THE 6-MILLION-OR-SO-EYES-FOR-AN-EYE GANG

Lately I read that an Israeli tv network included joking suggestions that Mary was impregnated by a school friend when she was 15 and that Jesus died at an early age because he was fat. The first segment depicted Jesus as an obese man, who could not have walked on water. The second segment described Mary as a promiscuous teenager and showed an extremely pregnant woman in pink underwear patting her exposed belly.

Not surprisingly – and in contrast to the many spineless bishops and priests – the Vatican protested strenuously. The TV show host, Lior Schlein – rhymes with swine – replied, “If they deny the Holocaust, we will deny Christianity.”

This is a reference, though an inaccurate one, to British-born Bishop Richard Williamson, who does NOT deny the murder of large numbers of Jews by the Nazis, but, as do others, challenges the number usually claimed and estimates 200,000 to 300,000. Thus, the slurs against Christianity appear to have been prompted by a dispute over the number of people murdered.

Let’s assume, though, that Bishop Williamson, who was, incidentally, consecrated by a radical, without papal authority, and excommunicated for a time, denied the whole thing. Schlein and company have no hesitation about imputing Williamson’s opinion to all Christians and consequently to retaliate against the entire group.

Let’s assume next that all Christians deny the whole thing. This is STILL quite a different matter from denying the validity of Judaism or parodying it. It would be, instead, denying a belief held by numbers of people that practice Judaism but which conviction has NOTHING to do with the tenets of their faith. Is the difference not obvious?

This is the, by now, well-worn tactic of massive and frenetic retaliation for a rather local disruption; criticize something one Jew has done or said, and some of them, at least, seek to extrapolate and misrepresent that to an attack on them all, charge that the critic has inveterate, prejudicial hatred for them, and scream for redress. It’s the same as the country’s military operations; a lunatic shoots a rocket that kills an Israeli, and they commence a large-scale war that kills a thousand of the others. When will the community of nations get enough of this nonsense and cease tolerating, if not rewarding them for their dangerous tantrums?