Posted on 05/15/2015 11:47:59 AM PDT by SJackson
Jpost editorial: Shortsighted Vatican
By JPOST EDITORIAL BOARD 05/14/2015
The Vatican announced this week that it was poised to sign a treaty with the Palestinian political leadership.
The Vatican announced this week that it was poised to sign a treaty with the Palestinian political leadership, representing what was referred to in official Holy See documents as the “State of Palestine.”
News media played up the announcement, with The New York Times calling the specific mention of a “State of Palestine” a “significant symbolic weight to an intensifying Palestinian push for international support for sovereignty that bypasses the paralyzed negotiations with Israel.”
Palestinian leaders celebrated the Holy See’s seeming endorsement as well. Hanan Ashrawi, a PLO executive committee member, told AP that, “The significance of this recognition goes beyond the political and legal into the symbolic and moral domains and sends a message to all people of conscience that the Palestinian people deserves the right to self-determination, formal recognition, freedom and statehood.”
Meanwhile, government officials and a number of Jewish organizations lamented the Vatican’s recognition. The agreement between the Vatican and “Palestine,” according to a source in the Foreign Ministry, does not move the peace process forward “and moves the Palestinian leadership further away from returning to direct bilateral relations.”
But Vatican officials were more reserved. “We have recognized the State of Palestine ever since it was given recognition by the United Nations [General Assembly in 2012] and it is already listed as the State of Palestine in our official yearbook,” Vatican spokesman Father Federico Lombardi said. Indeed, during Pope Francis’s visit to the region last year, the Palestinian Authority was referred to as the “State of Palestine” in advertisements and announcements released by the Vatican. Francis also referred to the State of Palestine in a speech he made in Bethlehem.
The reasons why recognizing a “State of Palestine” at present is counterproductive to forwarding talks between Israel and the Palestinians have been articulated by us on previous occasions. It’s worthwhile restating them.
First, Palestinians themselves are split between two different “states,” one on the West Bank and one in the Gaza Strip. The respective leaderships of these geographical entities are hostile to one another. As long as Palestinians are divided, it makes little sense to use a term that implies a modicum of unity and an ability to cooperate.
Second, Palestinians’ failure to cooperate has resulted in repeated delays in national elections. Mahmoud Abbas, president of the Palestinian Authority, has just entered his 11th year of a four-year term. Parliamentary elections have not been held in the West Bank and Gaza since 2006. So even if there were such as thing as a “State of Palestine,” this supposed “state” has no legitimate political leadership.
Who precisely is Abbas representing when the PA signs a treaty with the Vatican? Third, even if elections were to take place on the West Bank and in Gaza now, the result would probably be the creation of an Islamist government. That’s because Hamas would probably win. In April, in the student council election at Bir Zeit University – considered a bellwether of broader Palestinian public opinion – the Hamas-affiliated Islamic Waafa bloc won 26 seats compared to the Fatah-affiliated Martyr Yasser Arafat bloc’s 19 seats.
And even if Hamas did not win, it would mean a continuation of Fatah’s rule, which has been marred by infighting, corruption and the brutal suppression of political opposition.
We’ve seen how Christians have been forced to live under the rule of Islamists – including in Bethlehem and in the Gaza Strip. Is this the sort of “state” the Vatican wishes to recognize? No people has an unalienable right to a state. National determination is a privilege that must be earned. Palestinians have a lot of work to do before they can be said to be ready for statehood.
They must put aside their in-fighting and learn to cooperate.
More importantly, they must put in place institutions such as a free press, government transparency, protection of human rights, an independent judiciary and religious freedom for all – including Christians.
To be sure, Israel has its own ‘to-do’ list to help create an environment more conducive to achieving peace with its neighbors. But the Vatican’s recognition of the “State of Palestine” does nothing to contribute to that eventuality.
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The Vatican channels war against Israel
By MELANIE PHILLIPS 05/14/2015
The Vatican this week agreed a treaty with the Palestinians, to cover its interests in the West Bank, east Jerusalem and Gaza, which referred to its treaty partners as the “state of Palestine.”
When the newly elected Pope Francis came to Israel last year, making the Holy Land his first overseas visit, he let it be known that he wanted to put relations between the Vatican and the Jewish people onto a different footing.
Now we know what that meant.
The Vatican this week agreed a treaty with the Palestinians, to cover its interests in the West Bank, east Jerusalem and Gaza, which referred to its treaty partners as the “state of Palestine.” A Vatican spokesman said: “Yes, it’s a recognition that the state exists.”
Ever since the 2012 UN vote granting Palestine observer status, the Vatican has functionally dealt with Palestine as a state. That was bad enough. But recognizing it in a legal document and announcing that it had brokered a treaty with the state of Palestine is a deliberately loaded move. It puts the Vatican publicly behind the Palestinian strategy of waging war against Israel by diplomatic means.
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It is a lie first of all because there is no state of Palestine.
However many countries proclaim recognition of this spurious state does not alter that fact. The Vatican’s “treaty” is no more than a crude propaganda stunt assisting a war of extermination.
Recognition of a Palestine state is a ploy to bounce it into virtual existence by getting the world to agree it exists. The sole reason it does not in reality exist is that, resting on a wholesale denial of Jewish history in the land, the purpose of such a state is to create the platform for a devastating war on Israel.
By supporting this Potemkin Palestine, the Vatican has lined up behind those who disdain international law. In supporting the recognition gambit which tears up the Palestinians’ own treaty obligations under the Oslo Accords, the pope has now openly made Catholics complicit with reneging on promises and shattering bonds of trust.
And where exactly is this state of Palestine the pope has now recognized? For as PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah movement reiterated on its Facebook page this week (according to Palestinian Media Watch): “Palestine means the entire national land, from the [Jordan] River to the [Mediterranean] Sea.” For good measure, the PA’s national security forces declared on Facebook that Mount Tabor was in “occupied Nazareth” and the Hippodrome in Caesarea was in “Palestine.” And of course, the PA’s maps of Palestine include all of Israel.
So it would appear that what the pope has actually recognized and endorsed is the open intention to destroy Israel and replace it by Palestine.
Why has he done this? One answer is realpolitik. It is hardly a coincidence that the treaty was finalized shortly before this Sunday’s ceremony in Rome, due to be attended by Mahmoud Abbas, to canonize two Palestinian nuns.
Jamal Khader, rector of the Latin Patriarchate Seminary in Jerusalem, remarked in an interview: “The wider Arab world often thinks that it’s a Christian West against a Muslim East, so this is an important step from the Catholic Church to show that, no, it is standing with the rights of Palestinians, and with the right to a state of Palestine.”
In other words, recognition is an act of appeasement and moral cowardice. But there’s surely another, more personal reason. For the destruction of Israel is a leftist cause. And Pope Francis has a leftist view of the world.
As the former Cardinal Bergoglio, he came from Latin America where the church embraced liberation theology, or the use of religion to bring about Marxist revolution.
Marginalized for many years as far-left extremists, these theological radicals have now been handed a potent weapon against capitalism – the obsession with global warming.
Francis is dedicated to ending the capitalist order which he has called “an economy of exclusion by an idolatrous system of money.” To further the attack, he is deploying the eco-weapon in the forthcoming papal encyclical on climate change, expected to reflect his belief that anthropogenic global warming is destroying the planet.
As he has said: “An economic system centered on the god of money needs to plunder nature to sustain the frenetic rhythm of consumption that is inherent to it.”
Climate change is not only junk science, based on corrupt academic practices, intimidation and outright scientific frauds. It is rooted in deep green environmentalism.
Associated with New Age syncretism and movements for population control, this movement is pagan and anti-human, championing inanimate matter against supposedly innately rapacious mankind, and profoundly anti-Christian. Yet astonishingly, Pope Francis has a history of supporting it.
The highly traditional Catholic newspaper The Remnant has drawn attention to the former Cardinal Bergoglio’s connections with a global organization called the United Religious Initiative.
This was founded in 1995 by William Swing, the bishop of the Episcopal Church in San Francisco Bay.
According to its website, the URI aims include “enduring, daily interfaith cooperation, to end religiously motivated violence and to create cultures of peace, justice and healing for the Earth and all living beings.”
This appears to mean creating what Bishop Swing has called a “global soul.”
The New Oxford Review reported in 1998 that URI had held three annual summit conferences. Attendees included Christians, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Shintoists, Baha’is, Sikhs, Hindus, Zoroastrians, New Age followers, Wiccans and representatives of aboriginal religions.
Among the URI’s New Age supporters was Robert Muller, a Catholic who told a Theosophist newsletter that “the UN is humanity’s incipient global brain....
We still need a global soul, namely our consciousness and fusion with the entire universe and stream of time.” He also wrote that our “supreme interests” included “the apotheosis of the human race,” declared his belief in karma and reincarnation, and threatened a hellish destiny for those who balked at political and spiritual globalization.
Then there was Neale Donald Walsch, leader of the URI’s “Committee on Spirituality and the Global Social Agenda,” who claimed God had told him personally, “Forget about religion” while also informing Walsch of His wish for a bicameral world government and the redistribution of wealth.
In 1996, the Vatican rebuffed the URI’s advances, saying that united religions would give the appearance of syncretism and “force authentic religions to be on an equal footing with spurious religions.”
Yet in his previous incarnation Pope Francis was a supporter of the URI. Maria Crespo, an Argentinean Catholic and the URI’s global support coordinator, has said that the former Cardinal Bergoglio hosted a meeting of Crespo’s URI Cooperation Circle, which fosters interfaith cooperation, at the Buenos Aires Metropolitan Cathedral.
Join up the dots. Longstanding Vatican appeasement has been buttressed by a radical leftist pope.
Jesus was a Jew. If he were alive today, the world’s elites would be clamoring for him to be thrown out of Judea as a settler. And Jorge Mario Bergoglio, aka Pope Francis, would be amongst them.
It is hard to take the Vatican seriously these days on so many fronts.
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Palestinians’ failure to cooperate has resulted in repeated delays in national elections. Mahmoud Abbas, president of the Palestinian Authority, has just entered his 11th year of a four-year term. Parliamentary elections have not been held in the West Bank and Gaza since 2006. So even if there were such as thing as a “State of Palestine,” this supposed “state” has no legitimate political leadership .
Last Presidential election was in January, 2005. If Abbas can last a couple more years he'll equal the the Reich's electionless run from March 1933 to April/May 1945. What's the value of an agreement with a "state" without a legitimate government. Unmentioned in the article, the UN recognizes the PLO as the legitimate representative of the palestinian people, not the PA, which begs the question of who any agreement would be binding on.
Could this be the first mussie pope? Just asking. He is so anti-Israel.
(Palestinians means Muslims.)
When I read naive statements like the above, on how Muslims should be like us Infidels, I get discouraged.
The Church is being led to Perdition.
keep the faith and pray for the Church.
(*groan*) Just shoot me now...
Forgive me... but this decision by the Vatican is utter, complete, incomprehensible, blithering idiocy. This sort of insanity is NOT helping us faithful Catholics fight the good fight. (Nor is any insane blather about “global warming”, or any other mythical nonsense which is utterly beyond the purview of the Vatican, anyway.) Just saying.
Not to mention unnecessary. A treaty could be reached with the Palestinian Authority in it’s role as interim self governing body as it and the rest of the world, including Israel, have in the past. Despite the PA lacking a legitimate representative government. The motivation for declaring declaring a new state is unclear.
Why is this reversion to type any kind of news? There were a few years where the Vatican either repented of anti-semitism or veiled it. But historically, haven’t they been on the other side? Somebody, anybody, demonstrate how the Vatican has always been pro-Jewish and stamped out anti-semitism wherever it occurred. Pope John Paul excepted, of course.
bkmk
Im not Catholic but have heard from Catholic friends/family of their concerns about this pope. His mental condition.....perhaps.
Sickening.
Worst Pope ever? Or just worst modern Pope?
They have always been anti-Israel and have gone to great lengths to try and destroy the Jewish people throughout the ages and now the Nation of Israel.
American chrstians naively seem to think that chrstian Zionism is traditional, orthodox, conservative chrstian doctrine. It is not. Only American-style Fundamentalist Protestants and no other chrstian group whatsoever supports the ingathering of Jews in the Holy Land as something willed by G-d and desirable.
I invite all FReepers to investigate thoroughly all traditionalist Catholic (or for that matter, Orthodox) web sites representing people with whom American conservatives share positions on most issues--except for this one. Look at Tradition in Action, Chrstian Order, Catholic Truth Scotland, The Remnant, Gerry Metatics(sp?), Robert Sungenis--any of these web sites. They are not only anti-Israel (their critique of Israel's treatment of the "palestinians" sounds exactly like that of the Progressive Labor Party) but in many cases actually believe all the evil in the world is the result of a vast "Jewish conspiracy," and even that the "Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion" are authentic!
American chrstians need to understand that on this issue they deviate from all forms of traditional chrstianity, including Classical Protestantism. It's time to face some unpleasant facts and make a decision.
“which begs the question of who any agreement would be binding on.”
Israel, of course.
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