This article was originally published by the Times of Israel (April 20, 2026).
There are two reasons why people fail to grasp fairly evident truths. Either they genuinely cannot — and one should not blame them for what nature withheld — or they pretend not to, which points to a darker motive. I have been looking back at the cosmic buzz triggered within the Christian media sphere by Prime Minister Netanyahu’s reference to Jesus in a recent television address (March 19th), and wondering which of the two possibilities applies. Educated Catholics, there can be little doubt, fall into the second category.
“History proves that, unfortunately and unhappily, Jesus Christ has no advantage over Genghis Khan. Because if you are strong enough, ruthless enough, powerful enough, evil will overcome good. Aggression will overcome moderation.”
The Prime Minister was quoting the historian Will Durant (The Lessons of History, 1968), who was something of a reverent agnostic. Yet the crushing majority of Christians who had never read the book — as well as the handful who had but had blissfully glided past the passage in question — found in the quotation a serendipitous occasion for outrage, since Netanyahu was deploying it to justify the use of military force in the Middle East. The comment was widely branded “blasphemous,” and the National Catholic Reporter (March 23) embraced the viral notion that Netanyahu was celebrating the definitive triumph of ruthless force over meek and deliberately defenseless innocence — in short, the reversed Cross, the Anti-Christic full inventory of horrors.
One wonders whether one is mistaken in suspecting that the particular gleefulness of this uproar among good Christians, and especially good Catholics, had something to do with the fact that the accused blasphemer happened to be a Jew — the leader, moreover, of the one and only Jewish state in the world today. Does the object of the accusation not partake of the Israeli worldview that Candace Owens — the YouTube Passionaria who has found fresh anti-Zionist inspiration in her Catholic faith — identifies as the “Synagogue of Satan” of the Book of Revelation (2:9 and 3:9)? Does this reading not align perfectly with what Carrie Prejean Boller — the recent convert to Catholicism who has since become a prominent voice across Instagram — designates as the “warmongering heresy” perpetrated by the descendants of those who, in the words of 1 Thessalonians 2:15, “killed both the Lord Jesus and the prophets”?
The hypocrisy of this uproar is all the more striking given that Catholics, together with so many Christians of other denominations, have just been celebrating the Passion and Resurrection of the one they hold to be their Savior. For is the story not, at its very heart, about goodness and meekness being crushed by ruthless cruelty and evil? That this feast is also about the resurrection of the one who suffered this tragic fate — and that, as such, it prefigures a time when ‘every tear will be wiped away’ and ‘death shall be no more’ (Rev. 21:4) — does not dissolve the fact that, under the conditions of the present age, the death of Jesus stands as the exemplary icon of that of countless innocents at the hands of every Genghis Khan, past, present, and yet to come.
The good people who are the first to demonstrate their attachment to the values of Christian civilization appear to acknowledge as much when they lament that the armies of Christian Rome and Byzantium could not withstand the onslaught of foreign conquerors – or when they count themselves fortunate that Christendom held at Poitiers (732), Lepanto (1571), and the gates of Vienna (1683). As St. Ambrose of Milan wrote in his De Officiis, (390 AD) “…the courage of a man who defends his country against barbarians, or protects the weak from those who would destroy them, is full of justice” (I.35, §175) – an observation which lies at the origin of the Catholic doctrine of just war, as developed by St. Augustine, formalized by St. Thomas Aquinas, and finally codified in the Catechism of the Catholic Church (§2309).
Why, then, deny legitimacy to a state that has been struggling for its very existence since its founding, against an enemy that has made the annihilation of that state an article of faith? Why ridicule Netanyahu’s invocation of Jesus when those who do so invoke the very same logic of armed defense the moment the interests of Christian civilization are perceived to be at stake?
One is compelled to ask whether the answer lies in the fact that Netanyahu is a Jew – just as the one they worship as their Savior. Mere inconsistency cannot account for the pattern. What accounts for it is something older and darker: antisemitism, dressed in the now familiar garments of principled anti-Zionism.
These distortions of truth and justice have gone on long enough. It is for this reason that Prof. André Villeneuve and I have established a new initiative: Catholic Voices for Israel. We invite you to join us – as members, as friends, or simply as witnesses who refuse to look away.
