Bill Donohue Tries to Deflect Pope Furor by Insulting the German People and President Barack Obama

This last press release (below) from Bill Donohue called, "German Guilt Fuels Attack on Pope" is bizarre.

I kinda know that nobody in their right mind takes Catholic League president Bill Donohue seriously. And knowing that, I oughta ignore this latest press release. But shucks, it's just so very bad, I can't do that.

Mark these words. Unless the damage is controlled, this error made by the Pontiff - rehabilitating a Holocaust denier - will be written about for centuries as the beginning of the end of the modern Catholic church.

Donohue, and many other people who work for the Church, do not get how serious the situation is. He calls the scandal the "Bishop Williamson flap."

The press release: The tone in Donohue's invective reeks with sarcasm, employs the wounded bully approach and lashes out at the critics with no attempt at logic. It employs rhetoric that’s over the top.

Some of the stuff Donohue says is incomprehensible. I want to tell Donohue that he simply cannot think that telling us the Pope “condemned the Holocaust” is some special achievement in which the Pope takes pride. Lord knows, all civilization has condemned the Holocaust!

Donohue lashes out at German chancellor Merkel. Given the endorsement the Pope made of Williamson, Merkel correctly asked that the Pope make clear he opposes Holocaust denial – an obscene form of anti-Semitism, one that Williamson practices.

I'd like to tell Donohue that the Bishop in question was not forced to practice this obscenity during some distant youthful period when he had to join a "Holocaust Denial Youth Movement." He was in fact on TV a few days ago spouting off his disgusting Holocaust denial. Look at YouTube.

I want to tell Donahue that we need to hear the Pope say those words that Donohue said, “Williamson's denial of the Holocaust is obscene” – and yes, we need to see the Pope excommunicate Williamson, and if he then repents, the Pope can rehabilitate him.

I want to tell Donohue that the choices we common folk see before us are to believe that (1) either the Pope knew what he was doing or (2) he is a fool - and ask Donohue to please clarify which option I should choose.

Finally I want to tell Donohue not to insult President Obama and call his appointees thieves. That kind of nonsensical unrelated invective will not rescue the Church from its scandal.

So here is the offending press release, ugh!

GERMAN GUILT FUELS ATTACK ON POPE

Catholic League president Bill Donohue addressed the remarks of the pope’s biggest critics over the Bishop Williamson flap:

“No one has been worse than the Germans. Reeking with guilt over the Holocaust, we now have the spectacle of German Chancellor Angela Merkel telling the pope he needs to clarify his views on the Holocaust. Talk about hubris. This is a man who was forcibly conscripted at a young age into a Nazi group and saw his family suffer economically because he refused to attend the Hitler Youth meetings. This is a man who as Cardinal Ratzinger unequivocally condemned the Holocaust at a Jerusalem conference in 1994 and wrote about a book about it, Many Religions, One Covenant: Israel, the Church and the World. And he needs to ‘clarify’ his views to Merkel?

“Williamson’s denial of the Holocaust is obscene, but this doesn’t excuse the grand-standing of the Regensburg D.A. who is investigating whether the bishop broke their illiberal laws when he made his comments in Sweden. Then there is the German press which has exploited this issue beyond belief: one major story says the pope has previously offended ‘Muslims, women, native Indians, Poles, gays and scientists.’ Translated this means that the pope speaks the truth and some don’t like it. Perhaps most embarrassing is the left-wing Catholic theologian Hermann Haering who implored the pope to quit. What a disgrace this man is to Catholics everywhere.

“Today, the Vatican announced that Williamson must ‘unequivocally and publicly distance himself from his positions on the Shoah’ if he is to be reinstated (he is still not in full communion with the Church, and may never be). The pope, the Vatican statement said, was unaware of this bishop’s views when he lifted his excommunication.

“There will be those who won’t believe the pope didn’t know about Williamson. Yet these same people no doubt believe that President Obama didn’t know about the thieves he’s been appointing. Moreover, there are approximately 3,500 bishops spread throughout the world. The pope is smart, but he’s not a seer.”

A Talmudic Cartoon Opinion of Barack Obama

From the email rounds, a humorous Talmudic Barack Obama cartoon.

Pope Benedict on Bishop Williamson's Antisemitism: "I know Nothing"

EWTN reported the Vatican's statement, what the Pope knew about the Bishop:

...the prelate's viewpoint on the Shoah "was unknown to the Holy Father in the moment of the lifting of the excommunication."

We do not find credible Pope Benedict XVI's claim that he was ignorant of the antisemitic Holocaust denials of Bishop Richard Williamson.

Even so, let us accept the Vatican's claims at face value. The Pope didn't know. Nobody told him. He didn't see the video clips. He doesn't use YouTube or the Internet. But wait, the Pope publishes videos on that new fancy Vatican YouTube Channel. Hmm.

And we guess the Pope did not know about the Bishop's pet theories that were easily known about the 9/11 attacks:

A little more research also would have turned up an earlier lecture Williamson gave in which he rejects what everyone else knows happened on 9/11. It wasn't terrorists in hijacked airliners that brought the twin towers, Williamson says. No it was a series of planned explosions deliberately set... All the government explanations are nothing but "lies, lies, lies," he says.

Like Sgt. Schultz from the old TV series, Hogan's Heroes, we can hear the Pope saying, "I know nothing! Nothing!"

I was going to say, the Pope ought to do a better background check than that. But then I remembered all that stuff about the sexual predator Priests. And if you start doing background checks...just who will be left?

WSJ: Julia Angwin Explains How She Improved Her Google SERP Through SEO

What is a SERP you ask? It's short for "search engine results page" - and when you look a lot at you own SERP on google - that's called "vanity googling." If you are a journalist, writer or even a serious blogger, it's not just "vanity" to want to improve your SERP in google. It makes good business sense. People find you through your SERP. A good SERP creates a good image for a person in the public eye.

We've been qvelling with pride over our latest Google SERP for "tzvee" - try searching just "tzvee" and see what you get. The results are neat as of 2/5/09 - but that can change at any minute. Google search algorithms are ever evolving and their spiders are incessantly crawling the Internet. Google constantly wants to make sure that you are a real person, creating authentic content and not some automaton. They do a pretty good job of separating the wheat from the chaff.

Julia Angwin of the Wall Street Journal has just written a brilliant article about her quest to understand her own google SERP and to improve it through SEO - search engine optimization.

It's a New Me (As Seen on Google)
By JULIA ANGWIN

For years, I winced at what popped up when I Googled my name.

The top result of a search on "Julia Angwin" was an article I wrote for The Wall Street Journal in 2005 after I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby was indicted for leaking the name of CIA operative Valerie Plame.

I hated seeing the story at the top of the list for a number of reasons: It was not a topic I normally wrote about; it had an underwhelming headline, "Novak's Role is Still Largely Unknown"; and -- most horrifyingly -- the story contained an error and had a correction appended to it.

Mysteriously, this article had become my hallmark online, showing up in my top-five search results for years. As a longtime media and technology reporter who is coming out with a book, I didn't feel the article represented my career. So a few months ago, I began trying to figure out how I could knock that story -- and a few others, while I was at it -- out of my search results. It was the beginning of a long and arduous introduction into the murky art of search-engine optimization, or SEO.

One of the paradoxes of the digital age is that the boundless freedoms of the Internet also constrain our identity. Before the ubiquity of search engines you could go on a date or a job interview and construct a narrative about your life that fit the situation. No one in your book group had to know that you were a punk-rocker in high school. But it's much harder to package yourself in the Google era. Online, your digital identity often comes down to the top 10 links on your SERP, or search-engine results page.

Of course, Google is not the Internet's only search engine. But since it is the most dominant one, I only focused on improving my Google SERP.

My first thought was to try to remove the unwanted article from my SERP. But search-engine expert and consultant Danny Sullivan advised me that it is extremely difficult to remove items from Google search results.

If you can prove to Google that a Web site has stolen your Social Security, credit card or bank-account numbers and posted them online, then Google will consider removing the offending data, he said. Even in those cases, Google urges people to contact the Web site directly to seek removal. "They don't really intervene unless there is some good legal reason to do that," Mr. Sullivan told me.

Still, Google does encourage people to boost their results by creating content about themselves. "People should take control of their own presence," says Adam Lasnik, search expert at Google. The best way to do that, he advises, is to create original compelling content about yourself that is easily accessed by Google and earns links from authoritative and relevant Web sites.

For details, I turned to WSJ.com's search-engine-optimization consultant Alex Bennert, who advised me to bury the annoying article underneath more favorable material, such as my social-networking profiles on LinkedIn, Facebook and MySpace, as well as blogging site Twitter.

Next, I contacted Rhea Drysdale, a search-engine-optimization expert at OutspokenMedia.com. Ms. Drysdale explained that I needed to focus on linking my online presences to each other -- that is, my Twitter page would link to my LinkedIn page, which would link to my biography on my book-publisher's site. These interlinkages are key to understanding Google's page-ranking system. Google rates Web sites, in part, by how many links they have from other credible Web sites.

Ms. Drysdale explained that this interlinkage system was the reason that my Novak article had been appearing so high in my SERP. Using Yahoo's Site Explorer, a tool that identifies sites that are linking to a Web address, she found that the Novak article had 25 links from sites that included the Washington Post, Instapundit and 13 different places in the archives of a conservative blog.

By interlinking my sites, my efforts soon began to pay off. Two weeks into the project, the Novak article disappeared from the first page of my results. My LinkedIn profile jumped to the No. 1 spot.

Soon, my results got another boost as I launched a new blog and a column on WSJ.com. Within a month of the launch of both, traffic and links to these sites pushed two older articles I had written down or off my top results altogether. Of course, it's easier for me to move my results because I'm a journalist. Every time I publish a new article on WSJ.com, it immediately becomes part of my SERP equation.

For most non-journalists who do not maintain their own blog or Web site, it's a bit harder to create such a steady stream of new content on topics they want to associate with themselves. But it's not impossible. Ms. Drysdale recommends submitting articles to Web sites such as Squidoo.com, eHow.com or Google Knol on topics on that show off your expertise. "It's a huge branding opportunity," she says.

Still, visibility has a downside, which I unwittingly learned. The day that Apple Inc.'s Chief Executive Steve Jobs announced his "hormonal imbalance," I went on camera with a colleague at WSJ.com to talk about the possible impact on Apple's business.

Within hours, Apple enthusiasts at MacDailyNews.com started trash-talking me and my colleague for allegedly casting aspersions on their leader. As a result, these posts, some of them quite vulgar and nasty, shot up near the top of my search-results page. Luckily, they sank back down to the fourth page of my results within two days.

The whole unpleasant experience was an object lesson in another aspect of SEO: It's never over. You can work to boost your results, and then lose control in an instant. Constant vigilance is required. That's why big companies hire experts to monitor their search results on a full-time basis.

Still, I hoped to strike the knockout blow for my SERP with the creation of a new personal Web site. With its launch approaching, I sent it to Ms. Drysdale, who made some specific technical recommendations. The front page was too graphical, she said. It needed to have more text that Google could categorize when its systems examined the site, a process called crawling. So the Web designer I was working with changed some of the text to make it more crawlable, sacrificing a beautiful typeface on the altar of SEO.

She also weighed in on the importance of the text and coding -- some of it invisible -- called metadata that's embedded in a Web site that helps search engines categorize the content. When building a page, Web programmers include a "title tag," which is displayed at the top of the Web browser and describes the page to a search engine.

For example, The Wall Street Journal's home page has a title tag that reads: "Business News, Finance News, World, Political & Sports News from The Wall Street Journal - WSJ.com." All those words help search engines categorize the content and are the exact words that appear in a Google search result.

Once my title tags and metadata were optimized, the site went live.

At Ms. Drysdale's recommendation, I used Twitter to "tweet" about the site, sending out a short text message. I also linked to my site from my Facebook and LinkedIn pages, as well as my "WSJ Community" profile.

For several days, I was greeted with a deafening silence. My SERP changed not at all as the site worked its way through the circuits at Google. Finally, 10 days later, my site appeared on the ninth page of my results and began slowly bubbling its way up to the top of my SERP.

And thus, I learned the final lesson of SEO: Patience is required.

AP: Bishop Williamson Faces German Prosecution for Holocaust Denial

The AP reports:

There was no answer to several calls placed Wednesday to Williamson's home in La Reja, Argentina. Williamson could face charges in Germany, where he was interviewed by Swedish TV. State prosecutors have opened a preliminary investigation into whether Williamson broke German laws against Holocaust denial.

As this affair unravels, the Catholic Church has suffered a tremendous hit in prestige, which it cannot afford.

Under the circumstances, barring major damage control, the current Pope, Benedict XVI, will be out of office before Easter this year.

Criticism of the Pope over this affair is deep and widespread.

The Times reports tonight that:

Writing on his blog, Sandro Magister, a correspondent for the weekly magazine L’Espresso and one of Italy’s most highly respected Vatican experts, pointed to a “double disaster” of “governance and communication” within the church.

Pope Benedict on Bishop Williamson: "I screwed up"

You didn't really think that the Pope said, "I screwed up" did you?

Just think a minute about this past day or so.

It has brought to us a pretty stark contrast between a Western democratic political leader like Barack Obama and a traditional religious leader like the Pope.

Obama admitted that he erred when he selected tax-problem-riddled Tom Daschle for his cabinet. He is the one who said, "I screwed up."

Benedict can't get the utterance of confessing his error out of his throat. After days of denial he allegedly let his spokesmen backpedal on his behalf.

News sources are saying that Benedict is now retreating and insisting that Williamson recant his Holocaust denial in order to be rehabilitated.

We are skeptical. We think this is a mere rhetorical flourish to throw some water on the flames of this controversy.

And now the ball is back in Bishop Williamson's court. Will he recant his Holocaust denials or won't he?

My money says he won't. In fact my money says that Williamson will say something uber stupid like, "Look at how these Jews are crucifying me!"
Here is the video of this evil man saying, "There were no gas chambers."
To me this antisemite looks like the devil incarnate.

Is Tom Daschle Jewish?

No, Tom Daschle, who will not be Barack Obama's Health and Human Services Secretary, is not a Jew.

Daschle has withdrawn as a candidate for that cabinet post due to irregularities in his payment of taxes.

Daschle is a Roman Catholic. He was born in Aberdeen, South Dakota, to Elizabeth B. Meier and Sebastian C. Daschle. His paternal grandparents were ethnic Germans from Russia. Daschle grew up in a working-class Roman Catholic family as the eldest of four brothers.

Besides the responsibilities of his withdrawn cabinet post in the Obama administration, Daschle was slated to serve as the White House point person for all health policy issues. His withdrawal is a serious setback for the Obama administration. [Unfortunately, this posting has been revised from our earlier posting that assumed he would be the HHS secretary in the cabinet...]

Reuters: Pope Benedict XVI Refuses Chancellor Merkel's Demand that he clearly reject Holocaust Denial

Pope Benedict XVI continues to defy the world. This man may actually believe that he himself is infallible. The fact that he intends to make a saint out of Hitler's Pope, Pius XII, surely should be enough evidence to support that delusion. But now there is more.

Earlier today Andrea Merkel, the Chancellor of Germany, demanded that the Pope make clear that he rejects the Holocaust denial of Bishop Richard Williamson.

JP reported, "German Chancellor Angela Merkel called on Pope Benedict XVI to make a 'very clear' rejection of Holocaust denials after a former bishop was rehabilitated by the Vatican."

Remember this -- Holocaust denial is a crime in Germany.

The Pope's support for a Holocaust denier is tantamount to abetting a crime. The Chancellor was asking the Pope to make it clear that he did not abet a crime. The Pope has refused.

This situation has now escalated from a serious scandal to a crisis of international proportions.

The Vatican has decided to dig in its heels and resist diplomatic demands. Apparently the Pope believes that he has sufficient power to act with impunity in the face of the international community.

Only the Lord knows what will happen next.

Vatican tells Merkel: Pope clear on Holocaust

VATICAN CITY (Reuters) - The Vatican on Tuesday hit back at German Chancellor Angela Merkel after she called on Pope Benedict to make clear the Vatican does not tolerate any denial of the Holocaust.

Vatican spokesman Father Federico Lombardi said in a statement that the German pope's position on the Holocaust and Holocaust denial "could not be any clearer."

Merkel made her comments after an outcry over a decision by the pope to rehabilitate four traditional Catholic bishops, including one who denies the full extent of the Holocaust.

There's much dismay over the Pope in Germany today. Reuter's Faithworld reports:

...it’s rare to see such a wide variety of opinion lining up in Rome and in other countries against a pontiff. It is almost unthinkable that a head of government should break with protocol and openly criticise a pope. But when a German pope ignores one of the deepest German taboos, getting a reaction like this is — as they say here in Germany — “as certain as hearing ‘Amen’ in church.”

While only the Lord knows for sure, Tzvee predicts that the Pope will resign over this scandal.

To wit, Cardinal Ratzinger should never have been elected Pope to begin with.

No matter how long ago it was that he served the devil regime of Nazi Germany, a Hitler Youth and soldier in the Nazi army should never have had the chutzpah to present himself to represent a worldwide religion of peace and love.

The Catholic Church has to realize at last that it cannot defy history and morality for some sort of bizarre and irrational expediency. There are thousands of equally qualified Catholics, who have never served the devil, who can serve as the holy Pope.

This chapter of Vatican history will be recorded as a low-point of Church politics, close in decadence to that of the reign of Hitler's Pope himself, Pius XII during the Nazi era, who undeniably abetted by his acquiescence, the greatest crime ever perpetrated against humanity.

Tageszeitung: Hermann Haering Says Pope Benedict XVI Should Resign Over Bishop Richard Williamson Scandal

The political tempest over the rehabilitation by Pope Benedict of Holocaust denier Richard Williamson is intensifying for two reasons.

First, there is worldwide a combined psychological, political and social aversion to anyone who abets a Nazi apologist. Support of a Holocaust denial is directly equivalent to an apologetic for the Nazi genocide of the Holocaust. Add into this the suspicions about the Pope's past as a Hitler Youth and German soldier and that magnifies the public's distaste for his awful decision.

Second, there is a strong majority of people within the Church who understand that by definition a traditional religion cannot be quickly modernized but still want to see evidence that it is moving forward, not backward. The Pope's rehabilitation of retrograde theologians sends signals to the laity that the Vatican has shifted gears into reverse.

Hence the outcry intensifies. [Hat tip to Henry, thanks.]

Breitbart.com reports in excellent detail:

Call for pope to step down over Holocaust denier

Attacks on Pope Benedict XVI's decision to lift the excommunication of a Holocaust denier escalated Monday, with one theologian calling on him to step down as the head of the Roman Catholic Church.

Criticism following the pope's January 24 announcement has been particularly cutting in Germany, where denying the Holocaust is a crime punishable with a jail sentence.

"If the pope wants to do some good for the Church, he should leave his job," eminent liberal Catholic theologian Hermann Haering told the German daily Tageszeitung.

"That would not be a scandal, a bishop has to relinquish his position at 75 years, a cardinal loses his rights at 80 years," he said. Pope Benedict is 81.

Meanwhile, a senior Vatican official acknowledged the Vatican administration may have made "management errors" with the decision to lift excommunication against four bishops, including Richard Williamson, whose comments sparked the controversy.

"I observe the debate with great concern. There were misunderstandings and management errors in the Curia," said Cardinal Walter Kasper, who is in charge of the Vatican department that deals with Jewish relations.

"The Pope wanted to open the debate because he wanted unity inside and outside," the German cardinal told Vatican Radio.

He also noted that "these bishops are still suspended."

An international uproar followed the decision to rehabilitate Williamson, an English bishop who has dismissed as "lies" historical evidence that six million Jews were gassed by the Nazis during World War II. Jews and Catholics alike have produced widespread criticism.

"A pardon that tastes of poison," wrote Franco Garelli, an expert in religious history, in Italy's daily La Stampa Monday.

"The trouble caused by this complicated affair is evident not only outside the Church but within it," wrote the academic, who spoke of the "profound discomfort stirred up by the lifting of the excommunication in numerous Catholic circles."

Back in Germany, high-ranking Catholic officials said the pope risked losing vital support.

"There is obviously a loss of confidence" in the pope and "rehabilitating a denier is always a bad idea," the bishop of Hamburg, Werner Thissen, told the daily Hamburger Abendblatt on Monday.

The bishop of Rottenburg-Stuttgart, Gebhard Furst, meanwhile spoke of his "uncertainty, incomprehension and deception" in the national Bild.

In France, home to Europe's largest Jewish population, chief rabbi Gilles Bernheim denounced Williamson's remarks as "despicable" in an interview with Le Monde.

Williamson claimed that only between 200,000 and 300,000 Jews died before and during World War II, and none in the gas chambers.

French government spokesman Luc Chatel called Williamson's remarks "unacceptable, abject and intolerable."

In Austria, where Pope Benedict last week named a controversial ultra-conservative priest as auxiliary bishop in Linz, criticism also came from within the Church.

Vienna's cardinal and archbishop, Christoph Schoenborn, on Sunday lashed out at the decision to bring Williamson back into the fold, saying that "he who denies the Holocaust cannot be rehabilitated within the Church."

Belgian daily La Libre Belgique slammed the Vatican's "blindness" and "deafness," drawing links between Williamson and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

"Apparently no one can make the Iranian president and his henchman see reason" when they deny the "truth" of the Holocaust, and it is the same with the "bishop recently anointed by the highest authority of the Catholic Church," it said.

For the pope, the "blunder is extraordinary, especially given that his willingness for a dialogue with Judaism is indisputable," said French daily Liberation.

To Roman Catholics Worldwide: Nostra Chutzpah. We Jews Respect You

The activities of Pope Benedict XVI and the Catholic Church with regard to the Jews and to Israel is an item on the agenda of this blog. Our interest has been refocused by the recent circus surrounding the reinstatement of a Holocaust denying renegade bishop named Richard Williamson.

We Jews do respect our Catholic brethren. This below is our momentous statement to that effect, and like the source of our inspiration for this statement, we include mentions of our respect for Islam, Buddhism and Hinduism as well.

Background: In order to make the attitude of the Jews towards non-Jewish religions clear I have cited verbatim, paraphrased and condensed a classic Catholic declaration.

Please forgive me. If it sounds pompous, condescending or triumphal, unclear or obfuscating, of course that's because of my shortcomings as a paraphraser, not because of the tone or intent of the original.

Okay. For those who may not actually "get it" let me warn you that this is meant as a parody. It is not intended to be a systematic statement of Jewish faith in any way, shape or form. The parody does adhere rather closely to the Vatican's Nostra Aetate of 1965, long hailed as a breakthrough of some sort. It's important for us constantly to look back and reconsider what happened in the past and to determine what tasks lie ahead. It's equally important for us to hold up to others in a mirror certain publications, statements and attitudes and to hope that by so doing they will see something new.

In all parody there is at least a hint of humor. That may be difficult for the religious type to stomach. Again, consider yourself warned.

Here is our re-draft.

DECLARATION ON THE RELATION OF THE JEWS
TO NON-JEWISH RELIGIONS

NOSTRA CHUTZPAH

PROCLAIMED BY HIS ORDINARINESS

BLOGGER TZVEE I

FEBRUARY 1, 2009

1. In our time, when day by day humankind is being drawn closer together, and the ties between different peoples are becoming stronger, the Jews examine more closely their relationship to non-Jewish religions. In our task of promoting unity and love among humans, indeed among nations, we consider above all in this declaration what humans have in common and what draws them to fellowship.

One is the community of all peoples, one their origin, for God made the whole human race to live over the face of the earth. One also is their final goal, God. His providence, His manifestations of goodness, His saving design extend to all humans, until that time -- enunciated by our prophets -- when not just the elect, but all humans, will be united in the Holy City, the city ablaze with the glory of God, where the nations will walk in His light.

Humans expect from the various religions answers to the unsolved riddles of the human condition, which today, even as in former times, deeply stir the hearts of humans: What is a human? What is the meaning, the aim of our life? What is moral good, what sin? Whence suffering and what purpose does it serve? Which is the road to true happiness? What are death, judgment and retribution after death? What, finally, is that ultimate inexpressible mystery which encompasses our existence: whence do we come, and where are we going?

2. From ancient times down to the present, there is found among various peoples a certain perception of that hidden power which hovers over the course of things and over the events of human history; at times some indeed have come to the recognition of a Supreme Being, or even of a Parent. This perception and recognition penetrates their lives with a profound religious sense.

We know it is chutzpah to reduce world Religions to mere sentences. Nevertheless we will do so.

Religions that are bound up with an advanced culture have struggled to answer the same questions by means of more refined concepts and a more developed language. Thus in Hinduism, humans contemplate the divine mystery and express it through an inexhaustible abundance of myths and through searching philosophical inquiry. They seek freedom from the anguish of our human condition either through ascetic practices or profound meditation or a flight to God with love and trust. Again, Buddhism, in its various forms, realizes the radical insufficiency of this changeable world; it teaches a way by which humans, in a devout and confident spirit, may be able either to acquire the state of perfect liberation, or attain, by their own efforts or through higher help, supreme illumination. Likewise, other religions found everywhere try to counter the restlessness of the human heart, each in its own manner, by proposing "ways," comprising teachings, rules of life, and sacred rites.

We Jews reject nothing that is true and holy in these religions. We regard with sincere reverence those ways of conduct and of life, those precepts and teachings which, though differing in many aspects from the ones we holds and set forth, nonetheless often reflect a ray of that Truth which enlightens all humans. Indeed, we proclaim, and ever must proclaim, "Hear O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is one," in whom humans may find the fullness of religious life, in whom God has reconciled all things.

The Jews, therefore, exhort our children, that through dialogue and collaboration with the followers of other religions, carried out with prudence and love and in witness to the Jewish faith and life, we recognize, preserve and promote the good things, spiritual and moral, as well as the socio-cultural values found among these humans.

3. The Jews regard with esteem also the Moslems. They adore the one God, living and subsisting in Himself; merciful and all- powerful, the Creator of heaven and earth, who has spoken to humans; they take pains to submit wholeheartedly to even His inscrutable decrees, just as Abraham, with whom the faith of Islam takes pleasure in linking itself, submitted to God. True they do not accept the Torah as binding. We note with approval that they do not acknowledge Jesus as God, though they revere Him as a prophet. In their credit, they await the day of judgment when God will render their deserts to all those who have been raised up from the dead. Finally, they value the moral life and worship God especially through prayer, almsgiving and fasting.

Since in the course of centuries not a few quarrels and hostilities have arisen between Jews and Moslems, this ordinary blogger urges all to forget the past and to work sincerely for mutual understanding and to preserve as well as to promote together for the benefit of all mankind social justice and moral welfare, as well as peace and freedom.

4. As the ordinary blogger searches into the mystery of the Jewish people, he remembers the bond that spiritually ties the people of the Torah to the misguided Christians who have abandoned the Torah.

Thus the Jewish people acknowledges that, according to God's saving design, the core of our faith and our election are found among the Patriarchs, Moses and the prophets. We profess that all who believe in Abraham's sons according to faith are included in the same Patriarch's call, and that the salvation of the Jews is symbolized by the chosen people's exodus from the land of bondage. We Jews received the revelation of the Torah as the people with whom God in His inexpressible mercy concluded the Ancient Covenant.

We forgive the Church for the errors of the words of the Apostle about his kinsmen: "theirs is the sonship and the glory and the covenants and the law and the worship and the promises; theirs are the fathers and from them is the Christ according to the flesh" (Rom. 9:4-5), the Son of the Virgin Mary. We forgive that the Apostles, the Church's main-stay and pillars, as well as most of the early disciples who proclaimed Christ's Gospel to the world, sprang in error from the rejection of the Torah of the Jewish people.

As Christian Scripture testifies, Jerusalem did not recognize the time of her visitation, nor did the Jews in large number, accept the Christian Gospel; indeed not a few opposed its spreading. We do believe that God holds us Jews most dear for the sake of our Fathers. We forgive the false witness of the Apostle. In company with the Prophets and the same Apostle, we forgive that the Church mistakenly awaits that day, known to God alone, on which all peoples will address the Lord in a single voice and "serve him shoulder to shoulder" as Christians, and not as Jews.

Since the spiritual patrimony common to Christians and Jews is thus so great, this ordinary blogger wants to foster and recommend that mutual understanding and respect which is the fruit, above all, of biblical and theological studies as well as of fraternal dialogues.

We forgive the libel and slander of the the Church who said for millenia that the Jewish authorities and those who followed their lead pressed for the death of Christ. We forgive that for centuries that the Church charged what happened in Jesus on the cross against all the Jews, without distinction, then alive, and by some still against the Jews of today. We forgive that the Church while pretending to be the new people of God, presented us Jews for centuries as rejected or accursed by God, as if this followed from their Scriptures. We forgive that yet in 1965 the Church proclaimed in disdain of the religions of the world that, "All should see to it, then, that in catechetical work or in the preaching of the word of God they do not teach anything that does not conform to the truth of the Gospel and the spirit of Christ."

We Jews find obvious and beneath necessity to mention our rejection of every persecution against any person.

The New Testament and teachings of the Church are full of complete range of statements and teachings of antisemitism. Sincere rejection of evil teachings merits that each of them needs to be thoroughly rejected and removed from Church teachings and even from the scriptures themselves. Hence we Jews find perfunctory, condescending and insincere the statements of the Church such as, "Mindful of the patrimony she shares with the Jews and moved not by political reasons but by the Gospel's spiritual love, decries hatred, persecutions, displays of anti-Semitism, directed against Jews at any time and by anyone."

We find ironic and inscrutable those Church teachings linked to the subject of centuries of the Church's Jew hatred and persection that mysteriously avow love without expressing an iota of remorse, "Besides, as the Church has always held and holds now, Christ underwent His passion and death freely, because of the sins of men and out of infinite love, in order that all may reach salvation. It is, therefore, the burden of the Church's preaching to proclaim the cross of Christ as the sign of God's all-embracing love and as the fountain from which every grace flows."

5. We Jews agree with the Church that, "No foundation therefore remains for any theory or practice that leads to discrimination between man and man or people and people, so far as their human dignity and the rights flowing from it are concerned." Given its history of centuries of brutality and persecution of Jews and others, we reject that the Catholic Church has any right to determine or to declare what is "human dignity."

We Jews agree with the Church and reprove any discrimination against humans or harassment of them because of their race, color, condition of life, or religion. We Jews await the day that has not yet come when the Christian leadership in the Vatican "maintain good fellowship among the nations" (1 Peter 2:12), rather than denying the Holocaust, decrying other religions as false, seeking to convert the faithful from around the globe, and in general acting in a pompous, condescending or triumphal voice, as if they alone have the spiritual path to all that is right and true.

[May that day come speedily and in our time. Amen.]