Case Of Bishop Williamson Raises Bigger Issue: The Hypocrisy Of The West (Updated)

In Of ‘Bad’ and ‘Good’ Anti-Semites, Malte Lehming--the editorial page editor of the Berlin daily Der Tagesspiegel asks:

Why is the moral-historical bar being set very high for the Pope and the Catholic Church, whereas in the case of thousands of imams and Islamic scholars it is consciously set extremely low? Why should a Catholic clergyman not be permitted to show contempt for the dead of Auschwitz when the “Holocaust lie” and the “fable of the gas chambers” are commonplace tropes in so many Friday prayers throughout the Muslim and Arab world?

The answer, he writes, is the slack given to the Muslim world on account of its cultural backwardness--based on the assumption that Muslim Anti-Semitism is purely a European import:

As a consequence, even in Germany anti-Semitic slogans of the most grotesque sort could be shouted at anti-Israeli demonstrations during the Gaza war — slogans like “Jews out!” and “All Jews must die!” If native Germans had shouted the same slogans, the DA’s office would have started an investigation long ago.

The West is appropriately appalled by the WWII activities of the Mufti of Jerusalem, Hajj Amin al-Husseini and of the speeches of Ahmadinejad--but Hamas, Hizbollah and the Muslim Brotherhood get a pass. As a result of this selectivity:

what member of the Middle East quartet is bothered nowadays by the dissertation that Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president and co-founder of Fatah, completed in Moscow in 1982 ? Its title: “The Secret Ties between the Nazis and the Zionist Movement Leadership.”

Lehming concludes:

Bishop Richard Williamson should not be honored with a high office in the Catholic Church. He should be placed in quarantine — as should Hamas, whose charter makes the Jews responsible for World War II. If dialogue is not possible with Williamson, then it is certainly not possible with Hamas. Whoever complains about Williamson, but wants “somehow to include” Hamas, is lying to themselves and to the public.

The fact that pundits and 'experts' instead insist that true peace for Israel depends on their negotiation with (read: concessions to) Hamas reveals a uniquely selective blindness.

Apparently Bishop Williamson's onlyl 'crime' is that he is not the leader of a country at war with Israel.

UPDATE: Soccer Dad notes a similar case where Glenn Greenwald compares Avigdor Lieberman with Austrian politician Jorg Haider who praised Nazi policies, though Glennwald has to downplay the extent of Haider's comments:

Haider had made a handful of stray reprehensible comments which were anti-Semitic or even sympathetic to former Nazi Party members, but the platform on which he actually ran had nothing to do with that. It was the standard nativist, anti-immigrant cant sweeping much of the European Right at the time.

Read the whole thing.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad

Technorati Tag: Israel and Anti-Semitism and Holocaust.