Channeling Mel Gibson: Bill Donohue's War Against All Things Non-Catholic Is Heating Up ...Against Jews.

Maybe he was drunk at the time.

"Jews Had Better Not Make Enemies Of Their Catholic Friends Since They Have So Few Of Them"

One pope shedding tears at the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem did nothing to eradicate anti-Semitism in staunch pro-Catholic circles: the latest exchange of emails between Bill Donohue, president of the Catholic League and Philadelphia Rabbi Arthur Waskow indicate an animosity worthy of Mel Gibson.


Called "The Rottweiler's Rottweiler" (in reference to his defense of Benedict XVI and his own problems due to scandal and cover-ups), Donohue seems to goad people and groups into a fight. In fact, Donohue is such a staunch defender of the Catholic Church, he has turned offense into an art form: he has taken on progressive Catholic nuns ("totally lost their moorings"), the pay-away-the-lay controversy ("a severance package"), President Obama ( “He is now taking the culture war to the boiling point and he will pay.”) and gay marriage ("I want the law to discriminate against all alternative lifestyles, against gays and unions.").

Now he has taken on Jews as enemies of Catholicism.

It all started when Waskow, criticized the Vatican in a HuffPost op-ed piece for "attacking the religious freedom of millions of American women and the religious freedom of American nuns" on the matter of contraception. A rough email exchange ensued, with the indignant Donohue stating that "Jews had better not make enemies of their Catholic friends since they have so few of them." He then attributed the statement to former New York mayor Ed Koch. 

Koch has denied saying anything of the sort.

"Waskow is a man full of hate," he said, calling Waskow's op-ed "the kind of thing I'd expect from Bill Maher, not from a rabbi."

The exchange brought about a bit of irony as well: Donohue portrayed the recent Orthodox scandal of child abuse as an "epidemic" that Waskow (a Reformed rabbi) should take care of by "following the Catholic Church's reforms in dealing with clerical abuse." Rabbi Waskow obviously restrained himself from correcting Donohue on generalization of rabbis and - most notably - any comeback about cover-ups and pay-offs, the latter being a subject which Donohue has yet to fully address.

The odd connection to Mel Gibson's anti-Semitic sentiments comes in Donohue's defense of the Gibson's movie, "The Passion of the Christ":

[wikipedia] Hollywood is controlled by secular Jews who hate Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular. It's not a secret, OK? And I‘m not afraid to say it. That's why they hate this movie. It's about Jesus Christ, and it's about truth. It's about the Messiah.

NUNS ON THE BUS gets the Donohue treatment.

Waskow's defense of American nuns brought out the animosity Donohue has displayed for socially progressive nuns, such as the current Nuns On The Bus event touring the country. In an aptly titled Daily Kos article Catholic League to Progressive Catholics: don't let the door hit you on the way out, Armando succinctly points out that Donohue thinks that disagreeable Catholics should simply leave the church - and that includes nuns:

“Do we have more than a handful of nuns who have totally lost their moorings?” Donohue mused. “Oh, yeah.”

The problem is that the number of nuns has shrunk considerably in the last decade (now down to a mere 60,000 in the U.S.) and if the trend continues, there won't be anyone left to pay homage and subservience to the likes of Bill Donohue anyway.

With his uneducated and inappropriate statements, Donohue continually shoots himself in the foot, but he doesn't care, because he has always relied on the support of the Vatican: Sedevacantist* Mel Gibson mirrors Benedict more than even Benedict is willing to admit.

And God knows, the current pope has never been truly anti-Semitic.

Right.

Sorry Billy, We're Looking For Christians With Good Taste

...Like CNN

“Gangs of machete-wielding Muslims have been blamed for the weekend slaughter of hundreds of Christian villagers in Nigeria, but analysts say it would be wrong to assume the conflict was rooted in religion.”

Remember Charlie the Tuna? He was the mascot for Starkist Tuna who was always trying to lure Starkist into thinking that he had "good taste" when a God-like voiceover said "Sorry Charlie, we're looking for tuna that tastes good." So twist that sentiment around the latest scream of "PERSECUTION!"  that Bill Donohue of The Christian League is ratcheting up about 50 decibals. Twist it in another direction: we need to have Christians who have dignity, consideration and good taste. But Donohue exhibits the opposite. Consider his take on the same incident:

According to The Australian, “dozens of bodies lined the streets” of three Christian villages in northern Nigeria. “Other victims of the weekend’s Muslim fury jammed a local morgue, the limbs of slaughtered children tangled in a grotesque mess.” Children were scalped, “most had severed hands and feet,” and “officials estimate that 500 people were massacred in night-time raids by rampaging Muslim gangs.” According to one eyewitness media account, “They then set homes on fire and attacked men, women and children. Many were decapitated.”

 It was later found out that the attack could have been a response to a massacre in January of the Hausa Muslim Community resulting in 150 deaths. Christian mobs in Kuru Karama were said to blame.

When people started criticizing Donohue, he answered:

Back to CNN. It cited an ugly Muslim-Christian incident in 2001 in the same area. What started the Muslim massacre back then? “A Christian woman had tried to cross the road through a group of Muslims during Friday prayers.” Yeah, that’ll do it every time. 

It’s time to stop viewing Muslim-Christian violence through the lens of moral equivalency. 

Perhaps it's time for Bill Donohue to stop viewing any form of violence through a veil of blood. His style of "journalism" is more than yellow, it's red in the extreme. He conjures in me visions of my old nuns (very, very old nuns) who recounted in nauseating detail Roman orgies, (more bachannal than orgy), savagery of the Goths and the Vandals in sacking Rome, the cruelty of Ghengis Khan, the blood sacrifices of the Aztecs. Of course, their demeanor always changed when mentioning the Crusades (Western Civilization's first genocide along with the Albigensian Crusade), the Pilgrims of Massachusetts (who, after presenting the Massachusetts Indians with a translation of the Bible promptly wiped them out) or Father Junipero Serra (who, along with the California Missions established slavery of non-converts). 

It's time for many proselytizing Christians to own up to the annihilation of so many millions of people in history. And the ones who scream about the supposed atheism of Hitler, Stalin and Pol Pot are usually the ones who disavow any knowledge of wrongdoing by Christians in history. Or at least chop history's witnesses down to a few Catholic heretics who minimally staged the auto de fes of a few thousand old women. They seldom mention Torquemada, and while we had to memorize "Columbus sailed the ocean blue in 1492" we never heard about forced conversions of the Moors and the Jews and ultimately the mass exile of those two populations by good Queen Isabella.

"Moral equivalency" may be the only true lens we have. CNN has better taste than to run down a gory list of atrocities. Their viewers are smart enough to envision the bloodletting without detail.

Bill Donohue, however, believes in shock and awe.

The Inflatable Nativity vs The True Meaning of Christmas

Catholic News Agency:

New York City, N.Y., Dec 2, 2009 / 08:18 am (CNA).- Christians should not show timidity in cultural disputes over traditional Christmas songs, displays and Nativity scenes, the head of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights says. He charges such disputes are contrived by a small set of “mean-spirited people” who wrongly insinuate that many non-Christians are offended by Christmas.

How can I be offended by something that has been rammed into my being (as a turkey is by stuffing), making me numb to everything else around me for one month out of the year? And every year, staunch "keep the Christ in Christmas" church goers keep the holiday holier than Easter, elevating everything to worship status. It's about the only time Protestants acknowledge Mary and a time when Catholics mention Joseph with reverence. (Cuckolded husbands - even ones cuckolded by Almighty God - never seem to get much respect in the Bible).

Equal Time

It seems to me that Christians are rather mean-spirited about their own holiday: why can't other people celebrate that particular time of year in their own way and have that way acknowledged in similar fashion?

CNA spoke with Donohue in a Tuesday phone interview. He said that the “War on Christmas” largely began with the Catholic League’s successful efforts to place a Nativity scene in the same New York City public park which hosted the world’s largest menorah.

The Catholic League also sued the City of New York because miniature menorahs were displayed in public schools but Christian symbols were not.

From wikipedia:

On November 11, 2009, the American Family Association called for a "limited two-month boycott" of Gap, Inc over what they claimed was the "company's censorship of the word Christmas." In a advertising campaign launched by Gap on November 12, the term "Christmas" was both spoken and printed on their website at least once, and was part of a television ad campaign sung as: "Go Christmas, Go Hanukkah, Go Kwanzaa, Go solstice... go Christmas, go Hanukkah, go whatever holiday you Wannakuh".

I don't agree with Donahoe. The "war on Christmas" started with ... plastic, the air infusion of plastic, the coloring of extremely weird faces on plastic, light-up plastic, unbreakable plastic, AND polyester! Just look at the happy kids below enjoying their authentic costumes:

The Incredible Inflatable Nativity!

(This was on the FRONT COVER of a party catalogue)

“Let them experience the real reason for Christmas”

The above is not shameless exploitation of a holiday, but a HIDEOUS exploitation of a holiday! I can see Glenn Beck weeping in front of it saying something like, "What a wonderful gesture and from such wonderful kids!"

How many storefront churches are going to by this stuff? Probably hundreds. And how many in-your-face Religious Right churches are going to boycott it? Probably zero. They never did try to remove that glow-in-the-dark plastic Jesus from people’s cars, so why should they protest a tacky setup like this? After all, this is not an attack on Christianity.

Or it it? Snneeaky!

Now let's take a quick look at the other insidious ways secularists have been able to wage their War on Christmas:

And let's take a look at the Gap's vicious attack on Christmas: