Stop Divestment From Israel

The Lutheran Chruch's stand aginst Israel (never mind terrorism)

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

THE EVANGELICAL LUTHERAN CHURCH IN AMERICA ("ELCA") is the nation's largest Lutheran denomination, with nearly 5 million members. The ELCA's highest legislative body is its Churchwide Assembly, which convenes every two years. The ninth such Churchwide Assembly has just ended. Yesterday, the Assembly adopted a resolution calling upon the ELCA's members, congregations, and agencies to "participate in the churchwide campaign for peace--Peace Not Walls: Stand for Justice in the Holy Land. . . ." The elements of the "campaign for peace" are hard to discern from the language of the resolution itself. The resolution calls for "praying for peace with justice between Israel and Palestine," "learning about the situation there, sharing information, and building networks," "intensifying advocacy for a just peace in the region," "stewarding financial resources--both U.S. tax dollars and private funds--in ways that support the quest for a just peace in the Holy Land," and so on. Such vague provisions no doubt strike many as uncontroversial. Curiously, the only really tangible point of the resolution--opposition to the construction of Israel's security fence--is nowhere mentioned in the text of the resolution itself. The resolution's intent is manifest, however, in the name of the campaign which support it encourages: "Peace Not Walls," as though the two concepts were in self-evident opposition. (Why not "Peace Through Walls"?) And the real content of the resolution is made explicit in the "Whereas" clauses which introduce it: Whereas, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Jordan and the Holy Land (ELCJHL) and the Lutheran World Federation have drawn to the attention of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America not only the extreme hardship brought to Palestinian communities by the continuing Israeli occupation and construction of the separation wall, but also the imminent threat they pose to the future of the ELCJHL and other Christian churches in the Holy Land; and Whereas, the emerging fragile prospects for a lasting peace between Israel and Palestine require both Israelis and Palestinians to (1) avoid taking any actions that would undermine the peace (e.g., attacks on civilians, confiscation of land) and (2) actively engage in actions that will strengthen the will for peace; and *** Whereas, in carrying out this mandate, the Church Council in April 2004 joined the Lutheran World Federation, the World Council of Churches, and others seeking peace in the region in calling for an end to the construction of the Israeli separation wall being built on Palestinian land . . . The Churchwide Assembly's adoption of the anti-fence resolution came as no surprise; on the contrary, it was a foregone conclusion. The Assembly, which is attended inter alia by lay representatives of the ELCA's congregations, merely rubber-stamped an initiative that was already in place, adopted over the past two years by the ELCA's monolithically liberal staff. The Lutheran Office of Governmental Affairs went on record opposing the fence by July 2003, and other church agencies had fallen into line before the denomination's members had an opportunity to be heard. The fact that the resolution passed by a vote of 668 to 269 suggests that many rank and file church members were rebelling against the national organization's fait accompli. The ELCA paved the way for the "Peace Not Walls" resolution with an article in the May 2005 issue of the denomination's official magazine, the Lutheran. The Lutheran article was permeated by anti-Israel bias and riddled with false allegations against Israel. The Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA) identified 12 major factual errors, and one overriding omission: A crucial omission marred the [May 2005] article as a whole. There was not one reference to Palestinian terrorism originating from terrorist strongholds in West Bank cities, the causal factor in Israel's erecting a protective barrier. The omission is indicative of the striking disregard for Israeli suffering and loss of life that underpins the piece. The failure even to mention, let alone denounce, Palestinian terrorism is a consistent hallmark of the ELCA's writings on the Middle East. The "Peace Not Walls" resolution, like the Lutheran article, makes no specific mention of Palestinian terrorism, never acknowledges that Israel is building the fence to keep out mass murderers, not to steal a few acres of land, and gives no hint that the fence has saved many Israeli lives by making it more difficult for terrorists to slip into Israel. Likewise, the ELCA's Strategy for Engagement In Israel and Palestine singles out the fence as a threat to peace, but is entirely silent with respect to Palestinian terrorism: This Churchwide Strategy for ELCA Engagement in Israel and Palestine . . . describes the fragile hope for a just and peaceful solution that is growing in the region following the recent Palestinian elections. It also expresses a sense of urgency, calling for strong and concerted action so that: (1) the possibility of secure, contiguous, and viable Israeli and Palestinian states is not eroded by the placement of the separation wall and Israeli settlements in the occupied territories; (2) the witness and diaconic work of the indigenous churches in Israel and Palestine continues; and (3) the future of humanitarian ministries in Jerusalem and the West Bank--in particular those in which the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America participates through the Lutheran World Federation--are not jeopardized by a proposed change in Israeli tax policy. The ELCA's pronouncements on the Middle East are so one-sided as to suggest a dissociation from reality. Hamas gunmen brandish firearms as they celebrate Israel's withdrawal from Gaza and vow to continue their effort to exterminate the Jews; yet the ELCA thinks the chief threat to peace in the region is Israel's attempt to keep these terrorists out. For that matter, the ELCA seems more worried about Israeli tax policy than Palestinian terrorism. Of course, this willful blindness to Middle Eastern reality is not unique to the ELCA; on the contrary, it afflicts most mainstream Protestant denominations, as reflected, to take just one example, in the anti-Israel posture of the World Council of Churches. What explains the anti-Israel bias of the leaders of most mainstream denominations? There is no possible theological justification for it. There can be no more fundamental Christian doctrine than opposition to mass murder, as practiced by Palestinian terrorists. And there could hardly be deeper grounds for religious affinity than the shared scriptures and intertwined histories and traditions of the Jewish and Christian faiths. So it is no surprise that American Christians, and Americans generally, have overwhelmingly supported Israel in its conflicts with the Palestinians. Dissociation from Middle Eastern reality exists, not among the laity of the ELCA and other traditional Protestant churches, but among the leaders and professional staffers of these denominations. It is hard to escape the conclusion that those leaders are just one more layer of the liberal elite; for them, support for the Palestinian cause is of a piece with other liberal political positions promoted by their church hierarchies--environmentalism, high taxes, and so on. The fact that the leadership of mainline Protestant churches is dominated by liberals who substitute their own political biases for Christian doctrine and principles is an important factor limiting the growth of those denominations in comparison to the newer, evangelical churches whose leadership is not dominated by political liberalism. John Hinderaker is a contributing writer to THE DAILY STANDARD, a contributor to the blog Power Line, and a member of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America.

© Copyright 2005, News

A question for the United Chruch of Christ

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?

(Some)Churches gang up on israel

From The Minneapolis StarTribune paper:

Tom Teepen: Churches gang up on Israel

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.

 

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US Presbyterians target Israel

HoustonChronicle.com -- http://www.HoustonChronicle.com | Section: National

Aug. 5, 2005, 9:18PM

U.S. Presbyterians target companies linked with Israel

Outraged Jewish groups denounce the move as biased

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.

Hugh Hewitt takes exception to his fellow Presbyterians actions against israel

http://www.hughhewitt.com/

There are many Presbyterians who understand how foolish, unjust and dangerous is the "divestment" movement within the PCUSA. Unlike Netanyahu, we have a few options other than resignation. The Louisville church bureaucrats and a few radicals in the congregations have often triggered backlashes in the past, and this controversy is likely to move to that stage now that the actual "divestment" appears to be underway.

Here are two bios of the 5: Notice a "pattern"?

http://www.pcusa.org/mrti/bio-hylkema.htm: Note her outreach to Arab American community

http://www.pcusa.org/worldwide/middleeast.htm#makari

 

Victor E. Makari, Ph.D., serves on the General Assembly staff of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) as coordinator for the Office of the Middle East and Europe. Before June 2000 he was the area coordinator for the Middle East, South and Southeast Asia. Makari is a native of Egypt and has been a minister of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) since 1966. Since that time he has been significantly involved in ecumenical and interreligious dialogue and cooperation, both domestically and internationally.				Victor Makari, Ph.D., Area Coordinator for Europe and the Middle East
	Prior to his service on the national staff in 1990, Makari served for 25 years in three pastorates, as minister of education, associate minister, and senior minister, in Wayne, Pennsylvania, and in Columbus, Ohio, respectively. While in the pastorate he was elected (from 1974 through 1983) as a member (for three three-year terms) and as president (for three one-year terms) of the Program Agency Board, an antecedent of the divisions of the current General Assembly Council. Makari studied at Assiut American College in Assiut, Egypt, and the Evangelical Theological Seminary in Cairo (B.Th., 1959). In the United States he pursued postgraduate studies at Princeton Seminary (M.Div.,1961-64), Columbia Seminary (Th.M., 1965), and McCormick Seminary (special graduate studies in1965), and Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism (special studies, Fall 1965). He further studied at Temple University (M.A., 1972, and Ph.D. in Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies, 1976).

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.

Indefensible

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.

Martin Peretz is editor-in-chief of TNR.