May 14, 2009
An editorial in Der Spiegel, the German newspaper, was harshly critical of Pope Benedict’s visit to Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust Memorial. “The pope never mentioned the culprits, or the German words engraved into the floor of the Hall of Remembrance at his feet: Buchenwald, Auschwitz, Majdanek, Theresienstadt. He said nothing about the church’s position on the Holocaust, or about its history of anti-Semitism, which made the Shoah possible in the first place. Instead, he confined himself to mentioning the “deep compassion” of the Catholic Church for the victims.” However, in the next sentence the authors equivocate: “His next sentence could be interpreted by the malicious – who are not in short supply – as a qualification of the uniqueness of the Shoah:
Middle East Forum Legal Project | Apr 29, 2009