So racist Jewish "settlers" who make sport of robbing and killing Palestinian Arabs (ten percent of whom are Christian), as they have done now for decades, will continue to ply their vicious trade unobserved by the vast majority of the world's Christians. The false frame of "Muslim extremists vs. fearful Jews" will be imposed yet again on a historical reality of racist dispossession of indigenous Arabs from their ancestral lands by a fanatical Jewish state bent on conquest and destruction. This is not neutrality. It is delusion.
The greatest threat of "terrorism" comes from Jewish colonizers. Last month they issued a death threat to the Catholic Bishop of Nazareth and his followers, which was but a prelude to more recent attacks on clergy, the defacing of churches and monasteries with offensive graffiti, and the desecration of cemeteries. A church in Beersheva was recently sprayed with the message, "Jesus is a son of a bitch," while the building where Pope Francis was to meet Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu was tagged with "Death to Arabs and Christians."
To say nothing about this even as the Pope along with Christian institutions are under round-the-clock protection by some 9000 police, and the holy sites to be blessed are turned into a military base, is as ludicrous as anything yet seen from the land of "democratic" apartheid.
The threat has moved beyond Jewish "settlers." Last week, hundreds of angry Israeli Jews demonstrated against the Pope in Jerusalem, while police banned posters celebrating the Papal visit, apparently out of fear of widening the protests. Meanwhile, the local Palestinian Christian population is feeling more under attack than ever. On Sunday, the Pope stopped at the hideous concrete wall that has turned the birthplace of Jesus into a giant outdoor prison for its modern inhabitants. At a nearby refugee camp the Pope was reminded that Israel bars Palestinians from ever returning to homes inside territory conquered by Israel. Meanwhile, the Vatican steadfastly insists that the Pope's trip is "absolutely not political." The official purpose of his visit is to commemorate the 50th anniversary of a meeting in Jerusalem between Pope Paul VI and Patriarch Athenagoras that ended a 1000-year split between Rome and the Orthodox Church. But his itinerary does not include a stop in the Galilee, where most Palestinian Christians live.
While media mouthpieces for USrael denounce Islamic indoctrination in "madrassas," no attention at all is given to Jewish religious schools that reject a modern curriculum in favor of a literalist interpretation of the Bible which awards the land of Palestine to the Jews forever. At the same time, Israel's Holocaust indoctrination teaches boundless Jewish entitlement based on the theory that Jews are eternal victims of universal anti-Semitism. This is the ideological arm of "settler" fanaticism, and cannot be divorced from the overt acts of violence that constantly menace Palestinian Arabs, Christians and Muslims alike.
Another pious declamation from the Pope about the need for a "stable peace" while Israel continues breeding longstanding ethnic and religious intolerance based on master race doctrines the vast majority of the rest of the world has long since discarded as Hitlerian lunacy is simply base and hypocritical idiocy. We do not need more rhetorical posturing while Palestinians continue to be robbed, swindled, tortured and murdered. We need blunt criticism of Jewish racism and prompt dismantlement of the elaborate structure of oppression and misery it has constructed, not just in the occupied territories, but throughout historical Palestine.
Source:
Jonathan Cook, "The Pope in the Holy Land," 5/26/14, www.counterpunch.org
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