Paolo Lojudice compares Israel’s “slaughter of innocents” in Gaza to the nazis and adds Netanyahu is “tyrant pursuing a dark and bloody plan for power”
After Pope Leo XIV condemned Israel’s “barbarity” in Gaza on Sunday, one of his closest associates in the top echelons of the Roman Catholic Church has gone much further
Cardinal Paolo Lojudice – also a judge on the church’s Supreme Court and so close to Pope Leo that his words have been taken as Leo saying what he can’t quite say publicly and officially – has laid into Israel’s wanton war crimes in Gaza and into Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu personally, in a blunt and damning assessment that has set Israeli officials and their mouthpieces frothing.
Lojudice told Italian daily La Stampa that Netanyahu is a bloody “tyrant” behind “the most unbridled and illogical evil” whose murder of countless Palestinian children “cries out for justice to God” – and went on to say that the Israelis are committing the same crimes that the nazis perpetrated on them:
Some have been shocked to read the word genocide used by Francis in a book, but in Gaza we are beyond madness; the most unbridled and illogical evil is at work. The killing of children queuing for a handful of rice cries out for justice to God.
The boulder has now rolled away and any geopolitical justification has been eliminated. Faced with the current escalation of atrocities, no one is saying anymore that it is right for Israel to defend itself. I read in La Stampa the harrowing diary of a mother in the Strip; a vivid description of the ongoing massacre. The slaughter of innocents cries out to heaven for vengeance. We can no longer hold back from denouncing it.
[Netanyahu] won’t stop because he’s a tyrant pursuing a dark and bloody plan for power. Apart from Donald Trump, who only cares about selling weapons, no one accepts his self-legitimization anymore. The other evening at the Cistercian Abbey of San Galgano, Caritas organized a benefit concert. At the end, a woman from the Jewish community came to speak to me, almost in tears, in an apologetic tone. I hugged her and told her that religious affiliation had nothing to do with it. How can someone who commits such atrocities and has tens of thousands of victims on his conscience look at himself in the mirror? There’s nothing reasonable about a massacre; it’s evil taking hold and wiping out any sense of humanity.
We are far beyond [an eye for an eye]. No violence can exploit the name of God. In Jerusalem, I heard fundamentalist fringes using the Scriptures as a shield to trample on human rights. In reality, there is no longer any way to attempt an explanation. Does the fundamentalist reading of the Bible call for the total destruction of the enemy? A mystification because it speaks of destroying evil, not exterminating children. When you distort the Old Testament, you make it say what you want. Not all Jews do this. In Israel, fundamentalist sectors are now in control, combining fundamentalism with far-right policies in a mad pursuit of absolute power. The right of might humiliates the force of right. Because of foolish choices, they commit the same atrocities perpetrated against them. If the tyrant isn’t stopped, there’s no escape. Life has lost all value compared to the economic gains of the industry of death and wealth used for oppression…
…There is no need to question the causes of criminal actions like those in the Strip. The unfolding of blind and cruel violence will reverberate through generations for decades, sowing discord.
The UK state is prosecuting Jewish anti-genocide activist Yael Kahn for comparing Israel to the nazis. It would be interesting to see whether it would pursue Cardinal Lojudice if he ever came to the UK.