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Christmastime in
Bethlehem does not stand for ”peace on earth”
but for intensified jihad against the occupying Jews,
as least according to the highest-ranking Roman Catholic
prelate in the Holy Land.
Michel Sabbah, the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, has
praised jihad, justified suicide bombing, and led
marches at the behest of the late Yasser Arafat – leading
some to question whose bidding the patriarch is
doing.
Sabbah, an Arab and a
native of Nazareth, expressed his collaborationist sympathies
most forcefully during a visit to a refugee camp near
Bethlehem in 1999. During that visit, the patriarch placed a
wreath on a memorial to so-called “martyrs.” He then
maintained that the right of return is “an existing fact that
cannot be given up,” and declared that Israel’s “extracting
our rights in all circumstances is a form of jihad”
against the Palestinians.
However, he has not always
objected to holy war. “Love is power and jihad and
does not express weakness,” he told the newspaper Al-Quds.
Sabbah
goes further by excusing suicide bombing as a legitimate
response to Israeli policy. Sabbah said in a 2002
videotape to Palestinian Christians:
Ours is an occupied
country, which explains why people are tired and blow
themselves up. The Israelis tell Palestinians: Stop the
violence and you will have what you want without violence. But
one has seen in the history of the last ten years that the
Israelis have moved only when forced by violence.
Unfortunately, nothing but violence makes people march. And
not only here. Every country has been born in
blood.
Sabbah's service to Yasser
Arafat’s terrorists extends beyond words. On New
Year's Eve 2002, the
patriarch led a “peace” march toward one of the Israeli
checkpoints. Only about 200 people – most
of them Italian pilgrims – joined Sabbah.
A Franciscan priest
named Father Ibrahim explained to Italian journalist Massimo
Toschi from Missioni
Oggi (the monthly published by the Xaverian missionaries)
why the march attracted so few people. “He says that...the
patriarch organized the march at Fatah's request and that this was a
mistake,” Toschi wrote, “because the next time the request
will come from Hamas and the patriarch won't be able to say no.” The
Fatah
organization, which Arafat founded in 1959, is dedicated to
creating a Palestinian state by destroying Israel. Patriarch
Sabbah literally follows their marching orders.
Sabbah
has worked with a variety of other Palestinian terrorists, as
well. In 2000, Sabbah met with Arafat in Gaza as an act of
“Christian solidarity with the Palestinian leadership,”
according to a press release from the patriarch's office. The
release's author took great pains to mention by name the
Christians in Arafat's inner circle – including George Nabash,
founder of the Marxist-oriented Popular Front for the
Liberation of Palestine.
Sabbah’s
anti-Semitism is deep and overt, as evidenced by his remarks
toward Arafat during Christmas Mass in 1995. In
welcoming Arafat, the patriarch “was happy to recall” how
Byzantine Patriarch Sophronius tried to persuade Muslim Caliph
Umar Ibn al-Khattab to prohibit Jews from living and
worshipping in Jerusalem after conquering it in 636 –
eight years after Sophronius instigated a widespread massacre
of Jews.
“In
the end,” Sabbah once said, “we will send them away just as we
did to the Crusaders.”
Indeed,
he seemed to call for the full-scale demolition of the
Jewish state during a proclamation at the 2000 Christmas
Mass: “This is our land, to claim our freedom, among our
demolished houses and in our besieged towns and
villages.”
The
patriarch engaged in a worldwide PR effort for terrorists
during the seven-week stalemate between Palestinian
gunmen and the Israeli army at Bethlehem's Church of the
Nativity in 2002 – although his testimony was contradicted by
others in his church. When gunmen invaded the church and
began their seven-week occupation on April 1, Sabbah
“immediately declared that
the entering Palestinians were not armed, were willingly
accepted into the Church by the friars, and given
asylum,”
Sergio Minerbi wrote for the Jerusalem Center for Public
Affairs.
Two
days later, Franciscans, who serve as Catholic custodians of
holy sites, refuted the patriarch. Spokesman David Jaeger, a
Franciscan priest, wrote that the ensuing Israeli siege
resulted from “the violent
invasion affected by armed men who thereafter barricaded
themselves there.” Jaeger also told the Israeli daily
Ha'aretz that “when
the battle started, the doors of the Basilica were closed.
Armed Palestinians fired at the locks, entered the Basilica,
and barricaded themselves in the compound.”
While diminishing the
Israelis' concerns about terrorism, Sabbah accentuates
Palestinian victimization. Commenting on the situation at the
Church of the Nativity on May 8, 2002, Sabbah stated, “As the
cause of all violence is the Israeli military occupation of
the Palestinian lands, once the occupation is ended, violence
will cease.” During Easter Mass that year, he stated
“Injustice and oppression have been imposed on only one of the
two peoples,” adding that Israeli leaders “must stop talking
about terrorism to hide the root evil and to justify and feed
the permanence of death and hatred.”
Such rhetoric has won the
Palestinian patriarch a number of leftist admirers in the
United States. Since 1999, Sabbah has been president of
Pax Christi International, a Roman Catholic organization that
advocates radical pacifism. Though Sabbah's views might seem
to disqualify him from leading such an organization, they fit
Pax Christi's underlying philosophy of excusing Palestinian
murder. Sabbah's told the Pax Christi USA's 2003 national
assembly:
With the start of the
second intifada or
Palestinian resistance, under the guise of dismantling the
infrastructure of Palestinian terrorism, Israeli forces have
systematically destroyed almost every political and civil
Palestinian institution over the last twelve months. Not only
have President Arafat's government and security services been
decimated, banks and businesses, schools and research centers,
town halls, media outlets, the land registry and the courts
have been violated or destroyed. A peaceful future cannot be
shaped in this way.
It is the civilian
population, in the Occupied Palestinian Territories and as
well as in Israel, that is the victim of this never-ending
spiral of violence, of unjust military occupation and of the
current political and economic
crisis.
Sabbah regularly exploits
his Christmas messages for his political
purposes. In 2001, when Israeli authorities
prohibited Arafat from attending Midnight Mass in
Bethlehem, Sabbah's pro-Arafat propaganda became effusive
during his sermon: “The dignity of President Arafat is the
dignity of all of us. The occupation situation is unfair to
the Palestinians and they have to have their freedom. This is the meaning of
Christmas (emphasis added).” So much for Baby
Jesus.
In 2002, when the Israelis
again kept Arafat from going to Bethlehem, Sabbah used his
Christmas sermon to address the Israeli people more
melodramatically: “Blood has been flowing in your cities and
streets, but the key to solving this conflict is in your
[Israeli] hands. By your actions so far, you have crushed the
Palestinian people, but you still have not achieved peace.”
The patriarch also praised the absent Arafat: “We wish you
were with us tonight, and we call on God to give you the
wisdom and the power under this siege to continue your mission
toward peace and justice.”
In his Christmas 2003
sermon, Sabbah criticized the security fence that helps
separate Bethlehem from the rest of the West Bank, and called
Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip the
conflict's “basic evil.”
“The sacrifices of these
years will not be for nothing if those responsible conclude
the true results, rather than concluding that building the
wall is the true solution,” the patriarch said. “The true
results are that war destroys people and places and does not
silence a people that demands its
freedom.”
Last year, Sabbah reiterated
that theme. “Bethlehem should be a free city,”
he said on December 21. “The Israeli authorities
resumed the work to complete the wall, which makes Bethlehem a
big prison.
Ending the oppression and the humiliation of the Palestinians
would at the same time put an end to the fear and insecurity
of the Israelis.”
That same day, Sabbah declared
that Palestinians have “adopted plans for peace” and that
“Israeli leaders are invited to do likewise by putting an end
to their military interventions and by stopping construction
of the wall, as well as the hunt for the wanted.”
Those comments echo ones made
that day by Mahmood Abbas (a.k.a. Abu Mazen), who replaced
Arafat as the Palestine Liberation Organization's chairman:
“We are standing here today to reiterate to the world that we
are committed to the choice of just peace, to achieve the
rights of our people.” Israelis, however, remember that their
troubles have never stemmed from an unwillingness to
negotiate.
Sabbah's
activism overshadows his pastoral responsibilities and
destroyed his credibility with Palestinian Christians.
“It's
surprising that Bethlehem’s
Catholics are not behind the patriarch,”
Toschi wrote in describing the New Year's Eve 2002 peace
march.
“There's
talk about the divisions present even between the Catholic
churches and there's
consensus on the idea of the necessity of the Latin patriarch
being more autonomous with respect to political
positions.”
Italian
journalist Sandro Magister, who has covered the Vatican for
more than 25 years, wrote in L'Espresso that Sabbah
is “isolated ... even within the
Palestinian Catholic community. Isolated because he
is partisan; excessively aligned with the extremist currents
that throw their
weight around in Bethlehem and the territories.”
In 2003, Pope John Paul II
delivered a subtle vote of no confidence in Sabbah's pastoral
stewardship by appointing Jean-Baptiste Courion – a convert
from Judaism – as auxiliary bishop responsible for
Hebrew-speaking Catholics. But as the worldwide clerical
sex-abuse crisis demonstrates, this pope feels reluctant to
discipline malfeasant bishops more
forcefully.
Moreover,
subtlety might be lost on an activist prelate who has
made collaboration with genocidal totalitarians a way of life.
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