Searching the Internet for some Vatican response to the murders at Mercaz HaRav, I chanced upon a March 10 article by Mark Pelavin, Director of the Interreligious Affairs Commission of Reform Judaism, who wrote:


Reuters reports that Pope Benedict also spoke of the bombing [sic!] (indirectly, as is the Vatican style in such matters) during his public remarks yesterday, saying:


"'In recent days, violence and horror have once again bloodied the Holy Land, feeding a spiral of destruction and death which seems to have no end….' 'I encourage the Israeli and Palestinian authorities in their intention to continue to construct, through negotiation, a peaceful and just future for their peoples,' Benedict said after his weekly Angelus blessing. And I ask, in the name of God, (for people) to leave the torturous paths of hate and revenge and responsibly to take the roads of dialogue and faith.'" -"Some Christian Reactions to Yeshivat Mercaz HaRav Bombing"


I dispute Pelavin's assertion that the pope's statement was an understandably indirect reference to - and, since it

Both the IDF and the Hamas/PLO terrorists have defined (although opposite) rules of engagement.

was negative, a condemnation of - the Mercaz HaRav killings. So I wrote a comment. I did not dwell on secondary matters such as Pelavin's four-times repeated reference to the Mercaz HaRav "bombing," suggesting he was not sufficiently interested to learn how the victims died.


Instead, in my comment, which Mr. Pelavin has yet to post, I argued that rather than indirectly condemning the shooting, the pope directly whitewashed anti-Israel terror and slandered the IDF.


By referring to a "spiral of destruction and death," rooted in "the torturous paths of hate and revenge," the pope was equating IDF troops pursuing Gaza terrorists who launch rockets into southern Israel with a cold-blooded killer executing young people who study the Torah in a library. The phrase "torturous paths of hate and revenge" tells people that, driven by mirror-image bigotry, both sides wreak havoc, blind to the consequences.


But that is untrue. Both the IDF and the Hamas/PLO terrorists have defined (although opposite) rules of engagement, rooted in divergent political morality and goals.


The IDF entered Gaza not for revenge, but to arrest those responsible for Hamas rocket attacks. Those rocket attacks result not from blind hate, but from political morality and thought-out goals. The political morality is discernible from the targets: civilian housing, schools, work places. The goals: a) spreading trauma and therefore, possibly, defeatism; b) provoking a counterattack so the pope and media can falsely pillory Israel as participating, Hamas-like, in "torturous paths of hate and revenge," and the Quartet can pressure Israel to de facto recognize Hamas or permit military occupation by what is optimistically called "Western civilization."


On the Israeli side, the rules of engagement also reveal a goal - suppression of terror - and a political morality. The safest way to stop rocket attacks would be to carpet-bomb, thus possibly eliminating the rocketeers and possibly wreaking havoc sufficient to cause a civilian backlash against Hamas.


Instead, the IDF sent ground forces to hunt the terrorists, endangering its troops in order to protect Hamas's human shields - the Arab population - some of which population danced following the yeshiva murders. So IDF political morality requires protecting human life, even the lives of those in thrall to the fascist enemy.


The pope's statement is slander. However, placed in the context of Vatican attacks on Israel this past year, it is worse than slander.


The Catholic church is organized as a disciplined hierarchy. Priests obey bishops; bishops are guided by Vatican agencies. Otherwise, the Vatican could not have negotiated a 1933 Concordat requiring German bishops to preserve and protect the Nazi state.


Several times this past year, top Catholic leaders, representing the Vatican secretariat of state, made arguments justifying anti-Israel terror and made demands that would eliminate Israel.

In the context of Vatican attacks on Israel this past year, it is worse than slander.



Examples:


March 5, 2007: Using catchy, pre-scripted sound-bites, visiting German bishops accused Israel of Nazism.


Bishop Hanke: "This morning we saw pictures of the Warsaw ghetto at Yad Vashem and this evening we are going to the Ramallah ghetto."


Walter Mixa, bishop of Augsburg and German military bishop: "Cages in the image of ghettos."


20th century Nazis took gold teeth and hair from Jews in death camps; 21st century Jews take explosives and rat-poison-soaked nails from Arabs at checkpoints. Same thing?


Concerning checkpoints, Cologne's cardinal Meisner said: "This is something that is done to animals, not people."


Do folks in Cologne frisk animals for bombs? O poor chickens! Stripped of humanity-actualizing suicide belts!


Meisner did not mention the danger that checkpoints pose to soldiers 'lucky' enough to find those poisoned explosives.


Nov. 27, 2007: Cardinal Martino, chief of the Vatican office for migrants, spoke of "the Palestinian refugees, who like all other refugees, have the right to return to their homeland." Let me point out that Martino's office has never argued for any 'right of return' for 300,000 Serbs and Yugoslav-loyalist Bosnian Muslims whom Croatia expelled from the Krajina region of Yugoslavia in 1995 - expelled as part of a strategy that, according to Croatia's former foreign minister, was ordered by pope John Paul II himself.


And what about the 800,000-or-so Jews, expelled from ancient homes in 'Arab countries' as collective punishment for Israel's existence?


Only Arabs may return, although Martino knows what those people, indoctrinated to exalt murdering Jews, would do if allowed into Israel.


In January 2008, a worldwide delegation of Catholic bishops made more attacks. You can hear Canadian archbishop Weisgerber repeating the Arabs-are-treated-like-animals theme on Vatican radio.


In a move specifically related to the yeshiva murders, in December 2007, Michel Sabbah, the pope-appointed patriarch of Palestine, said Israel should cease to be specifically Jewish: "If there's a state of one religion, other religions are naturally discriminated against."


In fact, Israel firmly upholds everyone's freedom to practice any religion or none. Sabbah also said, "This land cannot be exclusive for anyone." But as is common knowledge, every other state in the region is exclusively Islamic, and as for Sabbah's beloved Palestinian Authority, its Basic Law makes Islam the source of legislation, while its practice makes Judaism fatal.


Since Israel upholds religious freedom, what was Sabbah's actual target? Answer: the freedom of Jews to practice Judaism in Israel - a freedom flatly contradicting St. Augustine's strategy/prediction that Judaism must never flourish, but linger in misery as living proof that Rome is the new Israel.


Why was Sabbah attacking the freedom to practice Judaism in Israel? Because the moment Israel loses its dedicated purpose as the safe home for the Jews; the moment it becomes everybody's country and is thus thrown open to an army of killers - the true meaning of an Arab "right of return" - at that moment, being a Jew in Israel will be like being a Serb in Kosovo: life-threatening.


Sabbah's Augustinian strategy was carried out March 6 at Mercaz HaRav.


Absent the Vatican's 26-year history of nurturing the PLO while pressuring and attacking Israel, there could be no strategy of Palestinian terror. Its Arab/Iranian sponsors are peanuts compared to the Vatican, with its vast

The Vatican... set the stage for the Mercaz HaRav murders, targeting the right to practice the Jewish religion in Israel.

influence, especially in Europe and the US. By telling the world that Israel equals the Nazis and there should be no Jewish state, the Vatican apparatus set the stage for the Mercaz HaRav murders, targeting the right to practice the Jewish religion in Israel: a glimpse of the desired future of papal appointee Sabbah.


And of the pope.


Diplomatically, the pope directed his March 9 statement to "the Israeli and Palestinian authorities," thus reducing the State of Israel to the status of the PA, which is indeed only an Authority.


Morally, he equated Hamas with Israel and refused, even as he called for pursuing the road of "faith," to mention the attack on a yeshiva that a) is central to Judaism, and b) is a religious school in a city over whose religious access the Vatican sheds copious tears. The pope thus confirmed that Sabbah and those others spoke for him in their attempted destruction of the Jewish state, a destruction that would put Jews everywhere at the Vatican's searing mercy.


Including people like me, a Jewish atheist. Take note.