God's Own Country

According to this (PDF), American Jews are going off Obama, and don't like his stand on Israel. Who cares? Like radical feminists or the political homosexualist movement, the Israel Lobby is simply not part of the new coalition that the Democratic Party began to become in 2008, and which it will become in full in 2012, so that any midterm losses this year will be nothing more than that, if consolidation and yet further expansion are successfully achieved, not least by the appointment to the Supreme Court of the white Evangelical whom the Republican Party has no more delivered than it has ever done anything about abortion.

Zionists, feminists and homosexualists - never to be confused with Jews, women and the homosexually inclined - could all die, and the only effect would to lessen the vote for any PUMA primary challenger. Forgive Obama if he remains dry-eyed at that prospect. Meanwhile, if American Jews wish to return to a position of political influence, then they need to return to their pre-1967 view of Israel as not really anything to do with them, instead seeing America as the Promised Land, looking to no Old Country or transnational religious hierarchy as the Irish, Italians or Poles do, and feeling no WASP or Scots-Irish (or, one should add, basically German wannabe-WASP) requirement to be loyal to every failing of America simply on account of having been there so long. Many, even most, of them have never given up that view, but they are screamed down by the limitlessly funded spies at AIPAC and the ADL.

Speaking of whom, if Richard Williamson had propagated any other error of historical scholarship, however egregious, then where and why would he have committed any criminal offence? And how are his views on the Holocaust doctrinally erroneous or ecclesially schismatic? Rightly, they were not in any sense the reason for his excommunication. That was for the schismatic act of being ordained to the Episcopate against the express will of the Roman Pontiff. The Holy Father should not have claimed ignorance of Williamson's historical opinions, even if that ignorance were genuine. He should instead have pointed out that correcting them was a matter for historians, and that holding them was neither heretical nor schismatic, and therefore no cause to deny full ecclesial communion.

And he should have issued a variation on that which he should say whenever anyone brings up Pius XII and the Holocaust: "We all know that the plain facts of history are against you, but we all know that those are not your real agenda, so if you want to get back to the real Pius XII days when the Holy See had quite warm relations with a State of which you are not a citizen and which did not exist during the War, then you should tell that State to stop imposing military law on the Catholics of the West Bank, to get out of that part of the viable Palestinian State created on both sides of the Jordan at the end of the British Mandate, and to stop bombarding the Catholics of Lebanon."

That would require but slight modification to make it the statement that should also be issued by President Obama, who might also point out that the combined Catholic, Orthodox, Oriental Orthodox, Anglican and Lutheran vote in America is a very great deal larger than the entire Jewish vote, never mind that minority of the Jewish vote which adheres to the Israeli Hard Right.