Majida El Roumi - Sobhan Al Kalima (Syriac) Christmas Recital

An Arabic Christmas Carol (Byzantine Hymn of the Nativity)

“Come ye Gentiles and adore the Lord, for this day a great light hath descended upon the earth!”

The Point

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Edited Under Fr. Leonard Feeney M.I.C.M. — Saint Benedict Center

December, 1956

This Christmas men are looking to the Holy Land, and they are listening — not for the strains of “Glory to God in the Highest,” but for the sounds of war upon earth. And we might say: It is just. God long ago crashed the Temple of Jerusalem to the ground, and cursed its people, the Jews, to be forever homeless and wandering. If the world has defied this Divine judgment and supported a Jewish return to Palestine, then let the world bear the consequences of God’s righteous anger.

But this leaves a greater part unsaid. For the Holy Land is infinitely more than a geographical locality which God has forbidden to the Jews. It is, for all time, the precious countryside where God became the Child of a Virginal Mother, and where God as Man walked and taught and died for us. It is, indeed, God’s Land.

If, therefore, we are anxious this Christmas, our concern is this: The leaders of our nation have proposed that Christian boys be ready to shed their blood in order to make the Jews secure within the borders of the Holy Land. But should this happen, should Christian lives be spent to keep God’s Land in the hands of His crucifiers, the price of such betrayal will not be confined to the deserts of the East. We will be paying, in kind, on bloody Main Street, U. S. A.

* * * * *

THE ENEMIES OF CHRIST AT CHRISTMAS

Soon, the Jews of America will be trying once more to jostle Christmas from its place as the nation’s chief interest in late December. As elbow for this endeavor, the Jews will rely again on their festival of Chanukah — once a minor holiday but recently seized on because of its timely Yuletide occurrence and now celebrated with all the blare and bluster the Jews can produce.

Though originally set up in 165 B. C., the observance of Chanukah (Hebrew for “Dedication”) has long since lost its holy, Old Testament meaning. Thus, when Jewish leaders decided a few years back to revive and exalt the holiday, they found it expedient also to invest it with a fresh and acceptable significance. They have, accordingly, made it an annual practice to hire the principal halls in the principal cities of the country for the staging of special Chanukah pageants. These loudly-trumpeted extravaganzas (“Inspiring — Breathtaking — Spectacular”) oppose the Birth of the true Messias by dramatizing, with the solemnity of religious ritual, the birth of their own messianic empire: the Jewish state of Israel.

It is, of course, true that the Jews would have been eager to exploit any one of their festivals that was opportune in order to affront the beauty and singularity of Christmas. Yet Chanukah is especially suited for such a use — because it was on that day that Our Lord revealed Himself to the Jews as the Messias, and, for doing so, was almost stoned. The story is told in the Holy Gospel of Saint John (Chap. 10, v. 22-39):

“And the Dedication was in Jerusalem: and it was winter. And Jesus walked in the temple, in Salomon’s porch. The Jews therefore compassed him round about, and said to him, How long doest thou hold our soul in suspense? If thou be Christ, tell us openly. Jesus answered them, I speak to you: and you believe not, the works that I do in the name of my Father, they give testimony of me, but you do not believe, because you are not of my sheep. My sheep hear my voice: and I know them, and they follow me. And I give them life everlasting: and they shall not perish for ever, and no man shall pluck them out of my hand. My father, that which he hath given me, is greater than all: and no man can pluck them out of the hand of my father. I and the Father are one. The Jews took up stones, to stone him. Jesus answered them, Many good works I have showed you from my father, for which of those works do you stone me? The Jews answered him, For a good work we stone thee not, but for blasphemy, and because thou being a man, makest thyself God. Jesus answered them, Is it not written in your law, that I said, you are God’s? If he called them God’s, to whom the word of God was made, and the scripture can not be broken: whom the Father hath sanctified and sent into the world, say you, That thou blasphemest, because I said I am the son of God? If I do not the works of my Father, believe me not. But if I do, and if you will not believe me, believe the works: that you may know and believe that the Father is in me, and I in the Father. They sought therefore to apprehend him: and he went forth out of their hands.”

Because it is reckoned by the Jewish calendar, the day on which Chanukah falls may vary from year to year by as much as a month. This year it is due to fall on its earliest possible date. But Jews have never been ones to let liturgical niceties stand in the way of more vital considerations, and so, the Jews of Boston (the only segment of whose plans we have heard) are making an adroit adjustment in their schedule. Their annual Chanukah pageant at the Boston Garden will be held this year, not when the calendar says Chanukah should occur, but some three weeks later, on December the twenty-third — just a stone’s throw from Christmas.

* * * * * The pride of Jewish rural life is the “kibbutz,” a sort of collective farm settlement, of which there are presently some 250 well-populated examples in the state of Israel. A recent volume to swell the praises of these communes is Harvard University Press’ Kibbutz, Venture in Utopia. The following two extracts from this book provide a raw, startling picture of the Jews who today inhabit the Land of Christ’s Birth:

“In its attempt to create a better world, the kibbutz has found that it faces considerable opposition, and it has come to view this opposition with an intense hatred. Indeed, it is not unfair to say the kibbutz hates almost everybody, since it views almost everybody as an opponent. Outside of Israel, all the ‘bourgeois’ countries are hated, and only the Soviet Union and ‘People’s Democracies’ are ‘loved.’

“As for marriage, they believed — and still believe — that a union between a man and woman was their own affair, to be entered into on the basis of love and to be broken at the termination of love; neither the union nor the separation were to require the permission or the sanction of the community. Today, for example, if a couple wishes to marry, the partners merely ask for a joint room; if they wish a divorce, they return to separate rooms.”

* * * * * Each year when the Church commemorates the arrival of the Magi at Bethlehem, on the Feast of the Epiphany, our priests are required to read, as an integral part of their Breviary prayers, the following homily by Pope Saint Gregory the Great:

“All things which He had made, bore witness that their Maker was come ... And yet, up to this very hour, the hearts of the unbelieving Jews will not acknowledge that He, to Whom all nature gave testimony, is their God. Being more hardened than the rocks, the Jews refuse to be rent by repentance.”

This is but one instance of what the Jews would term the “anti-Semitism” of the Church’s Advent and Christmas Season liturgy. With the possible exception of Holy Week in Lent, there is no period in the whole liturgical year which more emphasizes the bridgeless chasm separating Christian faith and Jewish infidelity.

From Advent through the Epiphany Octave, the texts of the Mass and the Divine Office resound repeatedly with that theme which is at once the fulfilled expectation of the Jews of the Old Law, and the indictment of the deicide Jews of today:

“Behold, O Israel, your king ... Blow ye the trumpet in Zion, for the day of the Lord is nigh ... It is the birth of the Christ, O Jerusalem ... The Savior of the world will be our King ... He shall sit upon the throne of David His father.”

These are the tidings of great joy which plague the Jews as sorely this December as they did more than nineteen hundred years ago. And among these tidings there is, for the Jews, no more hateful information than the exultant shouts that the Baby of Bethlehem is the true Son of David, inheriting a royal title from His foster father, Saint Joseph, and royal blood from His Spotless Mother, the Virgin Mary. It was precisely to attack this central truth of Christmas that the rabbis of the early Christian centuries concocted that unprintably-filthy version of the Birth of Christ which is now found in the Jews’ “holy” book, the Talmud. We have determined never to reprint, in direct quotation, these blasphemous assaults against the purity of the Mother of God. But that they were invented by the rabbis, for the express purpose of challenging Our Lord’s title to the Throne of David, is abundantly admitted by Jewish authorities. The Jewish Encyclopedia, for example, blithely states, in its article on “Jesus,” that, “For polemical purposes it was necessary for the Jews to insist on the illegitimacy of Jesus as against the Davidic descent claimed by the Christian Church.”

At no point in the Christmas liturgy, however, does the Church’s consciousness of Jewish perfidy becloud her joy at the Birth of the Messias. In this spirit, therefore, we anticipate the coming gladness, and leave our readers with that jubilant exhortation from the Third Mass of Christmas:

“Come ye Gentiles and adore the Lord, for this day a great light hath descended upon the earth!”

HOW THE JEWS INVADED THE HOLY LAND

The Point

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Edited Under Fr. Leonard Feeney M.I.C.M. — Saint Benedict Center

September, 1958

HOW THE JEWS INVADED THE HOLY LAND

Four Men Who Built The Zionist State

It is a peculiarity of history that the farther back we stand to get a look at it, the better we see it. And thus, with the smoke lifted and the rubble swept aside, those two increasingly distant calamities, World Wars I and II, are every day making a clearer picture.

It may be argued that the abiding effects of a war are not always the precise effects intended by the war’s planners. But when two international conflicts, fought within twenty-five years of each other, have both resulted in the establishment and extension of the same two world powers (to the detriment of all others), then there is more than mere chance to be reckoned with.

Those two powers, the chief two in the world today, are Communism and Zionism. The First World War gave them both a solid footing: the tracts of land they needed if they were to continue. The Communists announced a claim to all of Russia; the Zionists were granted one to Palestine. And World War II more than made good these claims. It gave the Communists the largest empire the world has ever known — stretching from Berlin to the China Sea. More unlikely, it gave the Zionists a sovereign Jewish state in the Holy Land.

That the fortunes of Zionism and Communism have been complementary, that world events of the past several decades have been to their common advantage, is obvious. That both movements are avowedly anti-Christian, and that both are in origin and direction Jewish, is a matter of record. But although the Jewish power of Communism has been quantitatively a greater oppressor of the Church — having killed more priests and desecrated more altars — the Jewish power of Zionism has hit the Church at the very core by seizing and profaning the one land which above all others is the Holy Land.

As an organized program of racism and revenge, fulfilling centuries of thwarted Jewish dreams, Zionism is larger than any one of the men who have been its leaders. Out of the last hundred years, however, there are four of these men who stand as symbols of Zionist progress. Considered in sequence, these leaders of Zionism will tell all of the story that must so urgently be known.

Moses Hess

In the year 1862, a German Jew named Moses Hess published at Paris a book called Rome and Jerusalem. If modern Zionism must be assigned a specific starting point, this was it. Hess’s message was straightforward. “Papal Rome,” he writes, “symbolizes to the Jews an inexhaustible well of poison.” But the Jews should not be discouraged, Hess continues. A “regeneration” of the world has been going on since the “great” French Revolution. Rome is already on the way down, he declares, and the job of the Jew is to establish Jerusalem in place of it. Christianity will be “finally replaced among the regenerated nations by a new historical cult. To this coming cult, Judaism alone holds the key.”

Hess nailed the whole argument in with the resounding blasphemy: “Every Jew has within him the potentiality of a Messiah and every Jewess that of a Mater Dolorosa ... The Messianic Era is the present age.”

There was no Jew in Europe that was not interested. But, for many, Hess’s call to arms was too dangerous. There would be Christian resentment, they said. There would be a reaction, and all those new liberties so lately acquired by the Jews, as a result of the Masonic revolutions, would be revoked. To these “assimilated” Jews of Western Europe, Hess was a stab of bad conscience. He was telling them that, despite their white gloves and tall hats and changed names, they were still, and irrevocably, Jewish.

On the other hand, to the Jews of Eastern Europe, still confined in the Polish and Russian ghettos, Moses Hess was a prophet. His book begot a dozen secret societies dedicated to a revived Jewish nationalism. And it set the stage for a more versatile Jewish leader.

Theodore Herzl

If Moses Hess was the violent revolutionist that Zionism needed to start it off, Theodore Herzl was the capable calculator who brought order to the Zionist frenzy, won for Zionism the support of Western Jews, and gave permanent direction to the Jewish resurgence by advocating the immediate establishment of a self-governing Jewish state.

With diabolical doggedness, Herzl peddled his plan for a Jewish homeland on every important doorstep in Europe. The Kaiser listened to him. And so did the King of Italy and the Sultan of Turkey. England offered him a piece of her own property in Uganda. But the Zionists were determined against second-class handouts. They wanted Palestine or nothing for their nation, and Jerusalem for their capital.

Herzl dared approach even the Pope, Saint Pius X, to ask support for a Jewish settlement in Palestine. To so fantastic a proposal, the Holy Father (says Herzl’s Diaries): “answered in a stern and categorical manner: ‘We are unable to favor this movement. We cannot prevent the Jews from going to Jerusalem — but we could never sanction it. The ground of Jerusalem, if it were not always sacred, has been sanctified by the life of Jesus Christ. As the head of the Church, I cannot answer you otherwise. The Jews have not recognized Our Lord; therefore, we cannot recognize the Jewish people.’ ”

The Pope did not discount the possibility of some measure of success for Zionism. Himself the virtual prisoner of Italy’s Masonic administrators, Saint Pius X held no illusory view of “Catholic Europe.” The men who were then running Europe’s governments were the offspring of those same Freemasons who had gloried in tearing down the ghetto walls while they sacked the churches. For Freemasonry had set the Jews up; and now that the Masons were in unchallenged power, the Jews could expect great things. But could they really expect Palestine? Besides being the Holy Land of the Christians, the territory of Palestine was the guarded property of the Turkish Empire, the centuries-old home of an established people. It seemed unlikely to the Pope that great numbers of Jews could ever settle there — and unthinkable that circumstances would ever permit the Jews to set up their own government in the place.

The Zionists, on their part, were confident that when desired circumstances do not present themselves on their own, they can be made to order. In a speech before the Sixth Zionist Congress in 1903, Herzl’s colleague, Max Nordau, said (and we repeat that the year was 1903): “Let me tell you the following words as if I were showing you the rungs of a ladder leading upward and upward: Herzl, the Zionist Congress, the English Uganda proposition, the future World War, the peace conference where, with the help of England, a free and Jewish Palestine will be created.”

Chaim Weizmann

When the World War that Nordau had foretold eventually came, in 1914, Herzl was ten years dead. But a new Zionist leader was on hand to oversee the expected Jewish triumph. This was Chaim Weizmann, an itinerant chemist who had moved from his native Russia to Manchester, England, sometime before the outbreak of the War. It was Weizmann’s task to acquaint the British government with Jewish designs on the Holy Land. In exchange for an official smile on these Zionist ambitions, Weizmann could promise that his race — its financiers, presidential advisors, newspaper publishers and all — would join whole-heartedly in helping Britain win the war. Consequently, on Nov. 2, 1917, the British Foreign Secretary, Lord Balfour, addressed a letter to Lord Rothschild, English representative of the powerful Jewish banking house.

“His Majesty’s Government,” wrote Balfour, “view with favor the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people ... ” Though the letter further specified that “nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine,” the Jews assumed this clause was meaningless. The Balfour Declaration, as this letter came to be called, gave the Jews a foot in the Holy Land, and they set out with determination to wriggle the rest of their bulk through the door.

To direct this operation, Chaim Weizmann went to Palestine in 1918, as head of the Zionist Commission. Under Weizmann’s supervision, armies of Jewish immigrants pushed into Palestine (made a British Mandate in 1922) till eventually they had swollen their numbers to one-half the total inhabitants. (Their land-purchases were less prodigal; by 1948 they owned only six per cent of the available property.)

Through all this, the Church remained adamantly anti-Zionist. In a 1921 allocution, Pope Benedict XV expressed his fear that “the Jews should come to take in Palestine a preponderant and privileged position.” Most Catholic observers, however, thought such a possibility remote. Father Bede Jarrett, noted English Dominican, gave the majority opinion when he wrote, also in 1921: “The Jew has always specialized in money. Industrial labor has no interest for him, and agricultural labor even less. Therefore, he will never go back to Palestine, where the wealth is almost entirely in agriculture. Indeed, why should he worry over Palestine when he has the whole world at his feet?”

What Father Jarrett did not realize was that “the Jew” intended to demonstrate just how abjectly at his feet the world was — and precisely by taking over Palestine.

World War I, as Nordau revealed, had been the scheduled means for setting up a Jewish state. But it did not quite do the trick. A second World War was needed to bring the Jews’ otherwise unthinkable scheme to perfection. At the conclusion of World War II, Chaim Weizmann came to America to claim the spoils. Spurred on by him and fellow-Zionists, the United Nations obediently decreed that at the expiration of the British Mandate, the Holy Land should be partitioned into two areas; the smaller to be governed by Arabs, the larger by Jews.

The British were to withdraw on May 15, 1948. At midnight of May 14, Zionist leaders announced the formation of a Jewish State. Ten minutes after their announcement, President Harry Truman, defying all protocol, accorded this infant monstrosity official United States recognition. Later, Mr. Truman was to write in his published memoirs: “I do not think I ever had as much pressure and propaganda aimed at the White House as I had in this instance. The persistence of a few of the extreme Zionist leaders — actuated by political motives and engaging in political threats — disturbed me and annoyed me.”

Even if it were not known otherwise, events of the last decade would bear stern witness that the Masonic Mr. Truman overcame his annoyance.

David Ben-Gurion

Though Chaim Weizmann was duly named President of the Jewish State, and held that office until his death in 1952, it was a position of honor only. The Jews were grateful for all Weizmann had done, but they were confident they had come to a new season: the full flowering of that “Messianic Era” that Moses Hess had proclaimed. And they had a new leader: their Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion.

As effective head of the Jewish State, Ben-Gurion represents the fulfillment of Hess, Herzl, and Weizmann; the achievement of Zionist victory. He is the symbol of Jewry on its own — the crucifiers of Christ free at last of Christian standards and surveillance. How alien the Jews are to those standards, their ten years of sovereignty have enabled them to show.

The acts of Jewish terrorism that had marked the final months of the British Mandate (when Jews were blowing up British buildings in Palestine, hanging British soldiers, mailing time-bombs to members of the British cabinet) seemed like mere schoolboy pranks when the Jews went to work on the Arabs. One million Arab residents of Palestine were forced to flee their ancestral homes — the orchards, pastures, and farms their people had worked for centuries. And as Archbishop George Hakim of Galilee insisted: “They were terrorized out.” The persuasive device employed by the Jews was simple: they massacred one whole Arab village; then they sent a sound-truck through all the neighboring villages, promising each one the same fate unless the people evacuated their homes immediately.

All this was apart from the military aggression, when Jewish soldiers, with arms supplied by Communist Czechoslovakia, invaded the Arab-assigned regions of Palestine and increased their national holdings by forty per cent. Feats like this thrilled the Jews who were watching from afar, swelled the fantastic sums being poured into Palestine by World Jewry, and provoked statements like this one by New York’s Jewish Congressman, Emmanuel Celler: “Maybe the Israelis may have to give the Arabs another lesson and cut through their forces again like a hot knife through butter. Only this time the pleas of the United Nations will not deter them. They will shoot their way clear into Beirut, Amman, and Alexandria.”

When Prime Minister Ben-Gurion’s plans for the further expansion of the Jewish state are realized (when international circumstances have been ordered to that end), there will be a fresh field open to the Jews. And it will be open not only for additional confiscation of Arab property, but for further desecration of Christian shrines and churches in those parts of the Holy Land that the Jews do not yet control. Bethlehem, for example, can expect a repetition of the profanity and sacrilege that the Jews have already perpetrated in Mount Carmel, Ain-Karim, Haifa, Capharnaum, Tiberias, Beit-Jala, Katamon, in all of Galilee, and in Jerusalem, the Holy City itself. These previous desecrations, so well calculated by Mr. Ben-Gurion, prompted the well-known but little-heeded warning of the late Apostolic Delegate, Archbishop Hughes, who stated that there is in operation a “deliberate Jewish effort to decimate the Arabs and to destroy Christianity in Palestine.”

The consequences of this “deliberate Jewish effort” will spread in our time far beyond the borders of Palestine. For the once-Christian West has betrayed Our Lord’s Holy Land into the hands of His crucifiers, and already the price of the betrayal is being paid, in kind. It has cost England her empire. And it has put that other chief Zionist supporter, the United States of America, face to face with a Third World War — one that looms like a terror out of the Apocalypse, and that will provide the most fantastic chapter yet in the unfinished story of Zionism.