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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 distincition 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 Departmen’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. |
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