A very cheery news day. Maybe this item rises to the top for sheer noxiousness: Some German Catholic bishops — that’s right, German bishops — are comparing Israel’s treatment of Palestinians with what the Nazis (that would be the German Nazis) did to the Jews.

“This morning we saw pictures of the Warsaw ghetto at Yad Vashem and this evening we are going to the Ramallah ghetto.” Several hours earlier on Sunday you probably would not have heard German Bishop Gregor Maria Franz Hanke choose such a divisive analogy.

But then on Sunday morning he was still in Israel and the rhetoric was considerably different than the one elected by the German Bishops’ Conference once they crossed over in to the Palestinian Authority on Sunday evening.

[...]

During their time in Israel the bishops uniformly made moderate and balanced statements, but once in the PA they provided German reporters accompanying them with a plethora of harsh proclamations against Israel. Their criticism received widespread coverage in the German media on Monday.

While crossing one of the checkpoints into East Jerusalem the Archbishop of Cologne, Cardinal Joachim Meisner, told reporters: “This is something that is done to animals, not people.” Meisner, a resident of eastern Germany, said that the fence reminded him of the Berlin Wall and that in his lifetime he did not believe he would see such a thing again. As the Berlin Wall was brought down so will this wall be brought down, he said, adding that the fence served no purpose.

Among the many substantive differences between how Israel has treated the Palestinians for the past several decades versus how the Germans treated the Jews during the Holocaust is the fact that the Germans gathered Jews together in ghettoes and then in camps in order to murder them, which they did, by the millions. Israel has committed no genocide against the Palestinians; the Palestinian population has steadily increased and continues to increase. This is quite an important difference which seems to have escaped these German bishops, barely 60 years after the closing of their own country’s gas chambers. A little odd.

Another distinction which they apparently fail to appreciate the significance of is the one between the Berlin Wall and the Israeli security fence. The Israeli fence is constructed to prevent suicide bombers and other attackers from crossing into Israel and killing people. No doubt it causes problems of varying severity for those living in the locales traversed by the fence, but those problems are first and foremost a result of the fact that there are suicide bombers and other murderers constantly being trained and organized by such groups as Hamas in order to kill people in Israel. The Berlin Wall, by contrast, was constructed by a Communist dicatorial regime in order to prevent people from fleeing oppression in East Germany and escaping to the West.

These distinctions are not that difficult to perceive. In fact, they’re so obvious that it feels like belaboring the point to even specify them in this way. It is therefore all the more appalling that German bishops would go to Israel and to the lands controlled by the Palestinian Authority and make these kinds of analogies, without reference to the massive differences between the horrors that took place in their own country and the situation in Israel, the West Bank and Gaza. These are not stupid men, one would think, to have risen to the level of bishops in the Catholic Church. The analogy to the Berlin Wall was made by a man who was a resident of East Germany, and is a Cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church. He cannot be a complete fool; at least, he is far too accomplished to use foolishness as an excuse for making these kinds of public statements. And if it is not innocent stupidity driving these remarks — by Germans of all people — then one cannot help but wonder what really is driving them.

The relentless attempts to equate the nation of Israel with the Third Reich began years ago with the most vile Jew-haters in the Arab world. Now, there are German Catholic bishops joining the effort — people who above all others should be sensitive to the gross error of doing so. It’s yet another illustration of this fact: no matter how hateful and absurd, lies do not sink of their own weight. Mere repetition is enough to strengthen them, and with continued repetition they can overwhelm truth sufficiently long to result in men committing the most irrational carnage imaginable. There clearly is an analogy with Nazi Germany in what is happening here. It’s just not the one that these German bishops are drawing.

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