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.
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