From the Weekly Standard:
Fences and a "Just Peace"
The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America makes a stand against Israel's security fence and in favor of a "just peace." (Never mind Palestinian terrorism.)
by John Hinderaker
08/15/2005 7:40:00 AM
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On August 11, 2005 the Wall Street Journal ran an article, "Today's Puritans Attack the Indian Mascots", http://online.wsj.com/article_email/0,,SB112371208212410238-IdjfYNilaB4m5yqZnuHaaeCm5,00.html describing efforts by the United Church of Christ to ban the use of language and sport team insignias that refer to Native Americans (such as the Seminoles, Indians, Braves, Washington Redskins). The UCC believes these are caricatures that demean and insult Natice Americans. By the way, Native Americans are objecting to the UCC efforts as meddlesome and unnecessary. I have a qestion for the gang of five that staged this coup at the UCC and http://hughhewitt.com/archives/2005/08/07-week/index.php#a000057 passed a resolution pressing comapnies to end dealings with Israel. If you are so concerned with images that spead prejudice and generate hate, why are you not raising a voice against the caricatures that prevail in the Arab world (both overseas and in some instance here) about the Jewish people? How about issuing condemnations against the Palestinian-drawn images and language that demonize Jews, about the telelevison series on Egyptian television that spreads theories of worldwide Jewish conspiracies, that depict Jews as obese, hook-nosed, and insatiably greedy, and stories in Syria and throughout the Arab world which propagate the infamous blood libel? In other words, why are you discriminating against the Jewish people of Israel who are only trying to protect themselves from the murderous hatred of people who revere and publish these very icons of hatred?
From The Minneapolis StarTribune paper:
| Tom Teepen |
| Cox News Service |
| Published August 9, 2005 |
The Presbyterian Church USA has adopted get-tough policies toward Israel ostensibly designed to force peace with the Palestinians, but they are more likely to sabotage peace than to advance it.
The church has threatened four U.S. companies that if they don't stop doing business with Israel, the church will divest the stock it holds in them. The companies provide heavy construction machinery, helicopters and communications equipment, all of which, the Presbyterians contend, can be, and sometimes is, used in supporting the occupation of Palestinian territories.
The idea is to cut Israel off from tactically crucial materiel. With the move, the Presbyterian Church places itself at the de facto head of a movement among mainstream Protestant churches to gang up on Israel. The Episcopalian Church USA, the United Church of Christ, the United Methodist Church and the World Council of Churches have all at least feinted toward disinvestment. Students at a number of colleges are pressing their schools to do the same.
If you set out to create a program to ward off peace, it would be hard to come up with one more promising than this. The policy will worsen Israel's already ingrained security anxieties, which make the Jewish state deeply chary of deals that might increase its vulnerability. And the policy will feed Palestinian delusions that others will produce a state for them without the Palestinians themselves ever having to accept the permanence of Israel as part of the deal.
Israel has been trying to cut a deal with the Arabs since it was created by the United Nations in 1948 and was immediately attacked by the surrounding Arab states.
Israel wound up in the West Bank and Gaza in 1967 when Israel's Arab neighbors, in the Six-Day War, were defeated in their next attempt to destroy Israel. In the aftermath, Israel agreed to a U.N.-sponsored formula by which it would return land in exchange for peace. The Arab states wouldn't hear of it and instead bankrolled and egged on Yasser Arafat and his Palestinian Liberation Organization, which rejected negotiations and enshrined armed struggle as the only legitimate means to form a Palestinian state.
A third war against Israel, a campaign of terror and two intefadehs followed. Even so, Israel has taken two striking unilateral steps toward accommodation. Although too tardily, it withdrew from southern Lebanon after rooting out the PLO mini-state that was entrenching on Israel's border. And now, with no quid pro quo, it is withdrawing from Gaza.
Israel has at times taken needlessly complicating steps. The settlements in the territories, except for the defensive ones near Jerusalem, qualify. But the weight of history falls on the Palestinians, whose unceasing belligerence got them into their current forlorn fix.
The churches' misplaced do-gooderism, blind to history and morally obtuse, will strengthen Hamas, Islamic Jihad and other rejectionist/terrorist elements among the Palestinians and undermine the post-Arafat leadership's efforts to regularize Palestinian governance as a precursor to the negotiated statehood that Israeli policy supports.
© Copyright 2005 Star Tribune. All rights reserved.
HoustonChronicle.com -- http://www.HoustonChronicle.com | Section: National
Aug. 5, 2005, 9:18PM
Associated Press
A Presbyterian committee accused five companies Friday of contributing to "ongoing violence that plagues Israel and Palestine" and pledged to use the church's multimillion-dollar stock holdings in the businesses to pressure them to stop.
The move follows a vote last year by leaders of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) to put economic pressure on companies that profit from Israeli policy in the West Bank and Gaza.
The vote had outraged Jewish groups, who said the strategy was biased and failed to recognize Israel's right to defend itself, and the tensions worsened after other Protestant bodies adopted similar tactics.
Jewish leaders are deeply disturbed that the campaigns threatening divestment essentially borrow from the 1980s movement against South African apartheid.
Presbyterian leaders insisted Friday that divestment would be only a last resort, if discussions with corporate leaders and lobbying stockholders failed.
"We are initiating a slow, deliberate process," said Bill Somplatsky-Jarman, who works with the Presbyterian Mission Responsibility through Investment Committee. The goal is to convince corporations to "change their business practices which inflict harm on the innocent."
David Elcott, head of interreligious relations for the American Jewish Committee, contended the Presbyterian strategy was meant to "punish and attack" Israel. He said he was particularly upset by the timing of the announcement, two weeks before Israel prepares to withdraw from the Gaza Strip.
The targeted companies are Caterpillar, Citigroup, ITT Industries, Motorola and United Technologies Corp.
The Presbyterians accused all except Citigroup of selling products such as night vision equipment, wireless communications and helicopters that the Israeli military uses to hurt Palestinians and bolster control of the territories.
To demonstrate equal abhorrence of violence against Israelis, the panel accused Citigroup of being part of a conduit for funds used to support Mideast terrorist groups.
A Citigroup spokeswoman called the claim "an outrage" and insisted the company worked closely with the U.S. government to help stop financing of terrorism.
Paul Jackson of United Technologies said his company was "ethical and responsible" and fully complied with federal regulations on military programs.
Caterpillar insisted it was in no way linked to wrongdoing in the Mideast and had "neither the legal right nor the tangible ability" to monitor how customers use its products.
"We have no intention of participating in a debate that appears aimed not at our company, but at the policies established and controlled by the governments of the United States and Israel," the company said.
A spokesman for ITT said he had not seen the announcement and could not comment. A Motorola spokeswoman did not respond to a request for comment.
Here is the "official" announcement of the PCUSA policy. Background biographies of the five member committee steering this disastrous course are here, here, here, and here.
This "phased divestment" policy is quite obviously a charade, an anti-Israel policy dressed up in the sophistry of Divinity School humbug. The majority of Presbyterians reject this absurd policy, and I suspect now that it has moved beyond the committee endless talking phase, a number of congregations will act quickly to demand of their elders a response that reflects that commitment to Israel.
The Disciples of Christ have just jumped in to the recent St. Vitus dance mania of some of its brethren, the United Church of Christ, the Presbyterian Church, and the Anglicans (both here in the United States and in Great Britain), in pouncing on the State of Israel as the primary villain in world politics or at least so villainous as to warrant almost unprecedented and relentless condemnation by their official leaderships. In this, they are following the lead of the National Council of Churches bureaucracy which has been--how can we say this, diplomatically?--made historically quite edgy by the national renaissance of the Jewish people. (If you look at the NCC website, you'd be hard pressed to conclude that the organization was anything other than a political mobilization of the left and one, at that, rather blasé about Christianity.)
It is a macabre spectacle watching these communions denounce Israel, the most consistent target of helter-skelter Arab and Muslim terror in the world, with victims virtually every day--one day two, the next day twenty-two--now numbering in the thousands, and anointing it as liberal Christianity's chosen object of theological opprobrium. The Disciples and the United Church, the most recent players in the "Israel shouldn't protect itself" school of international politics, have called on the Jewish state to dismantle its security barriers around the West Bank (a line of fences, checkpoints, electric fields, trenches, monitored roads and--just for your information, which you probably have not received on ABC News--not more than a few miles of admittedly ugly walls).
It isn't as if barriers between polities, even friendly polities, are a new invention. Take, for example, the United States and Mexico. But the policed lines that separate Israel and the Palestinian areas are actually war lines. They protect the Israeli population from the multitude of Palestinian militias that have as their very purpose the killing of Jews--at random, on roads, in malls, at cafes and restaurants, coming out of prayer, going to school, planting in the fields. Before the erection of these protective mechanics (they are not yet complete), the death tolls in Israel were actually so high that no small society could be expected to bear the ongoing horror. But the oh-so-offensive constructions have brought down the number of attempted terror strikes and the number of realized terror hits. Still, terrorists, young and middle-aged, male and female, try to cross the checkpoints that monitor the traffic between Israel and the territories with explosive belts on their bodies. The church whiners have also bleated about the harsh methods at these crossings. But they, too, have worked. Much of this would, perhaps, be unnecessary if the Palestinian Authority, which this week once again claimed competence in policing terrorism, would actually do so or even try to do so. But its claim is belied by the fact that many of the captured would-be mass murderers come from the PA's own armed groups. In any case, the most heavily armed and the most highly motivated to kill Jews are from those groups that are themselves in religious battle with Abu Mazen's regime.
Members of the high-minded general assembly of the Disciples of Christ declined to hear a talk by Tzippi Cohen, a young woman who survived the 2003 suicide bombing at Cafe Hillel on Emek Refaim Street in a neighborhood mostly made up of students and growing families, before they voted. Maybe they were afraid of hearing her searing account of the carnage, her psychological stigmata, so to speak. Some say in their defense that these churches are merely urging Israel to turn the other cheek. It is true that the Disciples and their haughty brethren have not issued dicta about how democratic societies in general--or Britain and Spain, to be specific--might deal with rampant terrorism. But don't expect Israel to be the guinea pig for what would inevitably be the weak-willed strategies of these weak-willed churches, already so at odds with their congregants that millions of them have simply wandered off into the desert or into the arms of theologians who worry for their souls.
Another round in the ongoing Protestant campaign against Israeli security measures is set for Tuesday, when the Disciples of Christ Church is to discuss a resolution calling on Israel to dismantle its West Bank security barrier.
The Disciples of Christ, a strongly liberal American church that broke from the Presbyterian and Baptist churches in the early 1800s, opened its annual general assembly in Portland, Oregon, on Saturday.
The "Tear Down the Wall" resolution that the organization is to weigh is basically the same one adopted at the beginning of July by the United Church of Christ, which shares a common lineage with the Disciples. Both churches have memberships in excess of one million people.
The Common Global Missions Board, an example of modern ties between the Disciples and the UCC, is a shared body that drafted the resolution on the security barrier.
"The Common Global Ministries Board," the resolution reads in part, "calls upon the Israeli government to cease the project to construct the barrier, tear down the segments that have already been constructed, and pay reparations to those who have lost homes, fields, property, and/or lives and health due to the barrier and its effects."
Although the language of the resolution is less incendiary than other anti-Israel divestment resolutions passed by other Protestant churches in the past few years, the fact that the resolution is even being discussed is enough to disturb both Jewish and Christian groups alike.
In the past, such groups as the Judeo-Christian Alliance and the Simon Wiesenthal Center have attempted to encourage members to vote down the resolutions.
On Tuesday as well, members of the Disciples of Christ are expected to demonstrate outside the Portland location of the Disciples assembly, together with representatives of the pro-Israel advocacy group Stand With Us and of the Simon Wiesenthal Center.
"In the wake of the terrorist outrages in London and [the recent] suicide bombing at a shopping mall in Israel, this resolution sends the wrong message, at the wrong time, to the wrong people," Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean of the Wiesenthal Center, said in a statement ahead of the general assembly.
Disciples of Christ officials have already rebuffed a Wiesenthal Center request to shelve the resolution.
From Friday's WSJ:
But there is little evidence that the leaders of these churches are representing the sentiments of their members. The Presbyterian action provoked outrage from the church's rank and file, as well as bipartisan condemnation in Congress. The church has yet to actually divest any funds, and its horrified congregants might still reverse the decree.
Religious Radicals
Mainline churches launch a policy to punish Israel.
BY EUGENE KONTOROVICH
Friday, July 22, 2005 12:01 a.m.
"It is the Occupation in its many facets that foments the violence and fuels the conflict [in Israel]," said a report endorsed by leaders of the Anglican Church in at their meeting in Britain last month. They adopted a resolution there supporting divestment from companies doing business with Israel. The Anglicans are only the most recent on a list of mainline Protestant churches to endorse a boycott of companies with ties to the Jewish state. The United Church of Christ (UCC) took similar action last month, and the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) passed a resolution last year. But there is little evidence that the leaders of these churches are representing the sentiments of their members. The Presbyterian action provoked outrage from the church's rank and file, as well as bipartisan condemnation in Congress. The church has yet to actually divest any funds, and its horrified congregants might still reverse the decree. In April, a labor union of British professors adopted a boycott of Israeli universities, prompting widespread revulsion from across the political spectrum. It soon became clear that the boycott was the work of a small group of activists who had foisted their political agenda on the union. True, the union is an unabashedly left-wing organization with long-standing support for the Palestinian cause, but even its members repealed the boycott within a month. Similarly, divestment campaigns at American universities, such as Harvard, have been rejected by students and faculty alike. Critics of Israel have been pleased enough with Israel's planned pull-out from Gaza that they want to continue encouraging such policies. Even Israel's Arab enemies are backing away from these tactics. Saudi Arabia, because it needs U.S. approval to join the World Trade Organization, is poised to drop its long-standing boycott of American companies that do business with Israel; Egypt and Jordan have already done so. Still, the divestment movement continues in some Protestant denominations. The United Church of Christ is particularly noteworthy for its hypocritical treatment of Israel. The UCC condemns Israel's security barrier for, among other things, "changing an international border without direct negotiations between partners." Yet the divestment resolution, passed at the same meeting, specifies exactly what Israel's final border must look like and what Israel must give up, including Judaism's two most holy sites. Even the United Nations Security Council and the recent "Road Map" peace plan endorsed by Europe and the U.S. leave the specifics of a final border settlement to be worked out between the parties. It would seem beyond the bounds of decency for a Christian church to demand that the Jewish State cede sovereignty over its sacred places. Is there any other religion to which these denominations would presume to dictate the disposition of its holy sites? Moreover, the denominations condemn Israel without informing their congregants of the broader historical context. The resolutions blame terrorism on Israeli "occupation." But Palestinian terror against Israeli civilians began well before Israel took Gaza from Egypt and the West Bank from Jordan in the 1967 Six Day War. At Camp David in 2000, Israel offered to withdraw from almost all these areas and allow the creation of a Palestinian state. The Palestinian leadership rejected the offer and began a homicidal spree that has cost the lives of more than 1,000 Israelis. Most American Christians back Israel and its right to defend itself. (The evangelical wing of Protestantism is especially vocal in its support.) A recent nationwide survey sponsored by the Anti-Defamation League revealed that nearly four times as many Americans sympathize with Israel than with the Palestinians, and an overwhelming majority of Americans (71%) believe that Israel is currently taking a "bold step for peace." The same cannot be said, though, for the leaders of these churches.
Mr. Kontorovich is an assistant professor at the George Mason University School of Law
James Besser in today's Jewish Week:
Radical Palestinian nationalists seeking an end to the Jewish state and not a two-state solution to the region’s woes may be the engine driving the divestment push by mainline Protestant churches.That is the conclusion of a growing number of Jewish leaders who concede dialogue with groups like the Presbyterian Church (USA) and the United Church of Christ over the accelerating push for economic sanctions against Israel has produced scant results.
