Category Archives: Christian Churches

Pro-Israel Christians and Jews air common concerns

Howard Brown, The Jewish Voice

EAST GREENWICH – Nearly 50 people braved snowy weather on Feb. 12 for an open discussion of the potential for cooperation between pro-Israel Christians and Jews.

Organized by Dave Talan of Temple Torat Yisrael, a panel composed of Russell Raskin (Lawyers and Judges for Israel), Jeff Gladstone (StandWithUs-RI), Pastor David Marquard (Christians United for Israel/Praise Tabernacle Church), and Rep. Ramon Perez (Dist. 13) spoke personally and for their communities regarding their support for Israel and the Jewish community in Rhode Island.

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Exposé discounts tales of checkpoint horror

The Jewish Star reports that filmmaker and investigative journalist Ami Horowitz found little evidence for the claims by Human Rights Watch of “onerous” waiting times at Israel’s security checkpoints, or that the waiting times – according to Amnesty International – amount to “collective punishment”.

All of the Palestinians with whom Horowitz spoke said that it took them 10 minutes or less to get through the checkpoint… The filmmaker also hired a Palestinian driver and traveled “over 300 miles” throughout the disputed territories in an automobile bearing Arab license plates. “We were not stopped even once,” Horowitz said.

The anti-Israel lobby routinely circulates stories of horror and oppression without seeking to present a balanced or realistic picture.  Isolated incidents are presented as the norm and facts are stretched to paint Israel as intentionally victimizing Palestinians.  Unfortunately, as the report makes plain, many church organizations have fallen for this:

In 2014, the Presbyterian Church USA voted to divest from Motorola on the grounds that the company was assisting “checkpoints that dehumanize Palestinians,” and the United Church of Christ cited the checkpoints in adopting its own pro-BDS resolution in 2015. The Evangelical Lutheran Church has embraced a manifesto known as the “Kairos Document,” which accuses Israel of perpetrating “daily humiliation” of Palestinians at checkpoints. As a result, a number of Lutheran synods around the country have called for boycotting Motorola.

The Church, at least for the most part, has largely abandoned the crude antisemitism that it displayed for much of its history.  Unfortunately the attitude of many church leaders towards Israel today helps to feed the antisemitism that the Church thought it had rejected.

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Bishop condemns Israel Apartheid week

From Jewish News Online:

A national Church of England leader has branded Israel Apartheid Week “neither helpful nor constructive,” in comments likely to reverberate throughout congregations across the country.

Dr Michael Ipgrave, who is the Bishop of Lichfield and Chair of the Council of Christians and Jews, made the comments this week, as events take place across British campuses highlighting perceived social injustices in Israel and the West Bank.

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Christians Who Demonize Israel – Part II

by Denis MacEoin
February 9, 2016
Published by Gatestone Institute

(See also Part I: Christians Who Demonize Israel: Kairos)

Christians make up only some 1.5% of the Palestinian population. They live in an overwhelmingly Muslim atmosphere and are, given the threats they face from Muslim extremists, naturally loath to express a Christian narrative that differs from the dominant Palestinian narrative, which openly rejects many fundamental Christian beliefs. It is commonplace for Palestinians to express denials of history. Thus, it is repeated that there were never any Jews in the Holy Land before the 19thcentury and that the first and second Jewish Temples never stood in Jerusalem. Not only do these claims fly in the face of over a century of archaeological work and the records of Greek, Roman and other historians in antiquity, they flatly contradict and annul the texts of both the Old and New Testaments.

Jesus, it would seem, was not a Jewish teacher but a Palestinian Arab who never set foot in Herod’s Temple because it did not exist, and there were never any Jews in the Holy Land. Mitri Raheb, pastor of the Evangelical Lutheran Christmas Church in Bethlehem, has actually argued that there is no DNA connection between Jews (ancient or modern) and Jesus, but that he himself, as a Palestinian, has such a link. By associating themselves closely with this Palestinian historical fabrication and never asserting the Biblical record (as to do so might be regarded as supportive of the Jewish right to a homeland), many Palestinian Christians are in danger of supporting by omission the Qur’anic claims that the Torah and Gospels have been falsified by rabbis and priests.

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Christians who demonize Israel: Kairos

by Denis MacEoin
January 27, 2016 at 5:00 am
Published by the Gatestone Institute

Last September, during the World Week for Peace in Palestine Israel — an initiative of the Palestine Israel Ecumenical Forum (PIEF) of the World Council of Churches, St. Thomas’ Church in Newcastle upon Tyne, UK, hosted an event titled “Wall Will Fall”.

For anyone unfamiliar with the history, legal issues, and distortions of the Israeli-Arab and Jewish-Muslim conflicts, the deeply one-sided presentations and literature of the event may seem reasonable in the lack of such a context, and this report will, therefore, attempt to rebalance the narrative.

There are, broadly speaking, two clashing narratives about historical and current events in the region. By presenting only one side of the conflict, Wall Will Fall served only to exacerbate the root cause for the failure of peace negotiations: Palestinian rejection of the two state solution. Although Israel was repeatedly condemned — often very harshly — for its treatment of Palestinians, not once in the presentations or in the literature available were the Arabs ever censured for their series of aggressive wars against Israel, or the Palestinians criticized for their decades of terrorist attacks on Israelis, their preaching of anti-Semitic hatred in school textbooks, mosque sermons, summer camps, government-controlled media, and elsewhere. During the event, guilt was placed on one party only: Israel. As we shall argue, Israel is the least likely candidate for censure at such a high level.

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