This is a video of Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu exchanging gifts yesterday with Pope Francis (he’s the guy in the skullcap). Haaretz reports:
Netanyahu, who was accompanied by his wife Sara, gifted the pope a book about the Spanish inquisition written by his father Benzion Netanyahu, a prominent historian. It bore the inscription: “To His Holiness Pope Francis, great guardian of our common heritage.”
The book is The Origins of the Inquisition in Fifteenth-Century Spain. That’s when the Catholic Church cleaned house in Spain and persecuted many Jews and Muslims. “This is one gift horse that should be looked squarely in the mouth! What a nice bread-and-butter gift!” says my tipster, Michael Desch.
Adam Taylor writes at Business Insider:
The leader of the world’s only Jewish state giving the leader of the Catholic Church a book that largely revolves about Spanish Catholics questioning, torturing, and punishing Jewish converts to Catholicism is certainly noteworthy. The Spanish inquisition is widely held up as one of the worst excesses of the Roman Catholic Church, and thousands of people were expelled from Spain or burned at the stake. Worse still, the inquisition of Catholic converts (and the use of torture to discover heretics) was first legally sanctioned by Pope Innocent IV.
So, Netanyahu’s gift may seem passive aggressive (or maybe just aggressive), and perhaps it is. But it is important to think of the context of the book…
I know what the context of the book is: all Netanyahu’s new existential threats to the Jewish people, from Iran to the Palestinians. His wife Sara told the Pope she couldn’t wait till he visits Jerusalem and Bethlehem, and this is her husband’s preemptive strike to keep the Pope from restaging Pope Benedict’s photo-op at the wall.
The man is so outrageously crass its not even true.
Can someone pass the chutzpah? its over there, right next to the hubris….
What an awful human being to insult the Pope with a book written by that vile, racist toad like Benzion. Too bad the pope has manners. I would have turned around, tossed it in the nearest trash can and walked out.
what does that mean, exactly? the historical context of the events portrayed in the book? the context of the book as a gift? the context of the author of the book and the author’s son impliedly lecturing the new pope on religious/ethnic intolerance?
PS, I am a human being, contrary to the opinion of some, but I am batting about .500 on the security passwords to post a comment
The Pope should give Netanyahu (the one without the skullcap) Max Blumenthal’s new book, Goliath.
At least he didn’t give the Holy Father a copy of John Cornwell’s Hitler’s Pope. Maybe he’s saving that for next year!