Posted on 07/31/2006 3:44:06 PM PDT by Diago
Have you ever been drunk?
Sunday, July 30, 2006
War Brings A Discreditable Plague Of Anti-Jewish Sentiment
The Mel Gibson DUI arrest and the vile anti-Jewish comments he appears to have made in the course of it highlights a major problem that has carried over from old traditionalism to younger adherents. It seems that there is an hostility to the Jewish faith, the Jewish people, the Jewish state that is just below the surface in many people who embrace traditionalism. It is as if, instead of being converted in heart to the radical love that our Lord calls us all to, they took in with the mother's milk of the Latin Mass the poison of Jew-hating.
The number of instances has piled up enormously since Israel started to fight the Moslem terrorist in Lebanon. One "traditionalist" blog took the opportunity to run a photo of some injured civilian and proclaim it the fruits of Zionism. The knee-jerk piling on against Israel is unbecoming, and puts people who do that on the side of the most wacky left-wing kooks in the West. Pat Buchanan has skirted close enough in his measured public comments over the last 20+ years to anti-Semitism that Bill Buckley has said he crossed the line (see WFB's In Search Of Anti-Semitism). There is Robert Sungenis, and Gibson's father, who denies that the Holocaust took place.
These folks all profess love for the Latin Mass and traditional devotions, but they have no love in their hearts for our brothers of the Jewish faith. To them, the by-words of our great-grandfathers, that Jews are "Christ-killers," hypocrites, whited sepulchers, and so on, the one set of attitudes that really ought to have been abandoned, buried, and forgotten in the Vatican II reforms, are alive and well. But they ought not to be.
As traditionalists, we must divorce ourselves from such discreditable notions that conflict with the basic tenet of Catholic Christendom, as expressed in our Holy Father's first encyclical, Deus Caritas Est. If you take out the one phrase in the Good Friday service of Veneration of the Cross in which we pray for the "perfidious Jews" there is nothing in the official liturgy of the Church that justifies this view. And eliminating that phrase was one thing that the people who brought us Vatican II can look upon with pride. Rabid, even latent, anti-Semitism has no place in Catholic traditionalism. It is something we are well shot of.
What is a proper American (or western) traditionalist attitude towards Jewish people, the Jewish faith, Israel, and its current conflict?
You have to start with the words of our Lord on the Cross. "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do." He did not say, "Father, forgive the Roman auxiliaries and the unknowing passersby." He said, "forgive them." That "them" embraces not just the apostles and disciples who failed to stand by Him, or the Roman soldiers who were following orders, or Pilate, or the unknowing jeering passersby, but the Jewish Temple Guards who beat and mocked him, the Jewish people of Jerusalem who had cheered Him six days earlier and called for His crucifixion that Good Friday morning, the Jews who bore false witness against Him before the Sanhedrin hours before, the scribes and Pharisees, Saducees and elders and doctors of the law who sought or agreed to his crucifixion, and the Jewish people as a whole. And if our Lord forgave them from the Cross, what more can we have to say about the matter?
Once that forgiveness is applied, we must treat and think of our Jewish brethern just as we think of our Christian brethern, and all men: with the same radical love of neighbor that our Lord called us to. So a bitter anger or hostility boiling under the surface is not in any sense appropriate. Let that anger go, and it won't come up when stressed or impaired, as it did with Gibson.
And what of the Jewish faith? While we treat the Jewish faith with greater respect, as it is the Old Covenant between the One True God and mankind, we recognize that Jews, just like Moslems, or Hindus or Buddhists, pagans, Wiccans, or protestant Christians, for that matter, are proper subjects of conversion. When our Lord said "Make disciples of all nations" the Jewish people were first and foremeost in His mind among the nations that need conversion. So individual and collective efforts to convert Jewish people to the Roman Catholic Church are highly appropriate. But here in modern western civilization, we must be able to work with sincerely religious Jews and their organizations to bring about common goals. The plain fact is that conservative and traditionalist Roman Catholics have more in common politically with orthodox Jews than they have with liberal protestants and Catholics. We have a common moral agenda (banning abortion, eliminating pornography, gay "marriage" and related gay lifestyle issues, feminism, and so on), and in a pluralistic society, we can't get what we want in this society without their help. And since they want the same thing for the same reason, we ought to work together in amity to achieve those goals.
And what of the Jewish state of Israel? First and foremost, it is the one reliable ally the West has in the Middle East. Its Moslem enemies hate and despise it as a "Crusader Kingdom," a non-Islamic smear on the map of what they think ought to be entirely dar al-Islam. Israel has the same enemies as the west in general: the Islamofacist movements in the Moslem world. The enemy of our enemy is our friend as far as common purposes go. The largely-European Israeli citizenry is made up of people who come out of the same cultural cauldron as we do. They are subject to the same influences, the same context that we are. They are people we can do business with.
Its enemies are not.
The fact is that the Christian faiths are largely satisfied and get what they want from the state of Israel with regard to custody of and access to our holy places. Are civil rights for Christians living in Israel all that they ought to be? No. And that is something we ought to work with Israel on quietly. Allow the Moslem enemies of Israel to overwhelm it, and see how well Christians there will fare. See how much respect our holy places get and how Christian pilgrims are treated by a Palestinian Taliban. I for one don't think it is too much of a stretch to imagine the Basilica of the Holy Sepulcher being dynamited by a Hamas/Hezbollah government, just as the Afghan Taliban did to statues of Buddha.
What of the moral claims of the Jewish people to that portion of the world? In my view, prior to the 1940s, the autonomous peoples in that region were not separable religiously, culturally, ethnically, or in any other way from their Moslem neighbors in Jordan, southern Lebanon, Syria, or Gaza. They did not then, and do not now make up an individual nation deserving of a seperate homeland. There is no overwhelming justification for any sort of "Palestinian state." The people who lived there could easily blend into the neighboring Moslem Jordanians, Egyptians, Syrians, and Lebanese. But the facade of Palestinian nationality has been maintained by Saudi Arabia and other wealthy and influential Moslem Arab states because they are affronted by a non-Moslem blot on the map of dar al-Islam.
Beyond that, the Jewish people have historical and biblical claims to the Holy Land that are undeniable. Add to those claims that justice required by the Holocaust, which proved the need for a Jewish state, and I am satisfied that Israel ought to exist.
Once that is established, and the fact that Israel is our ally is accepted, we have a context for viewign the relationship between Israel and its neighbors. Israel is a small state surrounded by larger and more populous Moslem enemies. The fact that most of the surrounding states, mainly Jordan and Egypt have accepted de facto peace with Israel does not change the fact that these Moslem states are, in the long term, hostile towards Israel, and harbor irredentist dreams of the day they can carve it up and redeem it to dar al Islam.
It is in our interest that Israel exist. It is in our interest that it be as strong as it can be against its hostile neighbors, who in fact are our long-term enemies as well (especially Syria and Iran). It is in our interest that the radical Moslem groups that Israel is now fighting, especially Hamas and Hezbollah, plus Islamic Jihad and others, are wiped out. Is it in our interest that Israel do that. They are trying to do that.
There are unfortunate casualties among civilians, and the Moslem terrorists they are fighting have a marked tendency to fire missiles and rockets from the surviving Christian enclaves in Lebanon, so that Israeli retaliation falls on those enclaves. Aside from extremely local circumstances, the accidents of war, and the heat of the moment, Israel has done nothing in this fight with Moslem terrorists that can be called an atrocity.
If Israel does, as an act of policy, do something that justifies criticism, we should be ready to bring measured criticism to bear. It is not "our ally, right or wrong." We must give Israel the same latitude that we give Spain vis-avis the Basques, Britain regarding Northern Ireland, or Canada regarding Quebec. Israel has proven itself over 50 years a responsible international citizen and good ally. It deserves the benefit of the doubt now.
The current conflict was not sought by Israel, or started by it. The Moslem Palestinians made it inevitable when they elected a terrorist Hamas government. Hamas and Hezbollah started the conflict by ambushing Israeli soldiers, kidnapping them, and firing rockets into Israeli civilian areas. Israel is doing unto its Moslem enemies just as right-thinking Americans would want the US to do unto its Moslem enemies in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere.
So why are we so hypercritical of Israel for doing just what we would do: responding to terrorism with the overwhelming force of a righteously angered modern nation? When a nation with a decent military force responds to terrorism, it is not a pretty sight. It leads to disturbing images on television and the net. But those images blown out of their context do not change the reality.
Nothing Israel has done so far is not justified by the acts of terrorism perpetrated against it. No one ever likes war, but what Israel is doing in Lebanon and Gaza is justified by the circumstances. So the proper view of the current conflict is detached sympathy towards Israel, with a willingness to speak up if Israel crosses moral boundaries it ought not. They have not done so yet, and so their actions ought to enjoy our measured support.
# posted by G. Thomas Fitzpatrick : 8:20 AM
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*That is an honest admission by a "traditionalist." Far too many soi disant traditionalists are carrying the poision of antisemitism in their souls. Their arguements about Liturgy and other matters can not be heard above their shrieking antipathy towards the Jews. Certainly Pope Benedict is not about to extend an olive branch to the sspx, riven as it is with hatred for the Jews, even though they appeal to Fr. Fahey as a way to be both "Christian" and "antisemitic."
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