Thursday, August 07, 2025
Elder of Ziyon
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Bishops, archbishops, and cardinals in the Roman Catholic Church, as well as numerous outspoken non-Catholic congregational figures, criticized Israel from their pulpits and keyboards, for mistreating the downtrodden Palestinians and committing human rights violations such as restricting Palestinian movement under the pretext of "security." Here in Rome, the papal authorities of the sixteenth century instituted a ghetto for the city's Jews, imposing a curfew and surrounding the squalid, flood-prone neighborhood with churches, monasteries, and convents where, once a week, Jews were forced to sit and endure fiery sermons denouncing them as devil-spawn and Christ-killers.
The accusations also included inversions of the hostage situation that unfolded in the Gaza Strip, with depictions of murderous and violent Palestinians in Israeli prisons as "hostages." That terminology unintentionally invoked the policy of those Christian institutions surrounding the ghetto to kidnap Jewish children and secret them away in monasteries and convents to raise them as Catholics.
Modern instantiations of earlier Christian treatment of Jews have also taken the form of the blood libel, a time-honored medieval Christian tradition that accuses Jews of making matza with the blood of a slain Christian child, resulting in massacres that local Christian leaders egged on; in its modern form, those religious leaders accuse Israel of starving the manifestly-still-overfed Gazans, or of killing Palestinian innocents who, if the incidents even occurred, died as a result of Hamas violence or Hamas use of those innocents as human shields - accusations that create a permission structure for even non-fighters to harm Jews anywhere in the world, and believe that in so doing they promote justice and righteousness.
Pope Leo XIV and his predecessor Francis - whose Renaissance predecessors directly issued the policies discriminating against the Jews of Rome - have both drawn rhetorical equivalence between brutal Palestinian terrorism and necessary Israeli measures to prevent or mitigate terrorism, calling on Jews to turn the other cheek as Christians have never done, despite Jesus urging his followers to do so in the Sermon on the Mount.
They have also urged an immediate ceasefire in Gaza, without regard for the fate of the Israelis held hostage there, a move that analysts says reflects a longstanding Christian tradition to sacrifice Jews to achieve higher goals, such as during massacres associated with the Crusades.
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"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022) |
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