This is a continuation from my last post about why I write about religion, but from a slightly different angle. While it was mentioned in the press, and Cardinal Pell responded to criticism of his comments about the Jews, and about the dire suffering of the Germans (believe it or not!), it seemed to me worth thinking about for a few more minutes, at least. Something like this should not be allowed to slip quietly under the radar. When cardinals make anti-Jewish remarks — that is, Christian ones — it may seem like a slip of the tongue, but it goes much deeper than that. It’s a bit like when Margaret Somerville says, without any tongue in cheek, that the only reason people are concerned about assisted dying is the intense individualism of contemporary Western society. That, of course, is the flip side of the pope’s concern about relativism. Relativism happens when you don’t agree with the pope. Individualism is intense when individuals claim rights the church is not prepared to countenance.
However, to the point. The epigram in the title (“How odd of God to choose the Jews”) is attributed to William Norman Ewer (1885-1976), one time foreign affairs correspondent for the London Daily Herald. Doubtless in intent an anti-Jewish witticism, it was countered, according to Wikipedia, by equally witty replies:
Not odd of God. / Goyim annoy ‘im
– attributed to Leo Rosen. Or:
But not so odd
As those who choose
A Jewish God
Yet spurn the Jews
– written by either Cecil Brown or Ogden Nash.
Why this sudden burst of interest in anti-Jewish wit and repartee? Well, as I said above, simply because Cardinal Pell, in his debate with Richard Dawkins on Australia Broadcasting Corporation’s “Q & A” the other day, lapsed into some surprising antisemitisms of his own, without any apparent reason or justification. Apparently, this Prince of the Church has apologised, but this should not mean that he should be given a free pass just because he has made pro forma apology. What he said was said before a TV audience and a viewing audience of hundreds of thousands if not millions, and now it’s posted on Youtube for all to see and hear. It was clearly unrehearsed, and thus it would seem expressed a view readily accessible to memory, no doubt because not seldom repeated. And saying that Jesus was the greatest human being who ever lived doesn’t do a thing to qualify the harm, because, for Christians, Jesus was rejected by the Jews, who thereby took the blame upon themselves and upon their children and their children’s children. But couple these remarks about the Jews with his comments about the suffering of the Germans and you end up with the obvious fact that antisemitism is a deeply rooted part of his mental economy.
Let’s start with the cardinal on the Jews.
For someone who claims to follow a Saviour who was not only a Jew, but who claimed that the last shall be first, and the lowest shall be the highest of all, this is an astonishing betrayal of his own faith. Only something as deep-rooted as racism can explain this extraordinary burst of amour propre, this disturbing tendency turn Jesus upside down. Yes, of course, I know that the last shall be first is hard to square with being a “prince” of the church, but at least you’d think he’d pretend, just to encourage us to think that he was sincere.
Now, let’s hear the cardinal on the suffering of the Germans.
Given that it was the Germans who almost succeeded in exterminating the Jews of Europe by cruelty and mass murder, how was it possible for the cardinal — who in a few moments, explaining that Catholics do not of course hate homosexuals, will say that Christians love everybody – to express the view that no one suffered so terribly as the Germans? He assigns Hitler a place in hell, and while we may not want to consign the whole German people to hell as Daniel Jonah Goldhagen would have us do (see his Hitler’s Willing Executioners), it is hard to believe that Hitler was solely responsible for the Nazi state’s horrendous “final solution to the Jewish problem,” and the suffering and slaughter of so many innocent people, whose only offence was to have been born to Jewish parents. (It is arguably significant in this connexion that a large number of SS members were not only Catholics, but communicating Catholics. Does the cardinal’s concern for German suffering reflect the fact that the present pope grew up in the shadow of Nazism, in an Austria that had become part of the greater German Reich?) Christianity itself has never taken any responsibility for the Holocaust, and yet as Hitler correctly stated, he never did anything to the Jews that Martin Luther had not recommended.
It is worth considering that last point in some detail. In his treatise “On the Jews and their lies,” Luther demanded the following treatment be accorded to the Jews:
First, to set fire to their synagogues or schools and to bury and cover with dirt whatever will not burn, so that no man will ever again see a stone or cinder of them. This is to be done in honor of our Lord and of Christendom, so that God might see that we are Christians, and do not condone or knowingly tolerate such public lying, cursing, and blaspheming of his Son and of his Christians. …
…
Second, I advise that their houses also be razed and destroyed. For they pursue in them the same aims as in their synagogues. Instead they might be lodged under a roof or in a barn, like the gypsies. This will bring home to them the fact that they are not masters in our country, as they boast, but that they are living in exile and in captivity, as they incessantly wail and lament about us before God.
Third, I advise that all their prayer books and Talmudic writings, in which such idolatry, lies, cursing, and blasphemy are taught, be taken from them.
Fourth, I advise that their rabbis be forbidden to teach henceforth on pain of loss of life and limb. …
Fifth, I advise that safe-conduct on the highways be abolished completely for the Jews. For they have no business in the countryside, since they are not lords, officials, tradesmen, or the like. Let them stay at home. … For you, too, must not and cannot protect them unless you wish to become participants in an their abominations in the sight of God. …
Sixth, I advise that usury be prohibited to them, and that all cash and treasure of silver and gold be taken from them and put aside for safekeeping. … Such money should now be used in no other way than the following: Whenever a Jew is sincerely converted, he should be handed one hundred, two hundred, or three hundred florins, as personal circumstances may suggest. With this he could set himself up in some occupation for the support of his poor wife and children, and the maintenance of the old or feeble. For such evil gains are cursed if they are not put to use with God’s blessing in a good and worthy cause.
…
Seventh, I recommend putting a flail, an ax, a hoe, a spade, a distaff, or a spindle into the hands of young, strong Jews and Jewesses and letting them earn their bread in the sweat of their brow, as was imposed on the children of Adam (Gen. 3 [:19]). For it is not fitting that they should let us accursed Goyim toil in the sweat of our faces while they, the holy people, idle away their time behind the stove, feasting and farting., and on top of all, boasting blasphemously of their lordship over the Christians by means of our sweat. No, one should toss out these lazy rogues by the seat of their pants.
But if we are afraid that they might harm us or our wives, children, servants, cattle, etc., if they had to serve and work for us — for it is reasonable to assume that such noble lords of the world and venomous, bitter worms are not accustomed to working and would be very reluctant to humble themselves so deeply before the accursed Goyim — then let us emulate the common sense of other nations such as France, Spain, Bohemia, etc., compute with them how much their usury has extorted from us, divide, divide this amicably, but then eject them forever from the country. For, as we have heard, God’s anger with them is so intense that gentle mercy will only tend to make them worse and worse, while sharp mercy will reform them but little. Therefore, in any case, away with them!
In view of this kind of deeply entrenched antisemitism, is it any wonder that Hitler’s Endlosung should have met with such favour and fervour amongst the German people during the period of Nazi rule? And is it any wonder that Cardinal Pell, notwithstanding his statement that he did not wish to offend Jewish sentiments, should have expressed himself in the way that he did? I am not at all surprised. What should surprise us is that someone like Martin Luther, capable of expressing such deadly prejudice against the Jews, should still be so highly regarded as a Christian reformer. Should someone express these views today, any other opinion that he might have would be instantly nullified. His status as a thinker of value and repute would be immediately and irremediably lost. Yet there are still Christian denominations that call themselves by his name!
The fact dawned on me late, perhaps somewhere in the mid-nineties. I was delivering my homily one Sunday morning, and I stopped, hesitated, fumbled some words, and realised, in a flash of recognition, that every time I used the Pharisees as a foil to Jesus’ sincerity — as the gospels do – I was actually using Christian antisemitism to make my point. In the gospels the Pharisee as hypocrite is the religious and moral background against which Jesus is presented and judged as transcendently superior to the Jews. In the Christian context the rejection of the Jews as legalistic and insincere and hyocritical is standard fare; very few recognise the antisemitism that it fed and still feeds. After his election and consecration as Bishop of Nova Scotia, the man who went on to become the primate of the Anglican Church of Canada, Archbishop Fred Hiltz, in his visitations throughout the diocese, used a sermon which was supposed to encourage Christians to see themselves as “living stones,” each person as part of the structure of the Church of God. It was based on this passage from the second chapter of the Letter of Peter:
Come to him [Jesus], a living stone, though rejected by mortals yet chosen and precious in God’s sight, and like living stones, let yourselves be built into a spiritual house, to be a holy priesthood, to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ. For it stands in scripture: “See, I am laying in Zion a stone, a cornerstone chosen and precious; and whoever believes in him will not be put to shame.” To you then who believe, he is precious; but for those who do not believe, “The stone that the builders rejected has become the very head of the corner [the keystone of the arch?],” and “A stone that makes them stumble, and a rock that makes them fall.” They stumble because they disobey the word, as they were destined to do. But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people, in order that you may proclaim the mighty acts of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light. [NRSV]
Christians are those who have inherited the promises given first to the Jews. The Jews have stumbled and fallen, because of disobedience, and have lost their inheritance; and a new people, God’s own people, a holy nation, has arisen to take their place. I do not think that once, in all the times that Bishop Hiltz repeated his sermon, there was any recognition of the essential antisemitism of those words. And this continues as a normative part of Christianity.
Jews are dismissed daily, even now, as legalistic and insincere — and not, therefore, as living parts of a spiritual house – bound by laws that impose hypocrisy as a way of life. But no one takes note of it, for it seems that it is only first century Jews who are being dismissed, but that is only a paper thin disguise. For the Christian, Jesus is the moral standard in Christianity, and so the law-observant Jew is still the object of oprobrium. The New Testament text is riddled with this antisemitism — about this Goldhagen is unquestionably right. Even some nonbelievers, many of them Christian by upbringing, reflect some of the same values, since the qualification is often added that they do not mean to impugn the higher morality displayed by Jesus in the gospels. Seldom revealed is the fact that rabbinic Judaism, which had its origins around the time of Jesus, was a form of progressive, meticulously intellectualised religion, that displayed the very same kind of biblical revisionism and wit revealed in some of Jesus’ sayings, such as, “The sabbath was made for man, not man for the sabbath.” The Talmud is full of such wisdom. Antisemitism is so deeply embedded in Christianity that it is often not noticed that simply separating Jesus from the Jews in the way that the New Testament does is a characteristic antisemitic move.
So, of course, the cardinal is antisemitic. It’s a part of his inheritance. It would be a mistake, however, to see this kind of intolerance as confined to Christianity. Religion itself is deeply compromised by its implicit intolerance. Faith itself is essentially intolerant, because, as Feuerbach said, “with faith is always associated the illusion that its case is the case of God, its honour his honour.” (quoted by Lüdemann, Intolerance and the Gospel, 22) No one who believes that his values are the same as his god’s can allow that the values of others are tolerable, let alone superior. Thus, for Islam, the Qu’ran and Sharia contain the blueprint for the perfect society. It may be, as Sadakat Kadri says in his book on Shariah law (Heaven on Earth: A Journey through Shari’a Law from the Deserts of Ancient Arabia to the Streets of the Modern Muslim World), that “Mortals can only fail when they play God.” (see the NYT review here) But that’s just the problem, isn’t it? If you play religion, then you end up playing God. That means that religion can only fail. That seems about right to me, and it was vividly on display in Cardinal Pell’s attempt to defend religion from its despisers.
I’ve always wondered how the “Lutherens” can overlook, or pretend, or whatever they must do, in order to honor and venerate this man who spoke about the Jews as any SS thug would later do.
Marvelous. I had similar ideas when talking to a Catholic priest about relativism, but was not able to put it so concisely.
Martin Luther was quite the character. As much as I would thank him for making the Bible available to any who would want to read it, it is amazing how instrumental he was in anti-Semitism. It amazes me how one person can simultaneously have such great and terrible ideals.
Yes, it’s a fair point that irrational intolerance is likely to spring, and has sprung, from any number of in-group allegiances, but the New Testament stories, as you point out, are unfortunate (to say the least) and surely no-one can deny that the role the Jews supposedly played in Jesus’s story has added somewhat to centuries of anti-semitism. I once put it like this, in a magazine style, “What would you do if you were God’:
Well, you get the picture with that, I hope.
no idea how pell supporters rated this guy so highly..
in addition to his casual anti-semitic comments his assertions included
we descended from Neanderthals,
how could they be our cousins and be extinct,
he wishes no one would end up in hell,
Hitler is in hell and if not or if there is no hell there is no justice,
there was a first human,
natural selection is an entirely random process,
he believes the wine is actually Jesus’ blood, but if you check it it really isn’t, however it still is..
for someone who seemed intent on schooling Dawkins on evolution he didn’t seem to understand any of the basics and yet still talked with certainty..
@s. Pimpernel.
I grew up and was confirmed a Lutheran of the ELCA, the largely liberal branch of American Lutherans. From my experience, Luther isn’t really venerated, honored or mentioned at all in the general week to week aspects of the church… that’s all about Jesus and the Gospels, and in general, sunday school and our religious instructions were focused around the Bible, and we only really talked about the creation of Lutheranism, and its distinctions from other Christian religions during our confirmation classes. And those lessions, by and large, focused entirely on Luther’s opinions of religion, and the differences between Catholicism (particularly as it was practiced at the time) and Lutheran Protestants, not so much on Luther’s life and opinions. I recall reading (admittedly, in wikipedia), that Luther’s anti-semetic ravings weren’t even translated into English until the 1970s, and when I did a school report on Luther in the 7th or 8th grade, I don’t think I really came across much mention of it, as most people were trying to come up with good things to say about Luther in their bibliographies, and just left it out, or buried it in 1000 page volumes.
I’d say its part and parcel of the general liberal Lutheran policy of completely avoiding any sort of conflict, both in history and in today’s society unless it is specifically brought up. I never once heard a Lutheran pastor adress Luther’s anti-Semitism in my 16 years in the church, but I don’t doubt that they’d be the first to condemn it if asked. But I feel like that’s a weasely way out… my confirmation should have brought it up, talked about it, and explained why Luther was wrong, and talked about anti-Semitism. But I think that they won’t do that, because talking about the bad things religion has done (particularly to teenagers) might set them off religion in general. So, they lie by omission and hope that most people won’t find out and get angry at lies by omission, or find out and become raving anti-Semites.
I call Pell’s comments a ‘Freudian bus crash’. No need for Dawkins to utter a word, the Cardinal does all his own damage.
And, as for Anti-Semetism in general, I was once moved to speechlessness talking to my niece (who was around 13), talking about the Holocaust, and she asked “Why would anyone hate the Jews?”, both because it was great that she had literally no idea and because its such a complicated question. And I think its really baked into not just the Gospels, but into the concept of Christianity itself, because if you believe the general idea of Jesus (and not that he was some sort of mythical thing), then the very, very first people who were exposed to his ideas, which were based on their own, just shrugged and moved on, and *still* do to this day, in spite of living next to Christians and dominated by Christians for nearly 2,000 years. The very people that the king of kings, the lamb of God, the Son of God directed *all* of his living energies trying to convert. I think that’s a realization that is hard to take for people committing their whole lives to Jesus, and I think people instincutally realize that the Jewish rejection of Jesus is perhaps the single greatest counterpoint to their claims of his divinity. So I find it unlikely that that that vague notion that the Jews are somehow ‘wrong’ will ever go away, except where the overall notion of Christians having ‘the truth’ erodes. I was brought up thinking that all good people would get taken care of by God, so I never really though about Jesus and the Jews as anything other than a local problem at that time and place with those particular Jewish guys, not some larger problem with Jews and Judaism in general. But unless you make that leap, which already puts you a little outside tradtional Christianity, its seems easy to slide into thinking bad things about the people that have such a long tradition of rejecting Jesus.
Sajanas:
Quite. A lot of things about religion happen by way of omission. Uncomfortable verses, like the ones used by my bishop in what might be thought to be an inspiring, affirming way, are simply misread. Not being, as such, antisemitic himself, he probably never noticed the residual antisemitism. But it’s there, just waiting to show itself.
I grew up in a world apparently without antisemitism. I never heard the word until I was an adult, and only recognised how remarkable that was when, one summer school, a bunch of us used to do things together, and one young woman (a fellow student) said to me, “You don’t mind being seen with me?” And I wondered what she meant. Someone later pointed out that she was Jewish. It never occurred to me that people made such distinctions. In India, where I grew up, Hinduism was colourful, but false, of course (my father was a missionary), but there was no sense that people were less worthy for being wrong. It was odd growing up in this cocooned world, that seemed not to be touched by the normal stresses and strains of the real world, but I only realised this much later.
Tod, what a great summary of Egbert’s “Freudian bus crash.” What is astonishing is that a pope should have thought him worthy to have become one (since popes are chosen from within the college of cardinals [for the most part/]). It shows the mentality of the Vatican very clearly. Es sieht sehr schlecht aus.
I get the picture, Mark, but do you think it is only somewhat that Christianity is responsible to centuries of antisemitism? I think Christianity is implicated much more closely than this. Don’t forget that many European nations expelled the Jews, most locked them into ghettos, or denied their right to work in ordinary occupations. Good Friday was the worst day for Jews, when they were not only shunned, but risked being beaten. And for centuries they were called Christ killers, blamed for the plague and other natural disasters, accused of killing Christian infants in their sacred rites, forced to wear distinctive clothing, and victimised in spontaneous pogroms. Antisemitism is still central to Christianity, and there is no way for Christianity to avoid it. It is, after all, the people of the new covenant. That’s why it’s called the New Testament. For it was the “new testament in Jesus’ blood’ that formed Christians as a new people of God. They may try to weasle out of it in various ways, but only by renaming their “testaments,” and acknowledging that Jesus is not prophesied in the Jewish scriptures can they escape the implication of Christian doctrines. Short of that Christianity remains antisemitic in essence.
Reblogged this on Secularity.
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Christianity got its start as a sect of Judaism, and, becoming its rival as it pulled away and developed into a separate religion, deprecated Judaism. Apparently this sort of thing is quite common when new religions spin off from older ones. John Wansbrough, who wrote Quranic Studies and The Sectarian Milieu, takes the bitter invective in the Koran against Christians and Jews as clear evidence that Islam developed as an offshoot of Judeo-Christianity. Wansbrough, I think, considered Muhammed as an invented founder figure to match the Jews’ invented Moses and the Christians’ invented Jesus. Smart man, that Wansbrough.
“Relativism happens when you don’t agree with the pope. Individualism is intense when individuals claim rights the church is not prepared to countenance.”
It takes someone like you, Eric, to hit the nail on the top of the head so perfectly.
Absolutely, Eric, I was going for hyperbolic understatement, if there is such a thing.
Generally, I do like to be cautious in such matters, since it’s so difficult to know where we would be in the absence of, for example, the NT stories, and to be confident of their exact causal share in the swirl of history. But we have all the ammunition we need if we can just drag concessions of some exacerbation; and with the things you mention and others, like blood libel, we can extract those concessions.
Steve (#12). Thanks for the reference to Wansborough. When I get a chance I will read some of his stuff. I have looked him up on Amazon, and the two books, Quranic Studies and Sectarian Milieu, strike me as necessary reading. If only I wasn’t so old, and just finding things out! Well, if time serves, I will get to them!
I think as soon as Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire, draconian laws were brought in persecuting the Jews. Since I’m no expert on history, I couldn’t find the reference for that claim, but if someone else with a better skills can confirm that, then that would underline the point of how intiminate antisemiticism is with orthodox Christianity.
As Sajanas said, no one ever told you. I suspect there was a lot of post-Holocaust compensation, like how everyone forgot about eugenics. My mother and grandmother were old school Lutheran (how many people know that there were actually Lutheran nuns?), but my upbringing was decidely philosemitic. Confirmation (three fucking years, if anyone else remembers that) included visiting a synogoue, and I was led to understand that Jews didn’t need salvation because they were in the Guy’s inner circle. It was only as an adult that I came to understand what a despicable bastard Luther was.
Now, how Lutherans were taught to understand Catholicism is another matter.
He seems to clearly say in the first video that the jewish people were not as intellectual as the egyptians and the egyptian empire was better than the israel one ever was, how is that anti-semite? God says the same thing in jeremiah and Isaiah… if anyone read their bible
The anti-semitism of the Bible make for tough going when listening to Bach’s great Passion cantatas, whose texts are largely based on Luther’s translation. Both the Matthew and John versions lay the blame for the death of Jesus squarely on the Jews.
The program for a performance of the Passion of John which I attended apologetically noted that, where possible, “the people” had been substituted for “the Jews” to avoid giving offense. It motivated me to glance through the Gospel of John for the first time since childhood, and I found it almost completely without redeeming value: nothing about taking care of the least among us, just “I am the son of God and the Jews are out to kill me.”
Of course, the teachings of Jesus weren’t all that distinct from those of the Pharisees like Hillel, or so Wikipedia tells me.
RD’s silence and stillness as Pell digs a deep hole and climbs into regarding Jews is eloquent. He knows he doesn’t have to say a word.
“apologistwright” (#18), I’ve allowed your comment to stand but not your trackbacks, since your site seems to me to be a bit down market. Your comment, however, fails to note that, whether or not Isaiah and Jeremiah say the same thing — which I doubt, read them again — the fact that Pell thinks this an appropriate thing to say without qualification makes it an antisemitic remark. Combine this with his truly assinine remark about the suffering of the Germans makes him an antisemitic poster boy. If you can’t see this, could it be your have a log in your eye?
Yes, bad Jim (19), I find that the intrinsic antisemitism of the passion stories make them unreadable (and perhaps unhearable) today. The supercessionism, which is normative for Christianity, is completely untenable, given the incredibly miniscule evidence for the founding of a new covenant, let alone for an old one. Religion itself is merely human imagination working overtime with worn out tools.
Shuggy, I agree that Dawkins’ silence is more eloquent than Pell’s idiocy, but his interventions were, by and large, apt and often decisive. Pell thinks he can rest on his authority, but forgets that authority must have at least some intellectual substance, none of which was on display in this debate. It astonishes me that anyone should have, at any time, considered him a candidate for high office (even in the church). But, of course, bishops are bureaucrats, and it shows.
I’m trying to imagine how history would have panned out had Christianity not happened. Jews would have probably been about as equally ignored as modern Samaritans; most regular people only think of “Samaritan” in the context of Luke’s parable, not knowing that actual Samaritans still exist. Of course, this comparison with Samaritans itself is not as effective since most people only know about Samaritans because of Luke (i.e. Christianity).
So it would be hard to say that anti-Semitism existed before Christianity, and it would be even harder to say that anti-Semitism would have ever existed, let alone been institutionalized throughout various post-Christian societies, like it has been without Christianity.
But Christians were equally as hateful with Jews as they were with other heretical Christian sects. Just read what Tertullian says about Marcion.
Still, Christianity inherited this hatred of heretics from the Jews themselves. Jews hated Samaritans in the same way, they even went about demolishing the Samaritan temple just because they could.
J. Quinton (#22). Of course, Judaism is a religion like any other, and should not be given a free pass just because of the evils of antisemitism. Judaism’s idea of being specially chosen from amongst the peoples to be God’s own people, is as silly as Chirstianity’s idea of being a new chosen people. Religion itself is the problem. But Christian antisemitism, even though there was already a pagan variety, went deeper and was far more virulent than the contempt in which many Romans held the Jews. And of course Islam inherited this, along with hosts of other ideas from neighbouring religions. Islam, like most religions is a sycretistic grab bag of opportunistic borrowings from its neighbours, in this case “heretical” Christianity, Judaism, Zoroastrianism, etc. Jehovah’s witensses visited yesterday with the offer to convince me of the marks of true Christianity. I turned them down, of course, but the problem is that there is no “pure” religion, uncontaminated by others. Religions are human creations, and, as such, no doubt perform human functions. The trouble is that they inevitably claim to speak for God. And anyone who makes such a claim, must act in loco dei, an immediate disqualification for anyone seeking to speak and act rationally.
I think you are being a little unfair to Cardinal Pell here. His remark about the Jewish people “chosen” by Jesus as the place to reveal himself as the supposed incarnation of God exactly echoes a point frequently made for other reasons by Christopher Hitchens: that there were more advanced civilizations to choose from at the time. And his point making the distinction between individual intelligence and intellectual development, which is highly dependent on the culture you find yourself in, is also a sound point in my opinion. He clearly stated his respect for the extraordinary intellectual achievements of the modern day Jewish people, and I thought he articulated that he was making a historical point specific to the time of Jesus’ (supposed) birth, not a general remark about Jewish people.
I would have to say his remark about the Germans in the second clip seems much more suspect, but I haven’t heard the whole context. He seemed a little too grudging to acknowledge that the Jewish people suffered more than the Germans, but I’m not sure what the larger context was. It is true that a large percentage of ordinary German people suffered devastating loss, hunger, and misery as consequences of the two world wars, and it’s arguable that they suffered more than other nations involved in the wars. This doesn’t seem like an injustice, since the Germans bore primary responsibility for the wars and the horrible crime of the holocaust. But millions of Germans, basically innocent of personal blame for these crimes, who just happened by accident of history to be German people living in Germany at the time and were swept up in events set into motion by their leaders, suffered greatly. This is a historical fact that, along with the holocaust, cannot be denied.
It is certainly true that the suffering of the Germans can not be compared to the suffering of the Jewish people, so I don’t really know what point the Cardinal was making. I would have to hear the larger context within that discussion to understand what he was trying to get at.
But I don’t see that these brief excerpts qualify as clear evidence of anti-semitism. Somehow I doubt he was really trying to argue that the Germans suffered more than the Jews, though of course I could be wrong on this. I just don’t see enough evidence to decide the matter in these videos.
I watched the whole video of the debate between Richard Dawkins and Cardinal Pell. I now know the context of the discussion of the German suffering, and it was a discussion of why does God allow suffering. His point in that excerpt, related to the larger context, was to claim that God intervenes, that he intervened to help the Jews escape from Egypt, and that he punished the Germans. I think that line of reasoning might have been a bit ad hoc, which is why he appeared to be taken aback by the remark of the moderator that the Jews suffered more. What I saw was a man who talked himself into a corner and got confused, not an anti-semite who was defending the Germans or justifying or denying the holocaust.
Together with my comment above, I think this all adds up to the fact that the claims that Cardinal Pell was engaging in antisemitic rhetoric is extremely dishonest.
Atheists need to have a high standard of reason and truth, and we need to be fair in debates with the religious. Claiming that Cardinal Pell is antisemitic, based on this debate, is damaging to the reputation of atheists. It is a slanderous smear against the Cardinal, not a matter of reasoned debate over points of religion. This smear is worthy of the kind of dishonest spin one might find on FOX news about President Obama, taking remarks out of context to create misconceptions.
I have no desire to defend religion whatsoever. It’s complete nonsense. But Cardinal Pell is a human being, and he is being treated unfairly, and these accusations ought to be retracted.
Jeffrey G. Johnson:
Come off your high horse! If I was wrong, I was wrong, but I said what I believed was the truth about what I heard, so no dishonesty was, in any case, involved. However, I think there is ample reason to think that the two references, one to the Jews as somehow a less sophisticated civilisation than the Egyptians, and the remark about the terrible suffering of the Germans — how on earth did he get to that? — support my claim that Pell is an antisemite. This is not a slanderous smear against the cardinal, since these were opinions which sprang naturally to his lips in the contexts involved. In discussing suffering and why god allows it, to have mentioned the Germans was a calculated piece of misdirection. In talking about human suffering, this is surely not the first thing that should come to mind, but it did come to the cardinal’s mind, and I don’t mind saying that there is something deeply troubling about that very fact, and I have no intent whatsoever to retract the claim that this points ineluctably in a particular direction. And I too listened intently to the entire debate from beginning to end, and the moderator’s response is dead on: this is precisely what comes immediately to mind. If the cardinal had wanted to speak generally about human suffering there is so much else that should have come to his mind, and didn’t. What was so accessible to memory was the “suffering of the Germans”, than whom no one suffered more, in the cardinal’s opinion. If it isn’t antisemitism it’s stupidity. Take your pick.