HOWARD EPSTEIN – ISRAEL LETTER Jan. 23, 2022
Last week, in my spoof predictions for 2022, I referred to the 125 UN member states who voted to fund an on-going enquiry into “Israeli war crimes”. This week, I take a rather more serious and critical view of this example of mass madness and malice.
For balance, we might ask, why there is no funding for research into Iranian human rights abuses? (It is an abuse to hang allegedly gay boys from crane jibs, is it not?) Or into the excesses of Hamas in Gaza who hold two million of their people captive, refusing to use the concrete they receive via Israel to build up, preferring to use it for attack-and-kidnap tunnelling into Israel? And into the war crimes of them both.
Israel is recognised by some (eg Lieutenant-Colonel Richard Kemp, British Army, ret.) as the most moral army in the world, going to extreme lengths to minimise civilian deaths in conflicts. Other conflicts can be many times bloodier, more oppressive and more indiscriminately conducted, but only Israel is to be investigated. According to Al-Jazeera, in 2020 Israel was condemned in the UN General assembly 17 times – the rest of the world six!
Where the abuse of human rights is concerned, there are many other offenders, some self-confessed. Pope John Paul II apologised on behalf of the Catholic Church to women – around 50% of the human race – as “they have often been relegated to the margins of society and even reduced to servitude”; to the victims of the Spanish Inquisition; for the forcible conversion of the indigenous peoples of Latin America; for the Muslims killed by the Crusaders; for Christian involvement in the African slave trade; for the Church’s role in burnings at the stake; for the religious wars following the Protestant Reformation; for the Crusaders’ “Sack of Constantinople” in 1204; for the countless Catholic sex abuse cases (all over the world); to the “Stolen Generations” of Aboriginal children in Australia, perpetrated by the Church; to China, for the behavior of Catholic missionaries in colonial times; and – in 1965 – to the Jews, all of whom were, till then, collectively held responsible for the murder by crucifixion of Jesus Christ.
Let me save you the trouble of counting them: that’s fully a dozen apologies for pernicious behaviour towards millions of people over two millennia.
Now we come to the big one, for its relevance to the UN (which after all voted Israel into existence by Resolution 181 on 29 November 1947). The Vicar of Christ on Earth also apologised for the comprehensive Catholic silence at, and failure to act during, the Holocaust.
But, sainted as John Paul II undoubtedly was (not least as compared with many of his predecessors, and one of his successors), he failed to mention the 1933 Concordat between the Church and Hitler – the first the Führer ever signed – accommodating the Church in regard to education, in return for there being no protest at the dissolution of the Catholic political party in Germany.
Another apology might properly be for the annual celebration by the Church of Hitler’s birthday. In case you are curious, “For he’s a jolly good fellow” goes like this in Latin:-
Iocundus enim est vir bonus (three times)
Et sic dicunt omnes nos
and so said all of Germany – and it must really have been something for the SS troops, resplendent in black uniform, complete with Totenkopf (death’s head) insignia, belting that out on 20th April every year, knowing that the Pontiff was with them all the way.
Not that you had to be Catholic to be complicit in the Shoah, for there must have been others, including atheists and agnostics, working in 1944/5 at the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force. It was they who, contrary to the wishes of Winston Churchill, deemed Auschwitz-Birkenau to be beyond the reach of their bombers, notwithstanding that the I G Farben works they did bomb were just a Jewish slave worker’s morning stroll from his hut, past the gas chambers and ovens, on his way to work, until he was shot, or beaten, or gassed, or worked, to death.
And Israel should feel guilty for its alleged war crimes? Do these people even know what a war crime looks like? Have they never heard of retaliation and self-defence?
This then is what an international kangaroo court looks like. Who is it in the UN that is (to borrow from Christianity) so blame-free that they may cast the first stone? Iran? China? Russia? Turkey? North Korea? Myanmar? Afghanistan? Venezuela?
According to Amnesty International, 82% of countries torture their own citizens. Israel and the UK are not amongst them (although the American record over extraordinary renditions is not digestible by those dedicated to Uncle Sam).
It’s tough out there all right, and life for Israel is not made any easier by one-sided, tendentious witch-hunts by some of the most evil entities in the world.
© Howard Epstein January 2022
