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Men's News Daily, CA
Feb 11 2004
The Defamation of Christianity - Part 8027
by Bruce Walker
We all know that Christian anti-Semitism caused the Holocaust, right?
The story goes something like this: (1) Christians, from the earliest
days, were anti-Semitic; (2) Christians engaged in unprovoked
persecution of Jews in the ancient and medieval world; (3) Christians
encouraged massacres against Jews that desensitized Christendom to
the Holocaust; (4) Men raised as Christians committed the Holocaust;
(5) Christians want to deny the Holocaust.
Baseball allows three strikes and "You’re out!" Football gives teams
four downs to keep their drive alive. Be generous and give this
8,027th defamation of Christianity defamation, five chances to be
right, and it is still defamation.
Christians were anti-Semitic?
Christianity has never been "anti-Semitic." The first Christians were
Jews themselves. The early Christians were Semitic people, even if
they were not always Jewish people. The notion of racial moral
superiority adopted by the National Socialist German Workers Party
resembled more Judaism than Christianity (although its ethics were as
hostile to Judaism as to Christianity.)
Racism was first and most emphatically condemned in human history by
Christians. Outside Christian theology, racism was the norm. Why,
then, describe the conflicts between Christians and Jews in the
ancient and medieval world as "anti-Semitic"? Simple: it creates the
false impression that differences between Jews and Christians sowed
the seeds of Nazi racial policies.
Christians engaged in unprovoked persecution Jews in the ancient and
medieval world?
The first three centuries of Christian existence was one long
religious holocaust with Christians the principal victims. Pagan
Romans also persecuted Jews. The Diaspora was a pagan Roman crime
committed at the same time that Romans were torturing Christians to
death. Seldom noted is that Jews, ten percent of the population of
the Empire, helped persecute Christians.
Constantine the Great may have been converted to Christianity on his
deathbed, but he was profoundly influenced by Christianity years
before, which led him to proclaim the Edict of Milan in 313 A.D. This
edict granted religious toleration to Jews, Christians and all faiths
within the Roman Empire.
The peoples of the Roman Empire were not forced to become Christians.
These most cosmopolitan people embraced Christianity as something far
better than they had seen before. This did not lead to perfect moral
behavior, but Christian doctrine denies that we will ever be sinless.
What naturally did occur, however, was an improvement in the moral
conditions within the Roman Empire, and that included no crimes
comparable to the Diaspora or the Babylonian Captivity or the
Assyrian destruction of the ten northern tribes of the united kingdom
of Israel and Judah or Egyptian oppression of Jews.
Christophobes do not even pretend these sorts of atrocities were
taking place. Float along another few centuries, and the next
indictments appear: the Justinian codification of Roman law included
discrimination against Jews. True: almost every people in the ancient
world, including Jews, discriminated against those who did not adhere
to the faith of the majority.
The most notorious crime of one faith against the other in the
ancient and medieval world was the systematic murder of over 90,000
men, women and children by Persians and Christians when Jerusalem was
captured in 614. Jews, who had lived within Christendom for
centuries, had never been subjected to this religious genocide.
Christians engaged in massacres of Jews which desensitized
Christendom to the Holocaust?
Aside from the holocaust of Jerusalem in 614, other peoples did
engage in mass exterminations of other peoples because of their
faith. The most ignored were the tens of thousands of Jews and of
Christians who were slaughtered in single, horrible holocausts by
Moslems in Spain.
Why do we hear so little about this? Bat Y’eor, the Jewish historian
who came from Egypt and who is the greatest modern student of Islamic
persecution of others, describes the ideal often presented in history
books of a wonderful, idyllic Islamic Spain as a "pious lie" by Jews
to make Christians, who never did anything comparable in Spain, look
comparatively worse.
The expulsion of Jews from Spain in 1492 is typically described as a
comparable episode, but of course it was not. Isabella and Ferdinand
were simply reimposing edicts already made by prior Moslem rulers
requiring that Jews become Moslems, convert or die. The greatest
difference is that Christians did not engage in an organized,
sanctioned slaughter of Spanish Jews.
The tragic massacres of hundreds of Jews in the Rhineland during the
First Crusade are the next "example" of how dangerous Christianity is
to Jews. The events are not disputed. Mobs of peasants traveled from
town to town killing entire Jewish communities. Seldom noted is that
these mobs were strongly opposed by the bishops and archbishops of
the towns in which these several massacres took place.
Bishops and Archbishops took in Jews, hid Jews, and tried in every
way possible to prevent these murders. The mobs tried smashed the
doors of bishoprics and tried to kill Christian clergy. The courage
of bishops and archbishops against the wrath of wild mobs changed the
course of these campaigns.
The mobs stopped looking for Jews to kill in towns which had a strong
Christian presence. Saint Bernard warned crusaders that killing Jews
for being Jews was like killing Christ. Hardly fodder for holocausts,
is it?
Cossacks in the 17th Century engaged in some of the most unspeakable
crimes against Jews in human history. This is also cited as "proof"
that the differences between Christians and Jews led to mass murder
of Jews. The Cossacks, however, were ruthless to virtually everyone,
including other Cossacks. Jews were not the first nor the last
peoples who suffered horribly at the hands of Cossacks. Moreover,
Cossacks were notoriously irreligious.
Salient is the reaction to these crimes within Christendom. Europe,
still developing in the 1600s and not yet "modern" nevertheless
strongly and unequivocally condemned these atrocities against Jews.
There was no denial and no support for this holocaust against Jews by
Christendom.
Men raised as Christians committed the Holocaust
True, except incomplete: Men raised as Christians, and who
emphatically and contemptuously reviled Christianity, committed the
Holocaust. The only people who opposed the Holocaust when they could
have saved their lives by being quiet were Christians in Europe. The
only people who spoke out against the Holocaust while it was
happening were Christians.
No one in 1945 seriously believed that Christianity "caused" the
Holocaust, but many people believed that the evil which Hitler
represented was ended by Christians. There are dozens of examples of
the deep gratitude which Jews felt toward serious Christians in this
hellish part of human history, but perhaps one example sums it up
best: Rome has the oldest synagogue, perhaps, on earth; after the war
was won and Nazism was defeated, the Chief Rabbi of Rome converted to
Christianity.
If Christians "caused" the Holocaust, then who caused the greater
holocaust in the Soviet Union a dozen years earlier? Not serious Jews
and not Judaism, but it is worth noting that Judaism and Jewishness
is no more perfect a vaccine against these sorts of crimes than
Christianity.
Lazar Kaganovich, perhaps the greatest mass murderer in modern
history, was the Soviet Himmler. Kaganovich, even as an atheist
Marxist, considered himself Jewish; he spoke Yiddish; he was raised
as an observant Jew. Yagoda, the sadistic head of the Soviet secret
police, was Jewish. Men who reject the moral precepts of Christianity
and of Judaism will commit unthinkable crimes against humanity.
Kaganovich and Himmler had the same theology: man is god.
Christians want to deny the Holocaust?
The myth that somehow America and Britain "denied" or "concealed" the
Holocaust is more than just odd. On December 17, 1942 the allies
denounced the mass murder of Jewish in occupied Europe "in the
strongest possible terms" what was described as a "bestial policy of
cold-blooded extermination."
Anthony Eden introduced the resolution in the House of Commons, and a
Labour MP asked that all members "rise in their places and stand in
silence in protest of this disgusting behavior" Lord Samuel, a Jewish
peer and former Leader of the Labor Party sad "These events are an
outcome of quite deliberate, planned, conscious cruelty of human
beings." This is Holocaust denial?
America and Britain deliberately decided that defeating Nazism in
Europe was to be given a much higher priority than defeated Japanese
Imperialism in Asia. Japan, in fact, had more power to actually
threaten the island democracies of Anglo-America, because the
Japanese fleet and naval aviation were superb.
Japan was exterminating Chinese and other Asians at a rate perhaps
greater than the cold-blooded murder of Jews in Europe. If the
democracies of Anglo-America were indifferent to that enormous crime
we call the Holocaust - by the way...what do we call the holocaust of
Chinese by Japan? I seem to have forgotten - then these Christians
nations certainly showed that indifference in inexplicable ways.
Christians as Christians had been condemning the murder of Jews for
more than one thousand years. This was often not reciprocated. The
first religious and racial genocide in Europe during the 20th Century
was not the murder of Jews but the murder of Christians within the
Turkish empire. Almost every horror later used by Lazar Kaganovich
against innocent, overwhelmingly Christian, people, and even later
used by Nazis against innocent, largely Jewish, people was used first
against Christians in this forgotten holocaust.
Packing people into cattle cars, torturing innocents, liquidating
children - all these things happened and millions of educated, decent
Christians died. As with the Holocaust, Christians who were not in
harm’s way risked their lives to save the innocent. Also, to his
enormous credit, an American Jew, Henry Morgenthau, worked bravely
and tirelessly to help these wretched victims.
There was holocaust denial, however, in this first pioneering racial
and religious atrocity. In 1918 Ben Gurion and Ben-Zvi published a
book projecting an Eretz Yisrael in the Ottoman Empire. Ben Gurion
says in the book: "it must be said, to the credit of the Turks, that
their rulers behaved toward the conquered with a degree of tolerance
and generosity which is unparalleled in the history of Christian
peoples of the period." Ben Gurion does not mention a single world
about the Armenian genocide.
The extermination of the Christian Armenians had been preceded by
decades of mass murders of Christians in the Turkish Empire. How did
Theodor Herzl during the Fifth Zionist Congress in 1901 feel Jews
should react to these decades of torture and mass murder of
Christians? Herzl urged the Congress to send a message to Abdul Hami
II (know as the "Bloody Sultan" for his massacres of Armenians) which
had an "expression of dedication and gratitude which all the Jews
feel regarding the benevolence which his Highness the Sultan has
always shown them."
The best and the worst moral attitude
Jews should want Christians to be deep and sincere Christians.
Christians should want Jews to take Judaism seriously. Defaming
Christianity does not lead to a safer, kinder world for Jews. It
leads to monsters like Bormann and Eichman. The best protection
against holocausts are men like pious Christians like George
Washington and Pope John Paul II. The best protection are honest,
decent Jews like Henry Morgenthau.
Monsters like Kaganovich, craven and cynical creeps like Ben Gurion
are found in all races, all faiths and every age. Some are CINOs
(Christians In Name Only) and some are JINOs (Jews In Name Only.) One
of the best ways to seed and to nourish this sort of evil is to
defame Christianity - like pretending that the Holocaust is the
logical consequence of serious Christianity.
Feb 11 2004
The Defamation of Christianity - Part 8027
by Bruce Walker
We all know that Christian anti-Semitism caused the Holocaust, right?
The story goes something like this: (1) Christians, from the earliest
days, were anti-Semitic; (2) Christians engaged in unprovoked
persecution of Jews in the ancient and medieval world; (3) Christians
encouraged massacres against Jews that desensitized Christendom to
the Holocaust; (4) Men raised as Christians committed the Holocaust;
(5) Christians want to deny the Holocaust.
Baseball allows three strikes and "You’re out!" Football gives teams
four downs to keep their drive alive. Be generous and give this
8,027th defamation of Christianity defamation, five chances to be
right, and it is still defamation.
Christians were anti-Semitic?
Christianity has never been "anti-Semitic." The first Christians were
Jews themselves. The early Christians were Semitic people, even if
they were not always Jewish people. The notion of racial moral
superiority adopted by the National Socialist German Workers Party
resembled more Judaism than Christianity (although its ethics were as
hostile to Judaism as to Christianity.)
Racism was first and most emphatically condemned in human history by
Christians. Outside Christian theology, racism was the norm. Why,
then, describe the conflicts between Christians and Jews in the
ancient and medieval world as "anti-Semitic"? Simple: it creates the
false impression that differences between Jews and Christians sowed
the seeds of Nazi racial policies.
Christians engaged in unprovoked persecution Jews in the ancient and
medieval world?
The first three centuries of Christian existence was one long
religious holocaust with Christians the principal victims. Pagan
Romans also persecuted Jews. The Diaspora was a pagan Roman crime
committed at the same time that Romans were torturing Christians to
death. Seldom noted is that Jews, ten percent of the population of
the Empire, helped persecute Christians.
Constantine the Great may have been converted to Christianity on his
deathbed, but he was profoundly influenced by Christianity years
before, which led him to proclaim the Edict of Milan in 313 A.D. This
edict granted religious toleration to Jews, Christians and all faiths
within the Roman Empire.
The peoples of the Roman Empire were not forced to become Christians.
These most cosmopolitan people embraced Christianity as something far
better than they had seen before. This did not lead to perfect moral
behavior, but Christian doctrine denies that we will ever be sinless.
What naturally did occur, however, was an improvement in the moral
conditions within the Roman Empire, and that included no crimes
comparable to the Diaspora or the Babylonian Captivity or the
Assyrian destruction of the ten northern tribes of the united kingdom
of Israel and Judah or Egyptian oppression of Jews.
Christophobes do not even pretend these sorts of atrocities were
taking place. Float along another few centuries, and the next
indictments appear: the Justinian codification of Roman law included
discrimination against Jews. True: almost every people in the ancient
world, including Jews, discriminated against those who did not adhere
to the faith of the majority.
The most notorious crime of one faith against the other in the
ancient and medieval world was the systematic murder of over 90,000
men, women and children by Persians and Christians when Jerusalem was
captured in 614. Jews, who had lived within Christendom for
centuries, had never been subjected to this religious genocide.
Christians engaged in massacres of Jews which desensitized
Christendom to the Holocaust?
Aside from the holocaust of Jerusalem in 614, other peoples did
engage in mass exterminations of other peoples because of their
faith. The most ignored were the tens of thousands of Jews and of
Christians who were slaughtered in single, horrible holocausts by
Moslems in Spain.
Why do we hear so little about this? Bat Y’eor, the Jewish historian
who came from Egypt and who is the greatest modern student of Islamic
persecution of others, describes the ideal often presented in history
books of a wonderful, idyllic Islamic Spain as a "pious lie" by Jews
to make Christians, who never did anything comparable in Spain, look
comparatively worse.
The expulsion of Jews from Spain in 1492 is typically described as a
comparable episode, but of course it was not. Isabella and Ferdinand
were simply reimposing edicts already made by prior Moslem rulers
requiring that Jews become Moslems, convert or die. The greatest
difference is that Christians did not engage in an organized,
sanctioned slaughter of Spanish Jews.
The tragic massacres of hundreds of Jews in the Rhineland during the
First Crusade are the next "example" of how dangerous Christianity is
to Jews. The events are not disputed. Mobs of peasants traveled from
town to town killing entire Jewish communities. Seldom noted is that
these mobs were strongly opposed by the bishops and archbishops of
the towns in which these several massacres took place.
Bishops and Archbishops took in Jews, hid Jews, and tried in every
way possible to prevent these murders. The mobs tried smashed the
doors of bishoprics and tried to kill Christian clergy. The courage
of bishops and archbishops against the wrath of wild mobs changed the
course of these campaigns.
The mobs stopped looking for Jews to kill in towns which had a strong
Christian presence. Saint Bernard warned crusaders that killing Jews
for being Jews was like killing Christ. Hardly fodder for holocausts,
is it?
Cossacks in the 17th Century engaged in some of the most unspeakable
crimes against Jews in human history. This is also cited as "proof"
that the differences between Christians and Jews led to mass murder
of Jews. The Cossacks, however, were ruthless to virtually everyone,
including other Cossacks. Jews were not the first nor the last
peoples who suffered horribly at the hands of Cossacks. Moreover,
Cossacks were notoriously irreligious.
Salient is the reaction to these crimes within Christendom. Europe,
still developing in the 1600s and not yet "modern" nevertheless
strongly and unequivocally condemned these atrocities against Jews.
There was no denial and no support for this holocaust against Jews by
Christendom.
Men raised as Christians committed the Holocaust
True, except incomplete: Men raised as Christians, and who
emphatically and contemptuously reviled Christianity, committed the
Holocaust. The only people who opposed the Holocaust when they could
have saved their lives by being quiet were Christians in Europe. The
only people who spoke out against the Holocaust while it was
happening were Christians.
No one in 1945 seriously believed that Christianity "caused" the
Holocaust, but many people believed that the evil which Hitler
represented was ended by Christians. There are dozens of examples of
the deep gratitude which Jews felt toward serious Christians in this
hellish part of human history, but perhaps one example sums it up
best: Rome has the oldest synagogue, perhaps, on earth; after the war
was won and Nazism was defeated, the Chief Rabbi of Rome converted to
Christianity.
If Christians "caused" the Holocaust, then who caused the greater
holocaust in the Soviet Union a dozen years earlier? Not serious Jews
and not Judaism, but it is worth noting that Judaism and Jewishness
is no more perfect a vaccine against these sorts of crimes than
Christianity.
Lazar Kaganovich, perhaps the greatest mass murderer in modern
history, was the Soviet Himmler. Kaganovich, even as an atheist
Marxist, considered himself Jewish; he spoke Yiddish; he was raised
as an observant Jew. Yagoda, the sadistic head of the Soviet secret
police, was Jewish. Men who reject the moral precepts of Christianity
and of Judaism will commit unthinkable crimes against humanity.
Kaganovich and Himmler had the same theology: man is god.
Christians want to deny the Holocaust?
The myth that somehow America and Britain "denied" or "concealed" the
Holocaust is more than just odd. On December 17, 1942 the allies
denounced the mass murder of Jewish in occupied Europe "in the
strongest possible terms" what was described as a "bestial policy of
cold-blooded extermination."
Anthony Eden introduced the resolution in the House of Commons, and a
Labour MP asked that all members "rise in their places and stand in
silence in protest of this disgusting behavior" Lord Samuel, a Jewish
peer and former Leader of the Labor Party sad "These events are an
outcome of quite deliberate, planned, conscious cruelty of human
beings." This is Holocaust denial?
America and Britain deliberately decided that defeating Nazism in
Europe was to be given a much higher priority than defeated Japanese
Imperialism in Asia. Japan, in fact, had more power to actually
threaten the island democracies of Anglo-America, because the
Japanese fleet and naval aviation were superb.
Japan was exterminating Chinese and other Asians at a rate perhaps
greater than the cold-blooded murder of Jews in Europe. If the
democracies of Anglo-America were indifferent to that enormous crime
we call the Holocaust - by the way...what do we call the holocaust of
Chinese by Japan? I seem to have forgotten - then these Christians
nations certainly showed that indifference in inexplicable ways.
Christians as Christians had been condemning the murder of Jews for
more than one thousand years. This was often not reciprocated. The
first religious and racial genocide in Europe during the 20th Century
was not the murder of Jews but the murder of Christians within the
Turkish empire. Almost every horror later used by Lazar Kaganovich
against innocent, overwhelmingly Christian, people, and even later
used by Nazis against innocent, largely Jewish, people was used first
against Christians in this forgotten holocaust.
Packing people into cattle cars, torturing innocents, liquidating
children - all these things happened and millions of educated, decent
Christians died. As with the Holocaust, Christians who were not in
harm’s way risked their lives to save the innocent. Also, to his
enormous credit, an American Jew, Henry Morgenthau, worked bravely
and tirelessly to help these wretched victims.
There was holocaust denial, however, in this first pioneering racial
and religious atrocity. In 1918 Ben Gurion and Ben-Zvi published a
book projecting an Eretz Yisrael in the Ottoman Empire. Ben Gurion
says in the book: "it must be said, to the credit of the Turks, that
their rulers behaved toward the conquered with a degree of tolerance
and generosity which is unparalleled in the history of Christian
peoples of the period." Ben Gurion does not mention a single world
about the Armenian genocide.
The extermination of the Christian Armenians had been preceded by
decades of mass murders of Christians in the Turkish Empire. How did
Theodor Herzl during the Fifth Zionist Congress in 1901 feel Jews
should react to these decades of torture and mass murder of
Christians? Herzl urged the Congress to send a message to Abdul Hami
II (know as the "Bloody Sultan" for his massacres of Armenians) which
had an "expression of dedication and gratitude which all the Jews
feel regarding the benevolence which his Highness the Sultan has
always shown them."
The best and the worst moral attitude
Jews should want Christians to be deep and sincere Christians.
Christians should want Jews to take Judaism seriously. Defaming
Christianity does not lead to a safer, kinder world for Jews. It
leads to monsters like Bormann and Eichman. The best protection
against holocausts are men like pious Christians like George
Washington and Pope John Paul II. The best protection are honest,
decent Jews like Henry Morgenthau.
Monsters like Kaganovich, craven and cynical creeps like Ben Gurion
are found in all races, all faiths and every age. Some are CINOs
(Christians In Name Only) and some are JINOs (Jews In Name Only.) One
of the best ways to seed and to nourish this sort of evil is to
defame Christianity - like pretending that the Holocaust is the
logical consequence of serious Christianity.