Archbishop denounces Israeli occupation and Synod call for “an end to the occupation”

A Jpost Article

ADL: Statements “worst kind of anti-Judaism, bordering on anti-Semitism”; Wiesenthal Center urges Pope to denounce Bustros’s remarks. The Simon Wiesenthal Center urged Pope Benedict XVI on Monday to immediately denounce a statement by Melkite Catholic Archbishop Cyril Salim Bustros at a Vatican Synod on the Middle East.

The archbishop had opined that “We Christians cannot speak about the promised land for the Jewish people. There is no longer a chosen people. All men and women of all countries have become the chosen people. The concept of the promised land cannot be used as a base for the justification of the return of Jews to Israel and the displacement of Palestinians.”

Butrus added that the “justification of Israel’s occupation of the land of Palestine cannot be based on sacred scriptures.”

Jewish reaction was swift.

“This political stunt, wrapped in theological garb, not only insults every Jew, but flies in the face of the statements and actions of Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI, both who have visited Israel and expressed solidarity with her people,” said Rabbis Marvin Hier and Abraham Cooper, dean and founder and associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, respectively. The two men had audiences with both pontiffs.

“The archbishop’s statement comes at the end of the conference wherein the so-called ‘Palestine Kairos’ document – which openly denies the right of Israel to be a Jewish state – was presented at the Vatican for the first time. These developments demand immediate action by the pope. Hopes for peace in the Middle East will only come when both sides recognize the rights of the others. These latest moves, left unchallenged, will damage interfaith relations and embolden anti- Semites and terrorists,” said Hier and Cooper.

The Anti-Defamation League also expressed deep concern over the remarks, calling them “the worst kind of anti-Judaism, bordering on anti-Semitism.”

In a letter to Cardinal-elect Kurt Koch, the newly-appointed president of the Vatican’s Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews, ADL national director Abe Foxman wrote: “By stating that God’s covenantal promise of land to the Jewish people ‘was nullified by Christ’ and that ‘there is no longer a chosen people,’ Bustros is effectively stating that Judaism should no longer exist.”

A spokesman for the Vatican, Father Federico Lombardi, issued a statement Monday that sought to play down Butrus’s remarks and distance the Holy See from them.

“If one wants a summary of the Synod’s position, attention must currently be paid to the “Message,” which is the only written text approved by the synod in the last few days,” Lombardi said. “There is also a great richness and variety in the contributions made by the fathers, but which as such should not all be considered as the voice of the synod as a whole.”

Lombardi, without specifically mentioning Bustros, embraced the synod’s call for “an end to the occupation” while suggesting that the Arab bishop’s statements belonged to the collection of “individual” contributions that did not express the synod’s official stance.

According to the Catholic News Service, the Synod Message regarding the Jews “warned against inappropriate use of the words of the Bible,” and said that “recourse to theological and biblical positions which use the word of God to wrongly justify injustices is not acceptable.”

A Jpost Article

“Holland’s powerful Jewish lobby is playing on the country’s sense of guilt over the Holocaust,” a prominent Dutch activist said last week, triggering angry reactions and accusation of anti-Semitism from pro-Israel Dutch Jews.

Gretta Duisenberg, the widow of the first president of the European Central Bank and a friend of the Queen of the Netherlands, said in an interview for Islam Online that “the Jewish lobby in Holland, like in the United States, is very strong and powerful, and it is still playing on our guilt feelings although it is 63 years since the Holocaust.”

Duisenberg, a leading pro-Palestinian activist and well-known member of Holland’s high society, added that “whenever you have something against the Jewish people in Holland, they call you an anti-Semite.”

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Dutch pro-Palestinian socialite: Jewish lobby plays on Holocaust

Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon may press charges against a student who shouted “slaughter the Jews” during a speech he gave at Oxford University on Monday.

Ayalon is looking into the possibility of pressing charges against the student for what is tantamount to a call for genocide.
“This demonstrates our new policy on hatred and racism and we will have zero tolerance for anti-Semitism, something that should have happened a long time ago,” said Ayalon.

Another protestor carrying a Palestinian flag started walking toward Ayalon before security intervened and he was ejected from the hall. Another student shouted at the Deputy Foreign Minister that “we will do to you what we did to Milosevic.”

Other students shouted, both inside and outside the hall, “Palestine will be free, from the River to the Sea.” After the event several students attempted to physically assault the Deputy Foreign Minister but were prevented from doing so by security.

Also on Monday, California police reportedly made 12 arrests after a speech by Israel’s U.S. Ambassador Michael Oren devolved into chaos.

Hecklers interrupted Oren’s lecture at University of California, Irvine, more than 10 times, shouting “killers” and “how many Palestinians did you kill?”

Oren took a 20-minute break after the fourth protest, only to be interrupted again by young men yelling at him every few minutes, local press reported.

The arrested students were apparently members of the university’s Muslim Student Union, which had publicly condemned Oren’s visit earlier in the day.

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Deputy FM may seek charges against ‘slaughter Jews’ heckler

By Abukar Arman

Indonesian Muslims take part in an anti U.S.-Israel-Egypt protest in front of the Egyptian embassy in Jakarta on Jan. 17, demonstrating against an underground wall being built to block a network of tunnels crossing Egypt’s border with the Gaza Strip. (Photo: Bay Ismoyo/ AFP-Getty Images)

The recent Egyptian government’s decision to seal the few “tunnels of life” that allowed people of Gaza to bypass the ongoing inhumane economic strangulation—along with its harassment and cruel treatment of the participants of Gaza Freedom March and the Viva Palestina humanitarian convoy—earned it a prominent position in history’s page of shame. A page crowded by wealthy Arab nations who failed the Palestinian people and abandoned them at their most vulnerable time.

However, by no means should that sideline drama veil or in any way divert attention away from the root cause of the problem—the over six decades of oppression imposed upon the Palestinian people.

In that period, the state of Israel has occupied Palestine with an iron fist, denying Palestinians the right to self-determination and coercing part of their “elite” to surrender to what seems like a condition of eternal subjugation. However, the gravest of the Palestinian sufferings is embodied in the suffering of the people of Gaza as they endure a vicious economic strangulation unilaterally imposed by Israel. And despite worldwide condemnation of that egregious draconian policy, Israel continues to operate with impunity, devoid of conscience.

In their 575-page report released last September, the fact-finding mission on Israel’s disproportionate use of force in Gaza appointed by the U.N. Human Rights Commission has confirmed the ugly truth that most of the Western media were inoculated to under-report or outright ignore. The mission was led by Judge Richard Goldstone, former member of the South African Constitutional Court and former Chief Prosecutor of the United Nations International Criminal Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda. While the report also blamed Hamas, it highlighted that “there was strong evidence to establish that numerous serious violations of international law, both humanitarian law and human rights law, were committed by Israel during the military operations in Gaza. … Actions amounting to war crimes and possibly, in some respects, crimes against humanity, were committed by the Israel Defense Force.”

According to Article 39 of the report, the Israeli forces intentionally targeted and attacked Al Quds Hospital in the adjacent ambulance depot in Gaza with white phosphorous shells, an internationally banned chemical substance that, among other things, instantaneously burns the human being into skeleton.

Although the key recommendation of Goldstone was for the U.N. Security Council to pass a resolution mandating a credible investigation into the war-crimes allegations by the International Criminal Court, no such action has been taken.

In reaction to the report, the U.S. Congress—while succumbing to the “Israel Lobby”—has passed a non-binding resolution condemning the Goldstone Report. The resolution was intended to express unequivocal blind loyalty to Israel, and to pressure the Obama administration to use its veto power (as a permanent member of the Security Council) against any resolution that might expose Israel. Apparently, the strategy worked; the report is now piling dust in the oblivion.

For whatever it’s worth, it is this kind of culture of impunity that, according to Goldstone, “emboldens Israel and her conviction of being untouchable.” This concern was immediately dismissed as anti-Semitic by loyalists and supporters of oppressive Zionism. Never mind that Judge Goldstone is Jewish and is a supporter of Israel’s right to exist.

Make no mistake, anti-Semitism is a real racist phenomenon; however, the politically motivated excessive use of the term to character-assassinate and silence legitimate critics and peace and justice advocates, such as former President Jimmy Carter and Archbishop Desmond Tutu, simply defeats the purpose.

Meanwhile, though the Obama administration is showing signs of discomfort with the current Israeli government, the U.S. foreign policy toward Middle East is still driven by unconditional loyalty.

As the Obama administration tries to reduce the post-9/11tension between the United States and the Islamic world and rein in the rapid growth of extremism, the Palestine issue remains an open sore that is festering in America’s foreign policy. While the current administration has attempted to demonstrate its intention of becoming an honest broker by appointing a credible diplomat—former Senator George Mitchell—as the Middle East envoy, Israel continues its belligerent oppression and expansionist policy by defiantly building new settlements.

Led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, Israel is adamant to continue the ever-expanding land grab driven by illegal home demolitions and confiscations, daily dreadful human rights abuses at check points, random imprisonment and assassinations, suppression of independent media, and systematic ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. This, needless to say, has frustrated the Obama administration, whose out-of-the-ordinary reaction to Netanyahu’s visit to the United States has caused Israel a big embarrassment.

In an article intended to rally the troops against Obama, Jerusalem Post’s hawkish columnist, Caroline Glick, wrote, “It isn’t every day that a visiting leader from a strategically vital U.S. ally is brought into the White House in an unmarked van in the middle of the night rather than greeted like a friend at the front door; is forbidden to have his picture taken with the president; is forced to leave the White House alone, through a side exit.”

Though this was not a decision to stop or even suspend the roughly $3 billion of unrestricted aid given to Israel every year, it still turned many heads and galvanized the usual suspects to come after Obama with all sorts of accusations.

Not since 1990 when then Secretary of State James Baker sent a blunt public message to then Israeli Prime Minister Ytsakh Shamir, telling him “call us when you are serious about peace … the telephone number is 1-202-546-1414,’ has U.S. leadership sent Israel a stern message that its actions are unacceptable.

At the end of the day, convincing Israel to do the right thing and stop establishing new facts on the ground to further complicate an already complex political issue will require more than symbolism. And nothing substantive is likely to happen until the United States modifies its one-sided Middle East policy. Meanwhile, Israel will continue business as usual. It might invade Gaza again. Some opinion makers in Israel are already boasting about what “Operation Cast Lead 2″ would look like with the use of “advanced Israeli-made Marakava 4 tanks.”

Nothing equates to oppression more than the inaction of an apathetic witness.

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Muffled Screams of Gaza