Pope Francis: The Sacred Fury Returns

The Sacred Fury Returns
The Pope found time this week for an old tradition – preaching morality to Jews. But just like those blood libels of the past, this time too: the facts are incorrect, and the blame is misplaced!
By: Anat Vidor, WIZO President
Photo credit: Reuters
Facing rampant antisemitism in several European countries, Australia, and especially Canada, I sometimes feel like we’ve returned to 1939. But this past week brought slight hints of the Inquisition, transporting me momentarily back to 1255.
It was the current Pope Francis who, disturbed by the Muslim war against Jews, and based on an unsubstantiated rumor that reached his ears, decided to take a break from dealing with the pedophilia culture flooding his tiny state, to update the world: “Israel bombed children, this is cruelty, not war.” One day later, the Holy See added two more spoonfuls of sacred fury, expanding: “Israel is spraying children with machine guns and bombing schools and hospitals. Such cruelty.” End quote.
Oh please, give me a break. This isn’t the first time in history that a pope has found Jews to be cruel, and it’s not the first time his accusations are based on complete lies. Blood libels have already filled history books and Wikipedia pages, and they always come from the same quarters and are directed at the same accused. We’ve never heard what the Chief Rabbi says about Christian cruelty in the Russia-Ukraine war that claims many children’s lives, or about the genocide Muslims are committing against each other in Syria. But the Pope, as a military expert with advanced intelligence services, feels quite comfortable dispensing moral lectures with anti-Semitic undertones. After all, if antisemitism is back in fashion, why not revive an old tradition?
Who thought that little Anat from Petah Tikva would answer His Holiness the Pope from the ivory tower of the Vatican, but if no one else is doing it, I’ll step up to the task.
Let’s start with the facts: The only children deliberately murdered in and around Gaza are the Jewish children killed by Hamas on October 7th. The only children in the area held captive are the Jewish children kidnapped to Gaza. The only school in the Middle East that was bombed this week is in Ramat Gan. And the only children in the world threatened with collective death are Israeli children, of all religions, while Iran is currently working on producing weapons for their destruction.
This doesn’t stop Pope Francis from saying things that make him sound humane, while consciously and deliberately trampling Jewish humanity – which the world loves to judge instead of learning from. We know the simple truth: The real cruelty is Hamas’s use of children as human shields for terrorists, a use that necessarily involves putting them at risk! The real cruelty, the inconceivable one, is that the typical Gaza child has a mother who, instead of protecting him and wanting what’s best for him – hopes he will be a shahid, meaning die for the supreme holiness of killing Jewish children. That’s true cruelty, Mr. Francis!
The Pope knows this. Yet he still chose to emphasize to his followers the “Jewish cruelty,” like his forefathers before setting out on a crusade. The same story again, with the blood of children, and matzot, and wells, and plagues. Instead of once, with courage and honesty, standing up in his white robe and saying what his God and our God expects him to say: “To kidnap children from their beds, murder their fathers, rape their mothers before their eyes, and drag them into captivity – that’s cruelty, not war!”
