"Why Is My Church Singling Out Israel?"

"Why is my church singling out Israel while Iran builds nuclear weapons, Syria is killing its citizens, Egypt is killing Coptic Christians, Saudi Arabia restricts the freedom of women and girls, Sudan continues the genocide of people in the South and Darfur etc. etc."

That's the pertinent comment of a Christian woman who has signed a newly-opened petition in Canada:

"We ask that the United Church reject boycotts of Israel in any form, refuse to hold the world’s only Jewish state as solely responsible for ending the Israeli-Arab conflict, and instead support positive initiatives to advance peace, reconciliation, and prosperity in the Holy Land – for the benefit of both Palestinians and Israelis."

As the British writer David Pryce-Jones put it last year:

A typical demo,this one in London

'Palestine is the most popular foreign cause of the moment. [See, for instance, this PressTV video from the heart of London, and hear the views expressed! D.A.] The world view is that small, Third-World nations are self-evidently victims of other powers, in this case Israel, the US, Britain, Hitler's Germany, even selfish Arab states....

[I]t was Gamal Abdul Nasser, the President of Egypt, who invented the Palestinian cause. He, and then other Arab rulers, intended to exploit the cause for nationalist purposes of their own. Skilful politicians, from Yasir Arafat to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the leaders of Hamas, have gone further, building Palestine into the challenge to Israel and the wider West that it has now become. Nationalism is no longer the issue.

Islamism has brought the cause of Palestine to be part of a general conflict of culture or civilisation. The Organisation of Islamic Countries and the United Nations, especially its Human Rights Council, now provide the international context for the delegitimisation of Israel and justification of the cause of Palestine. The Goldstone Report, Israeli Apartheid Week, the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement that has multiple ramifications, the NGOs that organise flotillas to Gaza or specialise in finding fault with Israel, are spin-offs from the cause as well as tributes to the inventiveness of those who dream up these incitements.

A media scrum seizes a well-crafted opportunity 

Why one particular issue and not another becomes a cause is also rather vague. Nobody seems to be agitating on behalf of the hundreds of thousands of Tamils or Darfuris murdered in Sri Lanka and Sudan respectively. The Chinese suppression of Tibetans passes almost unnoticed. For that matter, the murders by Palestinians of Israeli children ... are recorded, if at all, as humdrum facts that do not merit moral judgment.

 But the commitment of today's radicals to a cause with mass violence and war built into it, even the projection of another Holocaust, is an obvious moral dereliction. Also a refusal to learn from history: one of Hitler's first measures in power was a boycott of Jews, an ominous precedent for those pressing today for a boycott of Israel.

Murders by Palestinians are recorded without judgment....

Obscenity in Wales

....Some think this is simple anti-Jewish prejudice, but there is also something deeper: Israel's wish to survive sets it apart politically, intellectually and emotionally from much of the western world, where the instinct of self-preservation is failing. For true believers, whatever violence Palestinians do to each other or their neighbours, they are never in the wrong but always wronged by someone else.

 So Palestinians are relegated to live in a fantasy world in which their actions have no consequences, as though they did not qualify for responsible adulthood.This does no favours to them or to anyone. As is almost invariably the case with foreign causes of this kind, after the commitment and the incitement, come reality and the corpses."