Wednesday, April 27, 2005
Presbyterians, do you know what your church is saying on your behalf? The PC(USA) had panel discussion last night at Harvard. Not surprisingly, there were no dissenting voices on the stage, and little dissent allowed from the audience - something I can't say I blame the organizers for. Perhaps it's time for dissident Presbyterians to start organizing their own events?
The panelists were: Reverend Fahed Abu-Akel, the moderator of the Presbyterian Church (USA) and the Ecumenical Canon of the Cathedral of St.George the Martyr in East Jerusalem, Palestine, and Reverend Patricia Budd Kepler and Reverend Thomas F. Kepler of the Boston Presbytery.
The Crimson: Israel Divestment Debate Reignited
The panel resurrected the dormant campus debate over Israeli divestment, which flared in 2002 when 75 Harvard faculty members signed a petition calling on the University to sell its $600 million stake in companies that have significant operations in the Jewish state.
The same year, a counter-divestment drive garnered signatures from 439 Harvard faculty members, who objected that Israel had been singled out for criticism.
While all three speakers yesterday supported the Presbyterian Church’s decision to divest, Rami R. Sarafa ’07, president of the Society of Arab Students (SAS), said that “at this time, we and our co-sponsoring organizations are not promoting divestment but are promoting discussion and debate about it.†The International Relations Council, the Palestinian Solidarity Committee, and the Woodbridge Society of International Students joined SAS to co-sponsor the event along with several graduate school and alumni groups...
Last year I wrote about attending my parents' temple Passover Seder - a big event I thought might be fun to bring the family to and have some sort of Jewish experience together. It's a large, liberal, Reform synagogue, and the service reflected it. Very informal, and the big political issue of the service (Passover Seders are very customizable events, I guess. There are many versions of the "Hagadah," or Passover prayer book - feminist versions, child's versions, that kind of thing...) was the issue of the day a year ago - Gay Marriage, complete with flyers to fill in and send to your reps supporting same-sex unions... [continued in the extended entry]
Now, whatever one may think about the issue, I doubt it was a big one on the minds of the ancient Hebrews as they fled from Pharaoh's Egypt (that's the Passover story in case you didn't know, btw). I also think it's something that people of good will can have differing opinions on. Without getting in to how I feel about that issue, the fact is that specific current issues involving specific turns of policy and law can be concluded on in different ways, even by those who share the same values.
I wish my synagogue would have spent more time giving me the big, eternal morality lessons - the help in how to think - and less on spoon-feeding me conclusions to current events. Synagogues already deal in one eternal divider - religion - getting into politics just adds another danger-zone to the mix.
Getting involved in politics and allowing itself to be used for a nationalist effort is corrupting the Presbyterian Church.
The article goes on:
Abu-Akel said that the church supported the creation of the State of Israel in 1948, but that it has repeatedly called on Israel to return to its pre-1967 borders.
“The issue of divestment is not anti-Jewish. It’s not anti-Israel. And it’s not anti-Semitic. It’s anti-occupation,†he said...
Sadly, the PC(USA) isn't the government of the Arab states that Israel has to negotiate with, nor is it responsible for the "three no's" Israel has encountered since it first wanted to trade land for peace back in 1967. The PC(USA) has trouble with effectively assigning responsibility.
Martillo said in the question-and-answer period that “suicide attacks against Israel are completely justifiable.â€
Budd Kepler responded, “I don’t believe that violence is justifiable on any side. I also don’t think it’s long-term effective.â€
In an interview after the event, Yudkoff said that Budd Kepler “spoke more to the efficacy of such actions than to the right or wrong of suicide bombings.â€
“The event was disturbing as it took such a laissez-faire approach to Palestinian terrorism,†Yudkoff said.
But Budd Kepler vehemently denied any suggestion that she had taken an equivocal stance on the issue of terrorism. “For the record, let me clarify, the Presbyterian Church has condemned suicide bombers,†she said, adding that she fully backs the church’s position...
That is exactly what one would expect from a group which has such close ties to the various Palestinian Solidarity campaigns. They don't judge, either. It's impossible to take even 1/100th of the critical eye currently directed toward Israel and turn it toward the Palestinian Arabs and not come away utterly ashamed at where your wanting judgements have been focussed.
Martillo, BTW, is a notorious area anti-Semite who attends these events. His wife was responsible for this infamous "Night of Power" email and article which even the ISB had to distance itself from, and this article at al-Jazeerah (not to be confused with the TV Network) assuming Robert Spencer was a Jew and attacking Judaism as a response to his critiques of Islam. Martillo was also the person who just about got into a shouting match with Natan Sharansky during the question and answer portion of Sharansky's first talk as described here. Think "Zionists are Nazis" etc... He was there, inside the hall filming the talk (as well as Spencer's talk which he wrote an article about). His friends were also present, distributing their literature inside the hall, right next to the talk's organizers and easily confused with them. Which brings me to...
Sarafa’s Adams House roommate, J. Douglas Jamieson ’07, who is not an SAS officer, said he asked a security guard posted at Emerson Hall to order the Somerville activists to leave the site. The guard informed the activists that they did not have the required permit to distribute literature in the yard.
Somerville Divestment Group member John Spritzler, a Harvard School of Public Health research scientist, said that “if anyone had said...in 1968, ‘do you have a permit to leaflet on campus?’ everyone would have laughed.†But Spritzler and his fellow activists complied with the guard’s order.
Spritzler, who's oeuvre includes an essay on how one may convince one's self that Suicide Murder isn't as bad as you think it is at first glance and a book of WW2 history describing how the great conflict was not a battle of good v. evil, but in reality represented an "opportunit[y] to suppress class rebellion" was also present (at least his people were) and distributing a printout of this page which calls on his department to withdraw its support for the Jewish State.
By mixing with current politics, and taking the side they have, these are the people the PC(USA) finds itself in bed with.
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"It's impossible to take even 1/100th of the critical eye currently directed toward Israel and turn it toward the Palestinian Arabs and not come away utterly ashamed at where your wanting judgements have been focused."
And one may be excused for questioning whether the "1/100th" is at all an exaggeration. Does, for example, the PC(USA) apply a commensurable critique to Arab/Muslim countries that, virtually without exception, tend to treat Palestinians as second class citizens? And that question only scratches the surface, there were substantial reasons why, for example, Jordan forcibly and violently expelled Palestinians in the early 70's.
Certainly, everyone has to choose which set of issues to get involved in and which to forego, but this is in fact a worthy issue that needs to be addressed. One pivotal actor involved with this PC(USA) issue is Rev. Clifton Kirkpatrick whose business address is noted below. Writing a respectful, incisive and cogent letter that reflects an understanding of their stated concerns and the issue in general has the potential to amend their views, these are not MoveOn.org, types. The PC(USA)'s website that explains their concerns and positions is ***here*** and any letter, if it is hoped to be effective, should reflect an understanding of their stated position along with the more complex facts on the ground. Their concerns, as stated in broad moral terms, doesn't sound unreasonable on the surface, but a more thoughtful review of the details reveals just how superficial their analysis of the situation is.
Dr. Clifton Kirkpatrick
Stated Clerk of the General Assembly
Office of the General Assembly
Presbyterian Church (USA)
100 Witherspoon Street
Louisville, Kentucky 40202
Who is paying for former Moderator Abu Akel to fly to Boston and give anti-Israel speeches? If it is the Boston Presbytery, is this good stewardship of church funds?
And why are three Presbyterian pastors standing in fornt of a hall full of Harvard students for the purpose of bashing Israel? How many of those kids went to church last Sunday? Did it ocur to any of these full-time church employees to share a word of prayer with these young people? No. It was all radical left, anti-Semitic politics. No wonder our young people run formthe church as fast as they can.
On Terrorism
By American history and precedent terrorism against state-supported violent racism is completely justified. Palestinian terrorism against Israeli Zionist racists is exactly as justified as hacking slavers to death with swords in Bleeding Kansas. Reverend Professor Ralph Waldo Emerson (HDS, HC 1821) and Henry David Thoreau (HC 1837) raised money in Harvard Yard to support John Brown in Bleeding Kansas. All patriotic antiracist Americans and decent human beings in general should support Palestinian terrorism against Israeli Zionists, who are the enemies of the whole human race.
The only downside to Palestinian terrorism is the death of the Palestinian attacker. There have been no innocent Zionist civilians since the Zionists began their war of ethnic cleansing in December 1947. Suicide attacks against Zionist civilians are no more problematic than suicide attacks against German Nazi civilians during the Hitler period. Even though most Zionist factions effectively collaborated with Nazis from 1933-39 under the Haavarah or Transfer Agreement, Jabotinskians undertook assassinations against German Nazi civilians, and Jabotinsky called for suicide attacks against Germans.
Zionists are waging a dirty demographic war against Palestinians and do not respect the status of protected noncombatants under the Geneva conventions. Racist Zionist invaders, thieves and interlopers have been brutalizing, raping and murdering the native population (including women and children) of Palestine at least since the 19-naughts. Moreover, Zionists have frequently stated since the beginning of the 20th century that every single Jew in Palestine is a weapon or foot soldier in the demographic war against Palestine. The defenders always have the right to destroy the weapons or kill the soldiers of the invaders. Under such conditions Palestinians have no recourse but proportionate response to purposeful and indiscriminate IDF murder of Palestinian civilians.
Americans have been conditioned to believe that Israeli Zionists as Jews could not possibly do the horrible things that anyone will see and experience if he or she lives among Palestinians for a few weeks. (Joshua Hammer, former Jerusalem bureau chief for Newsweek and later a Nieman fellow, made such a statement at Harvard.) In fact, during the 30s many Americans refused to believe that the German Nazis were committing Nazi crimes because such criminality was inconceivable for Germans, a people that had produced Goethe, Lessing, Schiller, Beethoven, Mozart, Bach etc. The idea that German Nazis or Israeli Zionists could not perpetrate the crimes of Nazism and Zionism is simply racist prejudice based in an assumption of German or Israeli Jewish superiority to the people they are victimizing.
Israeli Zionists are the most militarized people on the planet. There is hardly a square centimeter of Israel that is not a legitimate military target, and buses are dual use civilian military vehicles that are used as troop carriers and that service illegal settlements. By US rules of engagement attacking such vehicles is certainly allowable, and during the Kosova war the USA attacked similar and to my mind far less military targets.
Every weapon that the Israeli Zionists criminals use against the native population is bought or provided by the USA. Without the USA Israeli Zionism would just be a bad memory. Palestinians are in fact at least as much at war with the USA, which as been manipulated into a satanic foreign policy by traitorous ethnic Ashkenazi American Neoconservative racists like Wolfowitz, Perle, Feith and Wurmser and by irredentist neo-Confederate white racists like Jerry Falwell, Pat Roberts and Richard Land.
Israeli Zionists are the bad guys and represent an evil in the world today just as the German Nazis did in the 30s. Nowadays, we Americans are the bad guys because we are allied with Israeli Zionists. We Americans have to accept that Americans and Israeli Zionists may be subjected to attacks by billions of people justifiably enraged at our policies, just as Germans whether military or civilian were subject to attacks by the French, Polish, Russian and Yugoslav resistance during WW2. As the bad guys and allies of the bad guys we Americans have no more right to criticize the tactics of the resistance than the German Nazis had. In retrospect and to this day we consider the anti-Nazi resistance heroes that fought for all of humanity. Likewise the Palestinian resistance today is heroic and fights for all of humanity.