Dr. Denis MacEoin

Last week, in response to Archbishop Vincent Nichols’s Christmas sermon that was harshly and unfairly critical of Israel, Dr. MacEoin did it again, in his similarly excellent Letter to the Archbishop of Westminster:

Archbishop of Westminster Vincent Nichols

Just last week, I watched a three-part television adaptation of the Nativity story. You may have seen it yourself. It was dramatically balanced, presenting both the religious narrative and the harsh realities of life in first century Judaea: Mary’s fear of being stoned, Joseph’s anxiety about his attachment to a sixteen-year-old girl who has fallen mysteriously pregnant, Herod’s fear of the Romans, the shepherds’ distress under Herod’s rule, and much else. Your connection of the Nativity to contemporary suffering is perfectly balanced; but your later application of that principle leaves much to be desired, almost certainly as a result of your ignorance of the realities of life in the West Bank. Such ignorance is widespread, so I do not single you out for sharing in it. But your calling and stature make it vital for you to get something like this right, otherwise your words will pass on shadows of that ignorance to all who hear and read you and will darken the minds of another generation.You say that ‘We too live “in a land of deep shadow”,’ and I don’t doubt the veracity of it. What you mean exactly by ‘a land’ is neither here nor there, since most of the world is in some kind of darkness and has always been so. It is the curse of the human race. We are in agreement. But in a moment we are not. You continue by saying:

‘That shadow falls particularly heavily on the town of Bethlehem tonight. At this moment the people of the parish of Beit Jala prepare for their legal battle to protect their land and homes from further expropriation by Israel. Over 50 families face losing their land and their homes as action is taken to complete the separation/security wall across the territory of the district of Bethlehem. We pray for them tonight.’

‘Particularly heavily’? Can you in all sincerity say that your singling out of events in Beit Jala merits that use of ‘particularly’? A difficult and misunderstood situation for some people becomes a paradigm for the shadow enveloping mankind? Of all the people in the world, you single out 50 Christian families in Beit Jala and expect those who hear you to recoil, cut to the heart by the horrors of that situation. You speak as if the world had no greater shadow to offer. Thousands have died and are dying in neighbouring Syria, but that gets no mention from you. An entire population is repressed and religious minorities are persecuted in Iran and you say nothing. Muslims who convert to Christianity in Pakistan, Afghanistan and elsewhere are put to death, yet you are silent. In Egypt, Coptic Christians are killed and persecuted and their churches are destroyed, yet you cannot find a sentence in which to condemn it. Christians are not allowed to possess Bibles or to worship or seek converts in Saudi Arabia, yet your voice is not raised. Christians are murdered and their churches burned to the ground in Nigeria, but I do not hear your voice. Yet Muslims are free to worship, open schools, have their own courts, and missionize in every Western country, yet you do not point out the anomaly.

Instead, it is the predictable condemnation of one of the world’s most democratic, liberal, and tolerant states that occupies your thoughts. You speak of a ‘separation/security wall’ without irony. Overall, this barrier is not a wall, it is a fence: it will be about 500 miles long when finished, and only about 3 percent of it will be a wall or is a wall now. There are very cogent reasons why some sections are built from concrete and are very high, unlike the rest, which is primarily chain-link fence. When the second intifada erupted in 2000, gunmen belonging to Fatah Tanzim squads went into mainly Christian houses in Beit Jala and used them as strategic points from which to fire into the Jewish civilian enclave of Gilo, a mere 800 meters away. They fired at first with Kalashnikovs and stolen M16s, then with heavy machine guns. The battles fought in Beit Jala, together with the return fire the Fatah shooting provoked, caused great difficulties for the Christians of the town, who wanted to stay apart from the Muslim-centred violence, whereas the Muslims of the Tanzim wanted to attract return fire into Christian properties. Not surprisingly, the Christian residents tried to force these terrorists (many of whom were from outside Beit Jala) outside their homes. In retaliation, the gunmen beat Christians badly. Christian women were harassed by Muslim men from a nearby village, Beit Awwad.

That violence was spread throughout the West Bank and Gaza. Hundreds were killed by terrorist attacks and suicide bombings, and hundreds more on the Arab side when Israeli troops fired back. It was the second intifada, on top of thousands of similar incidents since 1948, that impelled the Israelis to take hard action against those who wanted to kill them, to attack them specifically as Jews, and to wipe them out or expel them entirely from the Holy Land. Building the barrier was and is harsh to many who live in the West Bank, but it has cut terrorist attacks by over ninety percent. That is an achievement that must be taken into consideration before any condemnation of the wall or the fence. It was never the Israelis who started the violence, nor do they seek to continue it.

Tragically, the barrier did not prevent a hideous massacre in March of this year, when two Palestinian youths entered the Jewish settlement of Itamar, not very many miles from Bethlehem. They took knives and murdered five members of the same family in their sleep, including a five-month-old girl, whom they decapitated. The bodies of her mother, father, two younger brothers and baby sister were found by twelve-year Tamar Fogel, when she stumbled on a scene of such carnage that I flinch to describe it. It is in attacks like this that Israeli toughness begins, in which the plan for a long security barrier was born.

I know that some of the actions that have been taken to build or expand the barrier have resulted in injustice. But I weigh such injustice against several things. I weigh it against the photographs I was sent of the Fogel family massacre and the courage of young Tamar Fogel in facing up to her future as an orphan, yet still committed to her faith and her land. I weigh it against my understanding of how Israel behaves as a country. Israelis have a deep commitment to justice, something achingly evident in the number of times their Supreme Court has ruled against the government, not least in the matter of the security barrier. In 2004, for example, the Court ruled that ‘The route that the military commander established for the security fence … injures the local inhabitants in a severe and acute way while violating their rights under humanitarian and international law.’ The route was changed. In 2005, the Court issued an injunction against the government and the Israeli Defence Forces against the building of the fence round the village of Iskaka, and in the same year forced a halt to the barrier’s construction near Ramallah. Similar rulings have continued to the present day. If the appropriation of land in Beit Jala is illegal and can be shown to have merit, the case will undoubtedly receive a hearing. It may take time for such a case to pass through the judicial system, but what country can offer instant justice save one that makes no pretence at consideration, due process, or justice? If justice is your concern – and I see no reason for it not to be – may I please ask you to direct your criticisms to Iran, where sentences of death are passed in minutes, or to Syria, where justice is firmly in the hands of the regime, or to Saudi Arabia, where a misdemeanour may take you after Friday prayers to the main square in Riyadh, where an executioner’s sword will quickly teach you manners.

Israel, by contrast, has always applied its laws fairly and justly. The only person Israel has ever hanged was Adolph Eichmann, one of the planners of the Holocaust. There is no death penalty, even for the most horrendous acts of terror. This year, in return for a single Israeli soldier, who had been kidnapped illegally and kept incommunicado even from the Red Cross for many years, the Israeli state sanctioned the release of over one thousand Palestinian prisoner, many of them with hands stained by the blood of innocents and children. Israel has well-enforced laws to protect the rights of women, homosexuals, and members of religious minorities. Although Muslims have at various times destroyed synagogues in Jerusalem and elsewhere, the Israelis have long recognized that control of their own holiest site, the Temple Mount, is vested in the Muslim waqf authority and that control of almost the entirety of the second holiest structure of the Jewish faith, the Ma’arat Ha-Machpelah is also under the authority of the waqf Council. When I visited this shrine – the resting places of Abraham, Sarah, and Isaac with other patriarchs – we found ourselves squeezed into a tiny space, while Muslim visitors had full run of the place. There is a lack of balance between the two. In Iran, the regime has destroyed all the holy places and cemeteries of its own largest religious minority, the Baha’is. In Israel, the Baha’is practise their faith openly and have established their international centre in a series of dazzling buildings and luscious gardens that are now a UNESCO World Heritage Site of remarkable beauty. I ask you to judge here whether it is customary for the people of Israel to behave towards non-Jews with contumely, for it is the implication of that deep shadow that hovers over your sermon. If you do indeed mean the Israelis, if you do indeed think of them as bearers of that shadow, I must ask why. Why are Israelis thought to embody the heavy shadow of your accusation when true haters of mankind abound yet are never the targets of your anger. And if it is not the Israelis as Israelis but the Israelis as Jews, I think you will agree with my that that cannot be a helpful road down which to travel.

Your fifty families – if, indeed, there are fifty families – will, at worst, face a legal battle, knowing they will be vindicated if their claims are valid. Israel will not set their homes alight, nor gun them down, nor desecrate their churches nor violate their priests nor execute their converts. It will not do to them what the Muslims of Egypt have done in a long and systematic persecution. It will not do to them what the Taliban have done to Christians in Afghanistan and Pakistan. It will not intimidate or hector or torture or kill them. It’s time this was recognized, especially by a leading churchman like yourself.

The Christians of Beit Jala are, I suspect, being used to put pressure on Israel. The protest may well be part of a long and insidious campaign to malign and weaken Israel in the eyes of the world. Thus, Israel has been described as an ‘apartheid’ when it is, in fact, free of all traces of apartheid. What racism there is is on the same level as that found in the UK. Israel has been called a ‘Nazi state’ in an attempt to hurt Jews in the most painful way imaginable. It has been termed an ‘intolerant state’ when its reputation for racial, religious, and other forms of tolerance raises it above most nations.

I believe you owe the people of Israel an apology or an explanation. They need to know why you chose to single them out, selecting their actions as particularly examples of the shadows that lie on us. I cannot see Israel as a shadow, though I have seen it as a country surrounded by shadows all its life. It is a country of hope for millions. It has been a safe hand in securing the safety of Christianity’s holiest places, places that would fall into disrepair and be threatened with ruin should Israel be replaced by an Arab state, in direct allegiance to Islamic law, which forbids the repair of Christian churches or synagogues.

I have, I fear, abused your hospitality. I hope you have been able to spare the time to read my little letter. I trust it has given you cause for thought. What may arise from that is entirely up to you. I believe I have played my part, but if you know more, I can point you in other directions. Thank you for troubling to read so far. I have trusted that you would, and I have trusted in your innate goodness to awaken in your conscience new insights into the behaviour of a country that seeks peace when others lust for war.

Yours most sincerely,

Dr. Denis MacEoin

READ. IT. ALL.

(h/t Lenny)

to my Christian readers. Wishing all of my Christian readers a Merry Christmas! And thank you for your support over the years.

Like I did last year, I’ll leave the last word to Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu.

This is an astonishingly brilliant piece. I would beg you all to read it. It’s published at New English Review and linked, but I’m re-posting it all here because it is so good.

Happy Israeli organic chickens

In January 1981 the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) Summit meeting in Mecca declared that, “Palestine should be viewed as the paramount issue of Muslim nations.” Since then Europe hastened to adopt this path as well and has provided for the Palestinization of the cultural, social and above all political life of Europe.

For three decades, Europe obeyed the OIC in a servile manner. The EU has effectively created a major problem for itself that is eating away and destroying it. The EU made Palestine the hub of its international policy, transforming it into a symbol of peace and universal harmony, in a world that would not know “justice” until its coming. The only obstacle to this paradise is the Machiavellian Israel, the oppressor and usurper of Palestine, whose purity as a peaceful victim is the harbinger of global justice.

Europe does not yet dare use armed force against Israel, whose existence it claims to defend, while advising it to commit suicide. Europe fights Israel with the infamous Nazi weapons by delegitimizing its existence, robbing it of its history, defaming it by propaganda, hatred and attempts to destroy its economy through boycotts, divestment and sanctions (BDS). Toward this goal it encourages an international campaign of incitement to hatred by financing anti-Israel NGOs and lobbies. Europe claims that Jewish existence in its ancestral homeland, Judea and Samaria, is an “occupation” - a colonization. In this way, Israel has become a state that is occupying its own historical homeland. In Orwellian language propagandists speak of “the Israeli occupation of Palestinian land” that is called Judea, and not of the ethnic and religious cleansing of Jews from their homeland through wars, expulsions, dispossession and the dehumanizing apartheid rule of dhimmitude. Euro-jihadists invoke “Palestinian resistance” rather than the reality of their terrorism that has spread throughout the planet. The EU has used every stratagem to force Israel to self-destruct in the name of Palestine. That destruction would lead to an era of “justice and peace” in the world in the same way the charnel houses of Auschwitz were meant to purify humanity from Jews.

What does Palestinization mean? Firstly, it means creating a people as a substitute for Israel, which takes over its history and therefore its legitimacy. From Palestinization (like the Nazification of Europe two decades before) comes the delegitimization of Israel, an intruder state in the region and in history, even in humanity. The Palestinization of history denies Israel’s identity, culture, historic and human rights within its homeland, including Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem. For the OIC this process is part and parcel of Islamic theology, which regards the Bible as simply a falsified version of the Koran. According to Islam, biblical history is Islamic history, and the biblical characters we see represented in churches are all Muslim prophets who have virtually no connection with the facts reported in the Bible.

This context explains the Islamization of the Jewish and Christian religious heritage, an approach that involves denying the identity of these two religions, since Christianity views itself as emerging from Judaism, whose Scriptures it adopted. If the Bible is an Islamic account, Christianity too, and not just Judaism, are both falsifications of Islam. The negation of biblical history, with which Europe has assiduously linked itself by claiming that Israel is a colonizing intruder in its own homeland thereby challenges the historic rights of the Jews to their own homeland. This also negates Christian history and confirms the Koranic interpretation refuting the historicity of both the Torah and the Gospels.

Hence, if there was never a history of Israel or of the Gospels, but only the history of Ibrahim, Ishmael, Issa (the Koranic Jesus), if all the biblical kings and prophets were Muslim, in what is the West rooted? Would it not be in the Koran? That is the logical conclusion of Europe’s choice, when, furious at the return of the Jews to Jerusalem in 1967, it deliberately decided to deny them their ancient capital. It attributed their heritage to those who, by a war of invasion, had illegitimately occupied it since 1948, expelling and dispossessing all its Jewish inhabitants. In a nutshell, if the Israelis are foreign colonialists, occupiers of their own country, it means they have no past, no history, and if Judaism is just a tissue of lies, the same applies to Christianity. If Israel never existed in the past, then its modern restoration is just a colonial deception to conquer territory to which it has no historical, religious or cultural claims, and so its destruction is justified. If history testifies to the contrary, then Europe becomes willingly responsible for the abominable crime of genocide – wiping out the past existence of a people in order to remove its current legitimacy and its human, religious, cultural and historical rights. This reflects the participation, organization and financing by European nations and the European Commission of an international campaign of incitement to hatred for the dismembering of Israel.

The Palestinization of Europe is not just its theological Islamization through Palestinianism, this being the ideology for Israel’s demise by disclaiming a people’s territorial sovereignty, history and culture, in conformity with the jihadist worldview. Palestinianism is also a paranoid obsession to hound Israel while claiming it is for its own good. By proclaiming that the Palestinian cause is the cause of peace and justice, Europe invests enormous energy, billions of euros and every effort to send Israel back behind the 1948 lines which it knows are indefensible. Hundreds of thousands of books, accusations and speeches subvert the facts and impose this policy.
The Palestinian grounding in Nazism: The de-Judaizing of Christianity

Within this context, the Kairos Palestine declaration of 2010 brands Israel with terms like occupier of Arab lands, colonizer, promoter of apartheid; while conversely Palestinians are innocent victims resisting the occupation and aspiring only to security, justice and peace. The Kairos declaration, hardly surprisingly, condemns all Christian theology that is based upon the Bible or on biblical faith or history that would legitimize Israel. Understand if you can; what would remain of Christian theology, faith or history if you get rid of Israel and the Bible? Could Christian Palestinianism be the camouflage of Nazism, which had planned to de-Judaize Christianity? The document ends with a call to people, businesses and countries to take part in the BDS campaign against Israel. This request is in line with the demands of the OIC and similar to the understanding of the European former leaders, who are the same ones responsible for the current Eurabian situation.

What are the consequences of the choice of al-Quds – that is a Muslim Jerusalem – by Europe for its identity, the criteria for assessing its own history, and its immigration policy? The Europe that chose al-Quds and rejected Jerusalem is rejecting its own basic identity. It is denying the Bible, which is not merely a religious text that states various universal values, but also, for Christians, a chronicle of the coming of Jesus and Christianity, which is its culmination. If there had not been a Jewish people, nor biblical history or geography, there would not be Christianity either. Accordingly, Judaism and Christianity are just a huge aberration, and what remains are the Koran and the Muslim Jesus, whose eschatological mission is the destruction of Christianity.

The choice of al-Quds replaces the Bible with the Koran. Europe knows that the OIC has decided to move its head office from Jeddah to al-Quds. The OIC is deemed the most suitable institution to represent the world Caliphate, with its mission to anchor the universal Ummah in the Koran and Sunna. What church could remain in al-Quds? By seeking to destroy Israel, the Church is destroying its own very existence.

With such a disavowal of its own roots and identity, should we still be surprised that Europe has sold its citizens off cheaply on its own territory? In the same way that the European Union has not ceased to harass Israel and to challenge its roots and rights, it has dragged to court those courageous Europeans who have asserted their own identity, rights and freedoms. This political link between the OIC and the European Union did not only appear in the context of the Israeli-Arab conflict but also in internal European politics concerning the massive Muslim immigration into Europe, which started in the years 1974-75. It was then that a joint Parliamentary Association for Euro-Arab Cooperation (PAEAC) was set up with the task of passing on the political demands from the Arab League countries to the European Community and to monitor their implementation within Europe.

Transposing its anti-Israeli policy to Europe, the EU wants to create a tabula rasa of historical nationalisms and of the privileges of sovereign states, to transfer to the UN – dominated by the OIC – the world governance of human rights. The basic rights of Europeans to security, to their history and freedom of expression are disproved, rebutted, dismissed by the OIC under the guise of Islamophobia and its vehement request for European multiculturalism. Rooted in the civilization of jihad and dhimmitude, it imposes its own criteria through its European and UN go-betweens in its new Western empire. So while Europe prides itself on creating universal, humanitarian governance, on the international scene the OIC is implementing a Koranic order of Islamic human rights.

With the repudiation of Israel, the EU is repudiating itself. It is putting the emphasis on the Greco-Roman heritage and eliminating that of Judeo-Christianity to please the OIC and Muslim migrants. When the EU does this it eliminates its biblical and therefore Jewish basis, as if Christianity had arisen in the world out of nowhere. This repression of identity is just one more concession to Islam and its culture that is hostile to Jews and Christians, an issue that has been neither recognized nor repudiated. To throw Judaism (Israel) and Christianity (the West) into the dustbin of history is to remove human, historical, religious, cultural and national rights from Jews and Christians. It means adopting dhimmitude.

Eurabia and Palestinianism come from the same rejection and the same policy applied to the destruction of the nation-state, the manifestation of the spirit and culture of peoples, condemned to extinction in a globalized, humanitarian utopia. Their points in common are (1) the war against Israel; (2) the de-Judaization of Christianity; (3) the de-Christianization of Europe; and (4) the joint EU-OIC policy to strengthen the UN’s global governance that the OIC aims to monopolize. This suicidal approach is specific to Europe; it does not exist in China or in India, or even in Muslim countries.

With the anarchic uprisings of the “Arab Spring” (March 2011), the United States and most European countries led by France and its Foreign Minister, Alain Juppé, have become involved in Arab and African tribal conflicts, invoking the “right of interference” and the “right of protection”. These rights, however, are applied selectively, because they are never invoked to protect Christians against persecution in Egypt, Iraq, Turkey, Algeria, Sudan, Nigeria, Bangladesh, Indonesia or Pakistan. They are also not used to protect sailors arbitrarily taken hostage by the Somalis. Europe would find it grotesque and indecent to invoke these rights against the spread of anti-Israeli hatred calling for the extermination of the Jews, against the deluge of rockets launched from Gaza into Israel, or against the hideous crimes perpetrated by its Palestinian allies and “protégés” against Israeli civilians. Nor has it reacted to the Islamization of the biblical holy places in Hebron, both Jewish and Christian, by UNESCO, acting on orders of the OIC. Yet this approach is a serious breach of the religious and historical rights of Jews and Christians, and contradicts the western definition of human rights. The recognition of Palestine by UNESCO is a harbinger to the Islamization on a world level of the historical and spiritual roots of Judaism and Christianity and conforms to the Koranic assertion that Islam precedes and dominates these two religions.

Reuters

This post may be updated throughout the day.

• A Hamashole has been killed with out hurting anyone else in a “jihadist mission”.Which basically means he’s a clumsy (dead) dumbass.
• Winter is over, but we may be getting snow.
• Pamela Anderson is back in Israel, promoting her PETA agenda. She said “I love Israel. It’s very forward-thinking,” which I assume does not mean Israelis think about her forward parts.
• Meanwhile, I wonder if Pammie still likes snakes.
• Seemed like a good idea at the time?
• Libyan tyrant Moammar Gaddafi is sounding more and more like Charlie Sheen.
• US official Robert Einhorn stated Iran seeks nuclear weapons capability. No sh*t Sherlock.
• According to AP, thirteen Egyptians have been killed in “violence between Christians and Muslims.” But if you read the article, it seems the violence is coming from one side. Can you guess which one?

This Apparition was caught on tape by an unsuspecting tourist who accidently left his camera running just before Christmas Mass in the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem on the Palestinian side of Jerusalem. The apparition forms and disappears just as a monk dashes through the room. You can see the monk feels a presence and stops to pray just as the apparition disappears.

I don’t know about you, but that baby Jesus looks about as fake as Cher’s face, or Pamela Anderson’s…acting. Even Hamas would be unimpressed by how fake it looks.

Oogachaka!

to my Christian readers. Wishing all of my Christian readers a Merry Xmas! And thank you for your support over the years.

I’ll leave the last word to Prime Minister Netanyahu.

Either that, or he fell asleep in Bible class.

A Christian cleric wears a scarf with a logo of the Islamic Jihad group as he attends a rally to mark the 23nd anniversary of the group's founding, held at the Palestine refugee camp near Damascus November 5, 2010. REUTERS/Khaled al Hariri

P.S Your “main man” was a Jew, who also believed G-d gave the land of Israel to the Jewish people.

Not surprisingly, one of his ideas involves Israel.

Here’s something that could never have happened in the Naughts but will maybe be possible in the Tweens or Teens — if there’s a breakthrough in the Mideast peace process. The idea is an arts festival that celebrates the origin of the three Abrahamic religions: Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Every year it could be held in a different location; Jerusalem would obviously be the best place to start.

In Ireland, at the height of the “Troubles,” it was said that the only solution for rabid sectarianism was to let 1,000 punk-rock bands bloom: music helped create a free space for dialogue (of a high-volume variety). So no politicians allowed. Artists only.

I hate to burst Bono’s bubble (say that quickly ten times), but it’s called the Festival of Festivals, and it has been held in Haifa for the past 16 years.

16th Festival of Festivals in Haifa

THE COLORFUL FESTIVAL

Which promotes coexistence and peace, celebrtaes the December festivals of the three monotheistic religions with a wide range of cultural and artistic events on 5, 12, 19 and 26 December.

The colorful Festival of Festivals, now in its 16th year, takes place every weekend in December in Haifa’s mixed Arab-Jewish Wadi Nisnas neighborhood. The festival promotes good neighborly relations, with cultural and artistic events that celebrate the three main religious festivals that fall in December – Chanuka, Christmas and Eid al-Adha.

Thank you for your support, both for this blog and, more importantly, Israel and the Jewish people.