Rabbi Aviner against Christendom

Rabbi Shlomo Aviner (b 1943), the head of Yeshvat Ateret Kohanim in the Muslim Quarter and rabbi of Beit EL aleph is known for having some of the most inflammatory rhetoric against Christianity. English wiki Extensive Hebrew Wiki

Rabbi Aviner retains all the medieval contemptuous rhetoric as contemporary reality and sees Judaism as still at war with Christendom for who is the “true Israel.” People in the establishment have contacted him to stop his rhetoric but to no avail. Aviner also makes up stories and conspiracy theories in which he reports on alleged meetings where the Church is plotting to regain Israel. These stories are then reported as true in the Israeli newspapers which support him. And depending on his need, he blinds himself Vatican II and the Fundamental Accord (the 1992 document in which the Church recognized the state of Israel) and speaks as if the rebuffs to Herzl’s proposals in 1904 were still operative.

One known Orthodox academic wrote him a letter asking him: Does Harav not know the changes in Church policy? Does he not know the events as recorded in the newspapers? Rabbi Aviner responded by FAX with a three word answer. “ zeh tahbulah sifruti” translated as “it is a literary strategy” or “it is a literary technique.” This message implies that he knows the truth but it does not serve his needs.
Normally, these diatribes are only available in his Hebrew publications, and he leaves them untranslated on his website. However yesterday he included this talk on one of his English emails and posted it to the web in English.

Rav Aviner on
On Accepting Contributions from Christian Groups
[Be-Ahavah U-Be-Emunah – Ki Tetzei 5770 – translated by R. Blumberg]

The Evangelical Protestant missionary institutions try to infiltrate anywhere they can by whatever means possible. Now they have found the golden pathway – financial support.

Financial support is their present method of slowly infiltrating us. It doesn’t happen all at once. Not everyone who accepts their money immediately becomes a Christian. Yet their influence involves a seepage process that can spread over years. Those people are very patient and gradually they make inroads.

When a simple Jew hears the word “Christianity,” he is filled with abhorrence. He immediately thinks of the blood of millions of Jews tortured to death by the Christians. He recalls the Inquisition. He remembers everything. Therefore, he will never want to listen to them.

They use data to infiltrate every community. For example, in order to penetrate the Charedim they dress up like Charedim and keep tabs on their poor. If someone falls ill or passes away, they come to visit, help out, provide money, offer an encouraging word – without a single word about Christianity, obviously. They come again and again until a connection is formed. They talk from the heart. When they see that the time is ripe, they say, seemingly as a side comment, “Certainly Christianity is something bad, but Jesus the Christian was all-in-all agood person.” In the first stage, that one sentence is enough. Later on comes another sentence, and then another sentence, via the slow-seepage approach.

In one place, a missionary dressed as a Lubavitcher gave some Chabad women a series of lectures on Tanach in a style that was totally Chabad. The series went on for two years without one word about Christianity, until one day he mentioned that “That Man” wasn’t so bad.

Don’t mistakenly say, “They’re Christians, not missionaries.” Every Evangelist Protestant is a missionary, even if he hides it. Also, we haven’t learned Greek, so we don’t realize that the word “evangelist” means “missionary.” At all the pro-Israel Christian marches and demonstrations, the Christian Lovers of Israel walk hand-in-hand with the missionaries. It turns out that because of the money that you receive, Jews become Christians!

There’s a settlement in Judea and Samaria that received a million dollars from them. Now, in that settlement there’s a Christian worship service in their Town Council building! A prayer service of Christian missionaries and Jews for J. – right there in the Town Council building! Nowhere is it written that the one was in exchange for the other, but that is precisely the result. Let’s not be naive.

How fortunate you are, through G-d’s grace, to have been born in Eretz Yisrael, such that you don’t know what Christians are, how they operate and how sophisticated they are. You should bone up on your history.

By the way, there are two other types of Christians. First, there are liberal Protestants. They are against the State of Israel, because we, allegedly, committed an injustice against the Arabs. Second, there are Catholics, who presently are not engaged in missionary work. Yet, they, too are against the State of Israel, because they think that they are the true Israel, and it was they who were supposed to have established the State. Right now we are talking about the Fundamentalist Protestants who love the State of Israel and who are associated with the missionaries. The common denominator is that we suffer fusillades from all of them, and not just today but throughout history.
Full Version here

Here is some of the material found in his parashah sheets that was left untranslated.

The Christian Enemy Shlomo Aviner in be AHavah ubeEmunah Av 11 5769, #727
We’ve got a long bloody score to settle with Christianity. It was Christianity that split the most Jewish blood throughout history – whether though pious Christians, less pious Christians or others infused with Christian culture. The Holocaust was the work of Germans who never denied their Christianity.
At the end of the Holocaust, the Pope turned to all the Christian rulers in the world to do all they could to prevent the establishment of the State of Israel because the whole fate of Christianity depended on this and not just his own position.
Their plans fell through but they recovered quickly. The reasoned “true, a state has risen up but it will certainly fall apart, and we will help it to do so by creating instability.
Rambam writes that the Torah consists entirely of a war against paganism (Guide to the Perplexed III:29). Christianity by contrast is pagan on the inside, Jewish on the outside.

The above stories about missionaries giving Chabad derashot as a ruse is probably fictitious, but the story below of Polish Bishops wanted to start a new papacy in 2000 is entirely fantasy.

Pope Benedict XVI’s Visit to Israel
May 12, 2009 [Talk given in the yeshiva during lunch]

But with Hashem’s kindness, we returned to Eretz Yisrael. In fact, before the establishment of the State of Israel, the Pope (Pius VII) sent a letter to all of the Christians in the world – Catholics and non-Catholics – urging them to prevent the establishment of the State of Israel because it would be the destruction of Christianity and a slap in the face to the fundamental theological principle of Christians that they are the Nation of Israel. Nonetheless, the State of Israel was established and was victorious. But they said that the State of Israel does not exist.

During the last visit of the Pope (John Paul II) in 5760, he already acknowledged the State of Israel, and many Catholic communities, such as in Poland, threatened him, that if he were to take another step in the direction of the State of Israel, they would disassociate from him and make a separate Pope.
Full Text Here