Nice Pope, shame about his clergy and activists

Popes come, and they go, and thankfully yet another one, a friend of the Jewish People is now in office.Yet for all this we are reminded daily by the Catholic Church that as with any country, the leader is just one solitary person. Tony Blair and Mr Brown were both leaders who understood that jews were not the problem in the middle east, yet their party contains some of the most unpleasant anti-semites in the UK, and an organisation hatred of Israel that permeates the labour party and the left.

So anyone with Israel and the West's interests at heart (because western civilization and its survival is inextricably linked with that of Israel) can not expect too much of the new Pope Francis the saintly and modest. His love of the Jewish People is not at all shared by his clergy who carry out a daily effort to malign and distort news about Israel. Whichever Church website you find, and there are many, you will find the same Vatican sourced lies against Israel.

So today I wasn't at all surprised to see this long report about Israeli arrests of palestinian arab children. Not one word was devoted on catholic websites that reported this incident to the reason as to why the children were arrested, for volleys of stones thrown either at jews living in Hebron or at soldiers protecting the jews there (since jews returned to Hebron in 1967, after having been ethnically cleansed in the massacre of 1929, jews living there have been under constant attack from knifings, stone throwing and shootings. Even baby Shalhevet Pass was not spared by an arab sniper who targeted her in her stroller, Shalhevet's grandfather had earlier been killed  by axe wielding arabs, and her sister was also subsequently injured by arab stone throwers).

Twenty-seven Palestinian children, age seven to 15, were arrested while on their way to school in the West Bank city of Hebron, Christian Peacemaker Teams reported on 24 March. Three were detained for two days; twenty-four others were held for almost twelve hours.
The principal of the Hebron Public School reported that he was standing at the gate to his school at 7.30am when about 22 soldiers arrived and immediately began taking children from the street without speaking with the principal, teachers or the children. The street was full of children on their way to five area schools. Several adults arrived and tried to prevent the soldiers from taking the students but soldiers pulled the children away. Israeli soldiers arrested 27 students, age seven to 15. They made them walk to checkpoint 29 and violently forced them into the jeeps. Some of the children reported injuries.

The soldiers drove them to the police station near the Ibrahimi Mosque, brought 25 children inside and released two on a nearby road. They questioned the students without parents, a lawyer or teachers present and without permission from parents or other adults. Eight of the children were in grades one through four. Obaida Babyeh, age 15, a student at the Ibrahimi School, was one of the two released near the station. He said: “We were passing to go to our school and they arrested us. The soldiers pushed us into the jeep, then they took us away from the school checkpoint. They hit me on my knee. Then the commander came and talked with them in Hebrew. The commander slapped me and my friend on the face and let us go.” On 20 March, Israeli officials committed at least four clear violations of rights guaranteeed to these children under international law..............

We're supposed to understand that the children were just minding their own business, victims of hateful jews. Well one would expect such a report around easter, wouldn't one? It is not exactly acceptable for priests to attack jews physically any more at easter for 'having killed Christ', but incitement against jews is always a pleasant thought for a catholic news website.

I wonder why the 'Ibrahimi mosque' mentioned in the report above was not given its other more well known title, the Cave of the Patriarchs, the Machpelah Cave mentioned some 3,000 or so years ago in the Bible? The present building was not a mosque when Herod erected it around the time that Jesus made an appearance.

As with other campaigns to wipe out jewish attachment to the land, catholic clergy should understand that jews will still be around in the middle east, that Israel will be ever more firmly in control of its ancestral lands when the last christian communities in arab and islamic countries have long been wiped out.

In the words of Shalhevet Pass's father:

First of all, we are stubborn. The Jewish people are stubborn, a stiff-necked people. We are enrooted in this land. Both in our personal family, and in a more general way, this is everything. There is nothing, not murder, not Arabs, which can uproot us from here, because we are a stiff-necked people. Despite what the Jewish people have experienced, we have been able to hold our heads high. We have to understand how they lived in Galut where anyone could do whatever he wanted to Jews, and here, and here, in Eretz Yisrael, we hold our heads high, standing straight and tall, no one will ever get us out of here.

To Pope Francis and all the many catholic and other christian friends of Israel and the Jewish People, have a happy Easter. To jewish readers, Chag Sameach and Shabbat Shalom

(h/t Elder of Ziyon)