What Happened Today: December 22, 2023

EPA gives $50 million to lefty NGOs; Obama, Gay?; TikTok propaganda

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The Big Story

Joe Biden’s Environmental Protection Agency is entrusting the distribution of $50 million in taxpayer-funded grants to a left-wing climate NGO that promises to “mobilize additional sectors of the climate movement for the fight to free Palestine,” The Washington Free Beacon reports. On Wednesday, the EPA announced that it was planning to distribute $600 million to 11 grantmakers under the agency’s Environmental Justice Thriving Communities Grantmaking Program, created as part of the federal government’s “investment in climate action” under the Inflation Reduction Act. One of those grantmakers is Climate Justice Alliance (CJA), an umbrella organization of more than 80 “grassroots” environmental groups whose website proclaims fealty to a grab bag of intersectional far-left causes, including “Free Palestine” and “Stop Cop City,” the antifa-and-NGO-backed campaign to block the construction of a police-training facility in Atlanta. 

“For too long, low-income communities, immigrant communities, Native communities, and communities of color have endured disproportionate levels of air, water, and soil pollution,” said Vice President Kamala Harris in a statement accompanying the EPA’s announcement of the grants. “That is why President Joe Biden and I have put equity at the center of our nation’s largest investment in climate in history.” And who could argue with that?

The award means that CJA will receive $50 million to distribute to local “environmental justice” community organizations via “sub-grants” of $150,000 to $350,000 each. For a sense of what those grants might be spent on, we can check the “Free Palestine” section of CJA’s website, which—in addition to directing readers to “Alternative News Sources” such as The Electronic Intifada, Al Jazeera, and The Intercept—links to the social media accounts of the “community organizations” that CJA partners with. Here’s Communities for a Better Environment, which “builds people’s power in Ca [sic] low-income, communities of color to achieve environmental health & justice by reducing pollution & building green communities”:

Here’s Grassroots Global Justice Alliance, whose X tagline is “Many Struggles, One Movement,” and which in the past has organized a “People’s Caravan” to protest the “racism” and “misogyny” of the Republican National Convention, which seems a rather partisan exercise for a group potentially receiving taxpayer funds:

And here’s CJA itself: 

So, to review: the “Inflation Reduction Act” provides funding for “investment in climate action,” which actually has nothing to do with climate because, as the groups slated to receive the money explain, “climate justice” is intersectionally linked to every other progressive agenda item, from open borders to decarceration to opposition to Israeli “genocide” and “apartheid.”

In practice, then, it would seem that putting “equity at the center of our nation’s largest investment in climate in history” is officialese for a borderline Third World-arrangement in which tens of millions of taxpayer dollars are funneled via federal bureaucracies to the Democratic Party’s allies in the far-left NGO complex, where they can be used to lobby for policies opposed by the majority of Americans but supported by professional-class Democrats and the party’s wealthy donor base. But don’t call it corruption—it’s just “our democracy” at work. 

Read more here: https://freebeacon.com/biden-administration/they-justified-hamas-terrorism-now-biden-is-letting-them-dole-out-taxpayer-dollars/ 

IN THE BACK PAGES: What Pope Pius XII knew about the death camps

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The Rest

→One factor we didn’t consider in explaining why Harvard President Claudine Gay still has her job: Barack Obama. Obama “privately lobbied on Gay’s behalf following her congressional appearance,” according to a Friday report in Fox News. “It sounded like people were being asked to close ranks to keep the broader [Harvard] administration stable—including its composition,” said one “confidential source familiar with the matter.”

→President Biden has instructed Amos Hochstein, who brokered the pro-Hezbollah maritime agreement between Israel and Lebanon in 2022, to prevent a potential war between Israel and Hezbollah along the Lebanese border. According to a report in Al Arabiya, U.S. officials are urging “both sides” to halt their cross-border attacks. Israel has stated that it is open to a diplomatic settlement, but only if Hezbollah withdraws its forces north of the Litani River, as called for by U.N. Security Council Resolution 1701, which ended the 2006 Lebanon War. U.S. officials say, however, that Hezbollah won’t accept that outcome and that “Israel will be on its own” if it follows through on its threats to compel Hezbollah’s withdrawal with military force. As Tablet News Editor Tony Badran has been saying this whole time:

→Discussions are intensifying in Israel about the transition to the next stage of the Gaza war, motivated not only by U.S. pressure but also by the strain that full mobilization is placing on Israel’s society and economy. In our Thread of the Day, YNet columnist Nadav Eyal explains what he’s hearing from “senior Israeli officials”:

→TikTok is likely suppressing stories about the Uyghurs, Taiwan, Tibet, and other subjects that fall afoul of the Chinese Communist Party’s geostrategic line, according to a new hashtag analysis from Rutgers’ Network Contagion Research Institute. As The New York Times summarized in its write-up of the report:

For popular pop culture and politics terms like #TaylorSwift and #Trump, the researchers found roughly two Instagram posts for every one on TikTok, the report said. But that ratio jumped to more than 8-to-1 for #Uyghur or #Uighur, 30-to-1 for #Tibet, 57-to-1 for #TiananmenSquare, and 174-to-1 for #HongKongProtest.

These findings, the researchers concluded, suggest “a strong possibility that content on TikTok is either amplified or suppressed based on its alignment with the interests of the Chinese government.” Which would seem to make a pretty good case for banning the app, now used by 150 million Americans, or at least heavily restricting its reach—but apparently that’s impossible. Donald Trump attempted to ban TikTok via executive order in 2020 but was thwarted by the courts, while in March of this year, the Biden administration led a bipartisan push to force TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, to sell the app, only to run aground on legal obstacles and bureaucratic infighting. 

Read the report here: https://networkcontagion.us/reports/12-21-23-a-tik-tok-in-timebomb-how-tiktoks-global-platform-anomalies-align-with-the-chinese-communist-partys-geostrategic-objectives/ 

→In addition to pumping American teenagers full of viral propaganda, China is also funding several American climate NGOs, including the group behind the report alleging a link between gas stoves and childhood asthma. Fox News reports that Energy Foundation China, which is headquartered in San Francisco despite extensive ties to China and the CCP, donated more than $3.8 million in 2022 to U.S. environmental groups advocating for net-zero emissions, widespread EV adoption, and the complete phasing out of coal power. Among its donations was a $900,000 grant to the Rocky Mountain Institute, which published a study last December on the dangers of gas stoves that was cited by a member of Biden’s Consumer Product Safety Commission in January when he floated the possibility of a federal ban on the appliances. Kevin Killough at Just the News notes that this is not the first example of America’s rivals funding Western green movements: Multiple sources, including former NATO head Anders Fogh Rasmussen and Hillary Clinton, have alleged that Russia has funneled money to anti-fracking environmental groups in Europe for the purpose of maintaining the continent’s dependence on Russian natural gas. 

→For today’s Headline of the Day, we have a double feature, presented in shot-and-chaser format:

Shot: 

How Republicans are weaponizing antisemitism to take down DEI

That’s from a Thursday story in Vox, attempting to explain not only that there’s no relation between campus DEI and antisemitism, but also that it’s antisemitic to attack DEI since it’s “often lumped in” with “cultural Marxism,” a term that “was also used by Nazis before the Holocaust.” (By the way, that last part isn’t true: The Nazis referred to “cultural Bolshevism.”)

Chaser: 

University of Minnesota professor who denied Hamas atrocities on Oct. 7 a candidate for school’s top DEI job

That’s from a Friday story in Jewish Insider on Sima Shakhsari, a finalist for the position of associate dean of the DEI office in the university’s College of Liberal Arts. The story is even worse than the headline: Shakhsari, a professor of women’s studies who uses they/he/she pronouns, delivered a rambling speech on Israel and Gaza in a public talk that was part of her job application. In it, she touted her credentials as a “rape crisis counselor” to deny that any Israeli women were raped on Oct. 7. and explain that rape accusations against Hamas were “racist” attempts to “demonize” Arab men, rooted in white supremacist myths about “the innocence of white women.”

→The U.N. Security Council passed a United Arab Emirates-sponsored resolution Friday calling for “unhindered humanitarian access” to Gaza and “creating the conditions for a sustainable cessation of hostilities,” though it stops short of calling for an immediate cease-fire. Thirteen members of the security council voted in favor of the resolution, with the United States and Russia abstaining. The version that passed was toned down from an earlier draft that called for an “immediate humanitarian cease-fire,” but the current version does include language demanding “urgent and extended humanitarian pauses,” mirroring language from a Nov. 15 resolution passed shortly before Israel and Hamas agreed to a cease-fire-for-hostages deal. The United States also abstained from vetoing that resolution.  

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TODAY IN TABLET: 

Taking Judaism Personally, by Elias Neibart

If we want people who are Jewish from birth to engage more profoundly with their religion, we should look to converts—and Abraham Joshua Heschel—for answers

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SCROLL TIP LINE: Have a lead on a story or something going on in your workplace, school, congregation, or social scene that  you want to tell us about? Send your tips, comments, questions, and suggestions to scroll@tabletmag.com.

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What the Pope Knew

New historical discoveries cast light on the Vatican’s response to the Holocaust

by Fredric Brandfon

In the fourth year of the Second World War, Dec. 24, 1942, Pope Pius XII, speaking on the radio, delivered his annual Christmas message. Known for being verbose, the pope gave a speech that many found to be tedious and of “exorbitant” length. On page 24 of his text, the pope attempted to speak out on the subject of Nazi persecution. The pope deplored the fate of “hundreds of thousands of people who, through no fault of their own and solely because of their nation or their race, have been condemned to death or progressive extinction.”

Those few words exposed Pius XII to criticism for failing to provide leadership and moral clarity. The ambassador from the Polish government in exile was disappointed that the pope spoke in generalities, without specifying the Polish Catholic and Jewish victims.

Pius XII’s pronouncements, like the Christmas statement, invariably expressed sympathy for those suffering. But while he deplored the crime, he failed to identify either the perpetrators of the crime or its victims. As exemplified in the passage above, the pope could not bring himself to utter the word “Nazi” or “Jew.” A frustrated Polish ambassador indicated that Pius XII, by nature and experience, was far too detached from the harsh realities facing his listeners. But is that saying enough? New and not-so-new evidence from the Vatican archives may provide a more nuanced explanation of the pope’s words.

On Sept. 27, 2023, I presented my book Intimate Strangers: A History of Jews and Catholics in the City of Rome to Pope Francis at a general audience. At that time, I was able to speak briefly with Father Norbert Hofmann, secretary of the Holy See’s Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews. He was hopeful that with the publication of all of Pope Pius’ papers concerning World War II, a more sympathetic picture of the pope would be revealed.

Father Hofmann was referring to the fact that on March 2, 2020, the Vatican allowed researchers to investigate the full archive documenting Pope Pius XII’s war years. Discoveries from that archive have recently been published by David Kertzer in several articles as well as a book, The Pope at War: The Secret History of Pius XII, Mussolini and Hitler.

On Sept. 16 of this year, a further discovery was announced by Vatican archivist Giovanni Coco of a previously unknown letter dated Dec. 14, 1942, written by Rev. Lothar König, a German anti-Nazi Jesuit, to Pope Pius’ personal secretary, Rev. Robert Leiber. The purpose of the letter was to report to the pope concerning the persecution of the Catholic Church in Germany. An appendix to the letter provided the pope with the number of priests imprisoned in Dachau. The letter also informed the pope that 6,000 Jews and Poles were being murdered daily at Belzec, a camp southeast of Lublin in Poland. Finally—and perhaps most importantly for understanding the pope’s response—the letter requested that the Vatican be cautious in making the information provided public because, if it emerged that such information came from the German Church, the persecution of the Church in Germany would become even fiercer than it already was.

The Dec. 14, 1942, letter found by Coco is not the only letter documenting the Holocaust from eyewitnesses that Pius received in 1942. Seven months earlier, Abbot Pirro Scavizzi wrote directly to Pius from Poland saying:

The struggle against the Jews is implacable and constantly intensifying with deportations and mass executions. The massacre of the Jews in Ukraine is by now complete. In Poland and Germany they want to complete it also, with a system of mass murders.

A similar letter was written to the pope in August of 1942 by the archbishop of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, Andrea Szeptzycky. He wrote: "The number of Jews killed in our little area has certainly exceeded two hundred thousand. ... At Kiev, in just a few days, as many as a hundred and thirty thousand men, women and children were executed.” And Abbot Scavizzi reported that when he followed up his letter with a face-to-face visit with the pope, Pius XII cried “like a child.”

There can be little doubt then, that the pope was aware of the genocide taking place in Europe as early as 1942, both in general terms and also in many of its specifics. Nonetheless, he remained silent. He was woefully ambiguous in the Christmas message, and two months earlier, in an exchange of memos with Myron Taylor, the American special envoy to the Vatican, he refused to verify the reports he had already heard.

Pope Pius’ image was that of a spiritual man. To look at him, it would appear that his devotion to the religious life had left him spare and gaunt. Yet when faced with the Holocaust, he appeared more diminished than devout. Given the state of the evidence, the task for historians is not to justify his response but to explain it.

One explanation might be found in the advice he was being given in the fall and winter of 1942. The letter newly discovered by Coco, dated Dec. 14, 1942, concluded with a plea not to disclose the source of the horrific details related to the pope for fear of reprisals from the Nazis. Ten days later, Pius delivered his cautious and obscure Christmas message.

It is possible that the cryptic nature of the pope’s statement on the Holocaust was an attempt to honor Father König’s request. Also, his choice not to confirm what he had been told about the Nazi death camps to the American special envoy may have similarly been an attempt to protect his sources: If the Americans had publicized the pope’s confirmation of mass murder, those sources would have been jeopardized.

Furthermore, at roughly the same time, the pope was also receiving advice from Monsignor Angelo Dell’Acqua, a confidant who had little sympathy for the plight of Europe’s Jews. Dell’Acqua did not want the pope to compromise his neutrality, which would anger Hitler, and likely echoed the pope’s concerns about what the Americans might do if he confirmed their suspicions about the Nazi genocide in Europe.

The pope’s vague statements and his silence appear to be part of a chosen policy rather than the outcome of personal timidity. A clear statement of this Vatican policy was made later, toward the end of the war. After Mussolini was deposed on July 25, 1943, the new Italian government kept him confined near Rome for a short time, and then imprisoned him in the Gran Sasso mountains farther to the northeast. On Sept. 12, 1943, the Germans mounted a successful rescue mission. Mussolini was briefly taken to Germany and then installed as a puppet of the Reich in the city of Salò in Lombardy on the banks of Lake Garda. He became the feckless head of state for the Republic of Salò, (Repubblica Sociale Italiana), also known as “RSI,” which accomplished little besides the persecution of Jews. Even the studiously neutral Vatican had no intention of recognizing the legitimacy of this degraded regime.

Nonetheless, on Oct. 15, 1943, Monsignor Ambrogio Marchioni, a Vatican diplomat, met with Mussolini’s general, Rodolfo Graziani, who was attempting to gain papal support for Italy’s much-reduced dictator. The general asked that the monsignor side with the RSI. Marchioni demurred. The Church, he said, and certainly the Vatican, was neutral and had to remain neutral. It was not a priest’s role to support one belligerent or another, but rather to “instill calm, tranquility, order so as to ensure that ill-advised actions do not produce serious reprisals against so many innocent people or the entire population.”

The monsignor’s answer was almost as vague and noncommittal as Pius’ Christmas message. But while Pius had only expressed his dismay, Marchioni was delivering a diplomatic message. The Vatican had a policy. The Church was to remain neutral and take no “ill-advised” actions. Furthermore, its claimed neutrality had a purpose: to avoid incurring reprisals that would be aimed at the innocent. The fact that the most severe and bloody reprisals always originated from Fascist or Nazi forces was left unsaid, probably to avoid the very reprisals the monsignor feared.

Whether or not such a policy was in the best interests of Catholics and Jews under Nazi domination inside Italy is not a question with an easy answer. However, it is certain that the pope’s silence did no damage to the Nazis.

What is clear, however, is that Nazi reprisals in Italy and elsewhere were brutal. For the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, head of the Reich Security Main Office, the SS wiped out the Czech town of Lidice. On June 9, 1942, 173 men and boys were gunned down, while the women and children of the town were deported to concentration and death camps. Eighty children were gassed, most likely at Chelmno, and 53 women died, probably at Ravensbruck. On March 24, 1944, in Rome, 10 Italians were murdered for each SS officer killed in an ambush carried out by the Resistance in the center of the city. On June 10, 1944, a Waffen-SS reprisal razed the town of Ouradour-sur Glane in France, killing 642 villagers. The Nazi reprisals in central Italy, at Sant’Anna di Stazzema and Monte Sole, only two of many such Nazi massacres, resulted in over 1,200 civilian deaths, most of them women and children. Thus, it seems clear that papal policy, while frustrating and perhaps morally reprehensible, had a solid grounding in reality.

But the monsignor could not stop himself from saying one more thing to the Fascist general: The Church “does not, and cannot, remain neutral between good and evil.” Again, the monsignor chose silence instead of identifying who was good and who was evil (even if, in a face-to-face meeting between a Vatican emissary and a representative of Mussolini, that is not a realistic expectation). But at the same time, the monsignor's statement can be read as a veiled threat by the Vatican to a Fascist official: The pope would not countenance bloody retaliations against civilians.

Was this threat an empty one? In hindsight, we know that it was. The pope had few resources at his disposal to back up such threats. Accordingly, a policy of silence, or even of veiled threats, could only be based on the hope that someone else, not the pope and not the Vatican, would step up to alleviate the suffering of Jews and other innocents.

Nevertheless, if the pope believed he could not take concrete action to save lives, individual priests found a way. At many (but not all) churches, convents, and monasteries throughout Rome and Italy, churchmen and churchwomen did not “remain neutral between good and evil.” And thousands of innocent and Jewish lives were saved.

Was any of that intended by the pope’s statements or Monsignor Marchioni’s threat? It is difficult to know. When the policy is silence, the intent of the policy cannot be certain. What we are left with is an uncertainty that may accurately reflect a flawed yet deliberate response to an excruciating dilemma.