Our Complicity In Evil

The Church of the Holy Sepulcher,

Jerusalem

Last week—Thursday, February 26,--arsonists set fire to the Greek Orthodox Seminary in  Jerusalem and wrote, in Hebrew, insulting remarks about Jesus on the walls. 

Over the last five years or so Israeli settlers who have moved in to occupy Palestinian villages have not only forced out the occupants, but vandalized Christian Churches, monasteries, and cemeteries.  Two years ago the monastery of the Sisters of Bethlehem was firebombed in a midnight attack, the perpetrators of which left graffiti on the outside walls saying “Price Tag,” “Death to Gentiles,” and “revenge” in Hebrew.  The same terms were painted on tombstones in the Greek Orthodox cemetery in Jaffa.  Israeli settlers vandalized the car of a Catholic human rights lawyer in Jerusalem. 

Vandals left graffiti—in Hebrew—stating that “Jesus is a monkey” on the walls of the Dormition Abbey, a Benedictine monastery that marks the traditional site of the death of the Virgin Mary.  “Jesus is a Son of a Bitch” and “Price Tag” had been sprayed on the Abbey’s walls the year before. 

“Price Tag” refers to a campaign initiated four years ago by Israeli settlers on Palestinian lands to intimidate Palestinians and other non-Israelis into leaving the Holy Land.  It refers to the “price” that Palestinians must pay for their opposition to the expansion of Israeli territory into the towns and villages which they have occupied from time immemorial. 

Now the Israelis want to extend their “security wall” into the Cremisan valley and then expropriate the land there that currently belongs to Palestinian Christians.  The mayor, Vera Baboun, met with Pope Francis to ask his help in preventing this land-grab. 

Why don’t we hear more about these atrocities?  CBS reporter Bob Simon who died last month in an automobile crash in New York did a story back in 2012 on the plight of Palestinian Christians.  Then Israeli ambassador Michael Oren put pressure on CBS to squelch the story before it was even completed.  Simon recalled the incident:

According to Israeli government figures, tourism is a multi billion dollar business there. Most tourists are Christian. Many of them are American. That’s one reason why Israelis are very sensitive about their image in the United States. And that could be why Ambassador Oren phoned Jeff Fager, the head of CBS News and executive producer of 60 Minutes, while we were still reporting the story, long before tonight’s broadcast.  

 Don’t misunderstand me.  I have been to Israel four times.  It is an amazing country.  The Israelis have made the desert bloom.  But there is also tremendous human suffering there, a suffering that former President Jimmy Carter compared to the Apartheid of South Africa until its termination in 1994.  Had Mr. Carter wanted to hit closer to home he could have compared it to the plight of African-Americans in Mississippi or Alabama in the first half of the twentieth century.  The Palestinian peoples who are descended from the biblical inhabitants of Canaan and lived there through the kingships of David and Solomon, through the invasion of the Assyrians, who remained in the land when the Jews were taken to Babylon and when they returned, who survived Alexander and his Greeks, the Romans, the Byzantines, and the Arab invasion of 636 as well as the Turks in the 12^th century, are now being driven out—Christian and Muslim alike—by policies that want to purge the land of all who are not Jews. 

Today the Master Builder of this racist theocracy is addressing the United States Congress as the invited guest of Speaker Boehner.  I am not in favor of denying any one Holy Communion, but if I could make an argument that the Eucharist should be withheld from any Christian, it would be for John Boehner’s betrayal of his Palestinian brother and sister Christians.  Don’t misunderstand me, Prime Minister Netanyahu is not personally interested in driving all non-Jews from the land of Eretz Yisrael.  I would have some respect—profound disagreement but still respect—for him if this was a matter of something in which he truly believed.  But the Prime Minister, to keep his Likud party in power, courts support from those nationalist and those ultra-orthodox parties and individuals who want to make Israel 100% an Orthodox theocracy.  (note: not all ultra-orthodox wish to make Israel a theocracy; there are many who believe that the political questions need await the Messiah who will decide. And, of course, the majority of Israelis are secular Jews who have abandoned the idea that the land is theirs by a “divine right.”)  Tragically our own nation has involved itself in Israel’s racist agenda by our unqualified support for Israel both politically and militarily.  It is time that we reexamine our policies toward Israel and come to a more balanced and just stance. 

The Illiberal Liberals and Pope Francis on Freedom of Expression

Bill Maher: When Anger Dresses
Up as Humor it is no less toxic 

I am a fan of The Big Bang Theory and there probably isn’t an episode I haven’t seen at least once, but I still get a bit queasy and want to change the channel when I see Howard do his imitation of Stephen Hawking’s synthesized speech.   Professor Hawking has been on the show and almost certainly doesn’t mind, but I am not sure where the line is on making fun of a person with a disability or a challenge.  Just because the person being mocked doesn’t mind doesn’t make it right. 

I think we have, at least in the United States and at least among those of us who weren’t raised by wolves (or white trash), a social consensus that we don’t make fun of people with disabilities or with what we often call today “special needs.”  To make fun of a person with Down’s Syndrome or with Cerebral Palsy is called bullying.  We don’t do it; we don’t tolerate it.  Similarly the sort of mockery of people for distinctive racial or ethnic features that was the staple of cartoonists such as Thomas Nast or Friz Freleng would not be tolerated today.  Julius Streicher was the Nazi Cartoonist whose anti-Semitic drawings in Der Stürmer helped turn the German people against the Jews in Hitler’s Reich; we recognize the evils to which he made a significant contribution.   One certainly doesn’t denigrate women in today’s responsible press.  Nor is it acceptable to make broad statements or reinforce stereotypes of the LGBTQ community.  But isn’t it great fun to mock people for their religious beliefs? 

There are people who have reacted strenuously to Pope Francis for saying that people should not be mocked for their religious beliefs.  This is seen as an attack on “freedom of expression.”  What many people today do not realize is the difference between “freedom” and “license.”  Freedom recognizes that it carries along with it responsibility.  License is nothing more than the unbridled indulgence of self-willed egotists.  It refuses to be accountable to either objective truth or to the sensitivities and rights of others.  Those who make fun of others for their religious beliefs are simply schoolyard bullies on a larger scale.

Several weeks ago I saw Bill Maher on Conan.  Mr. Maher is one of religion’s most irresponsible critics and produced and starred in Religulous, the 2008 documentary that pretty much tarred all religion with the same choleric brush.  He also is not a nice man.  Anger, no, actually a discretely muffled rage, best described his performance on Conan.   Rage is no foundation for humor.  Anger in any and all forms, the Dalai Lama says, is poison.  And it is.  Nothing more; nothing less.  It destroys people from within like a cancer, spreading out from the gut into the whole person and becoming an obsession that distorts the individual’s power for healthy relationships and eats away their capacity for joy.  Anger or Rage is also highly contagious and spreads like a spiritual cholera from one person to another by even the most casual of contact.  Just look at how the bias against Muslims has spread in our society and in Western Europe, spread to the point where Duke University had to rescind its permission for the Adhān (the Call to Prayer) to be chanted from the chapel bell tower for fear of violence against the University and its campus.   Of course there are those who want to silence the bells in church towers as well or prohibit the display of crosses on the outside of church-owned buildings.  We must be careful because to undermine the freedom of public expression for one religion is potentially to undermine the public expression of any and all religion.

This is not to say that religion must be above criticism.  Rational argument is far different from mockery whether the mockery is in the form of cartoons, films, jokes, literature, or art.  Religion, like every other aspect in our lives, needs to be put under the microscope of free, rational, and responsible critique.  But the Pope is right.  It is no more legitimate to mock the religious beliefs of some or any or all than it is to bully the developmentally challenged, the transgendered, the economically disadvantaged, the ethnic minority, or the physically handicapped.  It is time we grew up and faced our biases rather than make them clever conceits that massage our egos into thinking that we are superior to others who are different from us.    

Ya Don't Have To Be Katholic To Be A Krazy

The Temple Mount also known as

The Noble Sanctuary

Kraziness of the “religious” variety is not limited to the Katholic wing-nuts as Rabbi Steven Pruzansky of Teaneck New Jersey recently demonstrated in his blog.  Rabbi Pruzansky, who heads the “Orthodox” Congregation Bnai Yeshurun in the northern New Jersey town that lies just across the Hudson River from New York City, wrote in his blog last week that “There is a war for the land of Israel that is being waged, and the Arabs who dwell in the land of Israel are the enemy in that war and must be vanquished. . .Arabs have no future in the land of Israel.” I put “Orthodox” in quotation marks as Pruzansky takes his opinions far beyond where most Rabbis would agree that Torah goes and indeed—and to their credit—the Orthodox Union—an association of Orthodox Congregations to which Pruzansky’s synagogue belongs—has condemned his views saying:

“We cannot countenance a response to terror that resorts to wholesale demonization, advocates for the collective punishment of Israeli Arabs, or calls for the destruction or dismantling of Muslim holy places. Such rhetoric is anathema to the Jewish religious tradition and has no place in civil society. Such rhetoric is wrong and must be repudiated, whether it is voiced by lay leaders, community leaders or rabbis.”

Rabbi Pruzansky pulled the offensive essay and issued a “clarification” in which he claimed that he never wrote that all Arabs or all Muslims fell underneath the epithet “savages” by which he castigated the terrorists who had brutally murdered four rabbis and a Druze policeman in Jerusalem the previous week.  That may be true—one can read the original sentence with several different interpretations—but exactly whom the Rabbi called “savages” isn’t the problem, only the symptom.  The problem is the blatant racism that underlies Rabbi Pruzansky’s entry.  While they may not be “savages,” Rabbi Pruzansky does not believe that Israeli Arabs or Palestinians are entitled to the same rights as are Jewish Israelis.   The Rabbi wrote

“Measures need to be implemented that encourage Arab emigration — the payment of stipends, compensation for property, etc. They must be made to feel that that they have no future in the land of Israel — no national future and no individual future.” And Rabbi Pruzansky went far beyond this suggestion that the native Palestinian Arab population who have lived in the land long before Joshua led the descendants of Jacob into “The Promised Land” be pushed to give up their family homes and their patrimonial orchards and emigrate.  He pushed the idea that any town or village from which terrorists came should be leveled and its entire population expelled.  Moreover, he advocated that severe restrictions be placed on the civil and human rights of non-Israelis who remained in Israel.  He further said that the Israeli police should use “live ammunition” against any demonstrating for Palestinian rights and that foreign reporters or cameramen have their notes and equipment confiscated so that they could not report on atrocities against the Palestinians.  What provokes the demonstrations against the Israeli authorities is the forcible removal of Palestinians from their homes—as is currently happening in East Jerusalem—so that those homes can be destroyed and new homes be built for Jewish Israelis.  Today’s Palestinian population are no johnnies-come-lately to Jerusalem and what is today the State of Israel but can be traced back to the Syro-Canaanite peoples who have inhabited the eastern end of the Mediterranean for over five thousand years.  How can the fortunate nieces and nephews of the unfortunate Polish and Russian and Czech and German Jews who were forced from their homes and lost their businesses before being herded into work camps and death camps because their existence was not convenient to a political ideology built on racial hatred advocate this sort of State-terrorism? 

Rabbi Pruzansky, like many others of a certain Jewish Orthodoxy, believe that the land of Israel belongs by Divine Right exclusively to the Jewish people and that all others, including those who have lived there for millennia, must vacate it.  The Rabbi went so far as to demand that the Muslim Holy Places on the Temple Mount be closed and that the shrines—the Dome of the Rock and the Al-Aqsa mosque be “uplifted intact and reset in Saudi Arabia, Syria or wherever it is wanted.”  This opinion shows the Rabbi’s contempt for religions other than his own.  The “Noble Sanctuary” is sacred to Muslims as was the Temple to Jews and for both religions its sacred character is linked to the specific site of Mount Moriah and is not interchangeable with any other place on earth for its specific religious significance. 

This was not the Rabbi’s first racist rant.  He was beside himself with fury at the 2012 re-election of President Barack Obama and attributed the President’s victory to voters “primarily from the Third World” who “do not share the traditional American values…”  He went on to write “It is a different world, and a different America. Obama is part of that different America, knows it, and knows how to tap into it.”

Christians, Jews, Muslims all must learn mutual respect and tolerance.  Christians, in their day, certainly have been guilty of bigotry and violence towards both Muslims and Jews, and no way occupy the moral high ground to lecture anyone else.  The Crusades and the pogroms and the Inquisition are all tired chestnuts hurled accusingly against the Catholic Church—but, tragically, they are all historically accurate examples of religion gone rotten.  Given our past, we Catholics are in no position to preach the necessity of respect for those of other religious persuasions, but by our example of tolerance and truth as mandated at the Second Vatican Council in Dignitatis Humanae and Nostra Aetate, and crowned by a proactive pursuit of charity and justice as indicated by Popes John Paul, Benedict, and Francis,  we Christians must get the message out that violence and hatred are no solid ground on which to build the future.  In the process of the sort of bigotry typified by Rabbi Pruzansky not only Judaism but all religion suffers a credibility gap.  Perhaps the following quote from the Dalai Lama puts things into perspective. 

Finally I would like to point out that the purpose of religion is not to build beautiful churches or temples; it is to cultivate positive human qualities such as tolerance, generosity, and love.  Fundamental to Buddhism and Christianity, indeed to every major world religion, is the belief that we must reduce our selfishness and save others.  

Many Catholics who share the religious arrogance of Rabbi Pruzansky would shrug their shoulders and condescendingly ask what the Dalai Lama or any other teacher outside their own faith tradition could possibly have to say to us who have received the teachings of Jesus.  I suspect many Orthdox Jews would also wonder why one would look beyond the rabbinical tradition when G-d has spoken his Torah.  Maybe we need to get over our prejudices and realize that Truth has never allowed any one source to hold the monopoly on it.      

The Devil's Evangelist

Catholics are not the only ones with their krazies.  This is a problem throughout the world of religions when individuals or groups lose the focus of religion and pervert it into something evil.  Unfortunately it is all too common whether it is ISIS style Islam or Jews who, with the claims that God gave the land of Eretz Israel to them exclusively, want the Palestinians expelled from their ancestral lands or Hindus who burn churches and kill Christians.  We are all familiar with the saga of Malala Yousafzai, the Pakistani teen who, as an advocate for the education of girls in the Muslim world, was shot by the Taliban and who, after her recovery, continues to live under death threats from “religious” extremists.  Less well publicized is the violence against Muslims in Myanmar (Burma) by the Buddhist monks known as the  Mabatha and led by the demagogue monk Ashin Wirathu.  Of course there are people in our country who advocate violence against people for their religious beliefs, and especially against Muslims.  Many of these people make the claim that they are “Christians” but their message is not merely a distortion of the message of Jesus but a 180^o perversion of it. 

One Christian demagogue who spent his life preaching a gospel of hatred in the name of Jesus was the Reverend Ian Paisley, founder of the Free Presbyterian Church movement of Ulster and of North America.  Paisley had been raised in religious bigotry—his father had been an independent Baptist preacher who had served in the Ulster Volunteers—a Protestant militia formed to protect the Protestant ascendency in the years immediately before World War I.  Paisley himself began preaching at the age of sixteen and his message from the first was one of fundamentalism and religious bigotry.

The conflicts that tore Northern Ireland apart during the second half of the twentieth century were not essentially religious conflicts but rather a socio-economic struggle between the native Irish who were held in menial jobs and high unemployment by the Scots-Irish who were the descendants of Scottish settlers whom the British had transplanted to Ireland in the late seventeenth and in the eighteenth centuries.  The native Irish tended to be Catholic; the Scots Irish were usually Presbyterian, though sometimes Anglican, Baptist, or Methodist.  Due to the eighteenth-century British laws that prohibited Catholics from owning land, studying at the universities, entering the professions, or having sufficient capital to build or own industries, eighteenth-century Ireland had economically fragmented with the Protestant minority being the landowners and capitalists and the Irish majority being tenant farmers and menial workers.  Nineteenth-century reforms and twentieth-century independence of the Irish Republic corrected this imbalance in southern Ireland, but in Ulster, the six-counties that remained under British occupation, the Scots-Irish Protestant population was the majority and was able to hold the Irish (and Catholic) sector of society in economic bondage.  The problem was that despite the relative prosperity of Ulster, there were only so many jobs to go around and what employment there was was tied to the Orange Lodges—Masonic-style associations of  Protestant Unionists.  Unionists were those who were dedicated to maintaining Union with Great Britain in the “United Kingdom.”  You got your job through your connections with the Lodges.  As Catholics did not, and could not, belong to these associations it was much more difficult for them to find employment and when they did it was in the more menial work that the Protestant upper and middle class would not undertake.  The result was high unemployment among the Irish (and Catholic) underclass and the resultant social evils that go with economic hopelessness.  In 1964 Ulster Irish looked to the experience of the African American struggle for Civil Rights and began their own peaceful organization for civil rights.  They wanted”

1.   and end to job discrimination and a fair share of the employment; and in particular equal access to civil service jobs

2.   public housing to be allocated on the basis of need and not of religious affiliation

3.   reform of the police force where almost all police were drawn from the Protestant sector of society

4.   an end to property requirements for voting so that all citizens could vote regardless of whether or not they owned property

5.   guarantees of habeas corpus, freedom of assembly, freedom of the press, all of which were frequently denied the Irish Catholic community

6.   electoral reform to end the gerrymandering that gave the Unionists disproportionate representation in government.

Terrence O’Neill, the Unionist Prime Minister of Northern Ireland, showed an openness to the movement and the reforms they were seeking.  Ian Paisley immediately organized a resistance to the civil rights movement, founding the Ulster Protestant Volunteers, a paramilitary group whose aim was to intimidate the civil rights movement out of existence.  This in turn spawned the Ulster Volunteer Force, another Protestant association to prevent civil rights for the native Irish.  The Ulster Protestant Volunteers and the Ulster Volunteer Force began organizing marches through native Irish neighborhoods to intimidate the populace from civil rights activities.  At this point, the Irish Republican Army was still dormant and had not become active, but in June 1966 the Ulster Volunteer Force was responsible for the burning of several homes and businesses belonging to the native Irish and several Catholic schools.  They also shot dead two Irish civilians on their way home from Mass.  This is generally considered to be the beginnings of the period of terror known as “The Troubles” in which over 3500 would lose their lives and almost 50,000 would be injured. This also  triggered the revival of the Irish Republican Army, an Irish and Catholic terrorist group whose goal was to protect the native Irish population from the Unionist violence and to respond in kind to the aggressive attacks of the various Unionists militias.  In response to the escalation of violence which he had begun, Ian Paisley would later organize two more paramilitary groups, The Force and The Ulster Resistance. 

Paisley’s political views and reliance on violence was rooted in his religious convictions that saw Catholicism as the religion of the anti-Christ.  For Ian Paisley true religion was not simply Protestantism—he was as opposed to most Protestantism as he was Catholicism—but in a Biblical fundamentalism, a rigorous Calvinism with its doctrine of double predestination, and an appeal to the sixteenth-century reformers who had declared the pope to be the Anti-Christ and Catholicism to be a diabolic corruption of authentic Christianity.  Paisley had left the Presbyterian Church in Ireland to form his own denomination, the Free Presbyterian Church of Ulster.  He was rigidly anti-ecumenical and one of the reasons he broke with mainline Presbyterianism was Presbyterian involvement in the World Council of Churches which he saw as compromising pure Protestant doctrine by its association with other denominations.  (The Catholic Church does not belong to the World Council of Churches, though it does have “observer status” with it; several Orthodox Churches do belong however and they do certain things such as prayers to the Mother of God of which Paisley disapproved vehemently.)

It really was Ian Paisley who turned the conflict in Northern Ireland from a political and socio-economic conflict into a religious one by making it a Protestant cause. 

How did Ian Paisley feel about the native Irish?: his rhetoric was worthy of a George Wallace or a Ross Barnett:  "They breed like rabbits and multiply like vermin" he declared.  "Catholic homes caught fire because they were loaded with petrol bombs; Catholic churches were attacked and burned because they were arsenals and priests handed out sub-machine guns to parishioners" he said.  It wasn’t because they were Irish that he said these things—he himself claimed to be “Irish” though his ancestry was Scots. It was because they were Catholics.  When the beloved Pope John XXIII died in 1963, Paisley declared from his pulpit: “This Romish man of sin is now in hell.” 

In the New York Times obituary this morning it was reported that while his politics had softened in his final years, the legacy of hatred remains:

But his politics were predominantly a crusade against Irish Catholics. And when it was over, when he had softened the diatribes and accepted leadership in a power-sharing government, the legacies of fighting and religious hatreds remained. Housing was still overwhelmingly segregated, discrimination in jobs was still common, and 3-year-olds, researchers said, continued to display sectarian instincts.

Sixty years of preaching leaves a legacy of hatred.  This man was the devil’s evangelist with his gospel of hatred.  If Calvin were right and we are predestined from all eternity to heaven or to hell, there is no doubt where a man whose life produced such evil fruit would find himself.  But, ironically, if the Gospel as proclaimed by the Catholic tradition is right, there is a hope of mercy for us all, even Ian Paisley.