Added: Feb 18, 2012

From: benzion888

Duration: 10:22

On Friday 27 members of the German Bishop's Conference that was visiting Israel, made a first-time historic visit to Yad Vashem--the Holocaust memorial museum in Jerusalem. Does that sound like a nice gesture to you?After the visit to Yad Vashem the German Bishop's went to Ramallah. Ramallah is a refugee camp for Palestinians, but the words "refugee camp" can be deceiving. It is really a fairly modern city of 57,000 residents. Life in Ramallah is not pleasant, suicide bombers have repeatedly come from the city and blown themselves up in places like Tel-Aviv and Jerusalem, due to this the Israeli army set-up checkpoints for those arriving and leaving the city. Recently armed Palestinian terrror gangs Hamas and Fatah have been battling it out on Ramallah's streets. It is stunning however that the German Catholic Bishops compared life in Ramallah to the Holocaust and particularly the Warsaw Ghetto. According to YNET news Bishop Gregor Maria Franz Hanke said: "This morning we saw pictures of the Warsaw Ghetto at Yad Vashem and this evening we are going to the Ramallah ghetto." Under the headline: "Bishops equate Israel's actions to Holocaust", YNET reported: "The delegation's visit to Ramallah took place several hours after their visit to Yad Vashem and several of the bishops chose to equate the situation in the Palestinian Authority with the Holocaust." The Bishop of Augsburg who was once under the spiritual leadership of Pope Benedict, said of the Palestinian areas: "Cages in the image of ghettos".One may ask why the Bishops equated Ramallah with the Warsaw Ghetto in particular? It could be that only in the Warsaw Ghetto there was an armed Jewish uprising against the Germans. They could be sending a message that the armed Palestinian uprising including suicide bombings is understandable.Let take a step back and see what these Bishops are comparing Ramallah with. What was the Warsaw Ghetto? When the Germans invaded Poland they sealed off an area of the city, into which they forced all the Jews. It was small and cramped, anyone leaving risked being shot. The following details are taken from a large volume on the Holocaust entitled "The Holocaust Chronicle."The Nazis deported thousands of Jews from neighboring towns to the Warsaw Ghetto in 1941 and '42, swelling the population to 445,000. Conditions in the ghetto were so abysmal that 43,000 people died there in 1941. (pg. 227, 220)The UK Department of Health estimated average calorie requirements is a daily calorie intake of 1940 calories per day for women and 2550 for men. Jewish residents of the Warsaw Ghetto were limited to 183 calories a day. On these starvation rations, the sick, young and infirm were the first victims of famine and disease. In comparison, nobody is starving in Ramallah, infact it is a UN refugee camp providing all the necessities and the EU is always funding projects and so on.The sealed off Ghetto contained 30 percent of the population of Warsaw in less than 2.5% of the city. (pg. 196)The following from Martin Gilbert's "Holocaust Journey" gives some idea of the enormity of the crime of the Warsaw Ghetto. In the place where Jewish men, women and children were deported from Warsaw to the death camps, a long time after the war a memorial was built. Those building the memorial wanted to inscribe on it all the names of the Jews who were deported from there to their deaths. But the number was far too high to make it feasible. The Vietnam memorial in Washington has 55,000 names on it. This one would have needed at least 300,000 names.The horrors of the Warsaw Ghetto and the Nazi death camps are unspeakable. To compare this to Ramallah these Bishops must be completely ignorant or what happened--which cannot be the case as they had just come from Yad Vashem--or Anti-Semites. This would be hardly surprising. After the war when everyone knew what had happened to the Jews of Europe, many war criminals escaped Europe to South America with the aid of Catholic priests along the 'ratlines'. Adolf Eichman, the monster that meticulously planned the destruction of European Jewry and the murder of six million men, women and children, the CEO of the project, that monster was smuggled to Argentina with Vatican papers (Eichman in my Hands, by Peter Malkin).

Channel: Education

Tags: ramallah  germany  bishop  bishop (catholic church)  warsaw  ghetto  israel  middle east  palestinians  yad vashem 

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