My name is Gerald A. Honigman, an educator who has done extensive doctoral research in Middle Eastern Affairs and National Security Policy Studies.
I recently came across your latest vilification of Israel and needed to respond…
I am widely published, and my work focuses largely on the quest for justice and human rights for all the different peoples in MENA and in the world at large.
Ireland’s prime minister, president, and your own one-sided, repeated criticisms of Israel (the sole, minuscule, nation of the Jewish People) undoubtedly are also a problem for many other Catholics and other Christians for deeply entrenched religious reasons:
As just one example of how this religious animus towards Jews as a people played out into modern times, when Theodore Herzl, Father of modern political Zionism, approached the pope at the turn of 20th century after the infamous Dreyfus Affair and blatant antisemitism which once again raised its ugly head in Roman Catholic France, the leader of your church told him point blankly that this would be impossible because Jews were doomed to remain forever homeless wanderers because of their (alleged) deicide.
Herzl later said his refusal to kiss the pope’s ring probably didn’t help matters any.
The reality is that too many of your countrymen and others are infected with deeply entrenched Jew-hatred because of almost 2.000 years of Roman Catholic Church teaching starting with such things as John’s calling Jews "children of the Devil" in his Gospel; the writings and homilies of church fathers like St. John Chrysostom; the Spanish and Portuguese Roman Catholic Inquisitions; Crusades, autos da-fes, expulsions, forced ghettoization, repeated massacres and humiliations leading right up to the Holocaust started by the Roman Catholic-born Adolf Hitler.
If Jews repeatedly get blamed for Communism because of Karl Marx’s accidental birth identity (which he hated), why has not Naziism been tied to the Roman Catholic Church the same way?
Given this virtually genetic anti-Jewish bias, people thus infected can only see the war in Gaza—started by Arabs butchering, gang raping, burning Jewish families alive, beheading infants, kidnapping hostages, and so forth—simply as an Israeli evil. And doing so exposes their and your own true nature all too clearly.
You and Ireland’s official government representatives have bought the Arab Hamas narrative hook, line, and sinker. Shame on all of you for this…
Hamas, as you must surely know, declares openly in its charter that the destruction of Israel and the slaughter of all of its Jews is its main raison d’etre.
October 7th, 2023, the Biblical holiday of Shmini Atseret, witnessed the equivalent of some 38,000 American civilians being DELIBERATELY massacred —simply the latest of Hamas’s (and other groups like it) numerous earlier atrocities.
Archbishop Martin, you and your colleagues shed tears for dead Arab children and other innocents.
Israelis are also torn apart emotionally for those people.
On the other hand, “ordinary” Arabs in Gaza joined Hamas fighters in the bloodlust and filmed themselves doing so. Others in the “moderate” Fatah/PLO/ Palestinian Authority’s lands passed out candy when news of the October 7th massacres and “victory” became known.
I feel sad for Arab innocents who suffer. But Israel didn’t ask to be wantonly attacked and brutalized by its Arab neighbors.
The destruction and loss of life in Gaza is because a war was forced upon, once again, the sole, minuscule, nation of the Jewish People—reborn because G-d ordained it to be so as the Hebrew Bible said it would be repeatedly, whether your church and others agree or not.
If there’s any iota of fairness in you, please read very carefully this comparative analysis of Arabism and Zionism, and then decide who really should have been dragged before the United Nauseating Nations’s ICC and ICJ, but repeatedly received free passes for 14 centuries of continuous genocidal jihadi attacks and subjugation of other native peoples by nations such as your own- practitioners of the double standard supreme:
Finally, if you’ve not read this assessment by one of the world’s leading experts on urban warfare, again, for the sake of fairness, consider doing so now.
War is horrible and innocents always pay the worst price for it.
But Israel lost hundreds of soldiers on the ground because it tried its best to limit losses to Arab civilians.
On the other hand, Arabs have routinely gassed, bombed, used heavy artillery, and so forth against their perceived enemies and never ever considered giving advance warning to civilians like Israel does, which inevitably telegraphs punches, allowing enemy combatants to also escape. Think of the Assads’ famous “Hama Solution” in Syria, King Hussein’s “Black September” in Jordan, the Iraqi Arab mass poison gassing of Kurds in Iraq, and so forth.
Has the Roman Catholic Church ever really made a fuss about any of these issues? How about other churches and nations? The real or alleged sins weren’t Hebrew ones, so no one cared.
When an enemy DELIBERATELY hides behind its own women and children, fires rockets, mortars, incendiary kites, and so forth from areas adjacent to or atop schools, mosques, apartment buildings, hospitals, etc.; and tunnels under and establishes headquarters and command centers in those places as well, the party that’s being attacked has little choice about what it can do to stop its people from continuously being targeted. They are victims of a double war crime committed by Arabs repeatedly against the Geneva Conventions on War.
Hamas has pledged to repeat October 7th over and over. Does this register at all with your government or Ireland’s Roman Catholic Church— or Spain’s and others as well? I wouldn’t be shocked to learn that this didn’t matter since the Church has a long history of causing the death of countless Jews itself in the past...
Does the plight of some 40 million TRULY stateless Kurds and a like number of stateless Amazigh/Kabyle/“Berber” people matter to you?
Arabs have almost two dozen states on over six million square miles of territory, including one lopped off of the original 1920 Mandate of Palestine in 1922 and called Jordan today.
I’m sure you care much for Arab refugees who became so because a half dozen surrounding Arab nations attacked a tiny, reborn Israel in 1948, and their attempt at policide and genocide backfired.
Do you care about the over one half of Israel’s Jews who became refugees from Arab and other Muslim lands…the other side of the refugee story no one ever hears about?
Returning to the Kurds and “Berbers” who I doubt you even discuss, both have had their own native languages and cultures outlawed by Arabs and/or Turks at times, and were slaughtered mercilessly. Professor Ismet Cherif Vanly’s book, “The Syrian ‘Mein Kampf’ Against the Kurds is self explanatory…
Why are “holy” people such as yourself silent on such matters? Is it because you can’t blame Jews for them?
When you judge Israel, make sure to use the same lenses of moral scrutiny as you do with other nations. You and your friends obviously don’t do this.
Winding down, what other nation, after being attacked so viciously, drops hundreds of thousands of leaflets, makes thousands of phone calls, purposely avoids taking out prime targets due concerns over its enemies’s civilian casualties like Israel has done? Especially since so many of them aided and abetted both Hamas and Islamic Jihad, including UNRWA members?
The answer is NONE.
Any fair assessment of this tragic, horrendous situation needs to place most of the blame (given accidental mistakes made by both sides in any conflict) of the suffering in Gaza where it belongs…on the Arab monsters who take joy in burning families alive and decapitating Jewish infants INTENTIONALLY—not because Arab civilians failed to heed advanced warnings by Israel to get out of harm’s way when an counterattack was imminent and became casualties as a result.
Israeli and other Jews pray constantly for the day when peace will finally arrive.
That Ireland, people like yourself, and other nations constantly accept as fact information supplied by folks who practice taqiyyah—deliberate lying to “Infidels”—is unbelievable, but you repeatedly do this and dismiss other conflicting reports from more accurate sources.
Is it ignorance on your part or just blinders on your own eyes that your church has historically claimed Jews have on their eyes for refusing to see the Christian “light”… that same light which lit the road paving the way to Auschwitz and Birkenau over the centuries. Churches even have statues of Jews with blinders over their eyes to depict this, along with stained glass windows with Jews stabbing the Christian Host of Communion to allegedly kill Jesus again.
Having stated all the above, thank goodness there are many other Christians, including Roman Catholics, who reject, what so much corroborating evidence shows to be an ingrained animus towards Jews and their lonely, continuously targeted, tiny beleaguered nation.
Forgive me (or don’t), but I just can’t help but conclude that, with recent statements and actions by Pope Francis, other church officials, yourself, and others occurring at the same time as the massive outpouring and resurfacing of age-old, Church ingrained antisemitism, that your vilification of Israel is affected by this same anti-Jewish bias.
And I’m extremely careful when I make such statements because I don’t want to be the one “crying wolf’ if such anti-Jewish animus is not really involved.
For too many people, in a post-Auschwitz world, it has simply become more “acceptable” to transfer religious inspired hatred of Jews as individuals (G_d killers, poisoners of wells, children of the Devil, etc.) to the vilification and hatred of the Jew of the Nations….Israel Reborn.