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On June 15, 2006, the General Convention of the
Episcopal Church in the United States passed a resolution condemning the
Gospels as “anti-Jewish” documents. Since the conclusion which the
Episcopalians drew from their recognition of that fact was to censor the
Scriptures, especially their liturgical use, by removing anything a Jew might
find offensive, many Episcopalians concluded that this was the final apostasy
in a long slide which began at the Lambeth conference of 1930 when that
church approved the use of contraceptives. Whether it is or it isn’t is
beyond our purview here. No matter what conclusions the Episcopalians draw
from the fact, the statement that the Gospels are anti-Jewish is, beyond the
shadow of a doubt, true. The only real question is why it took the
Episcopalians two thousand years to wake up to this fact or why they didn’t
draw what seems to be the more logical conclusion, namely, that if
Episcopalians want to be faithful to the example of Jesus Christ, they must
be anti-Jewish as well. The Episcopalians did not say that the Scriptures
were anti-Semitic. If they had said that, the statement would have been
false. Anti-Semitism is a relatively recent word. It was created in 1870 by a
German by the name of Wilhelm Marr. It refers to race, and claims that Jews
are hateful because of certain ineradicable biological characteristics. That
idea led to Hitler, but the defeat of Hitler led to a re-definition of the
word. Anti-Semitism now has an entirely different meaning. An anti-Semite used to be someone who
didn’t like Jews. Now it is someone whom the Jews don’t like. No Christian
can in good conscience be an anti-Semite, but every Christian, insofar as he
is a Christian, must be anti-Jewish. In contemporary parlance the two terms
are practically synonymous but their meanings are very different, and the
distinction is deliberately obscured for political purposes. On October 16, 2004 President Bush signed into law
the Global Anti-Semitism Review Act, which establishes a special department
within the U.S. State Department to monitor global anti-Semitism, reporting
annually to Congress. As one of the major steps in the implementation of that
law, Secretary of State Condaleeza Rice swore in Gregg Rickman as head of the
State Department’s office of global anti-Semitism on May 22, 2006. Rickman
had ties with both Jewish organizations and congress. He was staff director
for former Sen. Peter Fitzgerald (R-Ill.), and chairman of the Republican
Jewish Coalition. But his main qualification for the job was the role he
played in conjunction with Senator Alfonse D’Amato (R-NY) in shaking down $2
billion from the Swiss banks during the late ‘90s. “Gregg Rickman, working
with Sen. D’Amato, is almost single-handedly the one who uncovered the
corruption and the immorality of the Swiss banks,” is how William Daroff,
vice president for public policy of the United Jewish Communities, the
umbrella body of North American Jewish federations, and director of its
Washington office put it. “That kind of doggedness will serve him well in his
new capacity, according to representatives of groups that liaise between
Washington and small, vulnerable Jewish communities overseas.” Mr. Rickman will not have to define anti-Semitism.
His state department office has already done that for him. In its “Report on
Global Anti-Semitism” and its “Global Anti-Semitism Report,” the U.S. State
Department lists the following set of beliefs as anti-Semitic: 1)
Any assertion “that
the Jewish community controls government, the media, international business
and the financial world” is anti-Semitic. 2) ”Strong anti-Israel sentiment” is anti-Semitic. 3) ”Virulent criticism” of Israel’s leaders, past
or present, is anti-Semitic. According to the State Department, anti-Semitism
occurs when a swastika is portrayed in a cartoon decrying the behavior of a
past or present Zionist leader. Thus, a cartoon that includes a swastika to
criticize Ariel Sharon’s brutal 2002 invasion of the West Bank, raining
“hell-fire” missiles on hapless Palestinian men, women and children, is
anti-Semitic. Similarly, when the word “Zionazi” is used to describe Sharon’s
saturation bombing in Lebanon in 1982 (killing 17,500 innocent refugees), it
is also “anti-Semitic.” 4) Criticism of the Jewish religion or its
religious leaders or literature (especially the Talmud and Kabbalah) is
anti-Semitic. 5) Criticism of the U.S. government and Congress
for being under undue influence by the Jewish-Zionist community (including
AIPAC) is anti-Semitic. 6) Criticism of the Jewish-Zionist community for
promoting globalism (the “New World Order”) is anti-Semitic. 7) Blaming Jewish leaders and their followers for
inciting the Roman crucifixion of Christ is anti-Semitic. 8) Diminishing the “six million” figure of
Holocaust victims is anti-Semitic. 9) Calling Israel a “racist” state is anti-Semitic. 10) Asserting that there exists a “Zionist
Conspiracy” is anti-Semitic. 11) Claiming that Jews and their leaders created
the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia is anti-Semitic. 12) Making “derogatory statements about Jewish
persons” is anti-Semitic. The State Department criteria has serious
implications for anyone alive today. The most serious is that it turns many
Jews, who have made many of the above claims in books and articles they have
written, into anti-Semites. But the State Department’s definitions have
serious historical implications as well. If we take numbers 4 and 7 for
example, it seems clear that not just ordinary Catholics but Catholic popes
and saints were guilty of anti-Semitism, according to the State Department’s
criteria. Numerous popes beginning with Pope Gregory IX in 1238 have
condemned the Talmud as a blasphemous assault on the person of Christ and the
Christian faith and have urged Christians to confiscate and burn it.
Concerning #7, St. Peter, the first pope claimed in the Acts of the Apostles
that the Jews were responsible for the death of Christ. Even Nostrae
Aetate, the declaration of Vatican II on the Jews which ushered in an era
of good feeling and “ecumenism” claimed that some Jews were responsible for
Christ’s death. By their promiscuous use of the term anti-Semitism Rickman
and his cohorts in the State Department have turned traditional Catholic
teaching into a hate crime. In spite of 40 years of Jewish exaggeration and chutzpah,
certain facts remain. The Church is not and cannot possibly be anti-Semitic,
because the term refers primarily to race and racial hatred. The Church
cannot promote racial hatred of any group, certainly not of the Jews because
its founder was a member of that racial group. However, the Gospel of St.
John makes clear that there is a deep and abiding animus Christian against
the Jews who rejected Christ. This “Judenfeindlichkeit,” if we use Brumlik’s
word, is part of the essence of Catholicism. The Church is hostile to “Jews”
because they have defined themselves as rejecters of Christ. The Church is
anti-Jewish, but unlike the Jews, who, as Rabbi Solveichik has explained in First Things, feel that hatred is
a virtue, Christians are told to love their enemies. The “Jews” by which St.
John means the Jews who rejected Christ, became by that fact Christians’
enemies, but all Jews had been transformed by the coming of Christ. They had
to accept him as the Messiah or reject him. Those Jews who accepted Christ as
the Messiah became known as Christians. Those Jews who rejected him became
known as “Jews.” And why did the Jews reject Christ? Because he was
crucified. They wanted a powerful leader, not a suffering servant. The
leaders of the Jews, Annas and Caiphas, representing all Jews who would
reject Him, told Christ that if he came down from the cross, they would
accept him as the Messiah. Because they could not accept a Messiah who
suffered and died instead of restoring the kingdom as they wanted it
restored, which is to say in carnal fashion, the Jews who rejected Christ
became revolutionaries. The Jews who rejected Christ became revolutionaries
at the foot of the cross, but the full implication of their decision didn’t
become apparent until 30 years later, when the Jews rebelled against Rome,
and Rome retaliated by destroying the Temple. At this point, the Jews had no
temple, no priesthood and no sacrifice, and as a result they had no way of
fulfilling their covenant. Seeing which way the battle for Jerusalem was
going, a rabbi by the name of Jochanan ben Zakkai had himself smuggled out of
Jerusalem in a shroud, and after being recognized as a friend of Rome was
granted the privilege of founding a rabbinical school at Javne. It is at this moment, 30 some years after the
founding of the Church, that modern Judaism, Judaism as we know it, was born.
The Jews were no longer the children of Moses performing certain rituals in
fulfillment of their covenant. Judaism had become essentially a debating
society, because in the absence of a Temple, that was all the Jews could do.
The results of these interminable debates became known as the Talmud, which
got written down over the next six centuries. The debating did nothing to eradicate the spirit of
revolution from the Jews. In many ways, it intensified it by teaching the
Jews to look for a military Messiah. The Jews got their military Messiah
roughly 60 years after the destruction of the Temple, when Simon bar Kokhbar
rose up against Rome in 136. All of the rabbis in Jerusalem recognized bar
Kokhbar as the Messiah, and as if to prove that racial Judaism had become
meaningless, the Christian Jews were expelled for not recognizing him. The expulsion of the Christian Jews at the time of
Simon bar Kokhbar proved that the Jew was not a racial but a theological
construct. The ultimate determinant of Jewishness had become rejection of
Christ, and that rejection led inexorably to revolution. When they rejected Christ
Jews became revolutionaries. For the past 2000 years, history has been a
struggle between the spiritual descendents of two groups of Jews: those who
accepted Jesus Christ as the Messiah and those who rejected him. History
became, in some sense an intra-Jewish struggle at the foot of the cross. In the fall of 2003, Mahathir Mohammed, prime
minister of Malaysia, announced that “The Jews rule the world by proxy. They
get others to fight and die for them.” Mahathir was immediately denounced as
an anti-Semite and accused of making “an absolute invitation for more hate
crimes and terrorism against Jews” in spite of the fact that he had said no
such thing and in spite of the fact that many Jews agreed with him. Henry
Makow felt that Mahathir’s speech “opposed terrorism.” Another Jew, who
agreed with Makow that Mahathir wasn’t a terrorist, had something similar to
say. Elias Davidson, a native of Jerusalem, feels that Jews do rule the world
by proxy. He goes on to explain how: As a Jew myself (but opposed to
Zionism) I need no encouragement from Malaysian PM Mahathir Mohammed to
observe what should be obvious to the blatant eye: Namely that Jews
effectively rule US foreign policy and thus determine to a great extent the
conduct of most countries. . . . So it is with the proposition that Jews
control the world. Surely they do not control every single action; surely it
does not mean that every Jew participates in the “control.” But for all
practical purposes the proposition holds. What distinguishes a Jew like Davidson from a Jew
like, say, Stanley Fish is obviously not his ethnicity. It is not even his
politics. What distinguishes them is their divergent forms of literary
criticism. Davidson believes in the objectivity of statements. He holds the
Malaysian Prime Minister to what he actually said and, as a result, finds
nothing anti-Semitic in his statement. “Mahathir,” Davidson continues, has neither asked to discriminate against Jews, let
alone to kill Jews. It is shameful to equate him to the Hitlerites. He urges
Muslims to fight Jews by adopting modern methods, technology and educate
themselves, in other words to surpass Jews in excellence. What’s wrong with
that? By this he is doing service to the Muslims (over 1 billion people) and
to humanity. Jews must know their place and content themselves with influence
derived from their small number. Jews must learn some humility... . The Jews, if by that we mean the cabal that rules
the Jews under the name of the Sanhedrin, the Kahal, the politburo or the
ADL or the other major Jewish
organizations, has had centuries of experience in dealing with Jews like
Makow and Davidson. The modus operandi of Jewish leaders working over Jews
who disagree with their leadership goes all the way back to the beginning of
modern Judaism, which is to say, to the time of Christ, when, according to
the Gospel of St. John, the parents of the man born blind refused to speak
“out of fear of the Jews, who had already agreed to expel from the synagogue
anyone who should acknowledge Jesus as the Christ.” Any Jew who chooses
Logos—in any of its forms— over Talmud, which is to say the anti-Christian
ideology confected by Jewish leaders to keep their people in bondage, will
feel the ire of organized Jewry. Spinoza felt it in Amsterdam in the 17th
century; in our day Norman Finkelstein has felt it as well. Since it sounds
more than a little preposterous to call Jews who disagree with other Jews
anti-Semites, the modern day Kahal has come up with a new term. Jews who
disagree with the latter day Kahal are called “self-hating Jews” as they are
being expelled from the modern day synagogue of acceptable speech. The Kahal was the autonomous legal system which the
Jews established in Poland to take care of their own legal affairs. The
spirit which informed that legal body was the Talmud. According to the Jewish
Encyclopedia, the Talmud is “the supreme authority in religion . . . for the
majority of Jews.” The Talmud is a “systematic deformation of the Bible” in
which “The pride of race with the idea of universal domination is therein
exalted to the height of folly. . .. the Ten Commandments are not of
obligation in their regard.. . . With regard to the Goim (non-Jews)
everything is allowed: robbery, fraud, perjury, murder. . . .” Whenever its
contents were made known, Christians have condemned the Talmud as
incompatible with any rational social order. Jewish converts to Catholicism
from the time of Nicholas Donin onward have condemned the Talmud as well.
Numerous popes have condemned the Talmud because it was a direct assault on
both the divinity of Christ and the moral law as handed down by Moses.
According to the ex-Rabbi Drach, “the Talmud expressly forbids a Jew to save
a non-Jew from death or to restore to him his lost possessions, etc, or to
take pity on him.” The Talmud was created to keep Jews in bondage to
Jewish leaders by prohibiting all contact with Logos, whether that is
understood as the person of Christ or the Truth or reasoning based on true
principles and logic. Taught to deceive by the Talmud, the Jews end up
deceiving themselves and playing into the hands of the leaders who manipulate
them for their own ends. The Talmud has led to revolution. You don’t have to
be religious to be talmudic. Karl Marx was an atheist, but according to Bernard
Lazare, he was also “a clear and lucid Talmudist,” and, therefore, “full of
that old Hebrew materialism which ever dreams of a paradise on earth and
always rejects the far-distant and problematical hope of a garden of Eden
after death.” (p. 99). Marx was the quintessential Talmudist and the
quintessential Jewish revolutionary, and as such he proposed one of the most
influential false Messiahs in Jewish history: world communism. Baruch Levy,
one of Marx’s correspondents, proposed another equally potent false Messiah,
namely, the Jewish Race. According to Levy, the Jewish
people taken collectively shall be its own Messias. . . . In this new organization of humanity, the sons of Israel
now scattered over the whole surface of the globe . . . shall everywhere
become the ruling element without opposition . . . The governments of the
nations forming the Universal or World -Republic shall all thus pass, without
any effort, into Jewish hands thanks to the victory of the proletariat. . . .
Thus shall the promise of the Talmud be fulfilled, that, when the Messianic
epoch shall have arrived, the Jews will control the wealth of all the nations
of the earth. So, it turns out that there was basis in Jewish
history for what Mahathir Mohammed as well as ample evidence—the creation of
the state of Israel, for instance—that world Jewry had advanced considerably
toward its goal of world domination in the century and a half since Levy
wrote to Karl Marx. The Jews, quite simply, could not shake themselves loose
from the notion that they were God’s chosen people, not even after they
stopped believing in God. By rejecting Christ, they condemned themselves to
worship one false Messiah after another—most recently Communism and Zionism.
In their book La Question du Messie, the Lemann brothers, both of whom
converted from Judaism to Catholicism, and both of whom became priests,
compared present day Jews to the Israelites at the foot of Mount Sinai:
“having grown weary of waiting for the return of Moses . . . they feasted and
danced around the golden calf.” Zionism and Communism are two of the most
recent false Messiahs which the Jews have fallen down to worship. Having
rejected the supernatural Messiah who died on the cross, the Jews condemned
themselves to worship one false natural Messiah after another and repeat the
cycle of enthusiasm leading to disillusionment over and over again throughout
their history. Those illusions both found fulfillment in and lent themselves
to the creation of the birth of the Jewish state. On January 6, 1948, the
chief rabbi of Palestine announced that ““Eventually it [Israel] will lead to
the inauguration of the true union of the nations, through which will be
fulfilled the eternal message to mankind of our immortal prophets.” In the
history of Jewish messianism, fantasies of racial superiority alternate with
contradictory fantasies of universal brotherhood. “The great ideal of
Judaism,” The Jewish World announced on February 9,1883 “is that . . .the whole world shall be
imbued with Jewish teaching and that in a Universal Brotherhood of Nations—a
greater Judaism in fact— all the separate races and religions shall
disappear” (p. 98). The Jews were condemned to seek heaven on earth
through false Messiahs from the moment they chose Barabbas over Christ, a
fact that leads to the already mentioned cycle of enthusiasm followed by
disillusionment. When the Jews refused to be “heralds of a supernatural
kingdom,” they condemned themselves to the endless task of imposing their
vision of a naturalistic heaven on earth onto the world, “and they have put
all their intense energy and tenacity into the struggle for the organization
of the future Messianic Age.” Whenever a nation turns away from the
Supernatural Messiah, as was the case during the French and Russian
revolutions, that nation “will be pulled into the direction of subjection to
the Natural Messias” and end up being ruled by Jews. Does that mean that every Jew is a bad person? No,
it does not. Jewish leadership controls the “synagogue of Satan,” which in
turn controls the ethnic group into which Jews are born. No one has control
over the circumstances of his birth. That is why anti-Semitism, if by that
term we mean hatred of the Jews because of immutable and ineradicable racial
characteristics, is wrong. Over the course of their lives, Jews come to
understand that theirs is an ethnic group unlike any other. In spite of the
propaganda of racial superiority which the Talmud seeks to inculcate in them,
many Jews come to understand that a peculiarly malignant spirit has taken up
its home at the heart of their ethnos. Once they become aware of the
magnitude of that evil, Jews are faced with a choice. Depending on the
disposition of the heart, which only God can judge, they either dedicate
themselves to that evil or they reject it—completely as in the case of St.
Paul, Nicholas Donin, Joseph Pfefferkorn and other Jews too numerous to
mention—or inchoately, as in the case of the Jews of conscience who refuse to
go along with something which they know is morally wrong, be that abortion or
the eviction of Palestinians from their ancestral lands. The purpose of the Talmud is to prevent defections
from the synagogue of Satan. Behavior based on the Talmud naturally leads to
resentment on the part of non-Jews. The leaders of the Jews promote that
behavior knowing full well that it will cause reactions because “Pogroms in
which the rank and file of the Jewish nation suffer serve the useful purpose
of keeping them in absolute dependence on their leaders.” This is another way
of saying that the Trotskys promote the revolution and the Braunsteins suffer
for it. Jewish leaders promote pogroms, wittingly as the Gomeler Pogrom of
1905 or when Mossad agents deliberately killed Iraqi Jews to spread panic,
because pogroms promote fear, and fear is the way the Kahal keeps ordinary
Jews in line. Alice Ollstein, Jewish high school student from
Santa Monica, California, noticed this when she attended a recent policy
conference of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee Conference in
Washington, DC in 2006. Miss Ollstein went as an enthusiastic Zionist but
returned “feeling manipulated, disturbed and disgusted with a great deal of
what I witnessed there” (http://www.jewishjournal.com/home/preview.php?id=15634). What she witnessed was non-stop fear mongering. In
fact the “first thing” she noticed about the conference was “the carefully
manufactured atmosphere of fear and urgency.” The hall where the plenary
sessions were held was always filled with dramatic classical music,
red lighting and gigantic signs reading “Now Is The Time.” That, combined
with the montages of terrorism footage projected onto six giant screens,
whipped the audience into a “Save Israel” fervor that most found inspiring.
By the time we finished our meal, the audience seemed eager to agree to
anything that would protect Israel— even war. . . . Each speaker played upon
the audience’s deepest fears. . . . The Neoconservatives were in charge of the
fear-mongering. In particular, John Podhoretz, son of Norman and a columnist
for The New York Post, “got to
have the first word and the last word on almost every question.” Ollstein
found the comparisons which AIPAC drew between Iranian President Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad and Hitler particularly manipulative. To the tune of more dramatic classical music, the
six enormous screens flashed back and forth between Hitler giving anti-Jew
speeches and Ahmadinejad giving anti-Israel speeches. The famous
post-Holocaust mantra “Never Again” popped up several times. Everything was
geared toward persuading the audience that another Holocaust is evident ...
unless we get them first. Alice Ollstein resented “being forced to think”
that the Prime Minister of Iran was “pure evil through clever sound bites and
colorful images.” She came away from the conference feeling manipulated by
what Walt and Mearsheimer have characterized as the main agent of the Israel
lobby in America. She is not the only Jew who feels this way. Zionism has
reached the state of wretched excess that signals that a reaction is about to
set in. Jewish disillusionment with the god that failed that was known as
Communism came to be known as neoconservatism. The Jewish reaction to Zionism
can be seen in the proliferation of “proud, self-hating Jews.” In response to a Danish magazine running a series
of anti-Muslim cartoons in March 2006, a group of Israelis organized an
anti-Semitic cartoon contest. Gilad Atzmon, who described the contest on his
web site, finds it only natural that “a few Jews who happen to be ethically
motivated and talented enough to express themselves would raise their voices”
in protest against what was fundamentally a black operation designed to get
European countries so annoyed at the Muslim reaction to the cartoons that
they would support a nuclear attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities. Atzmon
claims that “the morally deteriorated conduct of the Jewish state and its
supportive Jewish lobbies around the world” has engendered “a celebration of
what I tend to define as ‘proud Jewish self-hatred.’” Atzmon is only half joking. The objective moment at
the heart of this parody is the slow spread of disillusionment with Zionism
among Israelis. At the very moment when Israel through proxies like AIPAC
rules the world, the Jews they claim to speak for are undergoing a moment of
deep disillusionment. Gilad Atzmon, the Israeli musician who has nominated
himself as the spokesman for the proud, self-hating Jew, believes “that it is
the proud SHJs that will bring Israeli Zionism and even global Zionism down.”
Having been born an Israeli, Atzmon had been
subjected to Zionist propaganda for his entire life. He fought in the army,
and then one day he woke up and didn’t believe it anymore. The very program that worked so well and still
works at large in the instance of my former fellow countrymen failed in my
case. Not only had I stopped loving myself, I somehow failed to hate the
Goyim. This is when I realized for the first time that actually there was no
anti-Semitism around. Somehow, when I stopped loving myself, I also started
to suspect the entire official Jewish historical narrative, both the Zionist
one as well as the biblical one. How to say it, it didn’t take long before I
started to question the official Zionist Holocaust tale. Belief in Zionism, like belief in Communism, was an
all or nothing proposition. Once the first doubt took root in Atzmon’s mind
the entire edifice was doomed to collapse. The first thing Atzmon doubted was
that dogma that “Jew-hating is an irrational act of madness or some backward
Christian tendency.” Unlike Ruth Wisse, who articulated one of the dogmas of
contemporary Judaism when she claimed that “anti-Semitism is not directed
against the behavior of Jews but against the existence of Jews,” Gilad Atzmon
began to entertain “the possibility that anti-Jewish feelings may come as a
response or even retaliation to Jewish acts.” In fact, he continued, “Zionism
is maintained by anti-Semitism. Without anti-Semitism there is no need for a
Jewish State and without the Holocaust there wouldn’t even be a Jewish
State.” According to Atzmon, Jewish organizations like
AIPAC and the ADL “are all remarkably good in generating hatred against
Jews.” That hatred in turn generates fear and fear is what keeps the average
Jew in bondage to the synagogue of Satan. During the course of his soliloquy,
Atzmon concludes that as a proud, self-hating Jew he hates neither Jews nor
Judaism, which he defines in ethnic terms. His quarrel is with what he calls
“Jewishness, . . . the supremacist tendency that draws its force from a
materialist secularized misinterpretation of the Judaic code. It is
Jewishness rather than Judaism that fuels Zionism with murderous zeal.” What Atzmon calls “Jewishness” is what Nicholas
Donin and Joseph Pfefferkorn and the Fathers Lemann would have called the
Talmud, which is to say, the racist, messianic ideology that has been the
main engine driving revolutionary Jews throughout history. Many Jews have had
this experience. They wake up one day and realize that their ethnic group has
been colonized by some dark evil force for centuries. The name of that evil
is the Talmud. The Talmud is the constitution for the synagogue of Satan, the
cabal which had ruled Jews through fear for 2000 years. Atzmon isn’t alone in feeling disillusionment with
Zionism. Yuri Slezkine also says that “The Zionist revolution is over”: The original ethos of youthful
athleticism, belligerence, and single mindedness is carried on by a tired
elite of old generals. Half a century after its founding, Israel bears a
distant family resemblance to the Soviet Union half a century after the
October Revolution. The last representatives of the first Sabra generation
are sill in power, but their days are numbered (p. 367). The rhetoric of racial superiority is hopelessly
outdated, even when surrounded by the window-dressing of holocaust
victimhood. Holocaust culture postponed the final reckoning, but by the
beginning of the 21st century it had become clear that “The rhetoric of
ethnic homogeneity and ethnic deportations, tabooed elsewhere in the west, is
a routine element of Israeli political life.” The realization arrives
half-way through Steven Spielberg’s film Munich, when the Jewish toy
maker turned bomb maker tells Avner Kauffman, “Jews don’t do wrong because
our enemies do wrong . . . . We’re supposed to be righteous.” During the
course of Munich, Aver Kauffman comes to the realization I have
already mentioned, the same one which turned Gilad Atzmon into a proud,
self-hating Jew. At this point it is not clear whether the proud, self-hating
Jew can leverage his disillusionment with Zionism into an escape from the
dialectic of Jewish history with its regular cycle of enthusiasm followed by
disillusionment followed by enthusiasm for a new Messiah. The objective
moment here involves an understanding of what Atzmon calls “Jewishness.”
Jewishness is not just another version of ethnicity like Irishness or
Polishness. “Jewishness” is an ideology. It is a Talmudic deformation of
Logos that has caused suffering, largely in the form of revolution,
throughout the last 2000 years of history. The Catholic Church has always condemned
anti-Semitism because Anti-Semitism, which is to say, hatred of the Jewish
race, is wrong in and of itself. But beyond that anti-Semitism is also an
inappropriate response to what Atzmon calls “Jewishness.” Anti-Semitism is in
many ways a competing form of “Jewishness.”
Anti-Semitism cannot deal with “Jewishness,” because a Jew is not
someone with Abraham’s DNA in his cells. Most Jews aren’t even Semites. The
Jew, insofar as he appropriates his “Jewishness,” is a theological construct.
He is a rejecter of Christ. The Talmud was created to keep the Jewish people
in bondage to a leadership that has existed under various manifestations
throughout history—the Sanhedrin, the Kahal, the Politburo, the ADL, AIPAC.
Each of these groups has proposed a false messiah as the antidote and
alternative to the true Messiah, and each has led either to violent reaction
or equally violent disappointment throughout history. In the 20 years
following 1648, the entire cycle played itself out. The Chmielnicki pogroms
and Shabbetai Zevi were reaction, Messiah, disappointment. There is some indication that the same thing is
happening again. Sixty years ago, the Communist empire spread across the face
of the earth, and yet at the same time the Jews who had supported Stalin so
faithfully began to experience widespread disillusionment with Communism. The
same thing is now happening to Zionism, at the very moment when the Israel
Lobby has reached the pinnacle of worldly power. If this is the case, what are the options at the
present moment? In one of his more cryptic moments, Atzmon claims that
“Salvation is the Masada of the Proud, Self-Hating Jew.” Atzmon is referring
to the mass suicide which followed the 70 AD insurrection against Rome which
eventuated in the destruction of the Temple. The 21st century version of
Masada would be much more dramatic because today’s despairing Zionists have
nuclear weapons, a fact which lends new urgency to dissuading the Jews from
taking the whole world with them when they go through one of their inevitable
periods of disillusionment. The other option is conversion, the option which
has always been there since the beginning. This means conversion to Logos in
all of its forms, from philosophical realism and the tenets of onto-theology
to acceptance of Jesus Christ as the one and only Messiah. It also means an
equally firm rejection of all forms of Talmudic deception, including sexual
liberation, racism, messianic politics, and deconstruction. The Catholic Church, which throughout its history
has urged the conversion of the Jews, has thus far been incapable of lending
assistance in this regard because it has been lamed by an interpretation of Nostra
Aetate which contradicts the Gospels. One of the rituals of post-Nostra
Aetate ecumenism which has developed over the past 40 years entails having
some church dignitary stand up at an ecumenical gathering—after the Jews have
denounced the Church as the font of all anti-Semitism and the immediate cause
of Hitler’s genocide—and announce that the Jews do not need Christ as their
savior. In May 2001, at a meeting of the international Catholic-Jewish
Liaison committee in New York, Walter Cardinal Kasper, the Vatican official in
charge of the Church’s relations with the Jews, tried to quell the Jewish
discomfort caused by the issuance of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the
Faith’s Dominus
Iesus on the Unicity and Salvific Universality of Jesus Christ and
the Church by claiming that “God’s
grace, which is the grace of Jesus Christ according to our faith, is
available to all. Therefore the Church believes that Judaism, i.e., the
faithful response of the Jewish people to God’s irrevocable covenant is
salvific for them, because God is faithful to his promises” (emphasis
added). In placating the Jews, Kasper not only contradicted
the Gospels and 2000 years of Church teaching, he also contradicted the
recently issued Dominus Iesus, which claimed that There is only one salvific economy of the one and
triune God realized in the mystery of the incarnation, death and resurrection
of the Son of God, actualized with the cooperation of the Holy Spirit and
extended in its salvific value to all humanity and to the entire universe.
“No one, therefore, can enter into communion with God except through Christ
by the working of the Holy Spirit.” Kasper also contradicted Pope John Paul II’s 1990
encyclical Redemptoris
Missio, which claimed that Christ is the one Savior of all, the
only one able to reveal God and lead to God. In reply to the Jewish religious
authorities who question the apostles about healing the lame man, Peter says:
“By the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, whom you crucified, whom God raised
from the dead, by him this man is standing before you well . . .And there is
salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among
men by which we must be saved.” . . .
salvation can only come from Jesus Christ. In attempting to extricate himself from hot water,
Kasper only made matters worse by muddying the already muddy waters even
more. In November 2002, Cardinal Kasper gave a speech at Boston College in
which he claimed that Jews could be saved if they “follow their own
conscience and believe in God’s promises as they understand them in their
religious tradition, they are in line with God’s plan, which for us
comes to historical completion in Jesus Christ” (my emphasis). In using the phrase “for us,” Kasper implied that
there were two ways to salvation, a clear contradiction of the Gospels and
recent Vatican pronouncement like Dominus Iesus. Kasper, however, was
not alone in making these heretical claims. In August 2002, the US Bishops’
Committee for Ecumenical and interreligious Affairs, under the direction of
William Cardinal Keeler, along with the US National Council of Synagogues
issued a paper entitled, “Reflections on Covenant and Mission,” which claimed
that: “A deepening Catholic appreciation of the eternal covenant between God
and the Jewish people, together with a recognition of a divinely given
mission to the Jews to witness to God’s faithful love, lead to the conclusion
that campaigns that target Jews for conversion to Christianity are no longer
theologically acceptable in the Catholic Church.” Once the heretical nature of statements like that
became apparent, Cardinal Keeler tried to control the damage by claiming that
the covenant and Mission statement that the USCCB Committee had released did
not constitute any kind of formal position on the part of the US bishops, but
rather merely represented “the state of thought among participants” in the
dialogue “between Catholics and Jews.” As some indication that Rome agreed,
the paper was never promulgated as an official document of the United States
Bishops’ conference. Deep Crisis But the fact that it got written at all gave some
indication that Nostra Aetate had led to a deep crisis in the Catholic
Church. In order to participate in ecumenical dialogue with Jews, Catholic
“experts” had to be willing to make heretical statements which contradicted
the teaching of the Catholic Church. They had to be willing to deny
fundamental tenets of Catholic theology. The Church was suddenly in a
position where she could not articulate a coherent position because denial of
the Gospel had become the condition sine qua non of dialogue with the
Jews. In many ways, this problem went all the way to the
top. Viewing the history of Pope John Paul II’s relations with the Jews, one
of the most ultramontane of American Catholic commentators was forced to
conclude that “Even Pope John Paul II . . . could occasionally create the
impression that the Church was perhaps now prepared to cut a few corners in
the interests of better relations” with the Jews. In the “Declaration on the
Relation of the Church with Judaism,” delivered to a Jewish group in Mainz,
Germany, in 1980, “John Paul II,” according to the same commentator,
“actually made the remark that the old covenant with the Jews had in fact
‘never been revoked by God.’” The statement was theologically defensible
because God never revoked the covenants with Noah or Abraham, but it gave the
impression that the “new and everlasting covenant” which Christ Himself
established did not apply to the Jews. Pope John Paul II’s gestures were even worse in
this regard. His prayer at the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem was theatrical but
ambiguous. Jews who pray at the Wailing Wall pray for the restoration of the
Temple. No pope could ever contemplate doing what would be a completely
wicked act, but Jewish artists lost no time memorializing that act and all of
the ambiguity it embodied as a way of justifying their call for a ban on all
forms of “proselytism.” It is no wonder then that people like Roy Schoeman
are confused. Schoeman is a Jewish convert to Catholicism who thinks the end
times have arrived. As a Catholic Schoeman now looks forward to the
restoration of the Temple without understanding that if that were to happen
it would be tantamount to the abomination of desolation spoken of in
Revelations and not the second coming. The idea of the Jews converting at the pinnacle of
their worldly power is implausible unless looked at from a theological
perspective, but since the premise of our argument is that the Jew is an
essentially theological construct, that is precisely how we should view the
issue. To begin with, the synagogue of Satan needs to be viewed as the
antithesis of the Church. So, if Christians, following the example of St.
Paul can say, “when I am weak, then I am strong,” the synagogue of Satan
would have to say the exact opposite, namely, “when I am strong, then I am
weak.” And that admission corresponds uncannily to the psychological
phenomenon of the “proud, self-hating Jew” which we have been discussing. The final collapse of Jewish resistance to Logos
will have to take place when they have reached the pinnacle of worldly power.
We have no way of knowing what the future will bring, but we can say with
confidence that at no time in the history of the past 2000 years have Jews
had more power than they hold at the present moment. The fact that the Jews
are now in full possession of Jerusalem and, according to some reports,
planning to rebuild the temple, lends credence to the belief that the stage
is being set for that last great battle over who will rule over the Jewish
soul. Fr. Augustin Lemann, himself a Jewish convert, feels that the future
conversion of the Jewish people is certain. He bases this on the testimony of
many Church Fathers. “There is a well-known tradition cherished by the
faithful,” writes St. Augustine, “that in the last days before the Judgment,
the great and admirable Prophet Elias is to explain the law to the Jews and
to lead them to the acceptance of the True Messias Our Christ” (Denis Fahey, The
Kingship of Christ and the Conversion of the Jewish Nation, p. 101). Then
“These carnal Israelites,” Augustine continues, “who today refuse to believe
in Jesus Christ, will one day believe in Him
. . . Osee foretells their
conversion in the following terms: ‘The children of Israel shall sit many
days without king and without prince and without sacrifice, and without altar
and without ephod and without theraphim.” “Who is there,” Denis Fahey
interjects, “who does not see in this a portrait of the present state of the
Jewish people” (p. 101-2). Augustine is not alone in his belief that the Jews
will at some point close to the culmination of human history convert. St.
Thomas Aquinas claims that “as by the fall of the Jews, the Gentiles who had
been enemies were reconciled, so after the conversion of the Jews near the
end of the world, there will be a general resurrection by which men will rise
from the dead to immortal life.” (p. 105). According to Father Augustin
Lemann, The prophet Elias then shall return
upon the earth to bring back the Jews to the Savior. Our Lord Himself has
clearly affirmed it (Matt: XVII, II).
. . The fathers are the patriarchs and all the pious ancestors of the
Jewish people, the sons represent the degenerate race of the time of Our Lord
Jesus Christ and of the succeeding centuries. It is however only some time before the second coming of Our
Lord Jesus Christ, before the dreadful day of the Divine Judgment dawns that
our Savior will send the prophet Elias to the Jews to convert them and to
save them from chastisement. St. Paul claims that this conversion will only take
place at the end of time, and that until that time, the Jews will
continue “to fill up their sins
always: for the wrath of God is come upon them to the end.” St. Jerome also
believes that the Jews will convert at the end of the world when they will
“find themselves in dazzling light, as if Our Lord were returning to them
from Egypt. . . .” According to Suarez,
“The conversion of the Jews will take place at the approach of the
Last Judgment and at the height of the persecution which Antichrist will
inflict on the Church.” The Jews will, according to all accounts, continue to
express their hostility to Christ until the moment of their conversion. The
conversion will be dramatic and in the last time Christians will resemble the
Jews “because of our sins, in fact they will be worse.” In this regard,
Origen supports the contention of Yuri Slezkine in his claim that modernity
is Jewish. St. John Chrysostom claims that “God will recall the Jews as
second time,” when the Christians have abandoned the faith. Jews will become
Christians when Christians will have become Jews. The Antichrist will be a Jew At that point of apostasy, the Antichrist will
appear, and he will be a Jew, who, according to Suarez, will find “his chief
support among the Jews.” He will also “restore the city of their ancestors
and its temple in which they have always taken a special pride” because if he
did not, he could not “get himself accepted as the Messias by the Jews who
dream of earthly glory for Jerusalem and imagine that that city will become
the capital of the future Messianic kingdom.” If Suarez could have been
catapulted into the future to contemplate the state of the state of Israel in
2006, he might well conclude that the end times were at hand. If he read
Gilad Atzmon’s website, he might conclude that the conversion of the Jews was
at hand as well. The unprecedented strength of the Jews, coupled with the
unprecedented weakness of the Church, allows nothing but apocalyptic
explanations. At the culmination of history, the Jewish
antichrist will be strong, stronger than he has ever been in history, and the
Church will be weak, weaker than she has ever been in history. At that
moment, the Messianic kingdom of heaven on earth, the kingdom of maximal
wealth and power for the Jews (and maximal misery for everyone else) will be
at hand and all that the synagogue of Satan has longed for for centuries will
seem to be within its grasp. At that point, the Jews will have a choice
forced upon them, and, according to Christian tradition, many will choose
Christ. Why they would do that then is easy enough to explain. Rabbi Dresner
does so in his book on the plight of the American family which is really a
tract on the plight of American Jews,
who in their search for passion and pleasure and power,
have lost themselves in the kingdom of Caesar. Is it not ironic that the
descendants of those who wrote the Psalms and offered prayer to the world
became, according to all accountings, the least worshipful. . . . The chosen
people seemed to flatten into normality, becoming what the prophets had
warned against: “like the nations.” . . . Many postmodern Jews have
discovered a puzzling truth. No license has replaced the Law; no symphony,
the Psalms, no chandelier, the Sabbath candles; no opera, Yom Kippur; no
country club, the synagogue; no mansion, the home; no Jaguar, a child; no
mistress, a wife; no banquet, the Passover seder; no towering metropolis,
Jerusalem; no impulse, the joy of doing a mitzvah; no man, God. (p. 329). At the heart of Rabbi Dresner’s panegyric on
American Jews, we uncover the psychological mechanism that will lead to their
conversion. When they are strong, they are weak. Alan Dershowitz has said
something similar about Jewish demographics in America in his book The
Vanishing American Jew. The more wealth and power the Jews accumulate the
weaker they become because becoming rich has deprived the Jew of one of his
most perduring illusions, namely, that Tevye would be happy “if I were a rich
man.” Tevye’s grandchildren are, as Rabbi Dresner indicates, far richer than
Tevye could have imagined, but in becoming rich and powerful they ended up being
“proud, self-hating Jews.” Money is, in many ways, the least important issue
here. As Rabbi Dresner indicates darkly, “Jews have tried all things.” After
having “exhausted modernity,” Jews now “seek the recovery of the sacred” (p.
330). What Rabbi Dresner failed to understand is that the
sacred cannot be recovered by performing outmoded rites. Jews cannot find the
sacred among the dead. They can only find it among the living. The Church can
capitalize on this moment and save the world from Masada with nuclear weapons
but only if it reasserts its traditional position on the Jews. That means
“Sicut Iudeis non . . . “ which states that no one may harm the Jew or
disturb his worship, but that Christians have an equally solemn duty to
prevent Jewish subversion of faith and morals. That means that the Church
should condemn anti—Semitism, which means “hatred of the Jews as a race,”
but, by the same token the Church should not allow the Jews to define the
term for her, because in that instance the Jews will use “the word to
designate any form of opposition to themselves” and their infernal project of
cultural subversion. According to the Jewish definition of the term, “anyone
who opposes Jewish pretensions is more or less mentally deranged.” Balancing Act The Church has never in its history been
anti-Semitic. Traditional Catholic teaching on the Jews has always involved a
delicate balancing act: On the one hand, the Church has
spoken for the Jews to protect their persons and their worship against unjust
attacks . . . On the other hand, the Church has spoken against the Jews, when
they wanted to impose their yoke on the faithful and provoke apostasy. She has always striven to protect the
faithful from contamination by them. As experience in past centuries showed,
if the Jews succeeded in attaining to high offices of State they would abuse
their powers to the detriment of Catholics, the church always strove to
prevent Catholics from coming under their yoke. They were forbidden to
proselytize and were not allowed to have Christians as slaves or servants”
(Fahey, p. 80). At the darkest hour of Nazi persecution during the
‘30s, Pope Pius XI defended the Jews from their persecutors by proclaiming
that “anti-Semitism is inadmissible. We are spiritually Semites.” Less well
known is the rest of what he had to say. After affirming that it was
“impossible for Christians to be Anti-Semites,” Pope Pius XI went on to say
that “we acknowledge that everyone has the right to defend himself, in other
words to take the necessary precautions for his protection against everything
that threatens his legitimate interests.” In giving his gloss on Pius XI’s speech, Denis
Fahey simply reiterates what the church has always proclaimed in the
statements on the Jews known as “Sicut Iudeis non . . .”: On the one hand, the Sovereign Pontiffs strive to
protect the Jews from physical violence and to secure respect for their
family life and their worship, as the life and worship of human persons. On
the other hand, they aim unceasingly at protecting Christians from the
contamination of Jewish Naturalism and try to prevent Jews from obtaining
control over Christians. The
existence of the second needs to be strongly stressed because to some extent
it has been lost sight of in recent times.
Catholics need to be made familiar, not only with the repeated Papal
condemnations of the Talmud, but with the measures taken by the Sovereign
Pontiffs to preserve society from the inroads of Jewish naturalism. Otherwise they will be exposed to the risk
of speaking of Pope St. Pius V and Pope Benedict XIV, for example as
Anti-Semites. . . . . Opposition to Jewish ambition “to impose its rule
on other nations” is not anti-Semitism, even if the Jews want to portray it
that way. The Christian must oppose anti-Semitism, defined as hatred of the
Jewish race, but he must also oppose the Jewish agenda of opposition to
Logos. As many Catholics have done in the past, the Catholic must oppose the
agenda of the revolutionary Jew, even now—nay, especially now— when Jews have
adopted the tropes of conservatism to disguise their true aims. St. Pope Pius X felt that the endtimes had arrived
in 1903. And in a sense he was right, by the time the dust had settled after
World War I, all of Europe’s remaining Catholic empires had been toppled and
the Jewish communist antichrist had been placed on the vacant throne of
Russia’s Christian Czar. Perhaps Pius X had a vision of the future when he
wrote on October 4, 1903 that Whosoever weighs these things has certainly reason
to fear that such perversion of mind may herald the evils announced for the
end of time and as it were, the
beginning of those calamities and that the son of perdition of whom the
Apostle speaks may have already made his appearance here below. So great are
the fury and hatred with which religion is everywhere assailed, that it seems to be a determined effort to
destroy every vestige of the relation between God and man. On the other hand
— and this is, according to the same Apostle, the special characteristic of
Antichrist—with frightful presumption man is attempting to usurp the place of
his Creator and is lifting himself above all that is called God. . . is dedicating the visible world to
himself as a temple, in which he has the pretension to receive the adoration
of his fellow men. ‘So that he sitteth in the temple of God showing himself
as if he were God’” (II Thess, II, 4). (p. 177). As John the Evangelist has written, there are “many
Antichrists” (I John II, 18), and the Jews have welcomed all of them. “Down
the centuries,” writes Father Lemann, “the Jews have welcomed all the enemies
of Jesus Christ and his Church and have constituted themselves their
auxiliaries. In the Great Sanhedrin, held at Paris in 1807, they applied the
Biblical titles, exclusively reserved to the Messias to Napoleon, though Napoleon was not of Jewish blood. They
even welcomed the principles of the French Revolution as the Messias: “The
Messias came for us on Feb. 28, 1790, with the Declaration of the Rights of
Man.’” (p. 187). Inspired by Pius X’s statement Msgr. Robert Hugh
Benson wrote Lord of the World, a novel which appeared in 1907 but
which was set in the early 21st century, roughly 100 years in the future,
which is to say in 2007. In that novel a weakened English pope confronts an
antichrist with the iconic name of Julian Felsenburgh on the plains of
Megiddo. In June of 2006 Pope Benedict XVI announced that he
was going to Megiddo in 2007. Megiddo is another word for Armageddon. The
apocalyptic aura of his visit was overshadowed by the apocalyptic nature of
the age. George Bush, like the antichrist Julian the Apostate was locked in
an unwinnable war in Iraq and threatening to extend that war to the east by
dropping nuclear weapons on Iran. Judging from appearances, the conversion of
the Jews did not seem imminent. The Jews had never been more powerful; the
Church was weak. But appearances can be deceiving. Benedict XVI was the
author of Dominus Iesus and had said, even before becoming pope, that he was
looking forward to the conversion of the Jews. Reversal was in the air.
E. Michael Jones is editor of Culture Wars. Share |
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