Pope Francis is Aligning Himself against Israel - By Michael Freund - http://www.breakingisraelnews.com/40827/pope-francis-is-aligning-himself-against-israel-opinion/#R2ge1D4z1IhxbZZl.97
In a treaty that was finalized in Rome last week, the Catholic Church fired the latest salvo in its 2,000-year-old struggle to disenfranchise the Jewish people. Meeting with Palestinian officials at the Vatican, church officials agreed to formally recognize the "State of Palestine" as part of a deal concerning Catholic activities in the Palestinian-controlled areas.
And just in case anyone failed to get the memo, Vatican spokesman Rev. Federico Lombardi went to the trouble of going on record as saying, "Yes, it's a recognition that the state exists."
This outrageous step is a severe blow to Catholic- Jewish relations and it cannot go unanswered.
Israel and the Jewish people should protest this measure in the strongest possible terms and make sure that Pope Francis realizes the damage he has done.
In biblical terms, by recognizing a Palestinian state in Judea and Samaria, the Vatican is effectively seeking to deny the eternal covenant between God and the Jewish people, to whom this land was promised long ago. This is not only offensive and disrespectful, but disingenuous too. Indeed, one cannot help but wonder: what Bible is the Vatican reading? Whichever one it is, it must be missing some pages, as even a cursory glance at the Scriptures makes clear that God promised to give the Land of Israel to the Jewish people and nobody else. In fact, there are over 150 biblical verses ranging from Genesis to Joshua to Chronicles which state this and reaffirm that Israel would return from Exile to this holy soil.
Take, for example, Isaiah 14:1-2: "The Lord will have compassion on Jacob; once again He will choose Israel and will settle them in their own land." Or how about Jeremiah 31:4, where God says: "You shall again plant vineyards upon the mountains of Samaria." And there's Genesis 48:3-4. And Judges 2:1, and Ezekiel 34: 11-13. And Hosea 3:4-5. And Amos 9:14-15. And Obadiah 1:17, Zephaniah 3:19-20 and Zechariah 8:7-8.
Moreover, the Bible stresses that these were not merely assurances, but a Divine oath, one that would never be broken.
"He remembers His covenant forever," says 1 Chronicles 16:15-18, "the word He commanded for a thousand generations, the covenant He made with Abraham, the oath He swore to Isaac. He confirmed it to Jacob as a decree, to Israel as an everlasting covenant: 'To you I will give the land of Canaan as the portion you will inherit.'" You get the point. But it seems that the Vatican does not.
In fact, my Christian friends tell me that the words "Palestine" and "Palestinians" do not appear anywhere in the New Testament. Hence, one could argue that Jesus himself would be mystified by the pope's position.
After all, according to Christian belief, Jesus the Jew was born and raised in Bethlehem, which means there was a Jewish community there, with synagogues, ritual baths, rabbis and perhaps a kosher deli too, centuries before Islam was even founded.
So would the Catholic Church now deem Jesus to have been a "settler" or "occupier" of Palestinian land? For an institution that bills itself as "the Holy See" and which claims to uphold sacred values, the Vatican's profane involvement in Middle Eastern politics is simply unbecoming.
And given its sordid history of anti-Semitism, book-burnings, forced conversions and Inquisitions, the Catholic Church should think a hundred times over before daring to step on Israel's toes.
If anything, the pope should be down on his knees pleading for forgiveness from the Jewish people and atonement from the Creator for what the Vatican has wrought over the centuries.
The current attempt to undermine and deny Israel's right to Judea and Samaria by recognizing Palestinian statehood smacks of "supersessionism," or replacement theology, a doctrine according to which the Church replaced Israel as God's chosen instrument nearly two millennia ago.
Over the past 50 years, since the Second Vatican Council, the Catholic Church had slowly begun to acknowledge that the Jewish people are "a covenanted people," thereby shifting away ever slightly from supersessionism.
But conferring legitimacy on a Palestinian state is akin to suggesting that the Palestinians have replaced Israel as the rightful owners of the land, a position that flies in the face of history, theology and common sense.
It is nothing less than supersessionism via diplomatic means, and a cruel insult to the generations of Jews who longed for Zion while enduring Catholic oppression and persecution.
Israel needs to respond to this affront forcefully. We cannot stand by and watch as our national integrity is called into question. A good place to start would be to withdraw our ambassador to the Holy See, curtail the number of visas granted to Vatican officials, and rule out any possibility of giving the Church the foothold it so sorely wants at the Tomb of King David on Mount Zion.
What a shame it is that after so much progress in Catholic- Jewish relations over the past few decades the Vatican would now betray all the headway that has been made.
But Pope Francis needs to realize that by recognizing the fictitious "State of Palestine" he is aligning himself against Israel, the Jewish people and the bible itself.
And that is something we cannot forgive, nor soon forget.
Sorry, Your Holiness, You are Dangerously Wrong - By Jonathan Tobin - http://www.jewishworldreview.com/0515/tobin051815.php3
Those who forget that the Vatican is a city-state and not just the home office of the Catholic Church got a reminder this past week of just how its sovereignty works.
Its decision to formally recognize "Palestine" as an independent nation was not a theological position but one in keeping with the policies of the rest of Europe which has chosen to promote the Palestinian Authority's ambitions despite its repeated refusal to make peace and its lack of control of much of the territory it claims.
The announcement of the planned treaty was timed to coincide with the canonization of two 19th century Arab nuns who lived in Ottoman-ruled Palestine. Yet despite that religious gloss on an otherwise realpolitik move the nuns were upstaged when Pope Francis embraced PA leader Mahmoud Abbas on his visit to Rome and pronounced him "an angel of peace."
Such hyperbole may be par for the course in exchanges between heads of state but for the pope to say something that is so patently false damages his credibility in a way that does the church more harm than might have occurred than had it decided not to join in the rush to recognize the Palestinians.
Abbas may be many things but he is no angel as well as not being a champion of peace.
The decisions being taken by the Vatican and other European states won't advance peace. To the contrary, such moves only encourage Abbas to continue to refuse to negotiate with Israel.
The only path forward for a two state solution to the conflict is for the Palestinians to be given statehood only after they have made peace with Israel and not before. Abbas and his predecessor, Yasir Arafat, have repeatedly refused Israeli offers of peace and statehood.
To this day, he refuses to sign any deal that recognizes the legitimacy of a Jewish state no matter where its borders are drawn.
That alone should be enough to deny Abbas the title of "angel of peace." But that isn't the only reason.
Abbas was a longtime deputy to arch-terrorist Arafat and played a role in organizing and financing many acts of brutal terrorism. But unlike other world leaders who might have employed violence in his youth and then became a statesman, Abbas has never really changed. He is the same man who wrote a doctoral thesis that centered on Holocaust denial at Moscow's Patrice Lumumba University that was published in 1984. He continues to embrace and honor terrorists, such as the murderers with the blood of innocent civilians on their hands that were released by Israel in order to ransom Gilad Shalit from his Hamas captors.
Just as important, though he occasionally makes statements about wanting peace when speaking to Western audiences or the international media, his official PA media incites hatred against Jews and Israel on a regular basis.
Let's concede that part of the Vatican's motivation for all the love being shown the Palestinians is a desire to position the church to protect Middle East Christians at a time when they are under siege from radical Islam in the region. That ISIS is slaughtering Christians with impunity is well known. Less talked about is the every day pressure that Christian communities are under throughout the region. The result is that ancient Christian communities are disappearing as its members flee for safety in the West rather than face increasing marginalization and discrimination if not violence.
That Christian institutions like the Church would choose to ingratiate themselves with the Muslim world by attacking Israel in this manner is not altogether surprising. Arab Christians have long sought to gain acceptance from Muslims by being in the forefront of the struggle against Zionism. It hasn't worked as Arab Christians continue to be attacked no matter how ardently they demonstrate their antipathy for Israel and Jews. Religious minorities in the Muslim have a natural ally in Israel but Arab Christians and some of their Western supporters continue to cling to the myth that they can win acceptance from Muslims by joining in attacks on the Jews.
That Western Christians also adopt such attitudes is equally foolish. But it can also be explained by anti-Semitic attitudes that persist in Europe despite the heroic efforts of Pope Francis' predecessors, Pope John XXIII and Pope John Paul II to eradicate the vestiges of the Church's past errors.
The pope might be forgiven for this flight of fancy if he were to give an equally egregious title to Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu during a meeting with him. But given the animosity that Europeans direct toward the democratically elected leader of the Jewish state such a similar papal embrace is highly unlikely.
Pope Francis's statement about Abbas can be dismissed as mere window dressing to the Vatican's diplomatic initiative. But the damage the pope does when he says things that are so blatantly false goes beyond the assault on the truth that so often occurs when world leaders are polite to each other.
The power of the papacy remains great. During the last decade of the Cold War, Pope John Paul II proved that Stalin was wrong when he mocked a previous pope by asking how many divisions he controlled. But that power must rest in truth if it is to be more than just talk.
The pope is a good man whose intentions should not be questioned. But just as the Vatican should refrain from acts that harm peace such as its recognition of Palestine, so, too, should the pope not utter falsehoods.
That Pope Francis must meet with Abbas is to be expected but when he says something so obviously untrue about him, it hurts the papacy and undermines good relations between the church and the Jewish people more than it helps the corrupt, tyrannical and undemocratic leader of a Palestinian kleptocracy.
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