The Pope’s Keffiyeh

The picture of the frail and wheelchair-bound Pope unveiling a nativity scene at the Vatican should have been completely uncontroversial. It is December after all and Christians across the globe are gearing up to celebrate the birth of the founder of their faith.

Not this time. The baby in the crib the pope found so moving, was positioned lying on top of a Palestinian keffiyeh.

Apologists and excusers for the Pontiff rushed to deny that the Church was intending any political statement.

Garbage.

The Vatican is a city state filled with sophisticated politicians, even if they do wear sandals and cassocks. If anyone tells you they were not fully aware of the message they were sending, they are insulting your intelligence or assuming you suffer from galactic naivety.

The Church has struggled long and hard to launder the stain of antisemitism and accommodation of Hitler by Pope Pius XII during World War II. As John Cornwell’s definitive work on the subject, Hitler’s Pope makes clear; they failed. From a rapprochement of sorts between the Vatican and the Jewish people, which took place in the 60s, the end of the twentieth and beginning of the twenty-first centuries has seen a gradual but sustained erosion of that rapprochement.

Today, when the State of Israel and the Jewish people are facing a 1930s re-run across the globe, to offer this inexcusable insult to the Jewish nation marks a tipping point and a huge and clear shift in the Church’s position.

It now gives credence and support to Islamist madness that Jesus was a “Palestinian” and to the screaming online mob who are foaming at the mouth over a Jewish actress playing the part of the founder of Christianity’s mother in the upcoming Netflix film “Mary.”

It’s not the only institution to have shifted.

The current Democratic party’s shift away from supporting Jews and the Jewish State has also been gradual. Ex-British Prime Minister, David Cameron demonstrated that he is no great friend of the Jews in his most recent iteration, as the recent British Foreign Secretary. Yet he still felt able to say about Barak Obama, “Obama was, I believed, the most pro-Arab, pro-Palestinian president in history.”

From a politician of his experience that was diplomatic-speak for saying, “Obama was, I believed, the most anti-Jewish, anti-Israeli president in history.”

Obama’s meteoric rise from Democratic nominee to president is therefore as good a place as any to observe that party’s change and see where it is today.

It would be stupid not to recognize there are plenty of good people still in the Democratic party who abhor the Squad and other of their most extreme party members.

However, as writer Melanie Philips makes clear; anti-Israel/anti-Jewishness is the pledge of allegiance to truly belong to the Left now.

That change was and is all too identifiable in today’s Democratic party and in the most worrying actions and inactions of the Biden/Harris administration to antisemitism both inside and outside America.

The same shift and the same timeline can be useful to measure how thoroughly and dramatically the same change has penetrated and permeated America’s overwhelmingly Left media. The same is true of its campuses and as the Pope and his nativity scene show, the Catholic Church.

I was contacted recently by one of the many Christian pastors I used to know from my days working on campus and in the UK’s media. He wrote to express his outrage at what he called, “the Vatican’s vile stunt”…but he was the only one.

The desertion of the Jewish people since October 7 by non-Jewish friends they believed would stand shoulder to shoulder with us this time, in the way they didn’t during the 1930s, has shocked many Jews. There are thousands of expressions of their pain and disbelief displayed across social media.

Even very old friends have watched pro-Hamas propaganda appear on the pages of people they valued and loved or been blocked by them altogether for the crime of being a Jew.

I rather smugly thought myself immune to this kind of hurt and disappointment. As an Orthodox Jew I am very familiar with the words of that famous Jewish leader and teacher, King David, “Don’t trust in rulers or human beings.”

But I too can stumble when it comes to making assumptions about old friends. That was certainly the case when in January of this year I wrote to the new editor in chief of the WSJ, Emma Tucker.

I claimed that there was a gradual shift away from the WSJ’s balanced coverage of the Israel-Hamas war.

I explained that I was a regular broadcaster on BBC TV and National Radio for twenty years until I resigned two years ago in protest at what I saw as their antisemitism.

I told her that… “I am a columnist for several Jewish newspapers, an author, and I speak to audiences all over the world.”

My main concern was the paper’s reporting of casualty figures by the Gaza Health Authority…

“The WSJ’s formula is usually to “qualify” such statements with the formula that the Palestinian Health Authority “does not distinguish between fighters and civilians.”

I do not believe that formula is sufficient to convey the message I assume it endeavors to impart.

The BBC, generally seen as openly partisan on this issue, is surprisingly clearer than the WSJ on the matter. When quoting casualty figures from the PHA they add the caveat, “Which is controlled by Hamas.”

I invited her response for this piece. None came.

The more I dug, the more I found to attest to the “gradual” shift away from the WSJ’s balanced coverage. The paper had itself reported on the proven statistical impossibility and unreliability of the Hamas-run PHA’s casualty claims. Eventually, I was able to arrange a meeting with two recently fired WSJ employees (Ms. Tucker has been busy firing lots of people recently). They were able to confirm the existence of pro and anti-Israel elements at the paper and the tension that has caused between staff.

The WSJ now routinely omits that weak qualification about no distinction between fighters and civilians altogether. A paper that has written about Hamas/PHA statistics being crude propaganda with no reliability, now routinely cites them as true.

There is a moment where a tiny crack becomes a rift that then goes on to rip something apart.

Aircraft engineers search for hairline cracks that might grow and cause a plane to crash. Ship engineers check their vessel’s hull for leaks for similar reasons. But there comes a point where something previously hard to see and to prove becomes so obvious that it requires no proof.

That point for the Church was reached and became obvious when a Pope unveils a de-Judified Palestinian Jesus and stands with people whose stated goal is to finish the job Hitler started.

It comes for the Democratic party when it elects the “most pro-Arab, pro-Palestinian president in history,” and then supports his successor sending billions of dollars to America’s enemy Iran, while withholding weapons from its ally, Israel.

That point comes for one of our last friends in America’s corrupt media landscape when it cites Hamas statistics despite knowing that they are lies.