Jews as alone as ever

Editorial

American policy toward a possible Israeli strike against Iranian nuclear developments remains somewhat ambiguous, despite the apparently clear statement by U.S. Vice-President Joe Biden on the weekend.

"Israel can determine for itself – it's a sovereign nation – what's in their interest and what they decide to do relative to Iran and anyone else," Biden told a TV interviewer. "We cannot dictate to another sovereign nation what they can and cannot do when they make a determination, if they make a determination, that they're existentially threatened."

Clarifications followed. Biden is notorious for speaking his mind and the statements from State Department officials afterward seemed aimed at clouding the apparently unambiguous carte blanche Biden offered. But the clarifications themselves seemed to echo the hands-off attitude expressed by Biden.

Perhaps the clear message in the American statements is that the United States itself, lacking either the political will or the military resources during a time when the United States is stretched tremendously thin, recognizes that something must be done, but that they are not the ones to do it.

The American policy, while seemingly generous in apparently granting Israel approval to act in preemptive self-defence, is actually strangely isolating, in a broader historical context. Knowing, as we do, that no one but Israel is anywhere close to being prepared to act against Iran's genocidal nuclear ambition, Biden's comments actually seem like an abandonment. In a more perfect world, the United Nations would stand with Israel to ensure that those who have promised to wipe Israel from the map would not attain the weaponry to do so.

Instead, as it has been for so much of its history, Israel is left standing alone against those whose priority is elimination of the Jewish presence in the region.

At the same moment, the head of the world's one billion Catholics is calling for a more powerful United Nations.

Pope Benedict, in an encyclical this week, urged creation of a "world political authority" to manage the economy. The statement, only his third as head of the Catholic Church, is the highest level of papal statement. In it, the Pope rejects laissez-faire capitalism and urges more government intervention in the economy.

The statement comes just before the meeting in Italy of leaders of the G8 industrialized nations, who will discuss common approaches to the economic crisis, as well as issues like a potentially nuclear Iran.

If we're not mistaken, this sort of centralized international economic control is precisely the sort of system many Catholics and other Christians have for centuries contended already exists under the sinister control of "you-know-who" (i.e. Jews). And while the idea of more international cooperation may be advisable in times of economic turmoil – the last things we need now are tariffs and protectionism – the Pope seems to be going further.

Benedict's encyclical has been shorthanded by some headline writers as calling for a UN with "real teeth." While he intends the UN to have more power over global economic matters, it is for good reason that the idea of a UN with real teeth is enough to put Jewish and Israeli teeth on edge.

The UN is so catastrophically misdirected by the coalition of Jew-obsessed autocrats who make up its membership that it is hard to imagine anything wholly positive coming out of it. And, given the UN's perverted addiction to attacking Israel, giving the UN

any more "teeth" seems shamefully naive.

While the current Pope's ideas on the UN may enflame Jewish anxieties, news emerges that puts one of his predecessors in a slightly better light: the discovery, reported this week, of a document from Pope Pius XII, whose actions (or lack thereof) during the Holocaust have been an historic scar on Jewish-Catholic relations.

The papal document instructs nuns in Rome to shelter Jewish refugees:

"The Holy Father feels in himself all the sufferings of the moment," says the Vatican communiqué recently recovered. "Unfortunately, with the Germans' entry into Rome ... a ruthless war against the Jews has begun, whom they wish to exterminate by means of atrocities prompted by the blackest barbarities."

The documents says, "The Holy Father wants to save his children – also the Jews."

The process of making the wartime pope into a saint has added to the longstanding difficulties between the Jewish community and the Vatican – so much so that Benedict has delayed the process. This latest discovery suggests Pius was not as insouciant about the plight of European Jews as has so far been understood.

This is a small, slightly strange footnote to a troubled history that seems to be repeating itself daily. As the Pope seeks more power for the world's greatest forum for Israel-bashing and the U.S. administration seems to be wanting a "made-in-Israel" resolution to Iran's nuclear threat, Israel – the Jews, truth be told – seem as alone as ever.

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