Mark Reid

A new CBS poll found that 58% of weekly Mass-attending Catholics approve of President Trump’s job performance overall. Not surprising, as these are the Catholics taking the faith seriously rather than just bearing the title. Catholics understand that President Trump is by and large getting the policy right.

This day (April 16) in 1948, the British withdrew from Safed & 100s of Arabs immediately attacked the city’s ancient Jewish community. The Arab commander cabled the Arab Liberation Army: “Our morale is very high, the young people are enthusiastic, we’re going to massacre them." The outnumbered Jews chose to stay and fight rather than flee; and, along with a small garrison of Haganah fighters, they managed to repel the attack. The Arab assault was part of the “civil war” portion of the 1948 War that was launched the moment the UN voted to partition Mandate Palestine into a Jewish state and an Arab state on November 29, 1947. From day one, the Arabs rejected any Jewish state on any part of the Land. In fact, on this same day (April 16, 1948), as Arab armies massed on the borders to invade the day the British Mandate ended, Jamal Husseini - acting chairman of the Arab Higher Committee - told the UN Security Council: “The representative of the Jewish Agency told us yesterday that they were not the attackers, that the Arabs had begun the fighting. We did not deny this. We told the whole world that we were going to fight.” And “fight” they did. The Arabs answered the UN vote with immediate terror: buses ambushed, passengers shot, the Jewish market in Jerusalem stormed with Arabs armed with knives and axes, entire convoys wiped out on the roads with no prisoners taken and corpses mutilated. Jewish civilians were dying at a rate of more than fifty per week. By March 1948, the Arabs were winning the “battle for the roads” and had the Jewish population on the verge of strangulation and, in Jewish Jerusalem, starvation. This is where the wildly misunderstood Plan Dalet came into effect. It was a desperate military counter-offensive to reopen supply lines and prevent total annihilation. It was never a “blueprint for expulsion” as propagandists like to claim. The real ethnic cleansing intent came expressly and proudly from the Arabs whose war cry was literally: Itbah al Yahoud! — “Slaughter the Jews!” On May 14, 1948, Israel declared independence. The next day, five Arab armies invaded with the explicit goal of wiping the Jewish state off the map before it could even breathe. They failed. That failure is what Arabs originally called the "Nakba" — “the catastrophe.” Its original use had exactly nothing to do with “refugees,” but was meant to give a word to the humiliating Arab failure to destroy the wildly outnumbered Jews and prevent Israel from being born. In reality, the vast majority of local Arabs fled before Israeli forces arrived, urged on by their own leaders who promised a quick victory and return. Those who stayed, by the way, became full citizens of Israel with equal rights; and they make up more than 20% of Israel's population today. Perhaps most importantly, there would NEVER have been a single refugee had the Arabs accepted the UN partition and/or chosen not to invade with genocidal intent. Like so many anti-Israel narratives that reverse cause and effect today, the “Nakba” narrative inverts aggressor and victim. It erases the fact that the Jews were fighting for survival against a war of annihilation explicitly declared by the Arabs from day one. What are some other ways cause and effect is reversed in modern anti-Israel discourse? Let me know your thoughts below.

Dear friends: I don’t know any Catholic in the United States, from the most traditional to the most progressive, who does not have strong feelings about the comments from President Trump and Vice President Vance about Pope Leo XIV. These include not only President Trump’s initial disrespectful Truth Social post about the Holy Father, but also Vice President Vance’s similarly disrespectful comments about Pope Leo having to be “careful” when he speaks about theology. Let me share some of my own feelings. First of all, it is shocking that a President and Vice President would treat such a good, holy and learned man with such disdain. Imagine telling a man with the Holy Father’s learning and experience (and authority) that he doesn’t understand theology sufficiently. What’s more, imagine attacking him as, ridiculously, “weak on crime” or somehow not understanding foreign policy. Second, I’m edified by Pope Leo’s charitable and courageous response to all this. Charitable because he has not responded in any way other than with charity and respect. As some of you may know, I know the Holy Father slightly, thanks to our being seated together at the Synod for two weeks, and know him to be a kind, reserved, discerning and highly intelligent person. In a word, holy. But courageous too: as we have seen during his time in Algeria and Cameroon, Pope Leo has not shied away from continuing to preach the Gospel, and speaking out in favor of peace (and yes, he understands St. Augustine’s concept of the “just war”) and against, as he said today, tyrants and those who would use God’s name to support violence of bloodshed. So, where will this all end? It’s hard to say. But I would imagine that now that the taboo has been broken, politicians will continue to denigrate him and thus try to persuade people, without saying it explicitly, to think that the Pope’s words do not need to be listened to. But this will be in vain for two reasons. First, Pope Leo is clearly fearless. A few hours after he was elected as pope, I spoke with a fellow Augustinian priest who had known “Bob” for decades. “He’s a great listener, very kind and much loved.” Then he paused. “But he’s no pushover.” But the main reason that the Pope’s words will be heard is less about Robert Prevost’s own many virtues but something else: the Vicar of Christ will be heard because he is preaching the Gospel. As Jesus told his disciples, “Heaven and earth may pass away, but my words will never pass away.” So, in these strange times, fear not.