Israeli officials fear the pope’s vocal criticisms and symbolic gestures - such as this year’s nativity scene in St Peter’s Square featuring baby Jesus resting on a Palestinian keffiyeh - may influence global public opinion.
Created by Bethlehem artists Johny Andonia and Faten Nastas Mitwasi, the nativity scene prominently features Palestinian materials, including olive wood, a symbol of Palestinian resilience.
During its unveiling, Pope Francis condemned the global arms industry for profiting from human suffering and reiterated his call for an end to all wars, urging the faithful to remember those suffering in the holy land.
The display, praised by many as a message of solidarity and peace, drew backlash from Israel’s supporters, who accused the Vatican of promoting a pro-Palestinian agenda.
HOW CAN YOU CRITICIZE US KILLING CHILDREN???
Because they’re antisemites ofc
Yeah. But then they are allowed to make fun of the Pope saying stuff like “Between the Pope and air conditioning, I’d choose air conditioning.” and you must laugh for some reason even though the dude is Jewish and so the Pope is nothing to him like any religious leader is nothing to me.
Israel’s children killing business is cutting into the church child molesting business. It’s a conflict of interest.
only an anti-semitist would say “don’t kill children”. they should get him fired for this.
Israel thinks this is what’s going to give them a poor public opinion!?
Imagine getting upset over “Don’t kill children”
This is probably a good time to mention that Israel, like all developed nations, has been experiencing a slowing birth rate.
This was a problem for them because the birthrate in the occupied territories was higher, and if you can’t maintain a Jewish majority in the country, how can you maintain the country as a Jewish homeland? This existential doom has hung over Israelis like climate change or the heat death of the universe: even if they aren’t destroyed in fire, they’ll simply dissolve over time until they disappear, and it will all be for nothing.
So you know. I’m not saying that killing Palestinian children was the solution they came up with. But the prospect of a justified way to wipe Gaza clean came their way, and it was too important an opportunity to pass up. If some children must be killed in the process, they think, silently, in the quietest corner of their hearts, then so be it.
Unfortunately the data doesn’t support your thesis. child birth graph Haredi jews are having more than double births than the average Israeli Muslim.
Combined (secular etc.) Jewish birth rate is on par (slightly higher) than Israeli Muslims and Palestinians in Gaza. (This was even before all the bullshit started last year)
This isn’t some secret. Listen to John Mearsheimer, who has talked about this for years. it is simple logic.
There is about the same number of Arab Palestinians and Western Israelis in the area. So for the Jewish supremacy ethonstate that Israel wants to be there is only three options:
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Indefinite Apartheid. This is extremely costly and as the Arab population keeps growing more and more difficult to maintain. Also it is just preserving the status quo
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Ethnic cleansing. Drive all the Palestinians out. However then your neighbors have to harbor them, they form a resistance there, and they keep demanding their right to return.
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Genocide. By eradicating them all, you get the “final” solution to permanently steal and settle the land.
So what we see is Israel maintaining option 1 and looking to escalate to option 2 and 3 whenever possible. Notice how they first tried to expel the population of Gaza into Egypt? When this option wasn’t possible and they knew that their western supporters in the US, UK, Germany and others were okay with genocide, they escalated to genocide.
The only way to get out of this situation with minimizing further destruction and murder is to abandon the Zionist project in favor of a just state that grants equal rights and justice to everyone living in Palestine.
I don’t believe I presented the information as a secret. And I agree with everything else you said. I’m a one-state-solution guy. This does mean that the state won’t have one official ethnicity/culture/religion, but I have no regard for the desire to build a state hegemony.
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I have no proof of this, but I think Israeli intelligence knew the October Hamas attack was coming. Probably didn’t realize how severe it was going to be, but they may have wanted it for an excuse for everything they did after.
I can’t even wrap my head around what the goal of Hamas was with their attack. Surely they knew that Israel’s response would be total insanity. Maybe they’re drinking their own koolaid even at the top.
Lets not confuse intelligence that something major is going to happen with actionable intelligence where you can preemptively take action to prevent an attack.
Prior to 9-11 there was most definitely increased chatter and I’d hazard a guess that many security and intelligence agencies knew something was going down on US soils but didn’t have actionable specifics that would have allowed them to take appropriate action and prevent 9-11.
I think it was a similar issue with Israel and they must have believed that the worse case was an isolated terrorist bombing and to prepare a typical lockdown and emergency services response and not a massive raid on their territories.
Yeah someone else provided some good links to the links here. I was making the same connection. Check the other reply.
Pretty sure this is common knowledge by now:
Yeah, seems like a pretty good source. It reminds me of the “Bin Laden Determined to Attack Within the US” reports that surfaced after the 9/11 attacks. I don’t actually believe that GWB was in on it, but I could see the administration letting something happen for reason to go to war.
It’s so similar in a way. Perhaps both were intentionally allowed at some level, just underestimated in scale. I can’t imagine either of the leaders, Bush or Netanyahu, to allow so many of their “own people” to die and make a mockery of their countries to the world. Perhaps they did. I doubt we’ll ever know.
I don’t believe Bush did it through malice, it was 100% incompetence.
I mean, take it from Richard Clarke:
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/trust-clarke-hes-right-about-bush/
Of course they knew, they have one of if not the best secret agency in the world.
What, Israel counts as developed nation?
“If you lill them you have fun only once!”
The Pope.
Remember that part of Jesus’s story where he had to flee because a mad king was systematically murdering children because he was scared that the child was “the king of kings”.
What a wild parallel.
If you believe in the divine Jesus, and have a decent understanding of history, surely you would know that the man would look more like the average Palestinian than the average Israeli.
When it comes to religion though logic must leave the building.
This is NotTheOnion material. Like, are you actually mad that the fucking Pope is not on board with killing children?
Ofcourse the catholic church is not onboard with murdering children. How will the clergy get laid if all the children are killed?
But on a more serious note, the current pope is actually doing a decent job of calling out atrocities and promoting some of the decent aspects of their faith, and not propping up all of the bad stuff as god’s will
He’s also a transphobe who uses his platform to attack trans people.
The current pope is good at PR, that’s all.
Its a strange world isnt it. In the last election I was shouted down on here by trans supporters who said you cant expect perfection from everyone, because Harris supported trans rights, but also was a supporter of Israeli genocide as well, which I thought was a bigger issue for humanity to address immediately with the limited time to apply pressure that was available.
So I’ll just parrot that right back now along with the idea that “you dont tease the fat guy at the gym”. Following the metaphor, the pope is currently on the treadmill shedding some pounds, so I’m going to hold my derisive comments about that particular rapist cult for the moment. And he’s a whole lot better than all the other popes of my lifetime. But next time he opens his mouth about trans rights, sure, kick his arse.
Perfect example of not letting perfect be the enemy of good.
A perfect example of centrism allowing evil to flourish because it’s lesser.
The alternative to a shit pope isn’t a slightly less shit pope, it’s having no pope at all.
But rather than argue for that, people argue to defend the papacy. It’s truly mind boggling.
He’s about as with it as you can expect the Pope to be. The Catholic Church has never really lead the charge of progress
The fact that he’s not advocating for the wholesale execution of trans people out in the street makes some people think he’s some kind of “crazy” pro LGBT “corruptor” of good Christian families.
At least here where I am, a stone’s throw away from Palestine, these are not topics that are dealt with with a lot of open mindedness. I hate “hate the sin not the sinner” just as much as anyone else on Lemmy, but I’ve seen the effect his rhetoric (specifically on gay people) has had and it’s certainly better than Benedictus 16 before him.
I don’t agree with everything he says (I attended a Catholic school, which is never a faith-enhancing experience) but I’m damn certain that he’s slowly dragging most of the Catholic faithful kicking and screaming into the 21st century when he just as easily could have been ten times worse on social issues. As far as a pope goes, this is pretty much the best case scenario as far as this stuff is concerned. The industrial-scale child abuse still needs a lot of work though. Let’s not kid ourselves.
Now if only he knew what a compiler is.Except scientific progress, it was the world leader for a few centuries there.
Is he? Is he really as with it as I can expect the pope to be? Is stopping the mass molestation and rape of children really too much to ask?
Progressiveness is hard, you have to hate someone.
I have to say as far as inspirational quotes go, it lacks something.
Do you mean like, the way war drives technical innovation?
I don’t get it.
No I’m making fun of the fact of that the pope is a “good Pope” because he’s slightly better than the previous popes. It’s a pretty low bar.
Crossposted 👍
But, security… Aren’t tens of thousands of children’s lives a small price to pay to stop the violence?
/s
Even in they old testament, only the first born children were killed.
Tell that to the 42 kids who got mauled to death by bears for making fun of someone’s hair.
That’s what the Egyptians did. When the Israelites spared the Midianite women, Moses got angry at them and commanded them to kill everyone. Except the virgin girls, probably for completely wholesome Christian reasons.
Yeah except for all those other times when everyone was slaughtered down to their animals. Or you know, that time when the entire human and air-breathing animal population of the planet except for 0.0000000001% were killed.
Yeah those plagues weren’t too bad comparatively.
“Child murderers complain that their child murdering is being called out”
The pope is Hamas!
“Is this antisemitism?”
“no, this is Patrick”
The vatican is finally right about something, even relevant, for once. Good for them. They have a lot to make up for, and this is a start.
If you’re on the pro-killing children side, it’s probably time to look in the mirror.
“Yesterday, children were bombed. This is cruelty, not war,” the pontiff declared last Saturday, lamenting the immense humanitarian crisis in the besieged enclave.
Israel lashed out in response, accusing the pope of ignoring its security concerns.
Israeli foreign ministry spokesperson Oren Marmorstein accused the pope of ignoring the broader context of Israel’s military actions, which have resulted in the killing of 17,000 children.
Maybe everyone should ignore a “security concern” if the only way to alleviate that concern is murdering 17,000 children?
Because whatever group you’re concerned about, probably won’t like you anymore after you murder 17,000 of their children…
Especially when the reason for your concern is people are mad you keep killing them in the first place.
To be precise, not all 17k Palestinian children had the luxury of immediate death from being blown up with American bombs by Israeli terrorists. Many of them were in fact killed by sniper fire, with an alarmingly large percentage of the murdered children dying from headshot or chest shot sniper wounds. These are kids as young as 5 and 6 being headshot from miles away by Israeli snipers. This has been corroborated many times over by American doctors who were working in the Gaza hospitals, before all of those hospitals got blown up too.
There is no possible security concern which could justify such acts of terrorism. Israel’s motivation is clearly a land grab, and Netanyahu’s is clearly to remain in power throughout the slaughter. They are absolute monsters.
Have you considered that even when Israel doesn’t kill children, people get upset about their children being corrupted in other ways instead?
Edit: /s I guess?
Well, that’s a hypothetical.
Because Israel has been systemically killing children since England invented it. And the people they first put in charge were killing natives before that.
Hell, their first PM even admitted they were stealing the natives land:
Why should the Arabs make peace? If I was an Arab leader I would never make terms with Israel. That is natural: we have taken their country. Sure, God promised it to us, but what does that matter to them? Our God is not theirs. We come from Israel, it’s true, but two thousand years ago, and what is that to them? There has been anti-Semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They only see one thing: we have come here and stolen their country. Why should they accept that?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Ben-Gurion#Zionist_leadership_between_1919_and_1948
It honestly wasn’t that long ago, and Israel has known from its inception that the people they stole the land from won’t just forget.
But today you have people with a straight face claiming the people whose land was stolen “invaded” land that was stolen from them literally a day earlier…
Sure, some understand reality and just spreading propaganda, but you still run into some who legit belief the bullshit.
I do think it’s a bit more subtle than that. Throughout history people of all faiths, including Jews, Christians and Muslims and of various nations including Arabs, Kurds, Turks and Persians, have made the Middle East their home. The overall division of land at this moment implies that only a tiny slice goes to the Jews. I think realistically after WWII the parties could have come together to discuss independence from the UK in conjunction with a slice of land for the Jews.
Of course, what happened instead was that the English gave land that was highly contested by all to the Jews, without any attempt at asking the opinion of the people living there.
Throughout history people of all faiths, including Jews, Christians and Muslims and of various nations including Arabs, Kurds, Turks and Persians, have made the Middle East their home.
Yes, that was the demographic makeup of what is now Israel for thousands of years prior to the creation of Israel as a religious ethnostate…
The overall division of land at this moment implies that only a tiny slice goes to the Jews.
It’s only a tiny slice when talking about the entire Middle East…
But even then, it’s an area where only Jewish people have full rights and can vote for political leaders…
How many countries in the Middle East can only Christians vote for political leaders?
the parties could have come together to discuss independence from the UK in conjunction with a slice of land for the Jews.
Seriously…
Why does there have to be religious ethnostates at all?
Your entire argument is based on religious ethnistates having to exist, but they just fucking don’t.
No country should require any religious determination to be able to vote for political leader.
realistically after WWII the parties could have come together to discuss independence from the UK in conjunction with a slice of land for the Jews.
Why not give the indigenous people autonomy after WW1 when the Ottoman empire was dissolved?
Why give it European immigrants?
Which is a clear recipe for disaster.
so you saying people will be upset about one thing or another anyway, so who cares if Israel is murdering children? Thats a bold argument. Lets see how that works out for you.
Not at all. I’m suggesting that people are upset with Israel for more reasons than just the killing. They kill people because they refuse to stop doing those other things which upset others.
Thats a pretty convoluted way of saying that, but I guess I’ll take your word for it.
Try thinking about what those other things are, related to corrupting children, which people are often upset with Israel for, and you might understand why I said it that way here.
Well “Ogmios, the god of eloquence”, if you would just said what you mean, we could get this done in a lot fewer comments. Actually, nevermind. I’m not interested anymore. I regret ever replying.
“Blocked ogmios”
So, if not murdering children is pro-Palestinian, then I guess I’m pro-Palestinian.
And logically, that means being pro-Israeli (or at least pro-Israeli government, because I know there are lots of Israelis who are not happy about what their government is doing) is also pro-child-murder. Their logic, not mine!
Unironically, this is how Israelis think. Those are the bad kids who would grow up to hurt them.
And the logic of fascists is “we can wipe them all out, so then the threat will be gone”, ignoring the practical impossibility of actually killing so many millions of people completely, as well as the fact that the entire world can see what they’re doing, and have connections to the victims, so they are making way more enemies than they started with.
It’s a delusion of superiority, that they are so powerful and their foes so weak that they can overwhelm them.
Absolutely if you go on killing their parents, their brithers and sisters; bomb their playgrounds, their schools. What else they are going to do except for lashing out anyone. These would be the kids vulnerable to be brainwashed into doing further horriffic things.
Why do Israelis (well most of them) care what an old Catholic has to say?
The logic chain of the Netanyahu camp is: Keep Netanyahu out of jail -by-> Keeping him in power -by-> Creating a problem and showing he is solving it -by-> Stirring up regional instability and dragging the US into it -by-> Being belligerent and genociding as hard as possible.
Now for this to work, they need to maintain conflict while maintaining the support from the US. About 70% of the US identify as some form of Christian… and some significant percentage of them support Israel in their genocide because they believe it will bring the second coming of Jesus. But if the about 20% of Americans who identify as Catholic actually flip to being anti-genocide because their leader advocates for that, that is under threat - it potentially becomes close to a majority who are anti-genocide, and makes ongoing support from the US less likely.
I’m with you up until you start talking specifically about catholics. I don’t have stats on hand but I believe the venn diagram of “people who believe in forcing Jesus to come back with some bullshit in the holy land” and “catholics” has very little overlap.
Here in the bible belt I’ve known and met many flavors of protestant who don’t even think of catholics as christians.
