Anti Semitism

An End To The Libel Of Blood

Leadership: In recent weeks, one of humanity's ugliest scourges has seen an unwelcome resurgence. We're talking of course about anti-Semitism. We're happy to see that at least one world leader recognizes it.

Amid an outbreak of sometimes borderline and sometimes outright anti-Semitism among Hollywood stars and politicians, we're starting to get that ugly Hitler vibe.

Christian Dior designer John Galliano recently ripped into Jews while at a Paris restaurant: "People like you would be dead. Your mothers, your forefathers would all be f***ing gassed. ... I love Hitler."

Sure, it's easy to write off someone under the influence and shooting his mouth off in a bar, but why are so many others doing it too — almost as if it's chic?

Whether it's Charlie Sheen referring to "Two and a Half Men" creator Chuck Lorre as "Chaim Levine" and Tweeting about "stoopid jews," or WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange claiming that Jewish journalists are out to get him, or Nation of Islam chief Louis Farrakhan blaming Jews for "pushing" the U.S. into war, the news seems full of anti-Semitic tirades.

And these don't include the usual, more predictable sources of anti-Semitic outbursts — such as soon-to-be ex-dictators Moammar Gadhafi of Libya and Ali Abdullah Saleh of Yemen, and Muslim Brotherhood spiritual leader Sheik Yusuf Qaradawi.

All have vented their splenes in recent days blaming the many problems of Muslim Arabs and the current uprisings on the 8 million Jews who live in Israel.

The world is awash in this irrational hatred of the Jewish people. And, weirdly, neither our own government or those in Europe have had much to say about it. Maybe it's the fact they've spent the past few years trying to undercut the very existence of the Israeli state, both in the United Nations and through their own foreign policies.

We're happy to relate there's at least one person who is speaking out: Pope Benedict XVI.

In an upcoming book to be published this month, "Jesus of Nazareth," the pope definitively ends any question of official Catholic church anti-Semitism, exonerating now and forever Jews for the crucifixion of Jesus Christ.

As Elan Steinberg of the American Gathering of Holocaust Survivors & Their Descendants told the magazine the Week, this is a "personal repudiation of the theological underpinning of centuries of anti-Semitism."

Indeed it is. And we doubt the timing of the book is an accident, given the upsurge in anti-Semitic speech and actions.

For those who don't know, Pope Benedict — a German priest who was known as Joseph Ratzinger before becoming the pontiff — was as a child pressed into the Hitler youth.

As a man who both survived and transcended the Nazi era's dark history, he knows perhaps better than anyone on Earth how anti-Semitism poisons the individual soul — and distorts religion and secular society.

And he no doubt understands the major challenge that now lies before Western civilization. Anti-Semitism is being used as a wedge by Islamic fundamentalists and their allies on the extreme left to destroy the cohesion of the West and to weaken it. In the U.N., it's become the semiofficial creed.

Pope Benedict sees this clearly and wants none of it. His book effectively ends any church sanction for the anti-Jewish bigots among us. We only wish that other leaders — America's own president in particular — had the same understanding and guts.