Vatican slams priest's comments on Pius

The Vatican on Friday condemned as "unjustified and inopportune" a claim by a church official that pressure from Jewish organizations is delaying the beatification of Pope Pius XII, the wartime pontiff who critics say didn't do enough to stop the Holocaust.

The Rev. Peter Gumpel, a German Jesuit who is spearheading Pius' cause, said at a conference in Rome that Pope Benedict XVI was "impressed" by warnings that relations with Jews would be ruined if he put the World War II pontiff on the road to sainthood.

Some historians and Jewish groups say Pius didn't do enough to prevent or limit the scope of the Holocaust. The Vatican insists Pius used quiet diplomacy to try to help Jews.

The ANSA news agency quoted Gumpel as saying that in recent meetings Jewish leaders had told Benedict that "relations between the Catholic church and Jews would be definitively and permanently compromised" by Pius' beatification.

The Vatican quickly issued a statement, saying that it is "exclusively" up to the pope to decide on a beatification, which is the last step before sainthood, and that Benedict "must be left completely free in his considerations and decisions."

"If the pope thinks that the study and the reflection on Pius XII's cause should still be prolonged, this position must be respected without interfering with unjustified and inopportune statements," the Vatican said.



A phone number for Gumpel rang busy Friday evening.

Jewish leaders also criticized the priest's comments, with Rome's Chief Rabbi Riccardo Di Segni denying that Jews were responsible for any delay.

Pius' beatification "is first of all an internal problem of the church," Di Segni told ANSA. "It is clearly a complex matter that divides the church itself."

Last year, Jewish leaders asked the pope to speed up the opening of the Vatican's secret archives on Pius' papacy to settle the issue of what he did or didn't do to save Jews.

According to participants in the October meeting, Benedict said he would give "serious consideration" to their request to freeze the sainthood process until the archives were opened. continues here

We back Israel 100pc, says America

US President Barack Obama called protecting Israel's security a "top priority" when welcoming Israel's President Shimon Peres to the White House on Tuesday.


Later, a delighted Peres said: "There is no space between us and the United States."

But in a sign of the differences between the views of the two new governments, in an earlier meeting with Vice-President Joseph Biden, Peres said ending natural growth in settlements was a non-starter.

"Israel cannot instruct settlers in existing settlements not to have children or get married," Peres added.

Biden had told the American Israel Public Affairs Committee earlier in the day that settlement expansion must stop and called on Palestinians and the Arab world to make "meaningful gestures" to advance peace.

” President Barack Obama called protecting Israel's security a "top priority"….”

Peres also rejected the idea of "linkage" between the Palestinian and Iranian issues - two topics the US administration has frequently mentioned together.

Before his meeting with Obama, Peres said Israel had not demanded that the US set a time limit on its negotiations with Iran.

"Israel doesn't give the US an ultimatum," he said after meeting Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

He added that the US and Israel were "100 per cent" on the same page when it came to Iran but that the issue of a time frame was misleading.

He explained that it was impossible to "set a clock" because events were "fluid and volatile" and would dictate the pace.

But earlier, Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman reportedly declared that action would need to be taken if three months of diplomacy elapsed with no results. continues here

Washington's elders of anti-Zion

AIPAC's annual conference opened this week to the auspicious news that the US Justice Department will drop its case against two former AIPAC employees on espionage-related charges based on a 90-year-old statute. But the original charges brought against Steve Rosen and Keith Weissman left some friends of Israel uneasy over the calumny of American Jews' "dual loyalty." In recent weeks, the case escalated with accusations that Congresswoman Jane Harman, a strong congressional friend of Israel, attempted to influence the case.

In March the queasiness was widespread in the pro-Israel community after Charles "Chas" Freeman claimed that the Israel lobby torpedoed his appointment to head the US National Intelligence Council. "The aim of this lobby," Freeman told reporters, "is control of the policy process through the exercise of a veto over the appointment of people who dispute the wisdom of its views." One result, he continued, is "the inability of the American public to discuss, or the government to consider, any option for US policies in the Middle East opposed by the ruling faction in Israeli politics."

Freeman's complaints echo the widely-criticized 2007 book, The Israel Lobby by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, in which the authors claim that the Israel lobby's core consists of "American Jews who make a significant effort in their daily lives to bend US foreign policy so that it advances Israel's interests."

And all this came after former president Jimmy Carter published his anti-Israel screed, Palestine Peace Not Apartheid in 2006.

BY NO MEANS should anyone ignore or minimize the Washington leaks and attacks against AIPAC, the American Jewish community or Israel. But it should be understood that these actions are part of a historic, decades-long, beneath-the-surface low-intensity war in Washington to weaken US-Israel relations. Not much has changed since an Arab propagandist in the US, Muhammad Mehdi, proclaimed some 40 years ago, "The road to the liberation of Palestine leads through Washington."

In more than 35 years of my involvement in US-Israeli relations, I have seen the ebbs and surges of various anti-Israel campaigns. Once the anti-Israel crusade was led or conducted by senator J. William Fulbright and congressman Paul Findley, assisted by Jewish anti-Zionists like Elmer Berger and the apostate Alfred Lilienthal, and supported by Arab propagandists and oil interests. In the 1960s and '70s the legislators charged that American policy in the Middle East was too pro-Israel and that Congress was corrupted.

In 1962 Fulbright launched an investigation of foreign lobbyists in Washington, attempting to force AIPAC to register as an agent of Israel rather than a domestic American lobby. His chief investigator was a journalist named Walter Pincus. (Today, Pincus, The Washington Post's veteran national security reporter, helps cover the Jane Harman story and the Rosen-Weissman trial.)

"Israel controls the United States Senate," Fulbright told Face the Nation in 1973. "Around 80 percent are completely in support of Israel; anything Israel wants it gets. Jewish influence in the House of Representatives is even greater." (Years later, after retiring from the Senate, Fulbright registered as a foreign agent for Saudi Arabia.)

Freeman, Walt, and Mearsheimer are but parrots of Fulbright and under secretary of state George Ball who wrote a 1977 Foreign Affairs article, "How to Save Israel in Spite of Itself." Ball declared more than 30 years ago, "How far should we go in continuing to subsidize a policy shaped to accommodate understandable Israeli compulsions which do not accord with the best interests - as we see it - either of Israel or the United States, but are a threat to world peace?... Because many articulate Americans are passionately committed to Israel, the slightest challenge to any aspect of current Israeli policy is likely to provoke a shrill ad hominem response. To suggest that America should take a stronger and more assertive line in the search for Middle East peace is to risk being attacked as a servant either of Arab interests or of the oil companies, or being denounced as anti-Israel, or, by a careless confusion of language, even condemned as anti-Semitic."

In the mid-1970s, secretary of state Henry Kissinger, frustrated by Israel's tough negotiating position and encouraged by Ball, pushed president Gerald Ford to conduct a "reassessment" of relations with Israel. After AIPAC rallied strong congressional opposition to the administration's proposed policy change, AIPAC was investigated by the Justice Department to see if it should register as a foreign agent of Israel. The investigators concluded, "There is not one shred of evidence that AIPAC should be registered as a foreign agent."

AS RONALD REAGAN's vice president, George H. Bush reportedly led the efforts to embargo F-16 aircraft shipments to Israel after the bombing of the Iraqi reactor in 1981. In 1991 as president, Bush went toe-to-toe with the American Jewish community when he sought to tie loan guarantees, which Israel needed to provide housing for the massive aliya of Soviet Jews, to restrictions on the building of settlements in the West Bank and Gaza. When Jewish organizations went up to Capitol Hill to lobby for the aid, Bush went on national TV, pounded his fists and declared that he was "up against some powerful political forces... I heard today, there were something like a thousand lobbyists on the Hill working the other side of the question. We've got one lonely little guy [the president] down here doing it."

Bush went on to chip away at public support for Israel by claiming that American soldiers had "risked their lives to defend Israelis" in the Gulf War and that "despite our own economic problems the United States provided Israel with more than $4 billion in economic and military aid, nearly $1,000 for every Israeli man, woman and child." continues here

BT shuts down ‘anti-Semitic’ Catholic website

BT HAS banned a religious website critical of extremist Jews that it has hosted for four years following a campaign from a group of MPs claimed it was anti-Semitic.

It is understood to be the first time that a website in Britain has been shut down under such circumstances.

The website, www.catholicvoice.co.uk, takes an inflammatory stance over extreme sections of Judaism that reject non-Jewish races.

The website editor, Timothy Johnson from Sheffield, a radical Catholic, told the

” the action highlights a growing campaign against critics of the actions of extremist Jews and is a breach of free debate in a free society”

Sunday Herald last night he was the subject of a "smear" campaign. He and his supporters say the action highlights a growing campaign against critics of the actions of extremist Jews and is a breach of free debate in a free society.

The site was shut after John Mann, chairman of the All-Party Parliamentary Committee on anti-Semitism, raised an early day motion supported by other MPs, including Glenda Jackson and Labour MP for Livingston Jim Devine.

Mann says the website is "vile and anti-Semitic" and "seeks to inspire hate against the Jewish community amongst others".

He complained to BT subsidiary Plusnet, which hosts the site, about the content, saying the site had "anti-Semitism on every page".

BT passes all internet traffic through a service called Cleanfeed, which uses data provided by the Internet Watch Foundation - a non-profit, non-government-affiliated organisation - to identify illegal content such as indecent photographs of children and racist and criminally obscene material.

But the site's content has not caused any issue for BT until now.

Although IWF's blacklist causes content to be censored even if it has not been found to be illegal by a court of law, IWF director of communications Sarah Robertson claimed in December that the IWF is opposed to the censorship of legal content.

BT would not discuss the specifics of why it had closed Catholic Voice now, but confirmed it was the result of the complaint.

Mann said: "Those who are writing, commissioning and uploading vile hate speech should face the full force of the law."

In his letter to Plusnet, he said: "The website that I understand is hosted through your organisation has been brought to my attention. It is deeply offensive in content - racist, anti-Semitic and discriminatory - and therefore in violation of your own hosting policy."

He complained in particular about two statements on the websites. The first - "To call Jesus a Jew is blasphemy" - was the heading for an explosive theological essay on Christ's origins.

Mr Johnson says the second - "Jews are followers of Satan" - has never appeared on the site.

Though not mentioned by either BT or Mann, the website more recently defended Richard Williamson, the Catholic bishop who questions whether millions of Jews died in Nazi gas chambers.

It is now understood Johnson is looking to find a host in another country, having accused BT of "hounding" the site off the internet.

He said the action underlines growing concern that critics of radical Jews in the 21st century - highlighted in the Israel-Hamas conflict - are being dismissed as fascists, tapping into a fear of Nazism.

He believes the actions raise concerns about civil liberties and the free discussion of controversial and provocative subjects on the internet. continues here

Aide to Rahm Emanuel: Obama pro-Israel

US president-elect starts selecting top gov't officials, but son of Israeli immigrant yet to accept White House chief of staff offer; aide to Emanuel tells Ynet, 'He would not consider role if he wasn't convinced Obama is pro-Israel'  

WASHINGTON - Despite reports in US media that Illinois Democratic Rep. Rahm Emanuel has accepted US president-elect Barack Obama's offer to serve as White House chief of staff, a source close to Emanuel told Ynet he has not yet accepted and was still considering the offer due to personal and family reasons. 

Emanuel is the son of American Jew and Israeli immigrant Dr. Benjamin Emanuel. The source told Ynet on Wednesday, "Emanuel is pro-Israeli, and would not be willing to consider accepting the job unless he was convinced that President-elect Obama is pro-Israel."

Michael Kotzin, executive vice president of the Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Chicago, said that Emanuel very often attends Israel-related events such as independence day and the yearly parade for Israel. 

"He brings his young children to the events, and told me that his father used to bring him as a child to Israel-related events. These are events with large crowds, and when Rahm Emanuel attends, he also speaks to the crowd about Israel," Kotzin said. 

Meanwhile, Obama continues to consult with his advisors about appointments, and starting Thursday morning will receive daily classified intelligence briefings similar to what is given to the president. Vice president-elect Joe Biden will also be taking part in some of the briefings. 

The most prominent candidate for White House spokesman is Robert Gibbs, who was Obama's communications director in the Senate and in his presidential campaign. 

CBS reported that Obama would not rush into any decisions regarding his cabinet, and would wait until after Thanksgiving to announce his appointments. 

Reports in American media also revealed that Obama was considering appointing two Kennedys as part of his cabinet. 

Politico.com reported that Caroline Kennedy, daughter of assassinated president John Kennedy, was being considered for US ambassador to the United Nations.  continues here

Lord’s Prayer debate reignited

THE debate over the Lord’s Prayer – an Anglican prayer recited in parliaments around the country has been reignited by new federal MP Rob Oakeshott.

Oakeshott, an independent from New South Wales, said he was “surprised and disappointed” that Australia’s indigenous population is not recognised daily in Canberra.

In response, the Speaker of the House of Representatives Harry Jenkins called for public debate over whether the Lord’s Prayer should continue to be recited each day by all parliamentarians. He suggested that the prayer might be rewritten or replaced.

Robert Goot, president of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, explained that his organisation does not have a set policy on the recitation of the Lord’s Prayer. He said that the group’s executive would discuss the matter shortly.

Rabbi Meir Shlomo Kluwgant, president of the Rabbinical Council of Victoria (RCV), said it had discussed the matter with former Victorian premier Steve Bracks. The RCV recommended that a generic prayer be introduced, which would be acceptable to members of all faiths.

While the Victorian Parliament opted to retain the Lord’s Prayer, Rabbi Kluwgant said that he nevertheless feels it is “crucial” for some sort of prayer to be recited before each parliamentary session.

The Prime Minister and Opposition Leader – both of whom are Christians – this week expressed their support for retaining the Lord’s Prayer.

  “Opening the Australian Parliament each day with the Lord’s Pray is an important reminder of our shared humanity and a reference to the words of our constitution when “humbly relying on the blessing of the Almighty God” we established the Commonwealth of Australia over 100 years ago,” Turnbull said via a statement.

Greens leader Senator Bob Brown suggested that after the Lord’s Prayer has been recited, senators and MPs should be given a moment to reflect on “the privileges and responsibilities of representing Australians in our national parliament”. 

He also endorsed Oakeshott’s call to recognise the first Australians.

In 1997, Senator Brown called for a review of the Lord’s Prayer.  continues here
 

Jewish lobby threatens Candy brothers' US deal

They are the feted brothers of London's luxury property market whose services are courted by film stars and Russian oligarchs alike. In just 12 years, the Candy brothers' brand of bespoke opulence for the super rich has brought them wealth and kudos in Britain. But in striving to secure a place at the top table among the movers and shakers of California, the brothers, both in their 30s, are facing a serious problem.


Christian and Nick Candy, who with a £6,000 loan from their grandmother built a property design business worth an estimated £9bn, are now trying to allay the fears of members of the influential Jewish community in Beverly Hills over their associations with Middle Eastern financial backers.

At the heart of the controversy is a prime eight-acre £250m development in Beverly Hills, California, which the brothers are using as a first foothold in Hollywood's high-end property market.

According to the influential Beverly Hills Blog, local councillors, egged on by angry Jewish residents, have challenged the brothers to declare their links with the wealthy Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim bin Jaber al-Thani, the Prime Minister of Qatar and part owner of a Middle Eastern newspaper that the Californians accuse of being anti-Semitic and anti-American. The sheikh and the Qatari government have bankrolled a number of the brothers' developments in London, including the £900m acquisition of the Chelsea Barracks.

While the brothers' Middle Eastern links are of little concern in London, any suggestion that the sheikh is connected to 9900 Wilshire, the name given to the Candy brothers' LA development, is a different matter. The Beverly Hills Jewish community is sensitive about doing business with some Middle Eastern states and investors. J A Mirisch, the Hollywood film distributor behind the Beverly Hills Blog, says: "Are we really so desperate that we need to welcome into our community people who incite to further hatred against Jews and Americans, or, for that matter, people who see fit do business with such anti-Semites and America-haters?" continues here