism"
even if widespread Jewish or ethnic Ashkenazi misdeeds were provoking the
reactions of hate and anger. It is a mistakefor the Catholic Church to
pander them in documents like Nostra Aetate.
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- The past few years, the Zionist lobby groups have been
pouring huge amounts of money into cash-poor Christian organizations in
order to enmesh them as accomplices to the genocide of Palestinians. Many
if not most of the Catholics attending this discussion had been flown in
from other cities, for a nice tourist vacation in Boston. The ADL's general
purpose for inviting Christians to participate in these interfaith discussions
is to promote Zionism among Christians and to make Christians hesitant
about divesting from Israel for fear of offending "Jewish sensitivities."
This was evident as I spoke to the woman who represented the Catholic Archdiocese
of Boston. While she was willing to blame the Germans as a whole for the
Holocaust, she was unwilling to blame the ADL as an organization for its
work to ban books and undermine the Constitution in America, for fear of
"stereotyping Jews," even though the ADL was instrumental in
lobbying for the Patriot Act.
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- While Pope John Paul publicly apologized for historical
Catholic anti-Jewish sentiment, no Jewish leader has ever expressed regret
for the slander of the Virgin Mary that exists in the Talmud. It is actually
very confusing to try to understand the Jewish outrage at being blamed
for killing Christ because the Talmud takes the position that the Sanhedrin
was right to kill him. Jews react in the same way to open discussions of
such scriptural polemic as they do to any debate of the Zionist theft of
Palestine. They become offended and fling accusations of "hate speech"
when anyone tries to refer to the meticulous Zionist planning of the genocide
of the native Palestinian population as is documented even in Zionist archives,
by Zionist writers and in Zionist newspapers.
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- There is no evidence that the Catholic Church's new friendship
with the Zionists is sincerely returned. Ethnic Ashkenazim have generally
treated Nostra Aetate with contempt, and Goldhagen, a prominent racist
ethnic Ashkenazi pseudo-scholar, effectively stated in A Moral Reckoning
: The Role of the Catholic Church in the Holocaust and Its Unfulfilled
Duty of Repair that the Catholic Church could only show true contrition
by completely subordinating itself to Zionism.
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- It was painful to watch sincere Christians being humiliated
for their beliefs by Ashkenazi Americans, who are using the Catholic tendency
towards repentance even for things they had nothing to do with, to promote
their own opportunistic political agenda which includes wiping out the
oldest Christian community in the world in Palestine. While Catholic teachings
encourage penitence and sensitivity to the feelings of others, ethnic Ashkenazim
never apologize for anything, but feign moral superiority while talking
down to the Catholics.
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- INTERFAITH DISCUSSION OR ZIONIST INDOCTRINATION?
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- The discussion program was carefully crafted and aimed
at encouraging the Catholic school system to incorporate the ADL's fictional
Holocaust propaganda in their curriculum. The program began as the ADL
discussion leader, Naomi Tovim, introduced the Talmud as the book of Jewish
law and mentioned that Catholics had a history of burning this book. She
of course did not mention what was in that book that may have offended
Catholics, nor did she mention that Catholics at various points of history
burned a lot of books, not limiting themselves to the Talmud. Bringing
up the Catholic Church's alleged "anti-Semitism" as an introduction
to the historically unrelated Nazi book burnings was in accord with the
traditional ethnic Ashkenazi anti-Catholic polemic, which assigns collective
guilt to all Christians for letting the Holocaust happen.
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- This anti-Christian bigotry is sometimes given a scholarly
veneer in the works of racist ethnic Ashkenazi pseudo-scholars like Hyam
Maccoby. In this polemic, Auschwitz is inherent in Christianity from the
first composition of the Gospels. As a result of indoctrination with such
nonsense American Jews reacted with outrage to Mel Gibson's film "The
Passion." The anti-Christian polemic never addresses the question
why the Catholic Church for 1000 years after Constantine permitted the
existence of successful Jewish communities in Catholic regions, without
forcing them to convert, even though the Catholic Church executed Protestants
and other "heretics."
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- Yes, the Catholic church has railed at the Talmud and
burned it now and then. Yet the burning of Maimonides' Mishneh Torah by
local Rabbis, who considered Maimonides' writings to be heretical, preceded
the first Talmud burning by Catholics in Provence. This was followed by
occasional burning of the Talmud in Italy for about 100 years because some
Catholic scholars claimed that the modern Jews were not practicing the
same form of Judaism practiced by the ancient Judeans (as Jewish Karaite
scholars then and now would also claim). The Catholic church at that time
period did not have much more tolerance of Jewish heresy than it had of
Christian heresy. The last Talmud burning took place in Poland in the context
of political clashes between Jewish Frankists and anti-Frankists.
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- After the shaming of the Catholics for Talmud burning,
the Catholic discussion leader, Celena Sirois, sent the group to tour the
"Fighting the Fires of Hate" exhibition, which was completely
empty of historical content, for in terms of killing authors and banning
books by ethnic Ashkenazim in the Soviet Union of the same time period
was orders of magnitude worse than Nazi Germany. Obscuring the facts about
the Soviet Union serves the purposes of ethnic Ashkenazi Americans, who
want to create a collective victim-status stereotype of Jews to cover up
the racist criminal behavior of some Jews. In the Soviet Union during the
20s and 30s ethnic Ashkenazim dominated the policies of book banning, collectivization,
and alienization. These policies resulted in massive internal deportations
and murders that totaled at least 8 million non-Jews.
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- While ethnic Ashkenazim try to seize a moral high ground
by collectively blaming all Germans for the acts of a tiny minority and
by accusing all non-Jews of inadequate reactions to German Nazi anti-Semitism,
the vast majority of ethnic Ashkenazim do not apply similar standards to
themselves. They do not blame themselves collectively for Soviet crimes
made possible by their ethnic group. While large numbers of Germans condemned
German Nazis for anti-Jewish actions during the 30s, ethnic Ashkenazi Americans
identify at 90% levels with Zionist Israel, a modern nation state that
commits very similar or worse crimes against the native Palestinian population.
It is hard to identify any human population on the planet more hypocritical
or racist than ethnic Ashkenazi Americans.
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- The traveling US Holocaust Memorial Museum "Fighting
the Fires of Hate" Library exhibit was an expensive photo gallery
complete with video clips demonizing Germans for their censorship and public
burning of literature that Hitler found offensive. No mention was made
that Hitler did not burn books written by Jews who promoted the Zionist
idea of "the Jewish people." There was no mention of the excellent
relations between Zionists and German Nazis from 1933-1938, a time period
that Hannah Arendt has called the Zionist phase of German Nazism. There
was no suggestion that not all Germans were Nazis. In short, the message
was simple. "Jews are innocent victims. Germans are evil incarnate.
America to the rescue!" A little anti-Islamic bigotry was thrown in
for spice with an out-of-context reference to Salman Rushdie.
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- The exhibit glorified American Jewish protests against
the German Nazis even as it neglected the extensive principled calls by
German Americans like Theodor Seuss Geisel (Dr. Seuss) for American opposition
to Nazi Germany. The exhibit was not a statement against book burning in
general, or they could have given examples of literature which had been
banned or burned in America, and how about the recent US bombing of the
oldest library of the world in Baghdad? Since most people have little historical
knowledge, this exhibit serves to create the idea that the Jews are the
defenders of American free speech. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Holocaust propaganda serves to shield the most privileged group in America
from just criticism of many of its members and of its collective conduct,
especially as relates to the ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people
and the destruction of America's Constitutional liberties.
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- The "Fighting the Fires of Hate" exhibit was
a very stylish finger-pointing exercise to distract public attention from
the fact that in our times, the ADL was one of the biggest lobbies pushing
for the Patriot Act, which monitors the reading history of library patrons.
Zionist organizations are heavily involved with Homeland Security and the
State of Israel. They use book banning and far worse methods to squelch
criticism of Israel. While there is no limit to the amount of hate speech
against Muslims or Christians that is tolerated now in the western world,
the mere suggestion that Muslims and Christians should have equal rights
with Jews in the Holy Land, or that the Hollywood version of the Holocaust
is not entirely accurate, have in recent times resulted in the deportation,
imprisonment, and even assassination of the speakers, writers, or publishers,
and in the banning of their books or films because of Zionist pressure
on western governments to abandon the principle of freedom of expression.
Therefore it was extremely ironic that the ADL was using this library exhibit
to present itself as America's ally in the fight against intellectual censorship.
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- After viewing the "Fighting the Fires of Hate"
exhibit we returned to the Conference room but we were not given a chance
to brainstorm as a group about our personal impressions. We did not get
a chance to reflect how the issue of book burnings might apply to our times.
I found it very interesting the subtle way the Catholic schoolteachers
were encouraged to absorb the historical propaganda and then guided away
from rational thought on the matter. Without any logical transition, the
topic shifted to the concept of faith education. The ADL leader read a
portion of the Jewish Sabbath Amidah prayer that refers to "our God
and the God of our fathers." Then we read a commentary by the Baal
Shem Tov (the Besht), the founder of Hassidism that explains the phrase
as classifying two separate approaches to religion. The "our God"
approach requires searching analysis while "the God of our fathers"
is based in tradition and in following the practices and beliefs of our
parents and grandparents. The Besht argues that neither approach is sufficient
for strong faith and that the two beliefs must be combined. The ADL's pre-approved
discussion question was, "How does the Ba'al Shem Tov's observation
about faith formation apply to religious education?" However, they
lost control of the discussion after my husband mentioned that the Besht
was addressing the basic question of knowledge and faith and had left out
of his discussion two of the tools identified by medieval Jewish scholars
to determine truth. Saadya Gaon lists four basis tools: the senses, logical
reasoning, reliable tradition and "intrinsic insight or empathy."
Saadyah Gaon considers that knowledge that it is better to do good than
to do ill as an example of intrinsic insight. My husband suggested that
the group consider the question, "How would you feel if you were a
Palestinian and someone stole your country, murdered your family and bulldozed
your home?" The ADL leader then became flustered and told us that
we were not to discuss that topic.
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- The ADL and Zionists in general want Christians to accept
the traditional but incorrect belief that modern Eastern European Ashkenazim
are physical descendants of ancient Judeans and Galileans of Palestine.
Christians who believe such primordialist nonsense often consider the theft
of Palestine from the native population by racist ethnic Ashkenazim to
have been a legitimate action even though it contradicts Christian ethics
and international law. Yet, the ADL and Zionists in general worry that
connecting modern Rabbinical Jews with ancient Galileans and Judeans is
lnked with the traditional conceptualization of Jews as Christ-killers.
Because of fear of this linkage the ADL tried to ban screen representations
of the suffering and crucifixion of Christ even though they form the core
of Christian theology. Thus, Zionists want Catholics to maintain flawed
primordialist beliefs about modern ethnic Ashkenazim but only if such traditional
beliefs ("the God of our fathers" approach) are combined with
the dispensation that Nostra Aetate (supposed to be a result of searching
analysis by Catholic theologians) gives to modern ethnic Ashkenazim to
commit atrocities with impunity. Zionists want Christians to accept essentialist
primordialist Zionist ideology as long as Christianity drops all doctrine
that assigns permanent pariah status for Jews.
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- After synthesizing Christian Zionism from Nostra Aetate
with traditional Catholic beliefs, the program then focused on the presentation
of modern Jews as marginal people in the "Fires of Hate" exhibition.
We read the parable of The Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25-37), which had no
clear connection to the exhibition topic. A man is mugged by robbers and
brigands, but the Priest and the Levite do not help him. Yet the Samaritan,
who comes from a marginal despised group, helps the victim without a second
thought. The intended result was a zero-intellectual content lesson that
connected Catholics and Jews in a bond of mutual agreement not to discuss
the elephant in the room.
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- While it is normal in Jewish theological tradition to
discuss religion in the absence of any ethical considerations, this is
not true for Christianity. Usually Christians strive to apply the lessons
to themselves and current issues. "What would Jesus do?" So here,
not only were the Christians being fed self-hatred by the ADL, and encouraged
to do penance and apologize to Jews for something that was not their fault,
and made to accept the Jewish lack of apology for their historical anti-Gentile
polemic, and encouraged to remain silent and not come to the defense of
Palestinian Christians and Muslims being ethnically cleansed from the Holy
Land out of respect for their Jewish friends' feelings, but they were being
taught a whole new way of looking at scripture: discussion of religious
texts in a way that completely avoids the topic. In short, Christians were
not only made to feel guilty for believing in their own religion, but encouraged
to give up their religion. The "New Direction" Catholic Jewish
discussion provided yet another example of the pervasiveness and thoroughness
of the nation-wide program to indoctrinate Americans with Zionist ideology.
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- The next ADL pre-approved discussion question related
to the Good Samaritan was, "What might this text say about what you
saw in the "Fighting the Fires of Hate" exhibit?" However,
because of my husband's previous comment about the Palestinians, the ADL
leader was afraid to go around the room with this question as she had with
the first question. So she only allowed one brief comment. Then it ended
with the last discussion question, "What do you imagine the victim
will think, say and do when he wakes up and finds out he's been helped
by a Samaritan?" In a subtle way, American Catholics were going to
be asked to come to the rescue of the Jews by supporting and financing
the continued existence of the marginal despised country of Israel. Since
the ADL leader had failed to lead the group where she was trying to lead
them, because it was obvious that every one of the Catholics sympathized
with the plight of the Palestinians, the last question was answered in
many different ways, and the group discussion ended without the group having
come to any clear conclusions.
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- Because of the success of a single pro-Palestine comment
in undermining an expensive Zionist indoctrination interfaith effort, I
strongly encourage all supporters of human rights to attend these interfaith
discussions to add their two cents to the discussion.
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- (*) Zionists tend to focus most on the following two
paragraphs (not contiguous in the text) of Nostra Aetate or We Remember.
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- The Church keeps ever in mind the words of the Apostle
about his kinsmen: "theirs is the sonship and the glory and the covenants
and the law and the worship and the promises; theirs are the fathers and
from them is the Christ according to the flesh" (Rom. 9:4-5), the
Son of the Virgin Mary. She also recalls that the Apostles, the Church's
main-stay and pillars, as well as most of the early disciples who proclaimed
Christ's Gospel to the world, sprang from the Jewish people.
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- Furthermore, in her rejection of every persecution against
any man, the Church, mindful of the patrimony she shares with the Jews
and moved not by political reasons but by the Gospel's spiritual love,
decries hatred, persecutions, displays of anti-Semitism, directed against
Jews at any time and by anyone.
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- AUTHORITATIVE LATIN TEXT
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- Semper quoque prae oculis habet Ecclesia verba Apostoli
Pauli de cognatis eius, "quorum adoptio est filiorum et gloria et
testamentum et legislatio et obsequium et promissa, quorum patres et ex
quibus est Christus secundum carnem" (Rom. 9, 4-5), filius Mariae
Virginis. Recordatur etiam ex populo iudaico natos esse Apostolos, Ecclesiae
fundamenta et columnas, atque plurimos illos discipulos, qui Evangelium
Christi mundo annuntiaverunt.
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- Praeterea, Ecclesia, quae omnes persecutiones in quosvis
homines reprobat, memor communis cum Iudaeis patrimonii, nec rationibus
politicis sed religiosa caritate evangelica impulsa, odia, persecutiones,
antisemitismi manifestationes, quovis tempore et a quibusvis in Iudaeos
habita, deplorat.
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- (**) Pope John Paul II stated in March 1998,
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- It is my fervent hope that the document: We Remember:
A Reflection on the Shoah, which the Commission for Religious Relations
with the Jews has prepared under [Cardinal Edward Idris Cassidy's] direction,
will indeed help to heal the wounds of past misunderstandings and injustices.
May it enable memory to play its necessary part in the process of shaping
a future in which the unspeakable iniquity of the Shoah will never again
be possible. May the Lord of history guide the efforts of Catholics and
Jews and all men and women of good will as they work together for a world
of true respect for the life and dignity of every human being, for all
have been created in the image and likeness of God.
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