March 2013: Cardinal Keith O’Brien resigned from his position as archbishop of St. Andrews and Edinburgh after a newspaper published unnamed priests’ accounts of unspecified inappropriate behaviour. Cardinal Keith O’Brien who served as Britain’s highest-ranking Roman Catholic leader acknowledged unspecified sexual misbehaviour and promised to play “no further part” in the public life of the Catholic church. The Church of Scotland issued a statement quoting O’Brien as stating that there had been times “that my sexual conduct has fallen below the standards expected of me as a priest, archbishop and cardinal.”O’Brien initially rejected the claims, stating he was resigning because he did not want to distract from the upcoming conclave which is due to pick a new pope.

O’Brien gave no clue as to what exactly his sexual misbehaviour consisted of but O’Brien’s time as cardinal ended as it began in controversy. In 2003, as a condition of being made a cardinal, he was forced to issue a public pledge to defend church teaching on homosexuality, celibacy and contraception. He was pressured to make the pledge after he had called for a “full and open discussion” on such matters. At the time, O’Brien stated he had been misunderstood and wanted to clarify his position. However previous statements made before the scandal over his behaviour broke, O’Brien stated celibacy should be reconsidered because it’s not based on doctrine but rather church tradition and “is not of divine origin.

The PA is the First Victim of its Own Reckless UN Bid

By Evelyn Gordon
JINSA Fellow

January 24, 2013: When the Palestinian Authority (PA) obtained UN recognition as a nonmember observer state in November, many Israelis feared the consequences for Israel: After all, PA President Mahmoud Abbas stated openly that he sought recognition primarily “to pursue claims against Israel” in international forums. Those fears may yet prove justified. But so far, the biggest victim of Abbas’s UN bid has been the PA itself.

The PA currently faces the worst financial crisis of its crisis-filled history. According to PA Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, it’s in “extreme jeopardy,” and on the “verge of being completely incapacitated.” Its 150,000 employees have received only half their November salaries and nothing for December. It “owes local banks more than $1.3 billion and can’t get more loans,” the Associated Press reported. It “also owes hundreds of millions of dollars to private businesses, including suppliers to hospitals, some of whom have stopped doing business with the government.” And it expects the poverty rate to double, to a whopping 50 percent of the total Palestinian population in the territories, if the crisis isn’t resolved soon.

So dire is the situation that a mere month after the vote, Abbas was already threatening to dissolve the PA and return full control of the territory to Israel if things didn’t improve quickly. If the PA can’t even pay salaries, he said, “What’s left for us to do?”

In short, far from augmenting Palestinians’ independence, the UN vote has endangered even the limited autonomy they currently have. For the financial crisis is a direct consequence of that vote – and, even worse, a totally predictable one.

The first source of the crisis is that Israel stopped transferring roughly $100 million a month in taxes it collects on the PA’s behalf. Contrary to Fayyad’s disingenuous charge of Israeli “piracy,” this merely ended an ongoing Palestinian piracy: For years, the PA hadn’t paid its bills to the Israel Electric Corporation, but Israel swallowed the loss, at considerable sacrifice: The IEC’s finances are so precarious that it can’t raise money without government guarantees. Last year, it sought a 30% rate hike from Israeli consumers to stabilize them. Yet Israel’s agreements with the Palestinians entitle the state to cover such debts by withholding money from the monthly transfers. The Israeli government repeatedly warned both the PA and UN member states that if the UN bid went forward, in violation of all Israeli-Palestinian agreements, it would withhold the full NIS 800 million (about $214 million) it was owed to it.

Second, Congress has been withholding some $450 million in U.S. aid – and though the Obama administration wants this money released, Congress hasn’t yet agreed. This, too, was known in advance: Washington repeatedly warned that the UN bid “would have significant negative consequences” for America’s “ability to maintain our significant financial support for the Palestinian Authority.”

Third, though Arab states promised to cover the shortfall emergency donation (which hasn’t yet arrived), but no money is even in the pipeline for the following months. And despite Fayyad’s professed bewilderment at this lapse (“I have no explanation,” he said), it was completely predictable: Arab states have serially defaulted on previous pledges to the PA, so why would they behave differently this time?

Finally, there’s the PA’s own fiscal mismanagement – from the billions of dollars it pours into Hamas-run Gaza, including paying 60,000 former PA employees full-time salaries to sit at home and do nothing, to such grandiose money-wasters as allocating more than $1 million to commemorate the 48th anniversary of Fatah’s first terrorist attack on Israel (even as its own employees go unpaid) or booking first-class tickets and five-star hotels for 22 Arab foreign ministers to attend its UN triumph (though most never showed). This, too, was well-known.

Nevertheless, the PA opted to proceed with the UN bid. In short, it walked into a full-blown fiscal crisis with eyes wide open. And only nine countries opposed this decision.

Or, to put it another way, the PA deliberately chose to subject its own people to severe financial hardship – tens of thousands of breadwinners with unpaid salaries, a skyrocketing poverty rate – for the sake of scoring points against Israel in the international arena. And virtually the entire world knowingly abetted this choice rather than insisting that the PA put its people’s welfare first.

The sorriest part of this story, however, is that it isn’t unusual. The PA has consistently put harming Israel ahead of helping its own people – most notably, as I explained in a previous JINSA column, by refusing repeated Israeli offers of statehood, thereby leaving millions of Palestinian refugees vulnerable to repression and expulsion from other Mideast countries. And Western countries have consistently supported this self-destructive behavior, out of a misguided notion that by supporting the PA’s positions, they “bolster” the PA and thereby help the Palestinian people.

The UN bid was a prime example: Several European countries said they voted yes or abstained because Hamas’s popularity was boosted by its conflict with Israel in November, so they needed to bolster Abbas by giving him a “victory” too – even if, as some European ambassadors admitted, this “victory” might actually “lead to further hardening of positions instead of improving chances of a two-state solution.”

Similarly, the European Union repeatedly and explicitly backs PA demands on final-status issues like borders and Jerusalem while not explicitly demanding any Palestinian concessions. Yet this effort to bolster the PA’s negotiating position merely reinforces the Palestinian delusion that no reciprocal concessions are required, even on obvious deal-breakers like the “right of return.” President Obama sought to bolster the PA by backing its demand for an Israeli settlement freeze, only to have Palestinians dismiss the “unprecedented” freeze he secured as “worse than useless” and refuse even to begin negotiations.

Indeed, after 20 years of Western efforts to “bolster” the PA, not only is there still no Palestinian state, but the PA itself is on the brink of financial collapse. So instead of clinging to the same failed tactics, perhaps Western governments should try something different.

Rather than “bolstering” the PA by acceding to its every whim, however self-destructive, while constantly seeking more Israeli concessions, they should try pressing Palestinians to finally make the concessions needed to seal a deal. It couldn’t possibly fail more miserably. And it just might work better.

Evelyn Gordon, JINSA Fellow, is a journalist and commentator writing in The Jerusalem Post and Commentary.

November 2012: Pope Benedict XVI ponders the early life of Jesus and several myths about how the birth unfolded in his latest book. In “Jesus of Nazareth — The Infancy Narratives,” the pope states the Christian calendar is actually based on a blunder by a sixth century monk, who Benedict states was several years off in his calculation of Jesus’ birth date. According to the pope’s research, there is no evidence in the Gospels that the cattle and other animals traditionally pictured gathered around the manger were actually present. The Pope further debunks the claim that angels sang at the birth, a staple theme of Christmas carols.

The book, which is being published in multiple languages in time for Christmas 2012, is the third in a series by the pontiff. The 176-page volume, which comprises a brief foreword, four chapters and an epilogue, traces Jesus’ life up to the age of 12, when, according to the Gospels, he was presented by his parents in the Temple in Jerusalem, the Vatican stated. The previous two volumes dealt with Jesus’ adult life and his public ministry. The initial worldwide print run with the book released across 50 countries in Italian, German, Croatian, French, English, Polish, Portuguese and Spanish. In the coming months, the book will be translated into 12 more languages for publication in 72 countries in total,

Alessandro Speciale, Vatican correspondent for the Religion News Service, stated the pope was not so much aiming to debunk myths as trying to show that the Jesus depicted in the Gospels is a real historical figure, who walked on earth and talked to people like anyone else.The pope also looks at scholarly studies of the Bible, some of which have indicated for decades that the traditionally accepted birth date for Jesus is wrong. While the book points out that the Gospels do not support the presence of animals at Jesus’ birth, this detail was apparently added in later centuries. Speciale stated the pope is a traditional man and does not suggest they should be thrown out of the Nativity scene and he doesn’t want people to change their traditions.

The Vatican quotes Anthony Valle, a professor of theology, as stating the pope has been open to scientific inquiry in his own study of Jesus’ life. “The pope is not against the historical critical method at all, in fact, he uses it, he appreciates it,” Valle stated. He sees the pope as using “both faith and reason” in his efforts to bring the life of Jesus closer. Monsignor Philip Whitmore, who translated the book into English, stated the pontiff used his writing to explore “the inner meaning of the infancy narratives, showing how they pick up on Old Testament themes and develop them in new and unexpected ways.” “The pope helps us to understand the world where Jesus was born. Caesar brought peace to the Roman Empire, but this tiny child brought something much more wonderful, God’s peace, eternal life, an end to sin and death,” Whitmore added. “Anyone who’s wondering why Christmas came to be such a great celebration in the West can find the answer right here. The pope explains how the birth of Jesus changed history forever.”

Pope Benedict XVI also writes in his book “Jesus of Nazareth, that the Jewish people are not collectively responsible for the death of Jesus. Many Catholics and other Christians blamed Jews for Jesus’ death for hundreds of years, but the Catholic Church formally repudiated that assertion in the 1960s. Benedict underlines the new position; “Who has insisted on the condemnation of Jesus to death?” he asks in the book, referring to scenes in the Gospels where the people of Jerusalem demand that Roman governor Pontius Pilate have Jesus crucified. The Gospel of John says the people in question were “the Judeans,” but the pope says the term “does not refer to unlike the modern reader may tend to interpret, the people of Israel as such, and it doesn’t even have a ‘racist’ connotation.” Far from meaning all Jewish people, Benedict writes, “the circle of prosecutors pursuing the death of Jesus” is the “aristocracy of the Temple,” or the priesthood. “Even that is not without exception,” he adds in the book.