The Pope is coming to Britain and I have been asked (alas, not by him) to give a talk about Double Cross: The Code of the Catholic Church.
My talk will take place on Thursday, 16 September 2010 at 7:00 pm at the Conway Hall, 25 Red Lon Square, London WC1R 4RL
A year ago, I recommended David Grossman’s To the End of the Land. At the time it had not yet come out in English. The English translation has finally arrived and I urge you to get it and read it.
Fondling choirboys was not Father Chesney’s poison, he evidently needed stronger stuff.
It has been reported that this Roman Catholic priest was no less than “ the IRA's director of operations in South Derry and was alleged to have been directly involved in the bombings and other terrorist incidents”.
Note the collusion of Church and State in this outrage. Father Chesney was quickly moved to a new parish, conveniently near his old hometown, but across the border, in the Republic of Ireland, safely outside the jurisdiction of Northern Ireland.
The British Government may have been right in defusing this matter at a time of great tension between Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland. However, the Church that did not punish Chsesney and allowed him to continue as a parish priest elsewhere has proven yet again that it should not be trusted.
In a bid to quell rumours about Obama’s being a Muslim (18% of All Americans believe that) the White House has issued a press release according to which Obama “prays daily, sometimes in person or over the telephone with a small circle of Christian pastors.” Moreover, we have been reminded by the White House of Obama’s Easter prayer breakfast where he “offered a very personal and candid reflection of what the Resurrection means to him. ”
This is not all: 27% of all Americans have not convinced by the repeated presentation of Obama’s birth certificate and continue to believe that he was not born in the USA. According to the American Constitution someone who was not born in the USA is not eligible to become President. Those 27% clearly believe that Mr Obama has cheated his way into the Presidency. Or, … they could just be plain racists.
Praying to Jesus (or to anyone else), Mr Obama, cannot save these people or anyone else. I sincerely hope that you – our great hope – have more effective means than prayers to govern your country.
I will talk about the Catholic Church and the Jews at a day of Jewish learning Limmud in Frankfurt, on Sunday, 29 August, at 10:30.
The lecture will be held in German and you can register through Limmud's website if you are interested.
In 1933, Hitler appointed Bernhard Rust as Education Minister. Soon, teachers who were critical of the regime were dismissed, all university professors were required to become members of the Nazi teachers organisation and university lecturers with left wing views were fired.
Israel’s current Minister of Education, Gideon Sa’ar is not a Bernhard Rust but he recently gave his blessing to Im Tirtzu, an Israeli right-wing watchdog that is now threatening Israeli universities with boycott unless they change their “anti-Zionist” curricula.
Already, Ben-Gurion University finds itself defending its status by stating that it “also teaches air force cadets, who would not come if anyone thought we were preaching anti-Zionism here.”
Perhaps someone at the University’s physics department should write a paper about downward spirals.
When Mr and Mrs Abergil named their daughter Eden they probably did not consider the meaning of the name. Eden in Hebrew means something refined, delicate. The Garden of Eden is paradise.
This is Eden Abergil's version of paradise. A Paradise that does not ' see anything wrong with Facebook images of Palestinian detainees.'
Out of the blue, a friend of mine said that he was uncomfortable with the fact that Israel was patrolling the Persian Gulf with two U-boats that Germany had given to Israel as a present and which Israel had armed with nuclear weapons.
My friend continued and explained that the whole world knows how in 1981, Israel had “started a war with Iraq” to bomb its nuclear reactor and that it was now planning to do the same with 17 nuclear sites in Iran. He added that the Iranians were not stupid and that they had buried their sites deep in the earth and that Israel was mad with its plans to attack Iran with those two small U-Boats.
I blew up. But he was adamant, yes, he said, he knew that those were Israel’s plans and this would not be Israel’s first mistake. Israel, after all had gone into that war in Gaza and a couple of years ago in Lebanon. I explained that I had no idea what Israel’s plans were and that I doubted very much that my friend had any inside information from the depth of Israel’s – probably non-existent – strategic planning. However, I reminded the flabbergasted dinner table – flabbergasted because of my reaction – that unlike Germany or any other country in the world, Israel had enemies that made clear their wish to annihilate it. Iran is one such enemy and that country has now been allowed to become nuclear.
Before Israel allows Iran or anyone else to annihilate it, it will strike. I have no moral qualms about that. My German friend does. Israel is not considering the other six billion inhabitants of the earth, he said. Some Germans are rightly uncomfortable with the fact that Germany had started two world wars. My friend is taking this discomfort a step further: he is terrified by the idea that German U-Boats – be they in Israeli hands- could trigger a third world war. This would be a third world war that could be laid at Germany’s door.
Israel’s irresponsible and immoral conduct vis-à-vis the Palestinians produces more and more anti-Israel sentiment. The willingness to accept a serious threat to Israel’ existence is where such sentiment should not be allowed to go.
2nd Dinner
Two days later, at a different dinner party in Germany, I was lectured to by a German lawyer. This man explained to me how well Israel had done in the last twenty years. Every year – he told me – Israel enlarges the territory that it populates; every year it cultivates more land. To top it all, Israel manages this without waging war.
Choosing who to dine with is an art.
The other day, in a small town in the Alsace, I entered a Leclerc store, one of those enormous French hypermarkets, when the cashier called after me to tell me that I had entered the wrong way. It was forbidden to enter by the tills, she said and insisted and made me go back and re-enter through the special entrance aisle.
I wanted to know why and was told “c’est le règle”, this is the rule. I asked why it was the rule and her explanation was “par c’est que”, because.
The cashier may have been just a stupid French girl but her thinking seems to shed light on what is wrong in the European Union. When the precursor to the EU, the European Economic Community, was created, the two main players were France and Germany. France that had twice failed to fight the Germans was afraid that Germany might at some point want to start another war. It wanted to hug Germany into a collaborative structure. Germany, at the time still a pariah, was grateful for anyone who was willing to partner with it. Germany a federative state, allowed France a super-centralised state, to structure the European institutions as it wished.
The result of this marriage of Mr Guilt and Mrs Fear, are bloated and wasteful EU institutions and a constant downpour of directives with which the administration of the European Union makes our lives a misery. Recently, UK hospitals were instructed that they were not permitted to test foreign nurses from European countries to ensure that their standard equals that of British nurses. Would it not be terrible if one such untested nurse would mistakenly poison the originators of this directive? The latest idiocy is a European directive that sets the number of eggs to a carton throughout Europe at ten. Sell twelve eggs in a carton and the EU will fine you.
A short video clip that was aired in YouTube last week has caused much controversy in Israel. The clip shows six Israeli soldiers doing a dance routine in an empty street in Hebron. It was prepared by the soldiers for their farewell celebration at the end of their stint in Hebron. The Israeli army is considering punitive action against the soldiers who participated in the making of the video.
This short video is just innocent fun. The only scandal is the fact that Israeli parents continue to send their sons to secure the illegal and immoral Jewish settlement of Hebron and the ultra right-wing settlers who were allowed to move into Arab Hebron after the Six-Day War.
