THE AMERICAN YWCA FAILS TO CONDEMN STATEMENT OF THE WORLD YWCA STATING ISRAEL IS JUST LIKE HITLER

[Note by Tom Gross]

Although the majority of American Christians remain strongly supportive of the state of Israel, in recent days a number of different Christian-associated bodies have shown their strong antipathy towards the Jewish state.

The timing of this new hostility may surprise some. It comes at the very moment when Israel is about to take enormous risks by withdrawing from a territory very close to its own major population centers, and which contains a still highly hostile population – a population in possession of more firearms per capita than almost any other in the world.

Israel is not being given any security guarantees for taking this risk by the Palestinian Authority or the armed groups which the PA shelters. But it is being rewarded with hostile statements and acts by some church bodies.

The National Coordinating Board of the American YWCA, meeting in Phoenix, Arizona, last week failed to pass a statement condemning the report of the World YWCA that said Israel aimed to "rid themselves" of the Palestinians just as "Hitler tried to exterminate the Jews."

The report was written by Doris Pagelkopf, vice president of the World YWCA, and the American representative on the World YWCA board. It was written after she paid a pilgrimage to Yasser Arafat before he died last year. She wrote: "I strongly felt the correlation to World War II. During that war Hitler tried to exterminate the Jews and now Israelis... are trying to choke off and rid the land of Palestinians."

There is a long article about that meeting in the Jewish News of Greater Phoenix, which I attach at the end of this email.

 

GAZA YMCA HOSTED CEREMONIES PAYING FAMILIES OF SUICIDE BOMBERS

Tom Gross adds:

This is not the first time the YWCA has allowed itself to be used in an extremist way on behalf of Palestinian radicals. On March 13, 2003, The Guardian (London) reported, in a news item titled "Saddam funds fail to buy Gaza hearts":

"... In January, Mahmoud Jamasi strapped explosives to a raft and guided it towards the vessel off the Gaza coast... the Hamas fighter was the absent star of yesterday's gathering at the Gaza YMCA as the only suicide bomber to be honoured by President Saddam's envoys, who handed out $245,000 to the relatives of those who died recently in the intifada"

 

YMCA: "THE ONE-SIDED MEDIA REPORTING IS UNFAIR TO THE PALESTINIANS"

The World Alliance of YMCAs, based in Geneva, has also previously issued a 3,000-word report (in I believe, 2003) concluding that "the one-sided nature of the conflict demands that the YMCA take the side of the oppressed Palestinian people."

The YMCA report declared that Israel is "killing people without provocation," and using "massive force against unarmed protestors and completely innocent people, mainly women, the elderly, and children."

The YMCA report further cited "biased and one-sided media reporting on the crisis, which left the Palestinian side generally outraged."

 

WORLD COUNCIL OF CHURCHES CALLS FOR ISRAELI DIVESTMENT

February 23, 2005

The World Council of Churches, the body representing millions of Protestant and Orthodox Christians worldwide, has called for its 347 member churches* to divest from companies profiting from "Israeli control of the West Bank and Gaza."

The central committee of the World Council of Churches, meeting in Geneva, modeled its resolution after that passed by the Presbyterian Church (USA) last year. No specific companies have yet been named.

[* Note: "Church" refers to denominational infrastructure including all individual member churches. Presbyterian Church (USA), for example, is a single member-church, but represents individual churches throughout the United States with an aggregate membership estimated at 2.5 million Presbyterians.]

Tom Gross adds: Besides their bias, the WCC is completely out of touch. Their resolution complaining of housing demolitions comes some days after Israel announced that this practice will no longer be employed. The WCC refers to a "dividing wall," when almost all the separation barrier is in fact a chain-link fence. And so on.

The WCC press release is at
www2.wcc-coe.org/pressreleasesen.nsf/index/pr-cc-05-08.html

 

Here is the short New York Times item on this:

Church Group Hints at Mideast Divesting
New York Times
February 23, 2005

The World Council of Churches, the Geneva-based ecumenical affiliation of 347 Protestant and Orthodox denominations, has recommended to members that they give "serious consideration" to divesting from companies that aid Israel in the occupied Palestinian territories.

The council's stance echoes that of the Presbyterian Church U.S.A., which voted last summer to explore selective divestment in such corporations. The Presbyterian Church's decision created a rift with American Jewish groups.

On Tuesday, the Anti-Defamation League called the Council of Churches recommendation, which is nonbinding, "a biased, one-sided interpretation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict."

The council's governing body, which issued the statement on Monday at a meeting in Geneva, said that "criticism of the policies of the Israeli government is not in itself anti-Jewish."

 

"CHRISTIAN AID" USES CHARITY FUNDS FOR ANTI-ISRAEL POLITICAL ADVERTISEMENTS

www.ngo-monitor.org/editions/v3n07/CAUsesCharityFundsForAntiIsraelAdverts.htm

NGO Monitor writes (24 February 2005): “Drawing upon simplistic and emotional language and imagery, a prominent advertisement from Christian Aid on the front page of The Guardian (London) sees this organization again using its considerable "charitable" resources to promote a political message focused on Israel's security barrier against Palestinian terror attacks.

On 15 February 2005, the front page of The Guardian featured a prominent advertisement from Christian Aid. At an estimated cost of approximately £4000 ($7500), Christian Aid has again used its considerable "charitable" resources to promote a political message focused on Israel's security barrier against Palestinian terror attacks.

Drawing upon simplistic and emotional language and imagery, this advertisement erases the context of this violent conflict, as was the case in CA's "Child of Bethlehem" and "Peace Under Siege" campaigns. Failing to acknowledge any Palestinian responsibility for the humanitarian situation in the Palestinian Authority, Christian Aid places the blame solely on "Israel's occupation and the poverty it has created." While Christian Aid claims to have condemned Palestinian suicide bombings, this immoral 'balance' does not justify the political attacks against Israel, as documented and analyzed by NGO Monitor and repeated in this advertisement.

The one-sided text, while referring to the difficult situation in both Israel and the Palestinian territories, treats the Palestinians as "the voiceless ones" ignoring the "voiceless" Israeli victims of terror and the many lives that have been saved by the security barrier. Christian Aid claims, in dramatic and entirely unsubstantiated fashion, that Palestinian families will be "carved down the middle by the separation barrier."

In sharp contrast to its legal status as a charity, Christian Aid's advertisement in The Guardian illustrates an unchanging political agenda, even at a time of renewed hope and efforts at peacemaking in the Middle East. In contrast to the new atmosphere in the region, it appears that Christian Aid has not reevaluated its own highly partisan contribution to the hatred and violence.”

 

BBC APOLOGIZES FOR BROADCASTING ANTI-SEMITIC BLOOD LIBEL OF SCOTTISH CLERIC JOHN BELL, BUT NOW CHURCH OF SCOTLAND OFFICIALS SAY BELL HAS BEEN MADE A MARTYR "LIKE JESUS."

After Scottish cleric John Bell and the BBC both apologized two weeks ago for a BBC Radio 'Thought for the Day' session in which Bell accused the Israeli army of deliberately shooting at "unarmed [Palestinian] schoolchildren," the issue seemed closed.

But in a letter to the editor published in The (Scotland) Herald, Church of Scotland official Sandy Gemmill compares Bell to Jesus.

Gemmill writes: "Two thousand years ago there was a man in Israel who used such uncorroborated tales of Samaritans, servants, agricultural workers, sheep, weddings and the like to illustrate various controversial points. Clearly the passage of time has not dampened the enthusiasm of the Israeli authorities to speak out against such tales and take action to suppress apparent lies

"... Unfortunately, any criticism of the Israeli government is now taken as being anti-Semitic... The term should not be used to deflect unfavourable comments about the way that governments abuse their powers. The Israeli government is no different from those in authority in, for example, Great Britain and the United States. Governments are like monoliths in exercising power on behalf of the people and from time to time must be reminded of the need to see beyond their own self-centred interests to those of the human race. If an uncorroborated story concerning any member of the Israeli Army, real or imaginary, can aid that process then that should be applauded."

British Journalist Melanie Phillips, a long-time subscriber to this email list, writes:

"So faced with a libel perpetrated against the Jews, Gemmill concludes that the Jews who are protesting are trying to suppress the truth and crucify the perpetrator, just like he thinks they did to Jesus! One is aghast at this calumny piled upon calumny, at the anti-Jewish prejudice that is here revealed and at the brazen revelation of the ancient theological underpinning of this prejudice. Gemmill assumes that what Bell said was true, even though there is not a shred of evidence for it and even though his account contained two demonstrable errors of fact which should surely give any rational person grounds for suspecting that the whole thing was a farrago of nonsense."