"BDS Activism Has Shifted Back To The Churches"

 

It might not be raw and ferociously in-yer-face like this recent blatant example of "Christian" antisemitism on Facebook , but it reeks of antisemitism nonetheless: the attitude of elements within the Presbyterian Church (USA) which has narrowly adopted a resolution instructing the Presbyterian Foundation and Board of Pensions of the PCUSA to “divest from Caterpillar, Inc, Hewlett-Packard, and Motorola Solutions.”

We learn of this antisemitism within the PCUSA from NGO Monitor, which has prepared a comprehensive report on the subject that can be accessed here and which includes examples of Facebook activity; summary here.

1. The Israel Palestine Mission Network (IPMN) of the Presbyterian Church (USA) (PCUSA) is a main advocate within the church on behalf of the boycott, divestment and sanctions campaign (BDS), whose goal is to delegitimize the State of Israel leading to that country’s dissolution. The Presbyterian Peace Fellowship is also an advocate for BDS. 

2. This report produces clear evidence of a strong undercurrent of overt anti-Jewish bigotry within the IPMN as expressed on the group’s Facebook page. 

3. Numerous postings uploaded to this site by IPMN members over a period of two years demonstrate an ongoing pattern of expressions of antisemitism, including:

a. a “Zionist controlled America [has a] desperate lust” for war with Iran

b. “Jewish interests” are “corrupting” the US government, and the media is “owned” and “operated” by these same “Jewish interests.”

c. the “Christian Holy Land” is “occupied” by the “zionist (sic) instigator”

d. Racial theories of Jewish origins claiming Ashkenazi Jews are not racially “Semitic,” are actually “Khazars,” and therefore should not be in the Middle East.

e. Israeli Jews should be ethnically cleansed: “Helen Thomas was right, ‘Go back to Russia, Germany…’ Just leave.”

f. “IRAN! Thank God for them! The only Zionist-free land left on earth.”

4. The site is administered by five IPMN leaders. Members include senior staff of the PCUSA, theologians, clergy, laity, and non-Presbyterian anti-Israel non-governmental organizations (NGOs).

5. At no point did any of these site administrators or any of the PCUSA staff take any overt action such as speaking out against the blatant antisemitism, rebuking members for their intolerant statements, or removing them from the site’s membership.

6. At no point did any of the members from non-Presbyterian NGOs speak out against this antisemitism, including members of the fringe group Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP).

7. This overt antisemitism is the backdrop to the IPMN’s advocacy campaign within the PCUSA for divestment and boycotts against Israel, culminating in votes at the June 2014 PCUSA’s General Assembly in support of divestment and other anti-Israel resolutions.

8. In 2013 both IPMN and JVP were recipients of the Presbyterian Peace Fellowship’s “top award” the “Peaceseeker Award.”

9. The bigotry expressed by IPMN members and tolerated by IPMN leaders and PCUSA staff is a moral failing of the church. Serious steps must be taken by the church to remedy this situation, including an apology to the Jewish community, for the church to be able to claim any moral standing on the Middle East.

 Observes the Board of Directors of the organisation Scholars for Peace in the Middles East (SPME). 

 'With the end of the academic year BDS activism has shifted back to the churches.
The language and tone of the [Presbyterian]resolution and the accompanying debate ... were strongly shaped by traditional Protestant supersessionism. The antisemitic basis of church-based BDS has become difficult to disguise and will shape coming debates over church-based divestment....

 ...In 2004 and 2005, as divestment resolutions in the guise of socially responsible investment were being debated within the PC-USA General Assembly, a controversy emerged when staff members organized a meeting of Presbyterian leaders with Hezbollah members in Lebanon.

 Engagement with the Muslim world, and especially with Palestinian Christians, has long been a PC-USA focus....The Kairos document is a Palestinian Christian implicit attack on the concepts of Jewish national identity and sovereignty in Israel and an explicit assault on Christian Zionism. It also describes “the occupation” as a sin, legitimizes violence as “resistance,” and calls for a South African style BDS campaign against Israel. It has gained enormous traction within left-leaning Protestant denominations including the Anglican and Methodist churches. The 2014 vote came after a protracted period of debate that was shaped by lobbying on both sides of the issue....  The pro-BDS/pro-one state group ‘Jewish Voices for Peace’ apparently also played an important role. Though tiny, the group gave PC-USA cover to claim Jewish support for the divestment resolution. The role of the PC-USA’s Middle East Issues Committee, Advisory Committee on Social Witness Policy, National Middle Eastern Presbyterian Caucus, and Israel/Palestine Mission Network in pushing BDS cannot be understated....

 The 2014 debate was also shaped by the Israel/Palestine Mission Network’s Zionism Unsettled document. The “congregational study guide” is distributed widely by PC-USA. Among other things the document promotes the ideas that Jews were well treated in Arab countries and that hostility is the result of Zionism, and that Israel, supported by the US, oppresses and brutalizes Palestinians. It also relies on strongly anti-Zionist sources and contains numerous misrepresentations of history. Opposition to the document has come not only from Jewish but Presbyterian sources....'

The Board continues, in the course of a cogent analysis which also goes on to mention certain other current  BDS initiatives in America:

'PC-USA’s Advocacy Committee for Racial Ethnic Concerns [ACREC], however, took the matter further and noted: For many worshipers today, the word “Israel” has taken on political and military connotations and the original scriptural meanings are almost lost. Just as PC(USA) adopted inclusive and expansive language for racial and gender justice, ACREC believes it is important and timely to be intentional and well-informed with language that has taken on political meanings beyond the walls of church and worship....

 Largely unnoticed in the controversy surrounding the PC-USA’s divestment vote was another resolution that called for the organization to undertake research toward “a recommendation about whether the General Assembly should continue to call for a two-state solution in Israel Palestine, or take a neutral stance that seeks not to determine for Israelis and Palestinians what the right “solution” should be.” Such a recommendation, to be debated at the 2016 General Assembly, would likely result in the PC-USA following the lead of Palestinian Christians in calling for a one state solution. In addition, another resolution was adopted that condemned Israel for human rights violations and pervasive racism. After the vote church leaders again took pains to publicly stress that the resolution did not mean the church backed the BDS movement and that Jews should not be offended by the move....

 [U]nlike historic “peace churches” such as the Quakers, which have long been on the left politically and strongly anti-Israel, but which lack well-developed theology, PC-USA appears to be reemphasizing traditional Protestant supersessionist attitudes and rhetoric. The elevation of the Palestinian Christian narrative of its own suffering and Israeli’s evil, the pains taken to distinguish modern Israel from Old and New Testament Israel, and efforts to expunge the term ‘Israel’ from both, meld traditional and modern antisemitism. The support given the church by David Duke and others also show again that the far left and the far right in America are converging on the issue of opposing Israel....'

Read the entire article here
See also here

In an eminently worthy editorial the National Review online points out, inter alia:

'The world’s organized hostility to Israel would be kind of funny if it didn’t have such serious consequences, or potential consequences. There are some 200 nations in the world. Many of them are very bad actors: dictatorships, terror states. And it is tiny, democratic Israel that is the focus of the world’s hostility.

The latest is that the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) — not to be confused with the Presbyterian Church in America — has voted to divest from Israel. Thus does a major American church join the worldwide BDS movement. (“BDS” stands for “boycott, divestment, and sanctions” — against one country, Israel.)

If Israel did not exist, the United Nations might not have much to do. Last year the General Assembly adopted 25 resolutions against particular countries. Twenty-one of those resolutions were against Israel; the other four were against Syria, Iran, North Korea, and Burma. Not since the apartheid regime in South Africa has a country been so stigmatized by the world. And foes of Israel, of course, promote the lie that Israel is an “apartheid state.”

Consider a few steps in the effort to delegitimize Israel. Stephen Hawking, one of the most famous scientists in the world, joined the academic boycott of that country. He has been happy, however, to go to Iran and China....

One consequence of anti-Israel boycotts is that they harm Arabs. They do so by perpetuating two myths, related. The first is that the Arab–Israeli conflict is Israel’s fault, instead of the fault of people who refuse to coexist. The second is that the Arabs’ lamentable condition is Israel’s fault, instead of the fault of people who refuse to reform, liberalize, or democratize....

Mainly, the boycotts serve the delegitimization of Israel, and the dehumanization of Israelis. They call into question Israel’s right to exist. They make Israel a pariah state. They soften Israel up for . . .

Well, Iran and other enemies of Israel have pledged to wipe Israel off the face of the earth. It is true that Israel is backed by U.S. military might. It is further true that it has military might of its own: nuclear weapons. But its survival is no sure thing. These boycotts and other protests are not “freebies” — rebukes of a nation that is going to be fine no matter what. They are not mere acts of political correctness. They undermine a country whose very existence is threatened every day. The Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) has now joined a nasty and growing mob.'

Read the rest here 
Rabbi John Rosove has an excellent indictment of the Presbyterians' action here

Meanwhile, our old mate the Vicar of Virginia Water has something noteworthy to add:

(For the article by David Fischler linked to there, see here)

Divesting, Demonising – & In Decline: The Ultra-Liberal Churches That Are Targeting Israel

Photo: Joshua Lott, New York Times

This is a guest blog by Professor William D. Rubinstein:

A few days ago, the Presbyterian Church (USA) voted to divest its investments in three companies doing business with Israel on the West Bank.  The vote (310:303) was extremely narrow.  At the same time, the church voted to endorse “gay” marriage.  I don’t agree with either action, but as I am not a member of that church its actions are none of my business.

However, in this guest blog I would like to highlight a number of important characteristics of some mainstream Protestant churches such as the Presbyterian Church (USA) which may not be known to many readers, and focus on two such churches in particular.

These characteristics are:

(a)    Each is a small, now ultra-liberal Protestant denomination;

(b)   Each is obsessed with Israel’s alleged crimes, while utterly failing to criticise far worse and more barbaric activities by other countries, especially in the Islamic world;

(c)    Most importantly, each of these denominations is rapidly and demonstrably losing membership, to the extent that they may well disappear.

The Presbyterian Church (USA) was once a fairly conservative mainstream Protestant sect, deriving from Scotland in the Reformation.  Fifty years ago, it would obviously not have endorsed either policy referred to above.  As it has shrunk in size and importance, the church – like many others of a similar type – has moved ever further to the Left, losing ever more of its conservative members.

Israel is absolutely central to the church's current foreign demonology, not North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Iran, or (God forbid) Cuba.  One might imagine that this focus is due to the age-old, inglorious tradition of Christian antisemitism, and although this may well be a component of the church's stance, it would be more accurate to see it as a facet of the church’s anti-conservative, anti-American, anti-Western world-view, especially since it ignores the barbarism carried out every day in the Islamic world.

The main point I want to highlight here, however, is that the Presbyterian Church (USA) is, literally, dying on its feet.  Its membership has declined (see Wikipedia) from 3,101,000 in 1984 to 1,176,000 in 2013.  In 2012 and 2013 alone, it lost over 10 per cent of its total membership.  According to one church spokesman in 2013, “projections are for an anticipated loss of perhaps 500,000 members over the next three-four years, about 25 per cent of the denomination’s membership”.

Any business with this record of abject failure would, of course, sack its entire management at the first opportunity, and adopt an entirely new business model.  Not so the Presbyterians.  The more they jump on every looney-left bandwagon that rolls along, the emptier their pews become, a fact obviously not lost on whoever is in charge of this church.

Then there is the United Church of Canada, a merger of the Methodists, Congregationalists, and some Presbyterians.  Its website is a veritable pastiche of every conceivable leftwing “politically correct” bandwagon that happens on by.  “Happy World Pride”, given prominent space, turns out to be an endorsement of the “International Day against Homophobia and Transphobia”.  “The United Church of Canada Celebrates World Pride Day”, it proclaims.  “The Truth and Reconciliation Commission” (á lá post-Apartheid South Africa) is “a comprehensive response to the legacy of [Canadian American] Indians".  And so it goes: “Fast For The Climate”, “Call For Justice For Victims of Extrajudicial Killings”, automatic opposition to the Canadian pipeline, and so on.

You guessed it: only one foreign policy issue figures prominently on their website, and it ain’t North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Iran, or Cuba.  Members of the church are called upon “to take concrete action to support the end of the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories”.  What is highly questionable is the highlighting of this conflict itself, and the utter silence of the church about, say, the enormities and barbarities carried out on a daily basis throughout the Islamic world against women, non-Muslims, Muslims of the wrong sect, political dissidents, and virtually everyone else – the usual double standards of the left-liberal politically correct brigade throughout the West.

Indeed, in 2012 the church voted in favour of BDS as triumphantly reported on Press TV, to which the church kindly gave a statement.  There is more on its BDS activities here and on its history, embraced causes, numerical decline (see below), and attitude to Israel here.

Canada is a democracy, and if the United Church of Canada wants to endorse BDS or anything else, that’s its own business.  What is striking, as in the case of the US Presbyterians, is that this church is losing members at a rapid and ever-increasing rate of decline.  According to Wikipedia, the church’s membership peaked in 1964 at 1.1million.  By 2008, it had a membership of 525,000, less than half of its membership in the 1960s, with only 200,000 attending on a regular basis.  By 2010, the membership had fallen to 490,000.  According to one analyst, “it lost 55 per cent of its members while Canada’s population grew 78 per cent”.

The last Canadian census showed that two million people claimed to belong to this denomination, but the next time most of them are likely to attend a service is when they are the only person in the room unable to hear the eulogy delivered in their honour.

That church’s consistent left-wing orientation has not escaped the attention of the Canadian press and commentators, with many critics condemning the church’s stance.  “The United Church [Is] Little More Than a Left-Wing Club”, one columnist noted in The Calgary Herald (24 August 2012), and many other similar opinions are available online.  “Canada’s United Church: Christianity? Or Now Simply Another left-Wing Activist Cult?” goes one.

Here's a relevant video, highlighting the church's hypocritical double standards where Israel is concerned:

  
I suppose that, within a generation or so, this church will virtually disappear.  Many will say “Good riddance”.  What is true of this church is also true of most other ultra-liberal Protestant denominations throughout the West.  The points made here could be multiplied a dozen times.  As to the Canadian scene, to quote Wikipedia: “Non-denominational churches and conservative denominations like the Assemblies of God and Christian Missionary Alliance are growing.”

(Daphne adds: See the US Presbyterian Church's Facebook page where it is getting angry messages from Jews and Xians alike to its recent vote; more opposition outlined here and here. In view of the widely shown photo at the top of this post [credit: Joshua Lott, for New York Times] of jubilant Israel-haters shown in the the throes of a seemingly orgasmic thrill over the gift from the church of a shoddy BDS victory, it's not surprising that some pro-Israel elements on Facebook and elsewhere are reminding them that to be true Israel-boycotters they'll have to forsake their computers!  Below: crowing over the Presbyterian vote on, of all things, the propaganda channel of that notable abuser of human and Christian rights, the Islamic Republic of Iran!)