Recently the first two sentences of a BIOCOM news article initiated a series of thoughts about the desire for peace.  Have you noticed that the world is not designed for letting people live and let live in peace with mutual respect?  Hence humans dream of the coming of a Messiah and they dream of a messianic age.  The very nature of life is tension and strife that arises out not just for the needs for basic survival (food, clothing, shelter sex) but also out of other innate drives such as a desire for power and control.  We are witnessing such desires become overt actions in North Africa and the Mideast as well as in other living arrangements throughout the world.  Cruelty, meanness, chronic lying, deceitfulness, greed etc. rule.  Cooperation and working for ones mutual benefit does exists at all levels of society but only within restricted conditions.

The two sentences that stimulated the above thoughts were: “US President Barack Obama told a delegation of Jewish leaders on Tuesday that Israel must create a context for peace with the Palestinians. President Obama said that Israel must use its military, political and cultural strength to create this climate in order to move forward towards peace talks.”

Why is it that Obama always puts the onus on Israel to do things?  When will there be a change in the political philosophy underlying such thinking?  When other nations win wars, it is the loser who sues for peace.  Israel is the only nation that the world demands that if it wishes to survive, it damn well better sue for peace and make as many concessions as it takes to satisfy the loser.  This attitude of the winner suing for peace, which is imposed on Israel, has been such from the very beginning of its modern existence. Obama is just continuing the antisemitic tradition.  Israel is a country that cannot afford to lose any war.  Its very existence depends on winning.  A single loss would lead to its complete destruction and the death of its Jewish citizens and life for Jews throughout the world would then become very precarious.  The above truth is derived from the writings and sayings of virtually all the recent past and current Arab political and religious leaders.  There is a profound antisemitism pervading this world.

After every war, Israel has returned conquered territory and still there is no peace.  The closest is the cold peace existing between Egypt and Israel and Jordan and Israel.  Why is there no comparable pressure being exerted on the artificially made up group of people called “Palestinians?”  Why should they not have to create a climate of peace?

Why can the Arab/Muslims and “Palestinians” keep going to war against Israel and suffer no consequences?  Why?   Because fellow Muslims have oil and the west needs their oil?  Why can the Arab/Muslims keep calling for the destruction of Israel and the death of all Jews but Israel has to create the climate of peace?  Have we entered the world of the surreal?  Apparently, Obama and other political leaders live in this surreal world.

It is about time that this vicious cycle of hate on the part of the Arab/Muslims is broken.  It is time to put the onus on the real people who have to create the climate of peace –  The Arab/Muslims.

The breaking of the cycle is unlikely to happen; it is comparable to the dream for a messiah.

Because the US and the Western nations have not learned and do not understand that only thing that the Arab/Muslims understand is strength and cruelty and act on it,  the ongoing cultural-religious war between Islam and the West is ongoing and does not seem to have an end in sight.  This mental aberration on part of the West coupled to other social and political forces, provides the philosophical basis for Obama and others to demand that Israel sue for peace;  that Israel give up tangible assets for an intangible a piece of paper promising peace which, according to Sharia law, can be abrogated at anytime.  According to Mohammad. such peace treaties are temporary “time-out” conveniences permitting the Arab/Muslims to rearm and regroup for the next step in their on-going war against the rest of the world and their desire to dominate and control – thereby making all subservient to Islam and its god Allah.  We already heard how many Egyptians want to terminate the peace agreement with Israel – but, when they do that, I bet that they will not return the Sinai Peninsula with all the Israeli developed oil fields back to Israel.

The world is in turmoil and no one has a clue as to how it is going to turn out.  One can only dream and hope.

Ever since the pre-release of Pope Benedict XVI’s book that absolves the Jews collectively of the Crucifixion of Jesus, various Jewish groups have been going wild praising him for his timely and well needed statement.  For example, Rabbi Marvin Hier, founder and Dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center said: “This is a critically important and timely statement by his Holiness, particularly at a time of increased mainstream anti-Semitism worldwide and a very important tool in the fight against Jew-hatred.” He goes on to say: “The Second Vatican Council’s Nostra Aetate declared that this was a false teaching, and absolved the Jewish people as a collective from the crime of deicide. The Pope’s new book goes beyond this declaration and shows why the earlier popular reading is not supported by the Gospel texts.”

Nicole Winfield, writing for the Associated Press (March 2, 2011) said:  ”In “Jesus of Nazareth” excerpts released Wednesday, Benedict uses a biblical and theological analysis to explain why it is not true that the Jewish people as a whole were responsible for Jesus’ death.

Pardon me if I dissent from such euphoria.  After all, ever since Nostra Aetate (1965), the Vatican’s most authoritative document on the issue of Jewish responsibility for the death of Jesus, the Catholic Church began to teach that Christ’s death could not be attributed to Jews as a whole at the time or today. Pope Benedict XVI’s statement, based on a detailed scriptural exegesis reiterates that position.  His analysis provides the intellectual basis for the Church’s new position.  I say new, because for over 1900 yrs, it taught that the the collective Jewish people for time immemorial are responsible for  the death of Jesus.  I wasn’t called Christ killer for nothing.  I wasn’t beaten in stair wells in the elementary school by groups of Catholic kids while they screamed Christ killer at me for nothing.  Listening to my grade school teacher tell the class that it was alright to beat up Jews as long as it was done in a dark alley where they could not be seen while she humiliated me in front of the entire class was all part of carefully instilled hate on the part of the Church.  There was a lot more to my personal experiences with the Church that I will not bore you with.  This uncivilized behavior was taught and encouraged by the local priest(s) of St Dominic’s Church in the Van Ness section of the Bronx – and elsewhere as well – at least during the 1930s and 40s.  Remember this was the time that Father Coughlin was riding high with his antisemitism as was the German American Bund, other antisemitic organizations and Charles Lindbergh and antisemitic rants as the key spokesperson for the American First Organization.  During that era, when the Nazis were coming to power, in power and moving toward world conquest and domination, the Church officials, for all practical purposes,said and did nothing.

You shall be known by your utterances as well as by your silence.

Stop and think at least about two aspects of what Pope Benedict XVI wrote:

First: What Pope Benedict XVI wrote is in a book.  it is neither a Papal Encyclical or Papal Bull.  It is not a Church edict. Since it was not said ex cathedra it does not imply papal infallibility.  I have no idea whether it was even reviewed by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.  What the Pope wrote is neither Church dogma nor doctrine.  At best, it provides intellectual substantiation for what Nostra Aetate was supposed to have done but failed to do.

One of the best and most comprehensive devastating critiques of  Nostra Aetate - the Declaration on the Relation of the Church with Non-Christian Religions promulgated by the Second Vatican Council in 1965 – was written by Gottlieb in his book The Naked Mind.

Second:  Everyone is centering on the age old concept that the collective Jew was not responsible for the death of Jesus.

Please note very carefully what Nicole Winfield wrote: “…why it is not true that the Jewish people as a whole were responsible for Jesus’ death.”   In one form or another, other people who are writing on this subject express the same thought:  the Pope supports the concept that the Jewish people do not hold any collective guilt over the death of Christ.  I will discuss the significance of why I emphasized the two statements: “Jewish people as a whole” and “collective guilt” below.

Apparently Pope Benedict XVI specifically addressed the very troubling but highly influential passage in the Gospel according to Matthew (27:24-25) in which the crowd is shouting: “Let his blood be on us and on our children.”  Drawing from the accounts described in the Gospels of Mark and John, the pope argues that the crowd spoken of refers to the “dominant priestly circle” and supporters of the rebel Barabbas, and therefore “not the Jewish people as such.”

Whereas, historically the Church interpreted these remarks as a curse upon all of the Jewish people – assuming that they were said at all considering none of the supposed Gospel authors were present when these supposed events took place, Pope Benedict states that the words do not amount to a curse upon the Jews because Jesus’ blood was shed for all people.  But, those words, assuming that they were uttered, had nothing to do with Christ’s shedding of blood.  They could never have meant all Jews since these people were speaking only for themselves – they had no authorization to speak for the Jewish people collectively – and, therefore, they could be referring only to themselves and their descendants not the descendants for all Jews.  It was the Church’s evil interpretation that these words referred to the Jewish people collectively that led to the centuries of horrors that followed.

Since the Pope refers to Barabbas, one should be aware that there are varying interpretations as to who exactly Barabbas was. There is one school of thought that Barabbas is really derived from the name Bar Abbas – the son of Abba and Abba is the Aramaic or Hebrew for father.  Benjamin Urrutia, a biblical scholar and co-author of :The Logia of Yeshua: The Sayings of Jesus, claims that Rabbi Yeshua Bar Abba or Jesus Barabbas must be the historical Jesus of Nazareth, and that the choice Pontious Pilate was to make between the two prisoners is a fiction: he contends that Yeshua Bar Abba (Barabbas) was the leader of the successful and nonviolent Jewish resistance to Pilate’s attempt to place Roman eagles – symbols of the worship of Jupiter – on Jerusalem’s Temple Mount.  Such an interpretation also makes the entire story of what the people also supposedly shouted about the blood being on them and their children also fiction.

Recently, Haley Sweetland Edwards and Garrett Therolf reported that Yemeni president Ali Abdullah Saleh, in a speech before the UN,  blamed the U.S. and Israel for ‘destabilizing the Arab world’  http://www.jewishworldreview.com/0311/yemen_blames_israel.php3).  He said that the anti-government protests in his capital were being run by the White House.

The truth is that his conclusion about Israel being a destabilizing force in the Arab world is true, but not for the reasons he stated. (I hope no one takes my comment out of context and use it to say that I agree president Saleh’s remarks.)

The reasons that Israel is a destabilizing influence in the Mideast are multiple.  The ordinary citizen in the Arab world witnesses how the remnants of a devastated people – a people who were decimated by the Holocaust and who survived concentration and death camps and  who were driven from virtually every corner of the Earth settle in a nearby area where their brethren have been living for centuries, which then became an independent nation.  And, within the  span of 60 -70 years they observed how this supposed cursed nation progressed from impoverishment in an undeveloped land, virtually devoid of natural resources, to become a stable democratic nation and a world leader in science and technology and an exporter of agricultural produce as they made the desert bloom, even while – at times – being forced to spend up to 50%, if not more, of its GNP on defense and being forced to engage in a continuous struggle for survival against the combined forces of its boarder states supported by not only the larger Muslim world but other nations as well.

Logic dictates that the people have been and are seeing a disconnect between what they were being told and taught by their political and religious leaders and reality.  It is natural that these oppressed people would desire the same for themselves.

This awareness was always the real fear of the Arab world and why the Arab/Muslim nations were so adamantly opposed to having a Jewish nation live alongside their feudal societies which are run by autocrats who not only run their autocratic nations cruelly but also theocratically – which only added to the burden of their people’s lives.

Having a successful functioning democracy – especially a Jewish nation which they were taught to be cursed by Allah – along side them would be destabilizing because the people would then be able to see for themselves what they were being deprived of and would demand such freedoms and opportunities for themselves.

It would be helpful and enlightening if the leaders of the Arab/Muslim nations would be honest and enter into individual or regional alliances with Israel to help develop their own nations and the region.

It would be helpful and enlightening, if the European nations and the anti-Israel media and the anti-Israel political left and right would spend their time encouraging such agreements instead of using their resources for disseminating distortions and lies about Israel and for fomenting  hate and discord towards Jews while promoting war.