Pope Changes His Mind: Williamson Must Acknowledge Holocaust
Who says that two wrongs can’t make a right? Pope Benedict XVI has had a change of heart about undoing British Bishop and holocaust denier Richard Williamson’s excommunication. To resume his position, Williamson will not have to recant his anti-Semitic rantings, one of which included the phrase “there was not one Jew killed by the gas chambers”.
“Bishop Williamson, in order to be admitted to episcopal functions within the church, will have to take his distance, in an absolutely unequivocal and public fashion, from his position on the Shoah, which the Holy Father was not aware of when the excommunication was lifted,” the statement said. Shoah is the Hebrew word for the Holocaust.
The Vatican is now going with the “Benedict didn’t know what Williamson is” defense. That’s a double-edged sword, of course, the duller half being that neither the pope nor his aides knew anything about the subject of Benedict’s merciful decree.
Sloppy work on the Vatican’s part, obviously, barely plausible, and perhaps just enough so that the issue may die down.
Williamson was shown on Swedish state television just days before the lifting of his excommunication was announced on Jan. 24, acknowledging his view that “there was not one Jew killed by the gas chambers” during World War II.
He said historical evidence “is hugely against 6 million Jews having been deliberately gassed in gas chambers as a deliberate policy of Adolf Hitler.”
Williamson subsequently apologized to the pope for having stirred controversy, but he did not repudiate his comments, in which he also said only 200,000 to 300,000 Jews were killed by the Nazis and none were gassed.
“Germany has paid out billions and billions of deutschmarks and now euros because the Germans have a guilt complex about their having gassed 6 million Jews. Well, I don’t think 6 million Jews were gassed,” he said.
In a sense, Williamson is probably right in that some of Germany’s Jewish victims where shot and others starved to death. But somehow that just technicality doesn’t quite cut it.
There wasn’t a change of heart, marc. The reversal of the excommunication was granted for the four men because that had nothing to do with Williamson’s expression of views on the holocaust.
I think it’s hard to believe that Benedict didn’t know about the problems with Williamson, but it appears that he chose to handle this in two parts- first, addressing the excommunication itself and reversing in order to try to bring this ultraconservative sect back into the fold and avoid a schism. And second, handling the issue of Williamson himself and whether he’s fit to serve as a bishop of the Church.
Right. I was referring to Benedict’s initial reversal which ought to have been informed by Williamson’s “distasteful” views. It might be a 2-step approach as you suggest; however, it seems more likely that the initial decision was a blunder, now somewhat rectified.
OK, let’s consider this. Imagine, just for a moment, that Bishop Willimason had ‘denied’ the Sabra and Chatila massacers at the hands of the Jews.
I rest my case
Williamson did not per se deny the holocaust.
What he did say is that the Jewish people were not the only ones who were destined for the concentration camps: alone, 7 to 10,000 priests were in various camps, as well as gypsies, the handicapped, down syndrome…..
anyone who was NOT arian…….
once they nazi’s were finished with the jewish people, there were plenty of others to fill the death camps.
This is all very ridiculous! We are told that Jews were gassed in the hundreds of thousands (some say millions), in multiple homicidal gas chambers and gas vans, at various “death camps” by the Germans during WW2. Ask yourself: Is there any doubt in these allegations? Have you ever really thought about this highly polemical chapter in history? Consider this:
– At the end of the war many German leaders were on trial for war crimes. The Nuremberg courts established ‘judicial notice’ on the gas chambers, which meant they were accepted as fact by the court without ever providing proof, simple as that. This sham ‘judicial notice’ made any defense against the gas chambers claim impossible. Does this sound like the pursuit of truth and justice? Keep in mind that this was a victors tribunal created to criminalize many of the defeated German leaders for war crimes. It wasn’t an objective court, as is often portrayed, or else the Allied leadership most definately would have been in trouble for their own war crimes.
– The Allied forces had broken the German communication codes and listened in on communications between camps and Berlin etc. From these communications there was nothing which suggested gassing of people in gas chambers.
– There were indeed delousing gas chambers for linen and cloth in a large number of concentration camps, also in camps which are no longer thought to have gassed people. This is not revisionism, but accepted knowledge among mainstream historians. The Zyklon B pellets were produced for extermination of pests such as lice etc. Relevant to the matter, has anyone ever found one autopsy report that confirms that someone was gassed in a gas chamber during the whole of the Holocaust? Just one autopsy report verifying death via the insecticide Zyklon B? The answer is no. And we are lead to believe that “millions” were murdered by such methods.
– The Red Cross issued a massive, three volume, 1,600 page report on the camps after the war, part of which reads: “In the final months of the war, the camps received no food supplies at all and starvation claimed an increasing number of victims.” … Gen. Kaltenbrunner. . . Allowed the Red Cross to distribute relief packages and one (Red Cross) delegate was authorized to stay in each camp (as an observer). Were the Germans that sneaky to be able to hide their diabolical gassing operations (some “witnesses” claim thousands were gassed at a time, 24/7) from Red Cross observers? Were any of these “witnesses” who claim such incredible things ever cross-examined? Nope!
What we nowadays call the “Holocaust” was in reality Germany’s “Final Solution” to their “Jewish problem”. What was Germany’s problem with Jews isn’t clear and is another matter all together. The government’s policy then was emigration for the Jews; surely heartless, but not extermination via gassings.
Although we have all seen the pictures of hundreds of dead and dying prisoners, mostly taken at Bergen-Belsen, the victims are obviously of disease. They died of the same fate that killed nearly 2/3 of the 650,000 victims of the American Civil War: dysentery, and typhus.
I’m partial to the skeptics on the “mass gassing“ allegations. For good reason it’s obvious that parts of the “Holocaust” story are in need of re-examination, because, many of those “self-evident” parts (The homicidal gas chambers being the largest legend of them all. Lampshades and soap made from Jewish corpses are a couple others.) are having an impossible time standing up to scrutiny; hence, the undemocratic actions in many Western countries to criminalize researchers and laymen alike who don’t follow the official historiography — which by the way, alone should have the skeptics of the world asking: What is really going on here?