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Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and Foreign Minister Avigdor Liberman were right when they blamed the noxious anti-Israel incitement rampant in Europe for Saturday's murderous shooting attack at the Jewish Museum in Brussels >>SNIP<< Pope Benedict XVI was perceived as a friend of Israel, despite his childhood membership in the Hitler Youth. His opposition to Islam's rejection of reason, eloquently expressed at his speech at the University of Regensburg in 2006, positioned him as a religious champion of reason, individual responsibility and law — Judaism's primary contributions to humanity. His predecessor Pope John Paul II was less willing to confront Islamic...

In one of his blander pronouncements during the papal visit, Netanyahu mentioned on Monday that Jesus spoke Hebrew. There was nothing incorrect about Netanyahu’s statement. Jesus was after all, an Israeli Jew. But Francis couldn’t take the truth. So he indelicately interrupted his host, interjecting, “Aramaic.” Netanyahu was probably flustered. True, at the time, educated Jews spoke and wrote in Aramaic. And Jesus was educated. But the language of the people was Hebrew. And Jesus preached to the people, in Hebrew. Netanyahu responded, “He spoke Aramaic, but he knew Hebrew.” Reuters’ write-up of the incident tried to explain away the...

The Vatican’s Secretary of State made a dramatic revelation ahead of Pope Francis’s visit to Israel next Sunday and Monday, declaring that the pope will talk about the “Palestinian people’s right to have a homeland, sovereign and independent.” Cardinal Pietro Parolin holds a role in the Vatican City State, located in the Italian capital of Rome, equivalent to that of a prime minister. … When asked what the pope particularly intends to talk about during the visit, Parolin revealed he would talk about “on the one hand, Israel’s right to exist in peace and security within internationally recognized boundaries.” On...

Palestinian Authority (PA) and Arab Christian sources are already celebrating Pope Francis’ visit to Israel starting next Sunday, saying his choice to begin the trip directly in PA-held Bethlehem is meant to “recognize Palestine” and “oppose the occupation.” “He is taking a helicopter directly from Jordan to Palestine—to Bethlehem. It’s a kind of sign of recognizing Palestine,” Father Jamal Khader of the Latin patriarchate in Jerusalem told AFP. The claims that his trip will begin in a “recognition of Palestine” comes amid reports from February by Rabbi Sergio Bergman, a member of the Argentinian parliament and close friend of Pope...