Loading ...The poor innocent Arabs/Muslims…veritable babes in arms…if it weren’t for Israel they would be living in peace and prosperity…
This was written in 1970 by the Reverend A. Roy Eckardt professor of religion at Lehigh University=
Edward Flannery combines ethical reflection with psychological analysis in a penetrating essay on “Anti-Zionism and the Christian Psyche”. Father Flannery is executive secretary of the American Bishops Secretariat for Catholic Jewish Relations. He emphasizes the marked similarities of response within Christendom to the Nazi Holocaust and to the re-creation of the state oF Israel. These are symptomatic “of determinative unconscious forces, specifically, of an unrecognized antipathy against the Jewish people”. After all, the two events are at the opposite poles in Jewish experience and as history: the one represents Israel prostate; the other Israel triumphant. And yet, while the stimuli are poles apart, the response in our Christian world to the Jewish situation has been the same: indifference-hostility, often accompanied by passionate denials that we are antiisemitic.
Father Flannery is cautious but candid. He reasons that the multiplicity of the indictments of “Zionism” by Christians, in the very time of Israel’s greatest peril. may well conceal unrecognized and unconscious motivations. “A certain vague uneasiness attends the idea of Jews restored to Palestine, and to Jerusalem in particular. This uneasiness may serve as the subliminal foundation for a Christian anti-Zionism and as the dynamics behind the various “reasons” for disfavoring the state of Israel. In anti-Zionism the death wish that for too many Christians have for Jews is carried forward.
For hundreds of years the Christian church has been telling the world and itself that by rejecting Christ, The Jews lost the divinely given right to sovereign identity, as a people and also as a faith
THE QUESTIONS WILL NOT LEAVE US
Who but the Jewish people are subjected to moral standards that no human group can possibly realize? Why should Israel be singled out for denunciation when other nations, with no fear of reproach, can invade neighboring countries or wage war on people inside their own borders? Why should Israel alone have to practice no end of self-restraint when countries all around are exempt from such demands? Why is it that Arabs are “entitled” to their homelands but not Jews? What is the possible ethical basis for allowing and encouraging the “dignity” of “face-saving” among Arabs but not suggesting that Israel is owed a comparable right? Why is Israel deprived of the “right to be ordinary”?
Just as in the 1930s Christians in more than one land could find in the Nazis unwitting instruments of divine punishment of Jews, so in the 1960s and 1970s a potent ideological affinity can appear between Christian attitudes toward Jews and Arab annihilations designs. The churches do not act effectively or courageously to oppose todays politicize campaign agains Israel because their own repressed enmity toward the Jewish people is too powerful an inhibiting force.
In truth, Christians can not deny a certain historical-religious fact, The theological wrecking grounds of the past are strewn with various masks assigned to Jesus of Nazareth. In contrast to all this nonsense, the only humanity Jesus ever had was that of a Jew of Palestine. The destiny of those who are Christians is tied, whether they wish it or not, to a certain man who, were he living today, could only be identified as an Israeli Jew. This consideration is posessed of infinite psychological and spiritual import. Among psychologists as among theologians, the ambivalemce of Christians towards jesus as a Jew has been noted many times. WE Christians devise curious stratagems in order to escape the relentless truth of the Jewishness of Jesus.
I will post more from Reverand Eckhardt later—Jew haters are easy to spot–they are obsessional and RELENTLESS in their criticism–the emotion and RELISH with which they go about their mission identifies them–and with never a good word to say…their denials of antisemitism are many–they even point to their jewish friends that agree with them…so how could they be baised??…well, it’s a free country-and they are entitled to their opinions…as I am to mine…I just say Peace to All Worlds!