Thursday, February 24, 2005
An emailer alerts me to this follow-up article in the J-Post on the World Council of Churches intention to pursue Israel divestment. See this post below for the original story.
There's another twist here, though. The interesting part is bolded.
JPost: 500 million Christians urged to divest
[WCC's international affairs expert Peter] Weiderud also said the WCC was unaware of any intimidation of Palestinian Christians by Palestinian terrorists or desecration of Christian holy sites. No churches under Palestinian control were large enough to qualify for membership in the WCC, although the body had indirect contacts with several churches there, he said...
Weiderud isn't paying attention.
Here is a lengthy report entitled The Beleaguered Christians Of The Palestinian-Controlled Areas. There's too much there to excerpt, but it enumerates the many, many ways in which the Christians of PA areas are suffering under Dhimmi status, including numerous incidents including the infamous siege at the Church of the Nativity.
Is the WCC willfully ignorant, or do they just not care?
It's not surprising that some ordinary parishioners may have a stilted view of the nature of the conflict, but Church leadership should certainly know better, or try to learn better. Here's how one Presbyterian Minister works the party line of the conflict into a sermon. What kind of impression would you come away with if this were how you had the conflict framed to you?:
People abusing the concept of "anti-Semitism" in order to support the Israeli government's racist policy towards Palestinians do nothing less than desecrate the memory of those Jewish victims of real anti-Semitism...If the Jewish people are ever to become "a light to the nations" (Isaiah 42: 6), and return to their core values of justice and human dignity, Israelis and Jews of conscience must call now for effective measures to end the occupation of millions of Palestinians. (Jordan Times, 11/30/04, on internet)
You couldn't be blamed for coming away with some very strange impressions. It would be like learning about the elections in Iraq from one of the handful of US soldiers who have deserted to Canada.
It seems fitting that a guy who runs off and leaves his countrymen to deal with the reality of the problems he wouldn't face himself should be looked to for moral lessons by a Church which prefers to think of Jews as mythical Bible-people, and not the real, living people they are - facing real, living problems of governance and real survival issues in the face of living evil. Real people need to be held to real standards, not held up for comparison to people and standards that are meant to reflect the divine.
Some might say this is a flaw in Zionism - that the realities of having a State and the real-world issues that such State demands people face will necessarily sully and be a burden on Judaism. Far easier to be just one of many people among nations focussed only on the spiritual and let others worry about realpolitik and statecraft. The trouble is that the haters have never needed the excuse of a state to assign nefarious designs on the Jews. Where real temporal power was lacking, the anti-Semites have simply made it up - see all the fairy-tales of Jewish World Conspiracies and the widespread belief in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
No, better to have a State - a sanctuary to fight for. Fighting phantom conspiracies is difficult, almost impossible. How do you disprove an allegation that never had any basis of fact in the first place? But in Israel there is a reality to be learned about, there are facts on the ground and people can be educated to them in a way that honest people can relate to. Not everyone is a Jew, but almost everyone lives in a nation-state and wants peace and security for themselves, and protection from murder for themselves and their children - and they can understand the impulse in others. The willfull ignorance of groups like the WCC and the PCUSA, along with their empowerment of the forces of Judenhass, can be fought. It just needs a little light shined in the right corners.
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