Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News: PCUSA

Showing posts with label PCUSA. Show all posts

Sunday, February 13, 2022

Presbyterian Church USA redefines "slavery" to say Palestinians are slaves to Jews

On Martin Luther King Jr. day, Rev. Dr. J. Herbert Nelson, II, the Stated Clerk of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church USA, offended all decent humans by saying Israeli Jews are slave owners and Palestinians are their slaves:

The continued occupation in Palestine/Israel is 21st-century slavery and should be abolished immediately. Given the history of Jewish humble beginnings and persecution, there should be no ambiguity as to the ethical, moral, and dehumanizing marginalization and enslavement of other human beings. The United States of America must be a major influencer of calling this injustice both immoral and intolerable.

I would also hope that the Jewish community in the United States would influence the call to join the U.S. government in ending the immoral enslavement. Dr. King continuously preached a Gospel of justice, so that all people could live in dignity.

He didn't say it was "like slavery" or "comparable to slavery." This idiot said it is slavery.

And to add to the antisemitism, he called on the Jews who obviously control America to tell the government to stop this "slavery."

On January 22, after criticism, he doubled down:

While my reference to these injustices as “slavery” may seem extreme to many and, of course, offensive to most Israelis, no one who is informed regarding the use of military power and racial bias to control the lives of Palestinian citizens can honestly avoid the truth of this situation.

And now, he triples down on his antisemitic libel, by redefining "slavery" to mean pretty much anything he wants it to mean, with an insane definition of the term. And as "proof" he says that he was enslaved himself as he was growing up.

Yes, really.

People do not have freedom to be who they are in community with everybody else, they are limited.
That is slavery.
They don't have the opportunity to do and have the opportunity to be able to engage the way others are able to engage in society. They are set aside and they are treated as though they are in no way related to the larger context of what it means to live in community. It is taking the power of government, the power of individuals who have money and abilities, to set others aside and keep them away from the wealth of communities and at the same time marginalize them at every part of their lives.
I know that feeling because I experienced it as a child. I grew up in the south and I know that it is equated, again, to slavery through my experience. I don't need anybody to read a book on that one. It's what I have had to learn to live with most of my life.

Silly me, I thought slavery meant owning human beings and depriving them of all rights. I didn't realize that an expert who somehow attended college in the South was enslaved.

And he is mystified how anyone can be offended by his redefining slavery to mean anything Jews do that he doesn't like:

It's difficult for me to see how my sharing words that would encourage something different, a coming together a community of giving individuals opportunities to see their own self-worth. To build bridges of hope to new community, living, and what that means in integrating people and allowing individuals to have the same opportunities. Why is that such a bad context to address on Martin Luther King's birthday?

He's practically saying, "I'm a Black man, how dare you disagree with me about what slavery means?"

We have a pattern here: terms like "apartheid" and "genocide" and "slavery" and "persecution" are given brand new definitions to apply only to Jews.

The irony is that by doing this, the modern antisemites are cheapening the terms themselves, trivializing real slavery (which still exists today in the Arab world) and real persecution and real genocide and real apartheid.

Which means that to these bigots, inciting hate against Jews is more important than actual genocide and slavery and apartheid.

Presbyterian Church leader blames Jews for antisemitism

We've seen the rabid Israel hatred and antisemitism of the Presbyterian Church USA in the past. (Even liberal and progressive Jews have found that PCUSA statements crossed the line into antisemitism.)

That hate continues.

The Stated Clerk of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), Reverend Dr. J. Herbert Nelson II, issued a statement against the Trump plan that goes way beyond valid criticism into antisemitism territory.

We must speak out on behalf of the Palestinian community, residents of this land for generations. Their land has been stolen. Their holy sites have been denigrated. Their homes and businesses have been destroyed and they all live under the iron fist of Israel’s continuing military occupation. This would not change under this “deal” proposed. As Christians, concerned for our own roots in this “Holy Land,” we cry out in anguish and anger as a kind of social and religious “ethnic cleansing” is occurring under these efforts of current Israeli leadership and of our own president.

What Muslim or Christian religious rights have been curtailed by Israel? On the contrary, if the Muslims controlled the land the way that PCUSA insists, the Jewish rights to worship would be the ones that are denigrated. There is more freedom of religion in the Land of Israel now under Jewish rule than there has been for 1900 years under Christian and Muslim rule. That isn't even in question.

But the statement gets even worse;

One of the deep ironies of the impact of the ongoing illegal taking of Palestinian land and the draconian control on the Palestinian community by Israel and its military is the potential for feeding the growing antisemitism in Europe and the U.S. that we so abhor. More violence is the inevitable fruit of a “deal” such as the one proposed.

This bigoted cleric is saying that Arabs are driven to violence against Jews worldwide and simply cannot stop themselves - meaning they are an inherently violent people. So, just as a pit bull owner is responsible for anyone injured by his pet, Israeli Jews are responsible for any Arabs or Muslims who attack Jews in Europe or America - these subhuman Arabs have no free will and cannot help themselves.

Saying that the Jews defending their people are responsible for haters attacking Jews is supremely antisemitic.

Once Nelson proves his bigotry against Arabs, he must extend it to Jews:

And the Israeli Jewish community should understand, better than anyone, the tragedies of sustained oppression.

This is a thinly veiled accusation that Israeli Jews are acting like Nazis.

I call on all Presbyterians who yearn for peace in The Holy Land to demand of our president a better “deal.” We must make clear to our political leaders that the “land of Israel” will never be at peace until justice is done for all her people, not just members of the Jewish community.

"Justice" is a codeword for allowing Palestinians to reject any and every peace plan they don't like, because they cannot accept anything that doesn't fit with "justice" - and they are the only ones who can define what justice entails. PCUSA is saying that the Palestinians have veto power over any peace plan that allows Israel to exist as a Jewish state, which they do not consider "just."

This statement is not a reasoned criticism of the Peace to Prosperity plan. It is an antisemitic and bigoted screed that uses the plan as an excuse to bash Jews and to say that Jew-hatred is justified.

(See also here.)

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What the Presbyterians Lost (Divest This!)

Well it’s another even-numbered year, which means the Presbyterian Church in the USA (or PCUSA) got together for their bi-annual conclave (called a General Assembly) to (1) condemn Israel while ignoring virtually all other suffering in the Middle East; and (2) put a brave face their latest membership decline as their denomination continues towards oblivion.

Throughout the 2000s and early 2010s, I was somewhat obsessed with the ups and downs of the Presbyterians, documenting preparations for each national conference as divestment came onto the agenda even-numbered year after even-numbered year.

The saga began in 2004 when the organization first passed a divestment measure, which was rescinded in 2006 after the church came under attack by both Jewish groups and their own members who were appalled over what was being said and done in their name.

But, as BDS-watchers know all too well, once an organization makes any move towards boycott or divestment, the boycotters have already decided the group belongs to them and exists for one purpose and one purpose only: to pass resolutions encapsulating their propaganda directed at the Jewish state.

And so, despite being rejected by the membership, BDS came back onto the organizations agenda in 2008, 2010 and 2012, being voted down each time, despite efforts by church leadership to box members into having only one choice (their preferred one) of returning the church to its 2004 divestment position.

Now a normal political movement might have gotten the message by then, or might have seen all of the damage their endless campaigning was doing to the church in terms of wrecking internal harmony and destroying the church’s reputation within the wider American society. But, as we all know, BDS is not in the normal business. And so the campaign continued as more and members left PCUSA (either as individuals or as whole congregations which defected to other Presbyterian branches not so obsessed with politics), and as the reputation of the church for fairness and faithful witness also headed into a tailspin.

When divestment was passed in 2004, it was possible for PCUSA leaders to convince the public that this was the democratic vote that represented the will of the membership. But after watching the corrupt leadership of the organization ally with BDS advocates to stack committees considering Middle East issues only with divestment supporters, remove anyone who could make trouble from positions of leadership, refuse members access to information and voices that contradict the BDS narrative, and insist that any “No” vote was just a postponement of an inevitable “Yes,” it became clear well before divestment was restored in 2014 that these votes demonstrated nothing but the lengths to which a degenerate organization would go to hand its reputation over to someone else.

When divestment was voted back in that year, the Jewish community decided enough was enough, refusing bad-faith calls to enter into interfaith dialog with a church dedicated to slapping Jews in the face every two years (all while claiming such slaps were given out of love and concern for their Jewish brethren).

In the meantime, the steady decline of the church continued as PCUSA coupled passage of new anti-Israel calumnies at their bi-annual events with tracking losses of another 5% of its membership. Issues of anti-Israel animus and collapse of the organization are actually linked. For as members died or left the church in disgust, those that remained represented a higher concentration of Israel haters. This was represented by a tendency we see in all organizations where the BDSers think they have the upper hand: overreach. And so, with divestment in their back pocket, the church moved on to condemning Zionism and those that support the Jewish national movement, adding slurs like “Apartheid” to the mix once they realized there were no longer enough fair-minded members ready to stand in their way.

But as the Israel haters wallowed in their “victory” within PCUSA, no one seemed to notice that their pronouncements no longer made news, or even a ripple in the pubic consciousness. Two decades ago, one could claim that a major religious organization making proclamations and condemnations represented moral statements informed by faith that should be taken seriously. But seeing how sausage (in the form of the aforementioned corrupt votes) gets made at General Assemblies for more than 15 years, who could possibly see their statements as expressions of sincere love and faith, rather than the output of venal politics?

Given that the number of Presbyterians nationwide is about to fall below the number of Jews just in New York, it’s also not clear why we need to take what they say any more seriously than they listen to us.

When I was more directly involved with helping those fighting anti-Israel bigotry in the church, I was frequently accused of being an outsider with no real concern for PCUSA and its members, beyond what they were saying about Israel. As I responded then (and continue to respond now): while it’s true I never would have come into PCUSA’s orbit had they not chosen to get into my face in such an aggressive manner, I’m perfectly comfortable that Israel will survive the slings and arrows of a hypocritical and dying organization.

But as someone who appreciates the important role Mainline Protestantism has played in American history, my fear is not for my own tribe but for what it means when this important pillar of national identity gets shattered with the pieces being dragged into the swamp, just so a bunch of anti-Israel bigots can claim to speak in someone else’s name.

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"Progressive" rabbis freaking out over PCUSA's anti-Zionism and antisemitism

I received a very interesting email from a staunchly Zionist Reform rabbi:

I'm living in the twilight zone. Arik Ascherman of "Rabbis for Human Rights" is having issues with Presbyterian Church USA's vote, publicly asking why PCUSA didn't at least propose positive investment as an alternative. The J Street contingent almost seems beside themselves in bewilderment. John Rosove, J Street's Rabbi Mouthpiece, of all people, wrote a pretty good article about PCUSA talking about a friend stabbing a friend in the back.

This resolution was unfair, biased, shameful, ignorant, and a misguided slander of the Jewish people and state of Israel, pure and simple....True friends of the Jewish people would not have passed such a resolution. True friends would have come to Israel to learn first-hand about the reality in which Israelis live. True friends would have toured other countries in the region to understand context. True friends would not have permitted the publication of that propagandist anti-Israel and anti-Semitic screed and would remove it immediately from its website. True friends would have joined with the American Jewish community to support efforts to help Israel and the Palestinians resolve their conflict. True friends do not stab each other in the back.

That is what the Presbyterian Church (USA) did, all disclaimers aside – and it hurts!

Meanwhile my movement's rabbis are having a conniption all of a sudden about Zionism Unsettled. I'm not sure that Rick Jacobs wasn't channeling Bibi on the URJ's conference call about the vote Thursday and said that Zionism Unsettled was anti-Jewish and the worst thing he'd seen since the infamous Zionism=Racism UN resolution in the 1970s. Add to that the numerous Reform rabbis quoting Bibi, actually quoting Bibi, about Christians in other nations in the region. I've seen this quoted a half dozen times by very left leaning Reform Rabbis in the past couple of days alone, "Let them come and visit Israel, the only democracy in the Middle East, the only country where Christianity is growing and see for themselves what is going on. Then let them take a bus tour to Libya, or Syria. I have two suggests for them, 1) make sure the bus is armored plated and 2) don't tell them you are Christians."

Strange things happen when friends stab you in the back, I guess.

I would add that strange things can also happen in the non-Jewish world when people who claim to represent Judaism all but abandon the Jewish state, publicly and repeatedly. Say what you want about Muslims but the number of Islamic leaders who publicly criticize Arab countries are tiny, because they understand the importance of a public united front.

Jew-haters laughably claim that Jews have an all-knowing, highly cohesive secret conspiracy that works behind the scenes to undermine everyone else, but the opposite is the case - and the Jewish "leaders" who publicly berate Israel are a large part of the reason that the world can criticize Israel so breezily. They give those criticisms a veneer of respectability, and haters like the leaders of PCUSA are very happy to quote so-called "rabbis" to justify their own antisemitism.

PCUSA's antisemitic moves come in no small part because they are exploiting the divisions in the Jewish world about Israel.

David Duke congratulates PCUSA for "standing up to Jewish racism and supremacism"

The Presbyterian Church USA has a prominent supporter for its anti-Israel resolutions - white supremacist David Duke:

“The [sic] tried to threaten the voters by saying that “David Duke” supports this policy and that the Church will get a bad name by supporting something that Dr.Duke has been tied to in the media,” Said Melissa Anderson who was there with close friends who voted on the divestment. “But, people are just not listening to the Jewish racist threats anymore, they are starting to stand up for real justice.”

Dr. David Duke, currently on a lecture tour, was reached for and he made this official comment:
..[T]hrough ethnic racism and tribalism they discriminate against Gentiles and take over media and other institutions.

Their racist power over the media and government is why Israel can get away with it all.

But people can stand up.

Bravo to the Presbyterian Church for standing up to Jewish racism and supremacism!

The world is waking up to Jewish supremacism!”

PCUSA must be so proud!

(h/t Will Spotts)

What the PCUSA is saying (Zvi)

I noted on Friday that PCUSA had passed a resolution that included this language:

In The Jewish Daily Forward, August 2013, Larry Derfner writes on racism in Israel:

The ADL [Anti-Defamation League] goes after anti-Semitism with a fist, it goes after Israeli racism with a sigh. As a matter of fact, the ADL and the entire American Jewish establishment should suspend their campaigns against anti-Semitism indefinitely and take a look at what’s going on in Israel.

Derfner, of course, is the columnist who was fired from the Jerusalem Post for writing that Palestinian Arab terror is justified.

It would be hard to imagine PCUSA saying that African Americans must stop whining about racism because Zimbabwe is racist against whites, or that Muslims must shut up about Islamophobia as long as Bibles continue to be confiscated in Saudi Arabia. For some reason, PCUSA is only interested in attacking a single ethno-religious-national group.

Zvi commented:

They are saying that destroying Israel takes precedence over fighting hatred and anti-Semitism.

What the Presbyterian Church leadership has just demanded is that American Jews:

* Stop trying to fight against hate-mongers who preach hatred against us because we are Jews, and
* Stop trying to prevent people from spreading anti-Semitic blood libels in order to cause naive idiots like the PCUSA leadership to hate us because we are Jews, and
* Stop trying to prevent deranged followers of anti-Semitic ideologies from gunning us down in the streets because we are Jews, and
* Stop disputing their hateful fictions about our history, which we are better qualified to discuss than they are, and
* Instead, to help hate-mongers in the US to destroy the world's only Jewish state, and
* Instead, to support thugs in the Middle East whose goal is the obliteration of the world's only Jewish state and the slaughter of its people.

PCUSA passes resolution that includes "the map that lies"

Perhaps the most problematic resolution passed by the Presbyterian Church USA was not the divestment resolution that has received all the headlines, but this one that calls for for the church to revisit whether they support a two-state solution at all.

Part of its rationale:

B. The Two-State Solution Then and Now

[See Map 1 and Map 2 under “Additional Resources.”]

These maps clearly delineate the present status of the so-called “two-states” of Israel and Palestine. Map 1 shows the erosion of the Palestinian territory, over six decades, which was to provide for a viable state. In the panel outlining the U.N. Partition Plan in 1947, as well as the panel showing a significant loss of territory from 1949–1967, a two-state solution still appeared viable. As can be seen in the panel showing the present state of Palestine since 2005, it is hard to look at this portion of the map and think that a two-state solution can ever be achieved. It is important to remember that all the white space in what once was a contiguous West Bank (named because it is west of the Jordan River) represents land now controlled by the Israeli military. The green splotches (often referred to as Bantustans or cantons) are separated by thirty foot concrete walls, electrified and barbed wire fencing systems, and checkpoints managed by the Israeli military through which all Palestinians, as well as others (tourists, for instance), must pass to travel between Palestinian cantons or into Israel proper. Tourists pass through easily, of course, as they go to visit holy sites on the Palestinian side of the walls (Bethlehem, for instance). Palestinians do not. They are prevented from visiting friends and family in other regions, conducting business, receiving adequate medical care, pursuing an education, or even getting to their olive groves for planting and harvest. As it presently stands, the “Palestinian state” has no contiguity and the matrix of Israeli occupation prevents free movement among Palestinians.

Here is PCUSA's version of "the map that lies":

As I've discussed in much greater detail in the past, the first three maps are complete lies.

The white sections in Map 1 were privately owned Jewish land but the green portions were not Arab-owned land by any definition; most of it was state land.

Map 2 shows the UN partition plan, though of course the UN didn't refer to the green areas as "Palestinian land" but as "Arab." Either way, the Jews accepted it, the Arabs didn't, and it has no importance except for what could have been if Jews had been accepted as a nation that deserves self-determination.

Map 3 shows no "Palestinian" land since the green areas were either annexed by Jordan or taken over by Egypt. At the time, virtually no Palestinian Arabs demanded an independent state in those territories - but they did demand that Israel be destroyed, as the majority do today.

So what does it mean when a resolution is based on lies?

It means that PCUSA cares as little for the truth as they do about Jewish national rights - something that this resolution will try to undermine even further.