Germany's Chancellor Merkel Questions Pope Over Holocaust Deniers

"A gimmick from Israel"?

The point would be that the pope took this bishop back into the church without having the bishop renounce the lie that he had furthered that had been the cause of the excommunication.

To further such a lie is evil and the pope has the responsibility to make sure that no one under him does such a thing.

If the lie was the origin of the excommunication, then letting him back in after any period of time without hearing a renunciation of that lie is a grave counter-move to Pope John Paul II's action to excommunicate the bishop in the first place.

This places one Vicar of Christ against another Vicar of Christ, an unseemly event.

"A gimmick from Israel" is a complete shot in the dark. Israel has nothing to do with this pope's decision.

Perhaps one's sympathy for this highly questionable decision does not come from denying the fact of the Holocaust but rather from denying that the Holocaust is the important evil that it was.

That is a much cleverer way to deny the Holocaust without appearing to be the lunatic that most deniers are to some extent.

Denying the relevance and importance of the Holocaust would be consistent with the inability of a person to recognize that rocket launches from Gaza pose a threat to Jews to which they need to respond, whether that response can be proven justified or not.

I don't feel guilty about the Holocaust. I feel disgusted that such a thing should ever have happened.

The Church was complicit in the Holocaust by its non-action, if nothing else. The pope's actions in regard to this excommunicated bishop are very, very important.

I am more than willing to admit that because of our virtual obsession with the Holocaust through Hollywood that other holocausts get overlooked.

The hundred million killed by Communist regimes, in Russia, China, Cambodia, Laos, and in Eastern Europe: know any films about them? Any discussion on C-Span? Yeah, every year or two.

No one makes films on Stalin. There are a few on the Gulag Archipelago, but only a few.

When I lived in Berkeley, they would say to me, "Stalin did what he had to do" (!!)

There are even more Communist holocaust deniers than there are of the other kind. Why so many in one century from such a small group of people?

Do you want to talk about them? 

The Muslim Brotherhood were allies of the Nazi Regime, and that is why we have to ask what the real motivation is of the various more radical Islamic states.

Iraq and Iran used to have major Christian and Jewish populations. What happened to them? And the Coptic Christians in Egypt? And the Nestorian Christians in Asia?

I don't want to forget about any of them.

Hamas fires rockets at Israel, Israel goes after Hamas. Suicide bombers board busses in Israel, Isaral goes after the terrorists.

When Israel starts firing rocktets indiscriminately into another country on a daily basis or sends suicide bombers to kill innocent citizens on purpose, then the debate will have legs. Otherwise, it's all wilfull ignorance and hate.

Look, I have been critical of the Israel's treatment of the Palestinians for a long, long time. And, I was against the settlements on the West Bank as far back as 1972 when they were built using our money.

I so wish that Itszhak Rabin had not been killed by a right-wing Jewish Israeli, but the whole belief that I had of  "land for peace" got tested and failed in Gaza. The Israelis went in and kicked their co-citizens out. They dragged them out of there to give the land to the Arabs of Gaza. And, instead of peace, they got rocket attacks.

And, there really is no other way to look at it. This is not the PLO against Israel. This is the more radical Hamas, unelected, taking over the "land for peace" to make war by launching rockets.

I won't even defend every action or counter-action by Israel. But when you look for a fight, as Hamas did, using the civilian population as shields and as propaganda for your cause, you  sewed the wind and get the whirlwind .

Gaza is not Palestine, but it was the opportunity for Arab Muslims to show that they could do a "land for peace" deal and come up with peace. They didn't.

That is first-class devilry. 

So, I ask, if Israel really gives up half of Jerusalem, as Rabin supposedly wanted, and lets the Palestinian state have a geographical expression that is real, not just some plots of land strung together, will Hamas accept such an arrangement?

Not necessarily. I think that the Israelis are more prone to change than Hamas, if for no ther reason than demographically they have to shed parts of  "Greater Israel" in order to remain the majority in Israel.

But I think that you are wrong about Hamas. I used to think as you do about this, and then I started learning about Islam, first from a women who grew up in Indonesia, Dutch, but who spoke Arabic and lived in Washington, DC with an Arab prince.

Then I began to read bios on Mohammed and look at what the Qu'ran actually says. You realize that Constantinople had been attacked for four hundred years before we began the First Crusade. 

The Law of Sharia is real and those British Muslims grew up in the UK, were treated fairly well and yet they chose to be commit acts of terror.

Sadat made peace and got killed by the Muslim Brotherhood.. The Jordanians would accept peace. Those who are most fanatical about making no changes to the historically expressed Islam, who don't want to "adapt", they will not accept even that. That is my opinion.

As I said, Gaza could have been a warm-up to bigger and better land-for-peace deals. How are you going to convince Israel to give up land for peace in the future if the land for peace deal already done is a bust?

I cannot require that of them. 

I add that Islam went into decay as a civilization, from being the premier civilization of the sciences, engineering and the arts because its most radical members essentially killed off its intelligentsia. The intelligentsia want freedom, more so than any other class of human, and we are the threat to those who wish to impose rigid orthodoxies. So, we have been the seed of Marxism and the first ones killed after the revolution.

Anyway, after the purge of the intelligentsia (I have the article somewhere) science and engineering went into decline and never came back. That is why Islam failed to conquer the West.

They hate themselves for this and hate us for making them feel this by foisting Israel on them in direct violation of what it says in the Qu'ran: once a country is Muslim, it must stay Muslim, and all Muslims are required to aid Muslims in this endeavor.