Sunday, June 26, 2005
You may have read in the New York Times and elsewhere that the Anglican Church is now considering -- like the Presbyterians, Methodists, United Church of Christ and the World Council of Churches -- to "selectively" divest from companies doing business with Israel that in any way support the occupation of the disputed territories.
NYT: Anglicans Consider Divesting in Solidarity With Palestinians
The move, presented as a message of solidarity with Palestinian Christians, immediately came under attack by Jewish groups, with some calling it ill timed and predicting a likely chill in Anglican-Jewish relations.
By voting to support the divestment measure, the Anglican Consultative Council, the church's most representative advisory group, recommended to its 38 provinces that they support a September 2004 report by the council's Peace and Justice Network. [Uh oh, there's that 'J' word again. - Sol]
That report, which condemns Israel's treatment of Palestinians, calls on the 75-million-member church to challenge and exert moral pressure on companies in its investment portfolio that support the occupation. The report's authors said the step should be considered only as a last resort, and the recommendations were strictly voluntary.
The council advised the provinces to "take appropriate action" regarding financial investments that bolster the occupation or that lead to "violence against innocent Israelis," through, for example, the acts of suicide bombers.
It is unclear how much weight the decision will carry. Last month, the Church of England's Ethical Investment Advisory Group opted not to withdraw a large investment in the Caterpillar Group and is unlikely to change its position. Caterpillar bulldozers have been used by the Israeli Army to raze Palestinian homes.
Before the vote, the Anglican bishop of Jerusalem, Riah Hanna Abu El-Assal, who helped lead the effort, talked about the occupation's effect on Palestinian Christians. He urged council members to support the resolution, saying it would send a strong message of disapproval to Israel.
Canon James Rosenthal, the council's communications director, said the remarks, and those by others, resonated with group members...
Now this is where things get interesting. Who is this Bishop Riah Hanna Abu El-Assal who's serving as the driving force behind this effort? That's a picture of Bishop El-Assal there. 
He looks so kind, like a big teddy bear, really. But looks can be deceiving, no? In fact, Bishop El-Assal (or Abu Asal) is a political monster. Not only is the Bishop a peddler of the "Jenin Massacre" myth, but the Bishop has truly compromised his faith for Dhimmi politics in a most astounding manner -- by going to Ramallah and praising Palestinian "martyrs." According to Come and See, "The Christian Web site from Nazareth":
According to Riah Abu Asal, Anglican Bishop of Jerusalem and the Middle East, martyers receive eternal life: "Do not consider those that were killed for the sake of God as dead, but alive with their Lord".
Fasl Al-MaQal, Feb 6, 2003
"Greetings of appreciation to all martyrs that were killed on the Land of Palestine". These were the words used by Riah Abu Asal, the Anglican Bishop of Jerusalem and the Middle East, in the opening of lecture in Ramallah two weeks ago.
Bishop Abu Asal added that all martyrs receive eternal life and they "live in the Kingdom of Heaven". He supported that statement by quoting the Koran verse: "Do not consider those that were killed for the sake of God as dead, but alive with their Lord".
Bishop Abu Asal was speaking about the Christian Arabs and their unique role through History within the Arab World. The lecture was given in the Arab Anglican Episcopalian Center in Ramallah. The crowd included several religious and community figures from the town.
Witness here the direct spread of the virus of the ethic of suicide, terror and death. The leader of a besieged Christian minority panders to his audience's politics, and that pandering habit, that expedient, based not on consistent Church teaching or brotherly love, but on pure cynical politics, reaches all the way up to the top levels in a country that should know better (England) and infects the teachings of what should be one of the great pillars of moral structure -- the Anglican Church.
This is one of the things that Dexter Van Zile's Judeo-Christian Alliance has been crying out about and crying over (see here, here and here) -- the compromise of divine principle for politics.
We see it in operation everywhere, this viral creep, this moral rot. Witness the media's inability or unwillingness to judge, even to the point of their infamous wrestling over the use of the word "terrorism." Instead, they split the difference. So on one side you have the depraved morality of the "liberation struggle" through the act of suicide murder as a virtue, and on the other you have the actions of people doing their best to protect themselves and practicing an ethic that we should be identifying with. Now along come the members of the Fourth Estate, they who claim not to judge, and the narrative they attempt falls somewhere in between these two sides...and thus our public tolerance for pure evil slips further and further over the fevered moral abyss.
And so a spokesman and leader of one of the world's great religions -- a religion in which suicide is one of the great sins -- can be heard in praise of the "martyr," and he maintains his place as one of the shepherds of the Anglican conscience.
This man is not an Anglican. He's still a Muslim and once a Muslim always a Muslim. There's no leaving. Death awaits apostates. If as a child he was raised Muslim....then he still is one though he may have gone to the Church School in England and graduated and has risen to become a Bishop. The Anglican Church, partuclarly under this new Druid Archbishop, has lost it's way. They've made this guy their token Arab prelate in order to wave him around for all to see, just as they did with Desmond Tutu, another corrupt Bishop. Not all clerics are good. Remember Richilieu; many of them become corrupt and political.
There are Bishops who were born Christian who support suicide bombers that murder Jews.
The Archimandrite of the Orthodox Church in Jerusalem, Attallah Hanna, called upon Palestinian Christians to join Muslims in carrying out “martyrdom operations…†According to the Archimandrite “They are not suicide bombers as some claim and they are not terrorists, rather, they resist occupation and we support martyrdom operations without any kind of reservations no matter what objectors and doubt-casters say about such a heroic kinds of resistance." http://www.islam-online.net/english/news/2003-01/11/article05.shtml
According to Habib Malik, a professor at the Lebanese American University, "a deeper dhimmi psychological state†has taken hold in the dwindling community of Palestinian Christians This dhimmi psychology produces an “urge to find—or to imagine and fabricate if need be—a common cause with the (Muslim) majority in order to dilute the existing religious differences and perhaps ease the weight of political Islam’s inevitable discrimination… Christians in Palestine improbably suppose that all persecution of Christians in the region would be softened, if not alleviated altogether, if the Palestinian problem were solved. This view relies on the myth that everything was fine between Christians and Muslims until Israel came along… this interpretation is not shared by the vast majority of the region’s Christians, whether dhimmi or free. Egyptian and Lebanese Christians, the largest and most significant Christian communities of the Arab world, do not share the same set of anxieties as the Palestinian Christians do. They know better than to believe that once the Palestinian problem is laid to rest all will be well.â€
A great man. A true brave christian who fears no zionists and speaks the truth. God bless you.