Wednesday, December 24, 2008

So, This Irish Catholicism?

Dr John Kelly is a former registrar of University College Dublin and is chairman of the Friends of Bethlehem University in Ireland and he had an op-ed in the Irish Times today opining that "Behind the cruel edifice of a wall around the birthplace of Jesus, an enclave of university students triumph in the face of adversity".

Well, that's okay but then I read this

..."the Wall", the 70km-long, eight-metre-high monstrosity that attempts to divide Palestine from Israel...and we were there to say the rosary walking up and down past the Israeli armed guards at the main checkpoint leading to Jerusalem.

There were about 10 of us, a few De La Salle Brothers from Bethlehem University, some nuns from the Caritas Baby Hospital and a couple of locals, one of whom was an elderly lady whose lovely olive and lemon back garden had been cut in half and destroyed by the construction of the wall a few years before.

As we walked up and down saying the rosary, in full view of the Israeli guards, Jack hacked a bit off the wall with his crucifix and gave it to me. I have it framed in my study. The wall almost completely circumscribes the small town of Bethlehem and it has a number of checkpoints, each with Israeli armed guards. It is impossible, for me at any rate, not to compare this situation with the Nazi's Warsaw Ghetto and second World War checkpoints.

As with the Jews in that terrible city of the early 1940s, the Palestinians are being treated like scum by the Israeli guards. Bethlehem resembles a ghetto...


He had a previous piece "Segregation wall strangles the life out of Bethlehem" in The Irish Times on 24 June 2006 and so you can't claim the man is unfamilair with the facts.

Kelly, the 'Nazis', in your terminology - and I do not refer to Arabs, Arab terrorists or whatnot as 'Nazis' - in this case are being kept out.

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