Posted on 04/05/2002 12:10:48 PM PST by scratchgolfer
Between Rome and Jerusalem
By Francis X. Rocca
On Easter Sunday, the Milan newspaper Corriere Della Sera ran a front-page editorial cartoon depicting Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, rifle in hand, sitting on a sarcophagus. The lid of the coffin is partially open and the fingers of a hand can be seen emerging from inside, trying to lift it further. In the background stands an angel, complete with wings and halo, looking on in bemusement. The caption reads: "Non resurrexit."
The words allude to the Latin Vulgate version of Paul's First Letter to the Corinthians (15: 14 : "And if Christ be not risen, then is our preaching vain, and your faith is also vain."), but a more obvious association is with Matthew's account of the Resurrection, in which the Pharisees secure Pilate's permission to "make [Jesus's] sepulchre sure, sealing the stone, and setting a watch" lest the disciples steal their leader's body to create the illusion that he's risen from the dead. What happens, of course, is that God sends an angel to move the stone aside. "And for fear of him the keepers did shake, and became as dead men." (Matthew 27: 62-66, 28: 1-4)
Now, the guards in the story are presumably Romans, not Jews, but they are working at the behest of Jews. Surely the cartoonist who cast Sharon in this role intended to portray him as a metaphorical Christ-killer.
Please forgive those three paragraphs of explication, but in Italy's current rhetorical climate, the Corriere cartoon actually strikes me as subtle. Yesterday the Turin paper La Stampa, another ultra-respectable establishment organ, ran a front-page cartoon showing a tank emblazoned with the Star of David pointing its gun straight at the baby Jesus, who tells the attackers: "Surely they don't want to kill me again?"
While anti-Semitic imagery is still rare enough in the mainstream Italian press to make it worth remarking on, the conventional wisdom is overwhelmingly and aggressively anti-Israeli. Why else would the popular TV host Bruno Vespa (a slightly more cerebral version of Larry King) dare ask the Israeli ambassador, a guest on his show: "Was this the way to repay the Holy Father's overture, sending tanks into the birthplace of Jesus?"
With all this talk about Jesus, you might think that this country -- with the world's lowest birthrate and a pervasive atmosphere of religious indifference in its cities -- was going through some kind of Catholic revival. A more reasonable suspicion is that faith is once again serving its age-old function as a veil for less exalted interests.
In fact, no group is more one-sidedly pro-Arafat than the anti-clerical Italian left, which continues to send representatives (including the Nobel prize-winning writer Dario Fo) to stand by the Palestinian leader's side. Their ultimate motivation, like that of the other European leftists who have flocked to Ramallah recently, is hatred of a global economic system dominated by Israel's ally the United States. To them, the Star of David stands for the Stars and Stripes, and dead Palestinians are more worth mourning because they die at the hands of the superpower's proxy state.
Meanwhile the post-Fascist right, eager for international respectability, has been comparatively friendly toward Israel. When Italian Jews held a demonstration on Tuesday (during which they were hooted and insulted by passing motorists), they chose to protest outside the offices of the Communist Refoundation party.
On this matter, though, the position of Italian Communists is not noticeably different from that of the Vatican, which has apparently decided that Israel bears more responsibility for the war than do Palestinian terrorists or their sponsors.
"Terrorism" is of course a dirty word almost everywhere, especially after 9/11, but many are prompt to draw distinctions. As the Catholic statesman Giulio Andreotti, seven-time prime minister and a pillar of the post-war Christian Democratic regime, put it to La Stampa: "I don't morally accept placing the millionaire Bin Laden ... on the same plane as that poor girl who immolated herself with a bomb. If I spent 50 years in a refugee camp, with my family and my children, I certainly wouldn't need the help of Iran or anyone else to be desperate ..."
Never mind that suicide bombers aim to do rather more than blow themselves up. Wouldn't a more valid comparison be between Bin Laden and the cold-blooded leaders of Hamas, who don't even feign pity for their suicidal pawns, let alone for their Jewish victims?
Italy is hardly the most anti-Semitic country in Europe. There has been no pattern of violence here like the recent wave of synagogue-burning and cemetery-desecration in France. (Though admittedly, there aren't nearly as many Jews here to attack.) Nor does Italian sympathy for the Palestinians, or even for Arafat, necessarily indicate anti-Semitism. Yet the anti-Israeli sentiment that prevails here often finds expression in the words and images of bigotry. It's especially troubling when that bigotry emanates from the most respectable quarters.
Francis X. Rocca is a writer in Vicenza, Italy. His column appears every Thursday.
The first cartoon is more ambiguous. I interpret it as suggesting that Sharon is keeping Christ's message of peace (represented here by the person of Jesus) safely bottled up and out of the way. It's provocative and controversial, but not anti-semitic, IMO.
Though the Israelis have scarcely gone out of their way to build bridges to the indigenous christian community (or its miserable remnant), I'm not about to believe the secular Italian media have suddenly got religion. They are appealing to religious sensibilities they do not share.
If we're dominating, somethings' been going terribly wrong.
Sorry to disagree with this writer, but much of the "leftist" fury is their remnant Soviet communist inculcation of Israel the bad guy, anti-semitism, and the events of 9/11. The leftist mind is troubled with can't deal with the affront to multiculturalism and local minority issues on an effective level. The fear of civil war creeps in. What was alienated and distant but really was local now must be addressed as local. The chickens came home to roost, so to speak. Rather than evolve, they got furious. Daily screaming articles in the papers during the Afghan campaign micromanaging every incident and adopting as truth every Taliban lie, rants about Vietnam, treatment of prisoners, etc. all couldn't raise the leftist collective fury as much as Israel. It's a deflection.
Watch how hysterical the "Western" European govt. apparatchiks act compared to the Arab govts. Who's got more "issues?"
In the context of the conflict, why is it that only one side is portrayed as preventing the resurrection?
More European moral equivalency.
Good point. What would Sharon be without Arafat? Somtimes enemies need each other.
Do you think Arafat being cornered like a rat in Beirut ready to be destroyed was Sharon "needing" Arafat? It was the Reagan administration which saved Arafat's arse in '82 and it was Shultz which brought him and the PLO back to life again in 1988 CONTRARY to the position held by Israel of not dealing with the PLO and its leadership.
It goes back much further than that, and before Sharon there were others. Each side's extreme element has encouraged a corresponding extremism. Where, for that matter, would Arafat be without Sharon?
...CONTRARY to the position held by Israel of not dealing with the PLO and its leadership.
This country has "positions" too. Very fine they sound on the evening news. And if they help the people to feel that "something is being done," where's the harm in that?
No. I will not accept your relativistic position. If you are prepared to go down that relativistic road then be prepared to accept the relativization of your faith and practice. At some point you will invoke first principles. At some point you will invoke principles common to our Christian and Judeo-Christian heritage. At some point you will stop the epistemology from regressing to idealism or thoroughgoing skepticism. At some point you will stop the reductionism to materialism or pantheism. In the same way therefore, critically examining the historical context of this matter you will come down on the side opposite to that given to you by the Arab Islamics. The Jews were not extreme. That's because the leadership was not extreme. That's because what occurred in the British Mandate was a progression of an Arab nationalism which couldn't stop anywhere West of the Jordan. It was so thoroughgoing that it denied completely its moderate voices and hence its very own leadership, led by the Grand Mufti in the 1936-39 riots literally terrorized out of the Mandate thousands of Arabs who would have compromised with the Jews in some kind of partition arrangement.
The Arab leadership never had a "Saison" such as the Jewish leadership did using the Hagannah in 1944, despite the fact that the British in their 1939 White Paper were prepared to close the door on any further Jewish immigration and give their fate entirely into the tender loving hands of the Nazi Mufti, went about crushing the Irgun and Stern and turning hundreds if not as many as a thousand of its own people over to the British. It was not the Arabs but the nascent State of Israel, in the midst of a war for its survival, which bombed an Irgun ship full of arms in 1948 killing a couple dozen Irgun with Begin barely escaping with his life, thus ending the existence of the Irgun. The Irgun and Stern were marginalized entities and yet entities whose small membership in either group grew directly out of at least 10 years of prior Arab aggression, intimidation and intransigence as displayed in the leadership of the Grand Mufti, the Supreme Muslim Council and the Arab Higher Committee.
Hence, this is not about "terror on both sides" and thus we can throw up our hands in some amoral exasperation as if that will relieve our responsibility to assess the issue from the standpoint of moral culpability. There is a moral position after examining the evidence and it falls on the side of the Zionists. The failure morally and in terms of leadership can be laid directly at the feet of the Arabs and the Pan Arab agenda. I know such a notion isn't popular in this time of playing one side against the other and relativizing the issue to the point of meaninglessness but that should be of small moment to one who is concerned with first principles, the First Cause, and stopping the inevitable infinite regress of moral analysis based on the kind of reasoning you have noted above.
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