ADL Attacks Church

Kenneth Jacobson, assistant national director of the Anti-Defamation League, has written to The Washington Times to protest my wry comment on the recent smear of Catholics by the ADL and its national director, Abraham Foxman. He did this by repeating the smear verbatim.

Foxman and the ADL said they were "saddened and disappointed that this pontiff, who has done so much to further Roman Catholic-Jewish relations, stopped short in addressing specific Catholic wrongs against the Jewish people, especially the Holocaust."

Jacobson simply reiterated the very words I had quoted, as if they some how refuted me!

So, according to the ADL, the holocaust was a "specific Catholic" operation! This libel is the fruit of "furthering" Catholic-Jewish relations. (The Jewish people, it goes without saying, have nothing to apologize for.)

A thoughtful book by the Jewish historian Peter Novick, The Holocaust in American Life, takes a dim view of the current obsession with the Holocaust and with the propagandist uses it has served. During World War II, Novick points out, Jewish groups were at pains to stress that the Nazis persecuted not only Jews, but Catholic and Protestant Christians as well. They wanted Americans to feel that the Nazis were everyone's enemy and wanted to avoid any impression that fighting Nazism was a narrowly "Jewish" cause. Onward, Christian soldiers!

Lo, we're now told -- by these same Jewish groups -- that the Catholic Church was on the side of the Nazis all along; in fact, Abe Foxman himself tells us that the holocaust was less a Nazi atrocity than a Catholic one!

Thank heaven for improved interfaith relations.

The Holocaust has become the chief tool in a smear campaign against the Catholic Church and particularly against Pope Pius XII. You could have fooled the Nazis who considered Pius "a mouthpiece for the Jews." You could have fooled Israel Zolli, the grand rabbi of Rome, who became a Catholic and took Pius' baptismal name Eugenio as his own. You could have fooled Golda Meir and other Jewish spokesmen, who praised Pius for his wartime efforts to save Jews.

In their animosity against Chris tianity, today's Jewish spokesmen (and their Gentile followers) have chosen to forget all this. In a revision of history worthy of Stalin, they insult not only the Church but the countless Catholic soldiers who died fighting the Axis, little knowing that, long after the war, many Jewish leaders would be accusing their Church of serving the Nazi cause. In fact, we now learn the Nazis were only incidental to the holocaust: The Catholics did it! (And they say David Irving lets Hitler off the hook.)

If the Jews really think Nazism sprang from Christianity, why didn't they have the honesty to say this during WorldWar II?

And by giving the holocaust such retrospective centrality in World War II -- a centrality which, as Novick observes, it didn't have at the time (or for many years afterward) -- they imply that fighting Nazism was a "Jewish" cause after all. Never mind that Nazism was destroyed by Christian soldiers (including Russian soldiers who had been robbed of their Christian heritage by Communism).

I repeat: These people will never be satisfied with anything less than a repudiation of Christianity itself. To them, as to their first-century forebears, Christianity is evil. All the hopeful rhetoric of the "Judeo-Christian tradition" and of Jews and Christians as "brothers in faith" comes from the Christian side. How can the Jews who choose to see Christianity as the mother of Nazism possibly feel they have anything important in common with Christians? Yet to notice such things and to draw one's own conclusions from them is to be accused of bigotry.

Jacobson refers to my "hostility to ward Israel"; he offers no reason why I should be pro-Israel. Israel has behaved treacherously toward the United States on many occasions; it denies the rights of my fellow Chris tians. And as an American taxpayer, I've been forced to subsidize Israeli mischief of all sorts. This "democracy" is based on the very opposite of the secularist and egalitarian principles the ADL and other Jewish groups promote in this country. Pardon me for sniffing a little hypocrisy in this "reliable ally" and its Amen Corner in this country.

The constant theme of liberal Jewish propaganda is that all frictions between Jews and Christians are due to Chris tian anti-semitism, a theme that has now matured, naturally enough, into the dogma that Christianity is inherently and traditionally anti-Semitic and was bound from the very start to eventuate in the holocaust.

If you buy this view, the only duty of Christians is to apologize for and renounce "their history" from the crucifixion onward. Even the Gospels and the Epistles, according to a filmstrip shown at the National Holocaust Museum (also taxpayer-subsidized), are stained by anti-Semitism. (The filmstrip was fi nally altered only after vehement pro tests were made against it.) One Israeli rabbi told The Washington Post, "To us, the Cross is worse than the Swastika. Golda Meir herself said that the crucifix worn by Pope Paul VI when she met him reminded her of Christian persecution of the Jews. As anyone can plainly see, all the bigotry and hatred are on the Christian side."

None of which will prevent our ecumenical fund-raisers from burbling on about "the Judeo-Christian tradition," a phrase that Christ and the Apostles seem never to have used, though our Lord did warn the early Church against the slanders and blasphemies of "those who say they are Jews and are not, but are a synagogue of Satan."

By all means, let us honor whatever is honorable among the Jews, and let us work for peace and charity wherever possible.

But when they are libelous opponents of the Church, let us have the fortitude to resist any false peace.

Copyright © 2000 by Griffin Syndicate