Rabbi Shmuley Boteach and Catholic-Jewish Relations

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Yesterday was Holocaust Remembrance Day.  There is a lot of tension between the Jewish community and the Catholic community these days.  This is especially evident amongst Israeli Jews and Polish Catholics.  American Rabbi Shmuley Boteach shared a meal with Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki.  The account can be read here:

http://www.breitbart.com/jerusalem/2018/04/11/rabbi-shmuley-discussion-polands-prime-minister-holocaust/

Basically what happened is the Rabbi had dinner with the Morawiecki and told him how awful the “Polish Death Camps” law is.  I personally don’t support this law, but I could care less.  I’m Canadian and the Poles can make their own laws.  I would also like to see some evidence on Boteach’s part that he has opposed holocaust denial laws which exist in over a dozen countries.

Regardless, this dialogue shows what is wrong with Catholic-Jewish relations.  Why is a Jewish Rabbi obsessed with this law?  He doesn’t live in Poland.  The reason is that the holocaust is used as a battering ram by many Jews to bash Christianity.  I remember reading articles in October when it was the 500th anniversary of the reformation and Jewish journalists were trying to point to 500 years old writings of Martin Luther and say that they helped cause the holocaust 400 years later.  It’s funny how they didn’t point to religious writings in the 1920’s or 1930’s.  That would have at least been an appropriate context for the crimes of the 1940’s.

I wrote a post about this and Dr. Michael Brown, a Jew turned Evangelical attacked me on his radio program by upholding the standard “Christian anti-Semitism” canard and threw out all of these vague accusations.  I then wrote two posts refuting his nonsense.

Muslims like to say that if Europe had been Muslim, the holocaust would not have happened.  I would like to also say that if Europe had been Christian, the holocaust would not have happened either.  If the holocaust was a result of Christianity, why didn’t it happen when Europe was thoroughly Christian, such as the 13th century?  The 20th century was not a period of time known for religiosity in Europe, especially Germany.  However, Poland is an exception.  Unlike Germany, it was deeply religious in the 20th century and it remains deeply religious today.  If anti-Christian Jews can link Poland to the holocaust, then they have a good case for making it a Christian phenomenon.

Poland, in trying to distance themselves from this crime committed on their own soil by these evil German socialist invaders has therefore implemented this law.  This whole episode is typical of the aggressiveness of some Jews in their dialogue with Catholics.  For many Jews, the holocaust is not a the product of an evil political party but the entire Christian religion.  We always hear the lie “2000 years of Christian anti-Semitism!!!”  If Christianity has been anti-Semitic for 2000 years, it hasn’t been doing a very good job at being anti-Semitic if it took 1900 years for the holocaust to happen.

To any Jew reading this blog who thinks this way, I have a challenge for you.  If the holocaust was a result of Christianity, why didn’t it happen when Europe was thoroughly Christian, such as the 13th century?  I’ve never heard a decent answer to this.

The holocaust wasn’t Christian in the slightest.  In dialogues with the Jews, the Church should throw this statement down and tell Jewish representatives that any attempt to link Christianity to this is a lie and a legitimate reason for ending dialogue.  Reasonable Jews will agree.  Jews like Rabbi Shmuley Boteach probably won’t.

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10 thoughts on “Rabbi Shmuley Boteach and Catholic-Jewish Relations”

  1. Poland, in trying to distance themselves from this crime committed on their own soil by these evil German socialist invaders has therefore implemented this law.

    So is this another fabrication of history? I don’t recall German Marxist-Leninists or followers of Marx and Lenin setting up death camps. Mein Kampf railed against Bolshevism, and many leaders of the SS were against Bolshevism.

    There was immense anti-Semitism in Poland from Polish nationalists before and during the War. This is a nice take-down of the fascist sympathizer Timothy Snyder’s attempts to exculpate Eastern European nationalists from collaboration with Nazi Germany and complicity in the Holocaust by blaming everything on Hitler and Stalin.

    https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/09/timothy-snyders-lies/

    As the historian Thomas Kühne has pointed out, Snyder plainly writes in the old Great Man tradition. Hitler and Stalin, in his hands, come across as colossi who never panic or stumble but always know precisely what they are doing. Thus, Hitler “intended to use the Soviet Union to solve his British problem,” he “knew” of Ukraine’s economic value, etc., while Stalin “deliberately” starved Ukraine, “chose to kill millions of people,” and engaged in “clearly premeditated mass murder.”

    To be sure, Snyder allows that Stalin was wrong to trust in Hitler’s professions of peace in 1941. But otherwise he portrays him as a master tactician. Stalin took advantage of “the public violence in Nazi Germany” to boost Soviet prestige, he writes, he used the rise of fascism to deflect attention from his own crimes, and, in August 1939, he made adept use of the new non-aggression pact with Germany to check Japanese advances in the Far East.

    Puffing up the two super-tyrants, Snyder downplays the social forces behind them and exculpates the political actors in between. Since Hitler and Stalin are alone responsible, others are not; violence is not something that arises from within the borderlands, but is visited on them from outside. “In eastern Europe,” Snyder writes, “it is hard to find political collaboration with the Germans that is not related to a previous experience of Soviet rule.” If Poles, Balts, and Ukrainians engaged in massive anti-Jewish pogroms following the German invasion, in other words, it is not their fault but that of the Communists.

    But anyone remotely familiar with East European history knows that the region has a rich history of anti-Semitism all its own. Although Snyder refers blandly to Joseph Pilsudski’s “great rival” Roman Dmowski, the Polish nationalist who successfully argued for Polish independence during the post-World War I treaty negotiations at Versailles, he fails to mention Dmowski’s fierce anti-Semitism or note how far back it extended. “[I]f all society were to succumb to [Jewish] influences, we would actually lose our capacity for societal life,” Dmowski wrote in 1913, evidence that Polish anti-Semitism did not follow on the heels of the Bolshevik Revolution four years later.

    Anti-Semitism was in fact far fiercer in Poland than in Germany from the early 1920s on and built steadily throughout the interwar period — before the non-aggression pact, in other words, rather than after. Where the Nazis were disappointed by the tepid public response to the Kristallnacht pogroms in November 1938, for instance, Poland saw major outbreaks of anti-Jewish violence in some ninety-seven towns and cities between 1935 and 1937 alone. Polish anti-Semitism clearly had a life of its own.

    Snyder struggles to get the borderlands off the hook in other ways, as well. He writes that “anti-Semites in the [Polish] Home Army were a minority” and says of the Polish peasants viewing passing trainloads of Jewish deportees that “[t]he gesture of a finger across the throat, remembered with loathing by a few Jewish survivors, was meant to communicate to the Jews that they were going to die — though not necessarily that the Poles wished this upon them” — a remarkable assertion that he makes no effort to substantiate.

    In fact, as the London-based government in exile well knew, the mood in wartime Poland was poisonous. In December 1939, an official with Poland’s underground Home Army informed London that “Jews are so horribly persecuting Poles and everything that is connected to Polishness under the Soviet partition . . . that at the first opportunity all the Poles here, from the elderly to the women and children, will take such a horrible revenge on the Jews, as no anti-Semite has ever imagined possible.”

    In the eastern forests and marshlands, members of the fascist Narodowe Siły Zbrojne (NSZ), or National Armed Forces, attacked Russians and Jews no less than Germans, while the Home Army, which absorbed the NSZ in 1943, declared war on “Jewish bands in the forests [that] were robbing and looting the peasants.” They were referring to Jewish escapees scrounging for food. In one incident, the Armia Krajowa (AK), as the Home Army was known in Polish, attacked a dozen members of the all-Jewish “Bielski partisans” returning from a foraging expedition, killing all but one.

    The Armia Krajowa also attacked Belarusians, killing some 1,200 in and around the city of Lida in late 1943, and engaged in a full-scale civil war with Lithuanian nationalist partisans in and around Vilnius and Navahrudak in 1943–4. None of this shows up in Bloodlands, which is only interested in the AK as victim of the Soviets. Snyder is particularly eager to defend the Home Army against charges that it did nothing to aid the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising from April 19 to May 16, 1943. But the logic he employs is so astonishing that the passage is worth quoting in full:

    Warsaw Home Army commanders had strategic concerns that militated against giving the Jews any weapons at all. Although the Home Army was moving in the direction of partisan action, it feared that a rebellion in the ghetto would provoke a general uprising in the city, which the Germans would crush. The Home Army was not ready for such a fight in late 1942. Home Army commanders saw a premature uprising as a communist temptation to be avoided. They knew that the Soviets, and thus the Polish communists, were urging the local population to take up arms immediately against the Germans.

    The Soviets wanted to provoke partisan warfare in Poland in order to weaken the Germans — but also to hinder any future Polish resistance to their own rule when it came. The Red Army’s task would be easier if German troops were killed by partisan warfare as would the NKVD’s if Polish elites were killed for resisting Germans. The Jewish Combat Organization included the communists, who were following the Soviet line, and believed that Poland should be subordinated to the Soviet Union. As the Home Army command could not forget, the Second World War had begun when both the Germans and the Soviets had invaded Poland. Half of Poland had spent half of the war inside the Soviet Union. The Soviets wanted eastern Poland back, and perhaps even more.

    From the perspective of the Home Army, rule by the Soviets was little better than rule by the Nazis. Its goal was independence. There were hardly any circumstances that would seem to justify a Polish independence organization arming communists inside Poland. Despite these reservations, the Home Army did give the Jewish Combat Organization a few pistols in December 1942.

    The rebels of the Warsaw Ghetto were thus attempting to lead the Home Army into a Soviet-engineered trap by launching a premature uprising. This is nothing but a repeat of the old AK line that Jews were the Poles’ national enemy and that their extermination was none of their concern. As Antyk, the AK’s anti-Communist propaganda bureau, declared in the summer of 1942 when the Nazis were rounding up some 5,000 to 6,000 Warsaw Jews a day and shipping them off to Treblinka:

    Whether we like it or not, Communism is attacking us. The extermination of the Jews in Europe by the Germans, which will be the final result of the German-Jewish war, represents from our point of view an undoubtedly favorable development, for it will weaken the explosive power of Communism at the moment of the German collapse — or earlier. Let us have no illusions. The liquidation of the Jews is not tantamount to the liquidation of the Commune, behind which is the Comintern and through which the Jews want to take their revenge on us.

    Under pressure from London, General Stefan Rowecki, commander of the Home Army, agreed to supply the Warsaw ghetto with a few pistols, as Snyder notes. But hostility was undiminished. As Rowecki told Wladyslaw Sikorski, the prime minister in exile:

    Now, when it is too late, Jews from various little Communist groups are turning to us for arms, as though we had storehouses full of them. As a test I have given them a few pistols. I have no certitude that they will use them. I will not give them any more arms, for as you know we ourselves have not got them. I am waiting for deliveries. Let me know what means of contact our Jews have in London.

    In fact, the AK, by its own admission, had ample storehouses of arms that it had hidden away in the Warsaw area following the German victory three years earlier: 135 heavy machine guns with 16,900 rounds of ammunition, 190 light machine guns with 54,000 rounds, 6,045 rifles with 794,000 rounds, 1,070 pistols and revolvers with 8,708 rounds, 7,561 grenades, and seven small anti-tank guns with 2,147 rounds, etc. Not all the weaponry was operable, but RAF airdrops had enabled the AK to replenish its supplies. Yet the Home Army saw fit to turn over only a few handguns, many of them defective.

    “To allocate machines without ammunition creates the impression of a cynical game with our fate and confirms the supposition that the venom of anti-Semitism continues to poison Poland’s ruling circles,” Mordecai Anielewicz, the young radical in charge of the ghetto forces, wrote the AK command in March. But the AK was unmoved. Indeed, the only ally the leftists had outside the ghetto was the Polish Workers’ Party, the name the Communists took after Stalin allowed them to reconstitute themselves in 1942, which was itself pathetically short of arms but which went to heroic lengths to support the ghetto militants in whatever way it could. Although Snyder believes that the ghetto fighters were following Soviet dictates in launching a revolt, they really had no choice — their back was against the wall.

    With mass roundups reducing the ghetto population from more than half a million to a mere 60,000 by early 1943, the survivors were all too aware that “each of us carries his sentence of death in his pocket,” as historian Emanuel Ringelblum put it. They had no alternative but to fight with whatever means they had. Thanks to the AK boycott — which Snyder, incredibly enough, defends — their weapons consisted of little more than knives, axes, crowbars, clubs, and homemade explosives.

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  2. I follow Che/Guevara/Jerzy Pawlowski on Disqus. I really find him insightful.

    He says:

    I’m originally form Poland, and I find this article to be extremely insightful. The fall of communism was about national liberation, and it caused the liberation of extreme xenophobia that was suppressed by the communists. The West doesn’t appreciate this point.

    https://disqus.com/home/discussion/americaninterest/the_dangers_of_democratic_determinism/#comment-3747635438

    No, Poland after WWII didn’t resemble France or Italy, and it doesn’t resemble France or Italy even now, after almost 30 years since the fall of communism. Poland didn’t resemble France or Italy because Poland was a backward agrarian country totally ruined by war, unlike France or Italy.
    And most human rights were respected under communist Poland. People went to school, had jobs, children, went to church, etc. People didn’t live in fear of war and hunger like before the Soviets. People could hope their children would have a better life than they did.

    There was no democracy under communist Poland, but that was for the better, because no clowns were elected to office, unlike today. And before WWII Poland wasn’t a democracy either, after Pilsudski took over power in a coup in May 1926.

    https://disqus.com/home/discussion/bloombergview/syria_conflict_trump_and_putin_are_locked_in_a_macho_contest_bloomberg/#comment-3852206644

    But regarding “Polish Death Camps”.

    That increases the temptation to legislate on history.

    History is already being legislated in Europe and Canada. In most European countries it’s a crime to question that six million Jews were killed in the Holocaust. If someone says that only one million Jews were killed, then that’s a crime. Jean-Marie Le Pen was prosecuted in France for such Holocaust denial.
    So history is already being legislated, and the only question now is how should it be legislated? Poland decided it wants to criminalize the most egregious cases of historical falsification and slander.
    My preference would be not to criminalize Holocaust denial and other forms of historical falsification, but if one form of falsification is criminalized while the others are not, then it creates the problem of fairness and objectivity. Poles believe they were one of the primary victims of Germany during WWII, so they also want their own victimhood to be properly remembered, instead of being slandered.

    The new law criminalizes references to Auschwitz and other Nazi death camps in Poland as “Polish death camps”.

    Yes, and for very good reason, because calling them Polish is a slander and falsification of historical facts. I would think that people who are so opposed to fake news would understand this simple fact.

    Many in Israel suspect that Polish nationalists are trying to stifle any mention of Poles collaboration with the Nazis.

    No, the Polish government has acknowledged the cases of Polish attacks on Jews during WWII. What they are opposed to is slander and falsification such as “Polish death camps”.
    https://disqus.com/home/discussion/bloombergview/polands_holocaust_law_seeks_to_weaponize_memory/#comment-3736997018

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      • There was no Polish Death Camps.

        There is no doubt immense anti-Semitism among nationalist Poles during World War II. I am against the history that tries to cover that up.

        My point is that a Pole who became pro-Russian and sympathetic to the post-World War II USSR disapproves of the notion of “Polish death camps”.

        My family wasn’t politically active in communist Poland, but they held rather conservative and anti-Soviet views. I underwent an ideological transformation while living in the U.S. First, because I was deeply disappointed by the devastation caused by the economic shock therapy introduced in Poland after the fall of communism. Second, because working in the financial industry in the U.S. allowed me to see firsthand the corruption and perverse incentives in capitalism. Third, because I realized that I opposed U.S. military interventions just as much as I once opposed Soviet interventions against Hungary and Czechoslovakia (especially the 1999 U.S. aggression against Serbia was a shock and a turning point for me).
        What is significant in my ideological transformation is that I was “flipped” to the other side, not unlike what happened to Victor Orban and other Eastern Europeans, who with time became disenchanted with the West and more sympathetic towards Russia. Anti-Russian zealots are making a big mistake by discounting such people as paid Russian trolls, because it blinds them to the shift in public opinion that is occurring in Europe, which causes them to be surprised by the “rise of populism”.

        https://disqus.com/home/discussion/bloombergview/a_new_peace_effort_is_needed_in_east_ukraine/#comment-3718285019

        As for me, I am probably to the left of “Che Guevara” and probably to right of someone like Jason Unruhe or “Maoist Rebel News”

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  3. Dr. Michael Brown (and Dennis Prager, and many others) likes to beat the drum “The hatred towards the Jews is the strongest hatred in the world, it’s unique and unprecedented! Oy vey!” Uhmm, that’s debatable, to say the least. True, the Jewish people suffered a lot throughout the course of history, but there’s another religious community that suffered worse- the Christians. And the hatred towards them is even more irrational than the one towards the Jews- hostility to the latter is almost always justified with certain “arguments” (“Jews are thieves, stingy, they care only about themselves, they control the banks and the media, they are responsible for all the modern wars!”, etc.,etc.), while hostility to the former in 95% of the cases goes with “We hate you, because you’re Christian!”

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    • Hi OrangeHunter;

      Yes! That is so true. The Christians have had more land stolen from them and civilizations destroyed. Our history is written so poorly to as I showed in the Crusades post.

      Probably the biggest persecution of Christians happened in the 20th century due to communism. Christians of Eastern Europe suffered tremendously under the communists. What is never told is that most of these communists were Jews.

      You can get Fr. Denis Fahey’s book The Rulers of Russia online in PDF form for free.

      In the book, we read: “On page 29 of Les Derniers lours des Romanof, we read: “In order not to leave myself open to any accusation of prejudice, I am giving (on pages 136-137) the list of the members of the Central Committee, of the Extraordinary’ Commission and l i e Council of Commissars functioning at the time of the assassina­ tion of the Imperial Family, The 62 members of the Committee
      were composed of 5 Russians, 1 Ukrainian, 6 Letts, 2 Germans, 1 Czech, 2 Armenians, 3 Georgians, 1 Karaim (Jewish sect), 41 Jews.1 The extraordinary Commission of Moscow was composed of 36 members, including 1 German, 1 Pole, 1 Armenian, 2 Rus­ sians, 8 Letts, 23 Jews. The Council of the People’s Commissars numbered 2 Armenians, 3 Russians, 17 Jews. According to the data furnished by the Soviet Press, out of 556 important func­ tionaries of the Bolshevik State, including the above-mentioned,
      there were in 1918-1919, 17 Russians, 2 Ukrainians, 11 Arme­ nians, 35 Letts, 15 Germans, 1 Hungarian, 10 Georgians, 3 Poles, 3 Finns, 1 Czech, 1 Karaim, 457 Jews.”

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      • Yes, unfortunately Christians in the East suffered (and continue to suffer) under the taint of communism. Russian religious philosopher Berdyaev though had a theory that communism is a punishment that God sent to Eastern Christians for their vanity and abandonment of the Gospel.

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        • Hi OrangeHunter,

          I heard this exact same theory about Russia from a ROCOR priest. He said in 1917 most Russians were only having communion once per year.

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      • In the same way that these communists were Jews you can say that the people who perpetrated the holocaust were Christian. Neither were religious. Judaism definitely has an ethnic component for sure though.

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    • for most of history Christians Have not been persecuted as badly as the Jews. The first four centuries and the 20th century yes definitely but in between? Not really unless you count Muslim conquests. In Europe though it was mainly the Catholic Church persecuting heretical Christians.
      The hatred for
      Jews is unique. Although I definitely don’t agree with Michael brown that it’s just the devil or whatever that causes it. It’s obviously a mix of a lot of factors but is
      Pretty pervasive through much of history.

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