Lovely: German Bishops Compare West Bank to Warsaw Ghetto
Of all the people in the world who ought to be careful about making insensitive remarks comparing Jews to Nazis, you think high among them would be German Catholic religious leaders. Unfortunately that is not the case.Yad Vashem lambasted a group of visiting German Catholic bishops on Tuesday for comparing the situation in the Palestinian territories with the Holocaust, calling the contentious remarks "political exploitation and demagoguery" and a gross distortion of history.
The sharp condemnation ... followed reports in the German press of comparisons made by senior German bishops between conditions in the Warsaw Ghetto during World War II and current conditions in Ramallah, resulting from Israeli military activities.
"The remarks illustrate a woeful ignorance of history and a distorted sense of perspective," Yad Vashem Chairman Avner Shalev wrote in a Tuesday letter to Cardinal Karl Lehmann, who led the Conference of German Catholic Bishops on a 10-day visit to Israel and the Palestinian territories.
Making analogies between the mass murder that was part of the plan to annihilate the Jewish people, carried out under the German Nazi regime and the current situation in Ramallah, and using words whose rhetorical power is immense, does nothing to help us understand what is going on today; such words only further poison the atmosphere making it that much more difficult to find workable solutions to deeply entrenched and thorny problems.
"These unwarranted and offensive comparisons serve to diminish the memory of victims of the Holocaust and mollify the consciences of those who seek to lessen European responsibility for Nazi crimes," he wrote.
Labels: Holocaust, Palestine, Religion
posted by Alcibiades @ 2:14 AM
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