Still Running Off at the Keyboard

For more than half a century, Arab governments have been manipulating the plight of Palestinians to marshal public opinion against Israel. Now, one Arab ruler is trying to play a variation on that theme.

Jordan’s King Abdullah II has been meeting with prominent Catholic bishops from the West to solicit their help on behalf of Palestinian Christians. The Muslim king talked with officials from the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops in February and spoke a month earlier with Archbishop Patrick Kelly of Liverpool, vice president of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales.

Abdullah met Kelly in Jordan while Kelly was attending the annual meeting of the Coordination of Episcopal Conferences in Support of the Church of the Holy Land, a group of Catholic bishops from Europe and North America. So far, at least one bishop is doing more than listening.

Cardinal Theodore McCarrick of Washington, D.C. – who serves as the USCCB’s president and who greeted Abdullah graciously during the king’s separate visit in September – addressed the problems that Palestinian Christians face in a meeting with President George W. Bush, columnist Robert Novak reported Feb. 16.

Abdullah’s apparent compassion raises interesting questions: Why would a Muslim ruler concern himself with the suffering of Palestinian Christians – especially in territory, the West Bank, which once belonged to his nation, which effectively ceded it to the Palestinian Authority? Why not address the PA directly?

Novak’s Feb. 16 column provided the answer:

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