The Panzer Pope, originally the �Panzer Cardinal,� according to his German curiae buddies, was a reference to the young Joseph Ratzinger's membership in the Hitler Youth. This as Luciana Bohne points out in Neocon Pope, �was a sly reference to Benedict�s disputed military past in the last days of the terminally delirious Third Reich -- and, perhaps to his continuing reactionary politics.� Actually, back in the old days, Joey was alternately called �the enforcer� and �God�s Rottweiler,� so I took the liberty of upgrading him to Panzer Pope. If the Iron Cross fits, wear it.

First of all, let me establish my credentials as a lapsed member of the One True Faith, precisely for its popes' tendencies to make statements like, �Show me just what Muhammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.� In one swell poop, the pontiff has forgotten his roots in the industrial extermination culture in which he was reared. And forgotten Jesus words from John 8:1-11, "Let the one among you who is without sin, be the first to throw a stone at her," referring to a woman brought by the Pharisees to the temple courts for adultery.

But moral narcolepsy tends to go hand in hand with Catholic [Christian] hypocrisy. As Frederic Laurent on page 3 of �Knights of Darkness -- the Sovereign Military Order of Malta� states: �All studies [of the post-WWII Nazi networks] have shown the determining role played by the Catholic Church in the flight of war criminals. Since April 1943, following negotiations between Pius XII and the ultra-reactionary American archbishop Francis Spellman, the Holy See became the clandestine center of Anglo-American espionage in Italy. This collaboration in fact had begun the previous year . . . between Earl Brennan, a veteran of the American State Department and Gain Battista Moncini, at the time a bishop and Under-Secretary of State at the Vatican. This close collaboration between the future Paul VI and the American secret services continued after the war through the intermediary James Angleton."

That�s just a taste from the 7-page summary that gives us the notion neither the Church nor its pope should be throwing stones at Muslims, given their role spreading the evil of the Third Reich. Of course, directly behind them come the Americans, at least those who have mercilessly bombed Afghanistan, Iraq, and now Lebanon, along with the help of the former victims of historic European brutality, now called the Jewish State of Israel. This with the military and financial aid of Conservative Christian President George W. Bush and his administration, peppered heavily with dual Israeli/US citizens, more than willing to pave the way for Jesus to Palestine by eliminating Palestinians, lately by building a wall around the shrinking turf left to Palestinians, reminiscent of the ghetto walls of Lodz, Krakow and Warsaw.

What goes around seems to come around. And now the Jewish victims who came to Israel are the victimizers. But then they had a little help from their Anglo, Euro and US friends. But allow me to let an Arab speak on this issue, the great and late (assassinated) Lebanese journalist Samir Kassir from his short and brilliant book Being Arab, recommended reading for all �Orientalists� (those Westerners who would explain the Mid East), including myself. In regard to the creation of Israel, Kassir points out from page 71 and on, that post WW I, �The Levant was obviously a target in itself, for France as much as for great Britain. Yet it was the part it played in their imperial strategies that prompted the two great powers, allies and rivals by turns, to consider it a major prize. At stake for Great Britain was the security of the Suez Canal, which in turn guaranteed British command of the Indies. London was consequently prepared to go to any lengths to control Palestine, including backing a new version for the plan for a Jewish state formulated by the nascent Zionist movement. Conversely, the sense Britain had after the Second World War that it would have to give up India influenced its decision not to make a stand to keep Palestine when its former Zionist allies turned against it. As for France, while possession of �French Syria� -- Syria and Lebanon combined -- was certainly in the interests of Lyon�s and Marseille�s business circles, its real attraction was that of ensuring France�s continued colonial domination of North Africa, culturally rather than geographically. This explains why France, after having to renounce Palestine, was anxious to divide Syria, and then stubbornly insisted on keeping on, despite the cost . . ."

Kassir further tells us that according to �Orientalist Robert Montagne, whoever controlled the Levant, home of the nascent Arab nationalism, would control the Maghreb and the new air route to Indochina.� So all pissing matches aside, as to how the larger half of Palestine came to fall in the hands of Jewish Zionists in 1948, this is the simply skinny: it was a initiated by England and France long before 1948 to keep a Western hand (which now includes all 10 US�s fingers) in the area�s politics, economy, and subsequently, oil.

Kassir says on page 76, �In the meantime the realities of geography had been supplemented by those of geology. The Arab world may have had its place in imperial politics before the discovery of its reserves of hydrocarbons -- and even before oil�s economy utility became paramount -- but oil entrenched power�s strategies. Prospected but not yet exploited, Mosul�s oil was already at the heart of British and French negotiations at the end of the First World War. . . . Oil also anticipated the new hegemony of the United States in the Middle East. In the 1930s, the major American oil companies began doling out sinecures to cement their alliance with the founder of Saudi Arabia, K ing Abdel Aziz; the relationship was sanctioned by the meeting on Roosevelt�s yacht in the middle of the Second World War.�

Thus, if we replay the Panzer Pope�s screed in the light of this history, �Show me just what Muhammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached,� we get the full impact of its distortion. It was the hand of the West and its Christian-Judeo religions that brought �things only evil and inhuman� and �spread by the sword of the faith[s] that [they] preached.� And continue to preach, calculating the consequences as a Muslim or Jihadist abomination. In the absence of historical knowledge, this becomes a devastating propaganda and political philosophy, along with entitlement to commit genocide, not so different than the African or Native American intifadas.

In that deftly dropped slam of Islam, indelicately brought forth by the sweet-faced Pontiff, the panzers of today roll over Mid-Eastern soil, on their new crusade for oil, land, and the suppression of Arab and Islamic people and culture. Some things never change, dooming us to repeat the consequences.

That we are human all, that we are brothers all, eludes us still. To state it even more radically, man made god and man was made by the elegant universe. This should give us pause to consider our commonality, and how we use religion ultimately as a divider not a unifier. Invariably, the missionary has preceded the conquistador, and the cross (or the star) turned into the sword, laid on the neck of the goat de jour. How simple to change it all, with a single act of consciousness: we are one, in fact, the family of the universe.