The Vatican Channels War Against Israel By Melanie Phillips
http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/As-I-see-it-The-Vatican-channels-war-against-Israel-403133
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.
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.
Melanie Phillips is a columnist for The Times (UK).
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