March 6, 2008

Peter King is Sports Illustrated’s senior NFL writer, and this week he is on a USO trip with pro football players to visit troops in Afghanistan. He’s keeping a diary at his Inside the NFL blog, and I imagine this joke by Bears defensive tackle Tommie Harris, one of a few ribs that King says bring “levity to serious surroundings,” wouldn’t go over well with the ADL.

Harris riddles us for a while, then produces a joke best saved for last.

“What did the pig say to the Muslim?”

Silence.

“Shalom.”

Magen David Adom have confirmed 10 wounded civilians, including three seriously. One terrorist was said to have been killed by a student.

Witnesses said that only one terrorist had entered the building and that he managed to fire 500-600 bullets over the course of 4-10 minutes before he was killed.

Although witnesses said only a single terrorist carried out the attack, police were searching the building for an additional terrorist, preventing the entrance of rescue workers. Later Police Chief David Cohen confirmed that there were no additional attackers.

The terrorist entered the Merkaz Harav Yeshiva in the neighborhood of Kiryat Moshe carrying weapons. He was not wearing a suicide-bomb belt as earlier reported.

The gunman entered the library where about 80 people were gathered, witnesses said, and opened fire.

Yitzhak Dadon, a student, said he was armed with a rifle and waited on the roof of a nearby building. “He came out of the library spraying automatic fire … the terrorist came to the entrance and I shot him twice in the head,” he said.

Approximately 50 ambulances were sent to the scene and a 16-year-old boy in serious condition and suffering from chest wounds was seen being evacuated from the scene.

“It’s very sad tonight in Jerusalem – many people were killed in the heart of Jerusalem,” Mayor Uri Lupolianski told Channel 2,

“We bless the (Jerusalem) operation. It will not be the last,” Hamas said in a statement.

This terrorist attack, which was likely retaliation for last weekend’s incursion into Gaza, was the first in Jerusalem since early 2004. It is not going to help those peace talks that ostensibly were about to resume.

(Photo: AP)

Kevin Drum has an interesting theory on why the media has not been pushing John McCain to distance himself from the endorsement of the Rev. John Hagee, whom Steve Benen labels “an anti-Catholic, anti-gay, anti-Muslim, anti-woman, and anti-Semitic televangelist.”

It’s funny, but in a way I think this is a demonstration of the condescending attitude that a lot of urban reporters have toward evangelicals. Call it the soft bigotry of low expectations. Basically, they figure that these guys are all lunatic nutballs with weird beliefs, and they’re so used to this idea that they give it a pass when it pops into the news. It’s just Uncle Bob. You know how he gets. If they actually took evangelicals seriously, instead of treating them like members of long-lost Amazon tribes, they’d pay more attention to stories like this and they wouldn’t give McCain a free pass on Hagee’s endorsement.

Having worked as a religion reporter for a pair of daily papers, I tend to agree with Drum.

He’s been called “Hitler’s Pope” and his name has been intrinsically tied to a worldly ambivalence to the Holocaust as it happened. For the past six decades, plenty of people have debated whether Pope Pius XII was actually an anti-Semite or simply blind, and the record has not been cleared.

Ruth Gledhill, who writes the Articles of Faith blog, reports that newly unearthed evidence further complicates the quest for understanding the pontiff formerly known as Eugenio Maria Giuseppe Giovanni Pacelli.

In 1917, it seems, Pacelli arranged for a meeting between Nahum Sokolow, the leading Zionist publisher, and Pope Benedict XV. It’s difficult to infer from this meeting what the future pope thought. He is merely a facilitator. But the exchange does offer some interesting, and ironic, insight into the efforts to create a Jewish state.

Sokolov arrived in Rome about three weeks later, and on the 10th May, after conferring with Monsignor Pacelli, he was received by Benedict XV. It was as though Herzl’s audience was being annulled. ‘Have I correctly understood Zionism?’ asked the Pope when the opening formalities were over. ‘What a reversal of history! Nineteen centuries ago Rome destroyed Jerusalem, and now, desiring to rebuild it, you take the path to Rome!’

In his reply Sokolov recalled the fate of the Empire and compared it to that of the Jewish nation: one had vanished, the other was reclaiming its land.

‘Yes, yes,’ agreed Benedict with enthusiasm, ‘this was providential. God willed it.’

The Pope then asked Sokolov to explain the Zionist project in detail. Sokolov answered as follows: ‘Our programme is twofold. It aims first to create in Palestine a spiritual and cultural centre for Jewry, and secondly to establish a national home for oppressed Jews. Our desire is to build up in that country a great centre where Jews will be able to develop their culture freely, to educate their children in the spirit of their ideals, and to devote all their energies to making their National Home a model of Jewish civilisation and morality.’

The Pope was deeply impressed. ‘That is a wonderful idea,’ he said. Then he wanted to know whether this plan had been contrived with a view to preventing persecutions. Sokolov answered in the rhetorical terms which came naturally to him. He referred to the right of the Jews ‘to a place in the sun—in our land.’

‘We look forward,’ he said, ‘to the rebirth of historical Judaism, to the spiritual and material revival of the homeland that personifies our national genius and our Biblical tradition in its purest sense. We claim the right of Freedom which cannot be denied to any people.’

Israel’s chief rabbi, Yona Metzger, thinks animal rights organizations might be disguising anti-Semitism as grievances with kosher slaughering.

“There are different and odd foods like seafood, which are prepared with serious abuse, but for some reason these organizations are only heard when it comes to Jewish slaughter.

“Koshering organizations in the United States have told me that they were being similarly attacked by these organizations for the prevention of cruelty to animals. They told me that these organizations have serious influence and great power in the United States, and that they use this to present the Jews as cruel people and to make other anti-Semitic accusations. If this attack continues, Jewish slaughter is in danger,” Rabbi Metzger said.

The same remarks were made in a booklet handed to the meeting attendees.

“We are living in a reality in which the issue of animals’ rights gets a lot of media and public attention. At the same time, different elements are attempting to cancel the Jewish slaughter or make different conditions to disqualify it.

“This compels us to ensure that we do not, God forbid, reach a situation in which those who provoke us will overpower us and the Jewish slaughter will be banned for so-called ‘humane’ reasons, something which might influence other countries and have very grave results,” the booklet stated.

There is an important post over at the CT Liveblog discussing recent reports that evangelical Christians have been kicked out of Jordan or had their visa renewals denied.

The government alleges covert missionary activity. Compass Direct reports on this aspect, noting in a late February dispatch:

  Jordan last week [week of Feb. 17] admitted to expelling foreigners for “illegal” missionary activities. Acting Foreign Minister Nasser Judeh told the Jordanian parliament on Wednesday (February 20) that authorities had expelled missionaries operating “under the cover of doing charitable work,” suggesting that evangelistic activity is illegal in Jordan. If such evangelistic work were illegal, Jordan could be opening itself to accusations of violating of Article 18 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which the country published in its official Gazette in July 2006, giving it the force of law.

On January 29 Compass reported that Jordan had deported and denied residence permits to at least 27 foreign Christian individuals and families in 2007. On February 20 the acting foreign minister, Judeh, read a statement by the Council of the Church Leaders of Jordan condemning the Compass report. The Jordanian parliament on Thursday (February 21) then passed a resolution condemning the Compass article. While it was unclear what the government considered false in the report, the fact of deportations of Christians was further verified as authorities on February 10 expelled an Egyptian pastor with the Assemblies of God church in Madaba and, the previous week, an Egyptian pastor from a Baptist church in Zarqa.

The big question for President Bush and Jordan’s King Abdullah is this: How can they expect evangelicals, American or otherwise, to support a Middle East peace strategy that puts a very low priority on securing religious freedom for all peoples of the Middle East?

If religious freedom is in jeopardy in a Western-friendly nation like Jordan, then Islamic leaders in Gaza, Syria, Iran, or Afghanistan have little or no motivation provide religious freedom to their populations.