CONNECT/Eddie Holt: More than racist and nutter Holocaust-deniers, the Jewish state of Israel is undermining sympathy towards the Jewish people. This is ironic but, more acutely, it is tragic.
During an Easter in which Christendom's shops were full while its churches were not, Jewish tanks rolled into Bethlehem seeking Muslims. Meanwhile, 1,700 British troops, egregiously, indeed embarrassingly, out of step with the national mood, trundled cannons down London's Mall to mark the death of the mother of the head of the Anglican Church.
Here, in Ireland, clerical paedophilia led to the resignation of a bishop and the ongoing scandal is already ominously treacherous for the Catholic Church.
It's been a grim spring for religion. In world terms, if not necessarily so in Wexford or Surrey, the Israeli invasion of Palestinian towns and cities is the story that counts. Given the Holocaust, in its most diabolical eastern European phase 60 years ago, the proliferation of Palestinian suicide bombers and ongoing Arab resentment at Israel's existence and behaviour, Israel justifies its own savagery.
As a result, the beleaguered Palestinians now see themselves - in the matter of persecution - as the Jews of the world.
After visiting Ramallah on March 24th, the Portuguese writer, José Saramango, the 1998 Nobel Literature Prize winner, likened Israeli attacks on Palestinians to Auschwitz. Of course, the comparison led to fierce Israeli denouncement of Saramango.
The Nazis' Final Solution, though gypsies, gays and communists perished in huge numbers, was primarily directed against Jews.Christian guilt over such industrialised genocide is still felt, and rightly so.
Perhaps it was always inevitable that part of the Holocaust legacy would be its use as a dangerous political tool. After all, genocide, like nuclear bombs, can contaminate for centuries. Yet, more than racist and nutter Holocaust-deniers, the Jewish state of Israel is itself undermining sympathy towards the Jewish people.
This is ironic but more acutely, it is tragic.
Reportedly, even some Israeli newspapers have carried a story that an Israeli general has urged a study of Nazi tactics at Warsaw in order to crush the intifada.
As there are Christian supremacists and Muslim supremacists, there are Jewish ones too. Likewise, anti-Christian, anti-Muslim and anti-Jewish sentiment undoubtedly exists. Look, for instance, at the depravity of the hate and propaganda sites on the Internet and you'll be in no doubt.
But where religion is concerned, it seems that even legitimate condemnation can be automatically termed "sectarian", "racist" or "bigoted". Consequently, reasoned argument on the subject is routinely gagged.
Yet, it is not sectarian to condemn the Catholic Church for child sexual abuse. Neither is it sectarian to condemn the Anglican Church for institutionalised discrimination against other religions. It is not sectarian to condemn Islam for fomenting a fundamentalism which colonises adherents' minds and makes them simultaneously homicidal and suicidal. Nor is it sectarian to condemn Israel for its brutalising and dehumanising of the Palestinians. These are real crimes against humanity and attempts to silence people for saying so only adds to the vileness of such crimes.
In Israel's case, it's striking how its policies cannot be understood unless you consider the deeper influences of Talmudic laws and the world view they create and express. In the case of our own state, the Catholic hierarchy fretting about Canon Law, while the public craves candour and justice, makes the point equally clearly. Serving, as they see it, "higher" authorities than mere human governments and laws - Muslims and monarchists have their own variations on the theme - their support for their own fellow-travellers supersedes support for all others.
Certainly, the survival of Jewish identity, culture and even racial uniqueness down the millennia is impressive, but it too is not without its own shadow. As Canon laws do for Catholics, Talmudic laws place Jewish "rights" above human rights. In the process, they can be held to justify not only Biblical claims of convenience, but recent claims of territory. Sure, there is Muslim fundamentalism in the world too - it has been a theme vilified daily in the West since September's attacks on the US - but Jewish fundamentalism is making a tyrant of Israel.
The Holocaust survivor and Israeli dissident, Israel Shahak, a chemistry professor who died last July, argued that Judaism and its teachings were poisoning the hearts and minds of its followers. Few of us doubt that Islam has the same effect on some of its followers, but the Crusades were a lot longer ago than the Holocaust, and consequently, it is easier and more acceptable to indict Islam. But peace can come only when human rights are placed above Jewish and Islamic "rights".
Likewise, in the Republic, the healing of victims of clerical abuse cannot be delivered by recourse to Canon Law. Indeed, an ethos which teaches its clerical students that the maintenance of the institution of the Church is more important than people, is, by definition, antithetical to the kind of humanism required to bring about healing for victims and the wider society.
In Britain, the Protestant lock on the role of head of state is contemptuously at odds with the declared aim of an egalitarian, multi-racial society.
But despite our understandable interest in the ongoing clerical abuse controversy and British interest in the political and symbolic playing-out of the death of their queen's mother, Ariel Sharon has cast Israel centre stage in the world. In brutally pounding the Palestinians (why are Palestinian children killed in such disproportionate numbers?) he is also pounding the memory of the Holocaust and giving ammunition to the depraved and the delusional who wish to question its authenticity.
IT'S not mere coincidence that a crowd who termed themselves "the master race" turned on those who believed themselves to be "the chosen people". The monstrous Josef Mengele, perpetrator of hideous torture in the name of "medical experimentation", allegedly remarked in Auschwitz that there were only two "great" races on Earth, but there was only room for one. Hence the "masters" set about annihilating the "chosen", dehumanising them first as "sub-human" before engaging in the "final solution" of industrialised genocide.
Against such a background, Israeli attitudes towards Palestinians confound many people. How could they engage in the systematic dehumanising of another people, given their own history? That the abused sometimes become abusers is generally acknowledged, and it is hard not to conclude that Israeli policy towards the Palestinians is a deliberate illustration to the world that never again will Jews be anybody's easy targets. But F-16s, tanks, missiles . . . often against children? That is not a state simply standing up for itself and defending its people. It's revenge and butchery equally as heinous as the suicide bombing of innocents. Watching a JCB shovel earth on Palestinian corpses hurriedly buried in a hospital car-park because the hospital morgue was full, could not but evoke sickening Holocaust footage of bulldozers and emaciated corpses. There were differences in scale, in colour (as opposed to 1945's black and white) and the fact that Holocaust corpses for burial were frequently naked. But fundamentally, there were no differences.
Mass graves are often the fate of the dehumanised (though lone graves outside "consecrated" ground can be markers too!). Clearly, it takes a thorough programming to persuade people to dehumanise themselves and others by strapping-on explosives and detonating them.
Yet when an 18-year-old woman goes suicide-bombing, given that typically, 18-year-old females have a tendency to narcissistic preciousness about themselves, a frontier has been crossed.
The officers' quarters at Auschwitz deserved a glut of suicide bombers. Shoppers and diners in Israel do not. But in Nazifying the Jewish state, supported by the US and especially by its "war on terrorism", the chosen person, Ariel Sharon, has chosen to tell most of the world to take a hike. No doubt, Talmudic Law, contaminating the body politic - as Canon Law and sectarian secessionist law contaminated politics in Ireland and Britain, and the "martyr's" promise of dozens of virgins contaminates Islamic societies - can be cited to justify his barbarism.
But that doesn't make him and his cronies any less barbaric and it is not anti-Semitic to say so.