Spine-flexing Shepherds Sighted!

People of goodwill throughout the world rightly shun Holecaust deniers. Their poisonous attacks on the truth of the Shoah eviscerate us all. This fact has not stopped the Mullahcracy in Iran from antagonizing the world; their ludicrous conference on the Holecaust has highlighted these nefarious peddlers of delusion.

The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops will have none of it. Cardinal William Keeler, Archbishop of Baltimore and Episcopal moderator for Catholic-Jewish relations, issued this statement after the Mullahs ran their sick sideshow:

We Must Remember the Shoah

On December 11-12 a conference, "Review of the Holocaust: Global Vision," took place in Iran. The conference was sponsored by the government of Iran whose President, Mahmoud Ahamadinejad, had previously denied that the Shoah (Holocaust) had ever happened. Speakers at the conference sought to diminish the scope of the Holocaust, the heinous crime against humanity by the Nazis who attempted to exterminate the Jewish people brought about the deaths of millions of other innocent people.

On December 12, the Holy See issued a statement that echoed the words of Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI: "The past century witnessed the attempt to exterminate the Jewish people with the consequent killing of millions of Jews of all ages and social categories simply for the fact that they belonged to that people. The Shoah (the Holocaust) was an enormous tragedy, before which one cannot remain indifferent . . . The memory of those terrible facts must remain a warning for consciences with the aim of eliminating conflicts, respecting the legitimate rights of all peoples and calling for peace in truth and justice.”

The Catholic bishops of the United States stand in solidarity with the Universal Church in condemning “revisionist history” that seeks to minimize the horror of the Holocaust. Here in the United States, we have a wide range of resources to use in fostering Holocaust education not only in Catholic schools but in private and public schools as well. In our own resource for such programs, Catholic Teaching on the Shoah (2001), the Bishops’ Committee for Ecumenical and Interreligious Affairs stated two major reasons why grappling with the history and significance of the Shoah should be part of the central curriculum of Catholic education. First, the Holocaust was not a random act of mass murder but “a war against the Jews as the People of God, the First Witness to God’s Revelation and the eternal bearers of that witness through all the centuries.” Second, future generations need to be ever vigilant so that “the spoiled seeds of anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism (will) never again be allowed to take root in the human heart” (see We Remember, 5).

Let us take this occasion to renew our commitment both to remember the great irruption of evil into human history that was the Shoah and to use that memory to fight the evils that led to it.

The Nazis committed genocide against Jews. They deliberately targeted the Jewish people for extermination because of who they were. Their attempt at mass-murder was an attempted Deicide as much as it was a genocide. Hitler's Third Reich had no room for any power greater than Der Fuhrer. The Jewish people, as the "First Witness to God's Revelation," were a living contradiction to the Nazi ideal.

Islamofascists such as the Mullahcracy in Tehran want the world to forget that inconvenient fact. The reigning Thug denies the Shoah to delegitimize Israel as a nation. By doing so, he only denies himself and his people the respect of the just throughout the world.

Fools and Reasonable folk alike may stand shoulder to shoulder to condemn any that would distort the truth of the twentieth century's greatest horror. I'm honored that Cardinal Keeler, in speaking for the US Bishops, has joined us in making that stand.