German Bishops Compare Ramallah to the Warsaw Ghetto
What were they hoping to achieve with their statements?
March 8, 2007 - Audio, 10.25 MIN
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Welcome back to Bible in the News, this is Dave Billington with you for this week. On Friday 27 members of the German Bishop's Conference that was visiting Israel, made a first-time historic visit to Yad Vashem--the Holocaust memorial museum in Jerusalem. Does that sound like a nice gesture to you?
After the visit to Yad Vashem the German Bishop's went to Ramallah. Ramallah is a refugee camp for Palestinians, but the words "refugee camp" can be deceiving. It is really a fairly modern city of 57,000 residents. Life in Ramallah is not pleasant, suicide bombers have repeatedly come from the city and blown themselves up in places like Tel-Aviv and Jerusalem, due to this the Israeli army set-up checkpoints for those arriving and leaving the city. Recently armed Palestinian terrror gangs Hamas and Fatah have been battling it out on Ramallah's streets. It is stunning however that the German Catholic Bishops compared life in Ramallah to the Holocaust and particularly the Warsaw Ghetto. According to YNET news Bishop Gregor Maria Franz Hanke said: "This morning we saw pictures of the Warsaw Ghetto at Yad Vashem and this evening we are going to the Ramallah ghetto." Under the headline: "Bishops equate Israel's actions to Holocaust", YNET reported: "The delegation's visit to Ramallah took place several hours after their visit to Yad Vashem and several of the bishops chose to equate the situation in the Palestinian Authority with the Holocaust." The Bishop of Augsburg who was once under the spiritual leadership of Pope Benedict, said of the Palestinian areas: "Cages in the image of ghettos".
One may ask why the Bishops equated Ramallah with the Warsaw Ghetto in particular? It could be that only in the Warsaw Ghetto there was an armed Jewish uprising against the Germans. They could be sending a message that the armed Palestinian uprising including suicide bombings is understandable.
Let take a step back and see what these Bishops are comparing Ramallah with. What was the Warsaw Ghetto? When the Germans invaded Poland they sealed off an area of the city, into which they forced all the Jews. It was small and cramped, anyone leaving risked being shot. The following details are taken from a large volume on the Holocaust entitled "The Holocaust Chronicle."
The Nazis deported thousands of Jews from neighboring towns to the Warsaw Ghetto in 1941 and '42, swelling the population to 445,000. Conditions in the ghetto were so abysmal that 43,000 people died there in 1941. (pg. 227, 220)
The UK Department of Health estimated average calorie requirements is a daily calorie intake of 1940 calories per day for women and 2550 for men. Jewish residents of the Warsaw Ghetto were limited to 183 calories a day. On these starvation rations, the sick, young and infirm were the first victims of famine and disease. In comparison, nobody is starving in Ramallah, infact it is a UN refugee camp providing all the necessities and the EU is always funding projects and so on.
The sealed off Ghetto contained 30 percent of the population of Warsaw in less than 2.5% of the city. (pg. 196)
The following from Martin Gilbert's "Holocaust Journey" gives some idea of the enormity of the crime of the Warsaw Ghetto. In the place where Jewish men, women and children were deported from Warsaw to the death camps, a long time after the war a memorial was built. Those building the memorial wanted to inscribe on it all the names of the Jews who were deported from there to their deaths. But the number was far too high to make it feasible. The Vietnam memorial in Washington has 55,000 names on it. This one would have needed at least 300,000 names.
I want to read to you two short selections from eye-witnesses in the Warsaw Ghetto, both are taken from Martin Gilbert's book "Holocaust Journey" page 317 and 318. These are not for a weak stomach, but this is what happened and this is what the Warsaw Ghetto was like, everyday. The first is from Adolf Berman a survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto: "On that very day, the first victims were the Jewish children, and I shall never forget the harrowing scenes and blood-curdling incidents when the SS men most cruelly attacked children -- children roaming the streets; took them by force to carts, and I remember, fully, those children were defending themselves. Even today the cries and shrieking of those children are clear in my mind. "Mama, Mama," this is what we heard. "Save us, mothers."
The second is from eye-witness Alexander Donat: 'I saw a young mother run downstairs into the street to get milk for her baby. Her husband who worked at the Ostbahn, had as usual left earlier that morning. She had not bothered to dress, but was in bathrobe and slippers. An empty milk bottle in hand, she was headed for a shop where, she knew, they sold milk under the counter. She walked into Operation Reinhard. The executioners demanded her Ausweis. "Upstairs ... Ostbahn ... work certificate. I'll bring it right away."
"We've heard that one before. Have you got an Ausweis with you, or haven't you?"
She was dragged protesting to the wagon, scarcely able to realise what was happening. "But my baby is all alone. Milk..." she protested. "My Ausweis is upstairs."
'Then for the first time, she really looked at the men who were holding her and she saw where she was being dragged: to the gaping entrance at the back of a high-boarded wagon with victims already jammed into it. With all her young mother's strength she wrenched herself free, and then two, and four policemen fell on her, hitting her, smashing her to the ground, picking her up again, and tossing her into the wagon like a sack.
'I can still hear her screaming in a half-crazed voice somewhere between a sob of utter human despair and the howl of an animal.'
The horrors of the Warsaw Ghetto and the Nazi death camps are unspeakable. To compare this to Ramallah these Bishops must be completely ignorant or what happened--which cannot be the case as they had just come from Yad Vashem--or Anti-Semites. This would be hardly surprising. After the war when everyone knew what had happened to the Jews of Europe, many war criminals escaped Europe to South America with the aid of Catholic priests along the 'ratlines'. Adolf Eichman, the monster that meticulously planned the destruction of European Jewry and the murder of six million men, women and children, the CEO of the project, that monster was smuggled to Argentina with Vatican papers (Eichman in my Hands, by Peter Malkin).
The words of Revelation 16 come to mind where those living in the kingdom of the beast "repented not of their deeds". The Catholic church has not repented over its involvement in the Holocaust. Today, they are using the Holocaust as a political tool against the Jewish state.
Later in Revelation 16--just before Jesus speaks of his return to the earth in verse 15 "Behold I come as a thief"-- the last sign Jesus gives us to watch for is the three unclean spirits coming from the mouth of the dragon, beast and false prophet. A spirit coming from a persons mouth is a teaching. In 1 John 4:1 we read: "Beloved, believe not every spirit, but try the spirits whether they are of God: because many false prophets are gone out into the world." The teaching coming from the false prophet, is an unclean teaching, a teaching that gathers the nations against Jesus Christ and against Israel. The false prophet is associated with the beast, whose career goes right back to the Roman beast of Daniel chapter seven. It can be traced in its various phases in Revelation 13 including the beast that looks like a lamb--appears holy, but speaks as a dragon, or Roman. He exercises all the power of the first beast before him, so he has an empire. Putting this together we have the Holy Roman Empire. The false prophet is associated with the descendant of this christian beast. He speaks the same "unclean teaching". He is a prophet, so he appears to be holy--christian but is false. The false prophet represents the teaching authority of the Roman Church, such as the pope, cardinals and bishops. Like the bishops visiting Ramallah. They were speaking of liberty, equality and fraternity for the Palestinians. (This is a false promise of liberty because the church couldn't really care less about them.) But really their words were chosen to gather the nations against Israel... and to Armageddon to be destroyed on the mountains of Israel, where Ramallah is.
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