TABITHA KOROL: ON THE POPE AND ISRAEL’S SECURITY WALL
The Israeli security barrier certainly causes much contention. Despite the enormous length and breadth of China’s Great Wall, Israel’s protective shield is much debated. Although Saudi Arabia’s $700 million electrified wall is grander, Israel’s is more maligned. Thailand’s 75 km barrier with Malaysia was also constructed to protect against Muslims, yet Israel’s is more vilified. Even though more walls exist in the United Kingdom to separate Protestants from Catholics, Pope Francis Xavier finds Israel’s more attention-worthy. Neither does this pope mention the massive walls around the Vatican (photo above), yet the surrounding Italians are peaceful, charming and friendly.
And how about when Pope Francis endorsed redistribution of wealth? Did he ever consider returning to Israel all the Jewish artifacts that had been pillaged by Roman soldiers over the centuries and are now concealed in the Vatican’s vast treasure caves?
The pope never once acknowledged that Israeli lives – Jewish, Christian, and Muslim – have been saved by the security barricade. Rather, by comparing Israel’s safeguard that keeps terrorists from murdering Israelis to the Warsaw Ghetto walls that imprisoned a captured and tormented Jewish people until they were put to death, he validated the Islamic terrorists.
The wall prevents the Palestinians from fulfilling the Qur’anic decree of killing those who will not convert to Islam. It may also be a creative outlet for the illiterate, unschooled, and otherwise-idle youths who have no other method of venting their regime-driven frustration and anger. However, having just read that Hamas pays youths to riot with stones on the Temple Mount, acting out at the wall may be another profitable source of income.
As Nonie Darwish explains in Cruel and Unusual Punishment, Muslims resent the Jews’ having accomplished more in 66 years than their brethren have in 1400, and they experience shame of false prestige for taking ownership of invention and creativity from the vanquished. Therefore, rather than compete in a modern world of ideas, Islam prefers to sacrifice generations of women and children to destroy Israel. Islam is not a religion, but an Arab imperialism and protectionist tool to preserve their supremacist Arab culture. To this end, Islamists created Sharia and jihad, from which they grant themselves to defame, intimidate, lie, terrorize, kill, and wage war.
They remain a mostly harshly ruled, severely frustrated and angry third-world people whose only real achievements have been destruction and conquest of productive and intellectually superior civilizations, which they then reduce to their original 7th century mentality. Inspired by a brutal warlord, murderer, slave trader, pedophile, rapist, and looter, these people may kill to leave their earthly troubles for heavenly sexual bliss or secure the credit they covet by appropriating others and calling them Muslims or Palestinians. Such is the case with Moses, Christopher Columbus, Albert Einstein, and now, Jesus.
This pope seemed prepared with an assault on Jesus’ Jewish heritage and language. Replacement terminology includes Jesus for Yeshu; Mary for Miriam; Israelites for Jews; now there is Palestine, a name that never existed in Jesus’ lifetime.
While the debate may continue, an expanding circle of scholars has rejected the common notion about Aramaic. They are now convinced that the language Jesus used to teach his talmidim (disciples) was Hebrew, not Aramaic.
There is a growing conviction that Hebrew was also the language in which the original “Life of Jesus” was first conveyed. Christian scholars working in cooperation with Jewish scholars in Jerusalem have been among the first to develop the evidence for this theory. Further, while the Christian New Testament contains some Aramaic place names and quotes, Hebrew, not Aramaic or Koine Greek, lay behind the composition of the Gospel of Matthew. Hebrew also vastly dominated the Dead Sea Scrolls.
Pope Francis welcomed being photographed, first, as sympathetically touching the wall of antisemitic scrawls and, second, in front a picture of Jesus swaddled in a terrorist kafiyyah, a repulsive depiction that he accepted. How many more changes might the public expect? And if, as suggested in the Vatican newspaper, Pope Francis Xavier may be compared to St. Francis Xavier, there may yet be another connection.
Saint Francis Xavier was born in the Basque kingdom of Navarre in 1506, soon after the 1492 Expulsion of the Jews from Spain. In 1516, the Spanish invaders confiscated his family’s lands and demolished their castle’s protective wall and gates, and they were surrounded by war for 18 years. This was a time when Jews spoke Basque and followed native customs. They were permitted to own real estate, cultivate their own land, and ultimately became successful. While their knowledge, ability and industry won them respect and influence, their increased wealth triggered Christian jealousy and provoked the clergy’s hatred. Jews were forced to live apart, although “protected,” and obliged to take positions of money lending in order to pay the excessive taxes imposed upon them.
When Francis Xavier later befriended St. Ignatius of Loyola in university, they turned to Catholic missionary service, and made vows of poverty, chastity, obedience, and the conversion of Muslims in the Middle East. Together they travelled to India, Indonesia, Japan, and Borneo and converted 30,000 people, more than any other since St. Paul. Francis dispatched the holy Inquisition to Goa, Portuguese-controlled India, which targeted the Christianos Nuevos, Iberian Jews and Muslims who had been forcibly converted during the medieval era. Francis is said to have died before the atrocities began, but is believed to have assisted in the first Auto-da-fé (public penance and burning at the stake), in Portugal in September 1540.
More people are killed by Islamists each year than in all 350 years of the Spanish Inquisition combined.
Did Pope Francis pander to the Muslims to resume St. Francis’s vow to convert Muslims to Christianity? Was he wooing the Muslims or was he lured into a propaganda trap? Perhaps this was to be another Munich Betrayal – deliver the Jews to the Muslims in exchange for mercy for Catholics. It has also been reported that Pope Francis Xavier intends to change the Vatican constitution. Where have we heard this before?
If we cannot identify his purpose now, then by his fruits shall we know him.
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