The United Church of Christ (UCC) is a shrinking Christian denomination
mainly active in the United States, and "
perhaps the most liberal
of the Mainline Protestant American denominations."
With just under a
million members and 5,000 churches (down from two million members and
7,000 churches in 1957, when it was founded), it still has prominent
congregations in the heartland of the American Congregationalist
movements, in states such as
Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Vermont, New
Hampshire, and Maine.
Although the UCC's membership has included many major U.S. governors, senators, members of the Supreme Court such as
William H. Rehnquist;
some outstanding theologians such as H. Richard Niebuhr, his older
brother Reinhold, and Paul Tillich; and several writers, and academics,
it is, however, best known today as the church that U.S. President
Barack Obama attended for twenty years between 1988 and 2008. For all
those years,
it was his spiritual home: "Trinity was where I found Jesus Christ, where we were married, where our children were baptized." He attended
Trinity UCC
in Chicago, with the largest of the denomination's congregations, some
10,000 members. Trinity UCC is a black or "Afrocentric" church that
bases itself on the pursuit of love and justice. Its black congregation
stands out as different from the wider UCC's mainly white membership.
Obama's "close spiritual advisor" in the church was none other than
its senior pastor,
Jeremiah Alvesta Wright Jr., who served as pastor
there from 1972 to 2008.
Wright was not merely a radical, but
apparently believed
and "preached anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, advocated bizarre
pseudo-scientific racial ideas, opposed interracial marriage, praised
communist dictatorships, denounced black 'assimilation' ... and really
believed that HIV/AIDS was created by the American government to kill
black people."
As if this were not enough, Wright
harboured deep anti-American beliefs:
In a sermon last September 16 marking the 10th
anniversary of 9/11 entitled, "The Day of Jerusalem's Fall," Wright
seemed to celebrate white America's comeuppance. ... "We supported state
terrorism against the Palestinians and black south Africans and now we
are indignant because the stuff we have done overseas is now brought
right back into our own front yards."
It is clear that Jeremiah Wright has a strange understanding of love
and justice. And it is also disconcerting that Barack Obama spent twenty
years attending his sermons
and called him a close spiritual mentor.
But perhaps Trinity Church and Pastor Wright are aberrations in the
belief and practice of the United Church of Christ as a whole. It could
well be that other churches within the denomination are milder in their
views and affiliations. But on one topic, there is clear unanimity
between Wright and the wider church. That topic is the Palestinians and
Israel. It is there in the above-quoted statement by Wright: "We
supported state terrorism against the Palestinians..."
It is even more evident in
a speech
given by Wright in 2015, in which he declared without blushing that
"Jesus was a Palestinian," and compared young black men and women in
Ferguson with the young men and women in "Palestine." This and other
statements were delivered at a Nation of Islam event in Washington D.C.
Speaking of the Black Lives Matter movement,
Wright said:
"The same issue is being fought today and has been fought
since 1948, and historians are carried back to the 19th century ...
when the original people, the Palestinians -- and please remember, Jesus
was a Palestinian -- the Palestinian people had the Europeans come and
take their country."
The speech was, in short, a farrago of ahistorical nonsense. He said further, citing the modish notion of intersectionality:
"The youth in Ferguson and the youth in Palestine have
united together to remind us that the dots need to be connected. And
what Dr. King said, injustice anywhere is a threat to justice
everywhere, has implications for us as we stand beside our Palestinian
brothers and sisters, who have been done one of the most egregious
injustices in the 20th and 21st centuries."
Really? More egregious than Cambodia or Maoist China or the Holocaust or Stalinist Russia?
He then went on to condemn Israel as an "apartheid state", and repeated one of the most ubiquitous lies in modern history:
"As we sit here, there is an apartheid wall being built
twice the size of the Berlin Wall in height, keeping Palestinians off of
illegally occupied territories, where the Europeans have claimed that
land as their own. Palestinians are saying 'Palestinian lives matter.'
We stand with you, we support you, we say God bless you."
It is hardly a secret that
Barack Obama hates
Israel; it takes a small leap of imagination to attribute that hatred
in large part to the sermons of Jeremiah Wright. There can be little
doubt that at least some of Obama's anti-Israeli stance derives from his
close relations with the anti-Semitic Nation of Islam and
his earlier experience, as a half-Muslim child in Indonesia.
It
appears
that "Obama was 'part of the Chicago scene' where Farrakhan, Jesse
Jackson, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr. and radicals would go to each
other's events and support each other's causes." Here again, the
question arises: was this anti-Semitic, pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel
current simply a part of black Chicago radicalism or did it pervade the
UCC as a whole?
The answer is to be found in two overwhelming votes passed on
"Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions" (BDS) and "Israel-apartheid"
resolutions by the UCC on June 30, 2015. According to
the New York Times:
"Approval came at the church's general synod in
Cleveland, where delegates voted 508 to 124 in favor of divestment and
boycott, with 38 abstentions. It was one of two resolutions on the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict debated by the church, which has about one
million members and more than 5,000 congregations nationwide."
A second resolution, condemning Israel as an "apartheid" state,
received fewer votes (51.4%) and did not pass, but its presence at the
synod said a great deal.
Following this vote in 2015, an organization affiliated to the UCC,
the UCC Palestine Israel Network (UCCPIN) published a guide to
Israel-Palestine affairs in August and again in September 2016. Titled
"Promoting a Just Peace in Palestine-Israel",
and sub-headed "A Guide for United Church of Christ Faith Leaders",
this toxic document is a desperately one-sided, inaccurate, and
counter-factual exercise in futile politics. Legally, UCCPIN operates
under the aegis of one of the denomination's local conferences. Their
guide is, therefore, not the direct work of the church's leadership, but
is clearly endorsed by a section of it.
The Guide most certainly does not favour justice or peace in the Holy
Land, as its contents show on every page. Some delegates opposed to the
resolution identified its one-sidedness.
Joanne Marchetto,
of the Penn-Northeast Conference of the UCC, said she was
"uncomfortable with how this resolution is presented... This is a great
injustice to the land, and I think we need to hear both sides of the
argument." But the guide produced by the church rejects any call to hear
more than the Palestinian narrative and anti-Israel arguments. At the
end, it has a four-page list of resources, books, DVDs, websites, a
reading list, educational material, alternative travel organizations,
and films. Not one of the many items on this list is remotely
pro-Israel. All are hardline pro-Palestine activist materials and links.
The UCC guide does not pay even lip service to the notion of fairness,
dual narratives, or a need for mutual understanding. The pro-peace
Jewish/Israeli voice is silenced while Palestinian hate speech,
genocidal threats, and endless terrorism do not come in for criticism at
any moment.
It is worth looking at some of the arguments advanced in the guide,
and where better to start than the Introduction (p.2), which opens with a
reference to the 2009 Kairos Palestine document. This prefaces
everything else because part of the resolution at the 30
th
synod was that church members must study the document as a basis for
their understanding of the Middle East and the actions that must follow.
There is no room here to describe Kairos in detail, but readers can find full commentary
here and
here. Perhaps it is enough to say that the Central Conference of American Rabbis
has described it
as "supersessionist" and "anti-Semitic".
Supersessionism is a modern
revival of the older Christian claim that God has replaced the Jews with
Christians, who are now his favoured people. It permits the
introduction of overt anti-Semitism into Christian doctrine and action,
for all that it is no longer a mainstream position within Christian
churches,
except, sadly, in Sweden.
The Kairos Palestine document was put together by Christian
Palestinians who adopted the Muslim narrative about Palestinians as
innocent victims of Jewish aggression. It is mendacious about which of
the two sides is responsible for the violence that has accompanied the
creation and maintenance of a Jewish state. Here is just one example of
this distortion: "The Palestinian people... also engaged in peaceful
struggle, especially during the first intifada."
The words "peaceful struggle" surely stick in one's throat. During the first
four years of the intifada,
more than 3,600 Molotov cocktail attacks, 100 hand-grenade attacks and
600 assaults with guns or explosives were reported by the Israel Defense
Forces. The violence was directed at civilians and soldiers alike.
During this period, 16 Israeli civilians and 11 soldiers were killed by
Palestinians in the territories; more than 1,400 Israeli civilians and
1,700 Israeli soldiers were injured. Approximately 1,100 Palestinians
were killed in clashes with Israeli troops. And Palestinians were indeed
stabbed, hacked with axes, shot, clubbed and burned with acid -- not by
Israelis but by Palestinian death squads.
One of the authors of the Kairos document was Theodosias Atallah
Hanna, the Archbishop of Sebastia from the Orthodox Patriarchate of
Jerusalem and a former spokesman of the Orthodox Church of Jerusalem and
the Holy Land.
He called for
the creation of an Islamic-Christian union that would foil the
"American offensive" against Iraq and "release Palestine from the river
to the sea" (which would entail the elimination of Israel).
"The suicide bombers who carry out their activities in the name of religion are national heroes and we're proud of them,"
Hanna has allegedly said, according to the ASSIST News Service.
He also said, in a speech in Dubai,
"Some freedom fighters adopt martyrdom or suicide bombing, while others
opt for other measures. But all these struggles serve the continued
intifada for freedom. Therefore, we support all these causes."
The UCC, moreover, has gone out of its way to ally itself with
Muslims and to attack Jews, so their unwillingness to condemn Hanna and
other authors of the Kairos document lends a further air of
one-sidedness to their position. This one-sidedness is made abundantly
clear:
1.4 In the face of this reality, Israel justifies its
actions as self-defence, including occupation, collective punishment and
all other forms of reprisals against the Palestinians. In our opinion,
this vision is a reversal of reality. Yes, there is Palestinian
resistance to the occupation. However, if there were no occupation,
there would be no resistance, no fear and no insecurity. This is our
understanding of the situation. Therefore, we call on the Israelis to
end the occupation. Then they will see a new world in which there is no
fear, no threat but rather security, justice and peace.
Oh? As when the Israelis left the Gaza Strip in 2005? Unfortunately,
the Palestinians have a history of regarding every retreat by Israel as a
triumph of aggression over diplomacy, as if to say: We shoot at
Israelis and they leave; so let's keep doing it.
It is all, then, still the fault of Israel, yet a Christian church in
the United States endorses such a document while claiming to promote a
"just" peace. The rest of the document follows suit. There is no room in
it for a Jewish, Israeli or moderate Christian voice, just hatred of
Israel and defence of the Palestinians who have turned down generous
offers of peace time and again.
The naïvety of the UCC is particularly striking in its choice to take
at face value the Palestinian statement that if Israel ended its
occupation, peace would follow as day follows night. That is simply
bunkum. When, after 1949, Gaza was occupied by Egypt and the West Bank
by Jordan, no one protested, no one attacked Egyptians or Jordanians. In
other words, Israel occupied only itself. But Palestinian terrorism
against Israelis continued up to 1967, right through the period of
Israeli non-occupation. There were no "settlements" then. Rather, the
Palestinians have always regarded all of Israel as one big "settlement."
Just look at any Palestinian maps; they cover both the entirety of
Israel and the Palestinian territories.
That naivety is further underscored by the fact that Israel pulled
its troops and civilians out of Gaza between 1994 and 2005, yet
"resistance" by Gazan terrorists under the radical Islamic movement
Hamas grew fiercer than before, resulting in ongoing rocket attacks on
Israeli towns and three major wars in 2008-9, 2012, and 2014. In its
Introduction, the UCC, knowing full well that Israel has not occupied
Gaza since 2005, still speaks of "the Israeli military occupation of the
Occupied Palestinian Territories: the West Bank, East Jerusalem and
Gaza." It is wholly black and white, without even recognition of the
control of most of the West Bank by the Palestinian Authority after the
Oslo Accords. What, may one ask, is the point of entering into a complex
political debate if one side refuses to admit the true facts of the
situation?
Another gratuitous piece of misinformation occurs on page 3 of the
UCC Guide, which claims that Israeli settlements in the West Bank
"violate the Fourth Geneva Convention." Any expert in international law
could have told the authors that this is false. Article 49 of the Geneva
Convention addresses the forced deportation or transfer of an
occupier's population into a conquered territory, as happened under the
Nazis. (For finer details see
here and
here.)
The Israeli settlers remain in the West Bank without coercion, based on
the fact that the San Remo Treaty of 1920, the Treaty of Sèvres (which
ratified the 1917 Balfour Declaration), the Covenant of the League of
Nations's Article 22, and the League of Nations's Palestine Mandate all
provide for the broad settlement of Jews across the Mandate territory.
The Fourth Geneva Convention quite simply does not apply.
The UCC Guide states flatly that "Israeli settlements in the West
Bank are identified as illegal by the international community" -- even
though international law says exactly the opposite. The West Bank and
Gaza were both occupied as a result of a defensive war against Egypt and
Jordan in 1967, in which the Israelis were victorious. It is never
illegal to occupy territory obtained in defensive military action. The
legality of the occupation is confirmed in UN Resolutions
242 (1967) and
338 (1973), to which the Palestinians and their supporters have never paid heed.
Resolution 242 was deliberately phrased -- "territories" rather than
"the territories" -- to show that Israel should not leave all the West
Bank and did not have to move its military forces out until the
Palestinians agreed to a lasting peace based on secure borders for the
Jewish state. The Palestinians not only reject all offers of peace on
that basis but go much farther and call every day for the abolition of
Israel and the creation of a Palestinian state covering Gaza, Israel,
and the West Bank.
On that same page, the UCC Guide condemns what it describes as the
"Separation Wall," pretending that Israel's 450-mile security barrier is
made of concrete. In fact, only 10% of the barrier is a wall; 90% is
made of fencing, ditches and other impediments to terror attacks. This
gross exaggeration
of simple on-the-ground facts further exposes the UCC as dishonest. And
more than dishonest, for the UCC Guide offers no reason why the fence
was erected in the first place: to prevent incursions into Israel by
suicide bombers and other terrorists intent on taking human life. The
barrier has, in fact, been immensely successful, cutting thousands of
Israeli deaths down to near zero. Ignoring these facts in order to
promote a false understanding of the barrier and its purpose cannot
remotely serve the interests of justice.
The promotion of lies magnifies a growing sense that the UCC does not
care about human life. Palestinian lives, yes (and there is nothing
wrong with that); but clearly, Jewish lives and Jewish efforts to
preserve life are of little or no concern. Worse, the church does not
seem to know or care that Arab Israelis (including Christians) are
almost as likely as Jews to die in a suicide bombing or a bomb on board a
bus.
On page 4, the UCC Guide states that "Israel has built hundreds of
permanent and mobile military checkpoints throughout the West Bank."
This, again, is pure fantasy.
In 2015,
there were no more than fifteen checkpoints across the West Bank. You
do not have to be a mathematician to work out the difference between
that figure and "hundreds." There were several hundred checkpoints some
years ago, but the Israeli security services have done their utmost to
reduce that number conspicuously since then. Writing in 2013,
the Israel Defense Forces stated that,
Today, there are nearly 40 crossings between Judea and
Samaria and other parts of Israel. Some are used for the passage of
people; others are used for the passage of goods. In addition to these
crossings, 13 checkpoints are placed strategically throughout Israel's
Central Command region, and operate in time of need and in light of
security considerations.
They also clarified that,
"Crossings" and "checkpoints" are terms with different
meanings. Crossings are facilities used by Palestinians to enter from
Judea and Samaria into other regions of Israel. Checkpoints, on the
other hand, operate during times of heightened security to prevent
terrorists from carrying out their plans to harm civilians.
Checkpoints have been used as a method to filter out and prevent
terror attacks before would-be Palestinian attackers have a chance to
enter Israel. As a result of such insidious methods as
female suicide bombers
hiding explosives under their clothing and the use of ambulances to
conceal and transport terrorist weapons, routine checks have been
intensified at all types of crossings.
It may well be true, as the UCC Guide states, that these checkpoints
cause inconvenience to innocent Palestinians. That is unfortunate and
wholly undesirable for an Israeli government fighting international
opprobrium. But the checkpoints are not there to target innocent
Palestinians. They are there to restrain terrorists from setting out to
kill innocent Israelis. The only people to criticize the checkpoints
across Northern Ireland during the many years of terrorism there were
supporters of the Provisional IRA. This author used to go through those
checkpoints when visiting the province over that period, and never heard
anyone grumbling: everyone knew they were there to save our lives from
bombers and gunmen.
The above reference to "female suicide bombers hiding explosives
under their clothing" was prompted by a particularly disturbing example
of one young woman from Gaza,
Wafa Samir al-Biss.
Her story personifies the deep dehumanization of Jews by Palestinian
terrorists and those multitudes who praise and honour them. In late
2004, Ms Biss was badly burned in a kitchen fire and was taken quickly
to an Israeli hospital, Soroka, in Beersheba. There, she was treated by
Jewish and Muslim doctors and nurses for a few months. Allowed to go
home, she was given a pass to return to the hospital for further
treatment as an outpatient. Six months later, she arrived at the Erez
crossing, where a quick-witted guard noticed she was walking awkwardly.
Forced to remove her outer clothing, it was revealed that she was
carrying a 22-pound bomb strapped to one leg. When questioned, she said
the bomb had been given to her by the Abu Rish Brigade, a faction of
Fatah, and stated:
"My dream was to be a martyr. I believe in death. Today I
wanted to blow myself up in a hospital, maybe even in the one in which I
was treated. But since lots of Arabs come to be treated there, I
decided I would go to another, maybe the Tel Hashomer, near Tel Aviv. I
wanted to kill 20, 50 Jews ..."
Yet the UCC wants to see crossings and checkpoints removed because
they inconvenience Palestinians -- Palestinians like Wafa al-Biss and
members of the Abu Rish Brigade; Palestinians like the thousands of
bombers, knife-wielders, machete carriers, gunmen and others who have
tried and, all too often, succeeded in slipping through checkpoints to
kill innocent men, women and children; killers whom Hamas and the
Palestinian Authority honour as heroes and heroines, martyrs and
prisoners who slaughter in support of the fantasy that their deeds will
advance the cause of a better life for the Palestinian people.
As the Palestinian media, mosque sermons, and political speeches
remind the world daily, the long-term aim of the Palestinian authorities
is to carry out genocide against the Jews whom they falsely allege have
"stolen" their land (UCC Guide, p.4), and to destroy an open,
pluralistic, democratic state.
The UCC boasts that it is "a just peace church" (Guide, p. 6), but
instead of supporting peace and justice, it defends mass murderers. It
complains about the defensive actions of the Jews and is knowingly
silent about the horrors wrought by Palestinian wars and terrorism. It
treats Palestinian actions as mere responses to Israeli aggression -- a
total reversal of historical fact. Is it even morally defensible to call
the members of this church followers of a man known as "the Prince of
Peace"?
There is a final irony here, and it makes matters worse. On the one
hand, the UCC shows itself to be profoundly anti-Semitic. Not only do
they hold a supersessionist view of Jews and Judaism, but their
startling double standards towards Israel fall afoul of the
international definition of anti-Semitism in the modern age -- and at a time when a
new anti-Semitism is rising rapidly in Europe and elsewhere.
On the other hand, the UCC loves Muslims and goes out of its way to
support them. Of course, there is nothing wrong with befriending others
or supporting them when they are subjected to discrimination. Several of
the church's online pages make a point of this (for example
here,
here and
here). A
report from June 8, 2016 informs us:
This interfaith Ramadan campaign, a celebration of
solidarity, is the result of a partnership between representatives from
the Northwest Chapter of the Council for American Islamic Relations
(CAIR), the Pacific Northwest Conference of the United Church of Christ,
and denominational leaders. UCC churches, to honor Muslim neighbors'
Ramadan commitments, have been invited to do three simple things during
this holy month:
1) Hang a banner or change their message boards in a way that honors our Muslim neighbors.
2) Take time to make an appointment to visit a local mosque or Islamic center to bring greetings from their local congregation.
3) Consider hosting an event to learn more about Islam and make a special effort to speak up against anti-Muslim rhetoric.
Is the UCC unaware that Council for American Islamic Relations (CAIR)
is far from being a feel-good interfaith movement for peace and warm
relations? It is, in fact, notorious for its close ties to Islamic
terrorism. Even ten years ago,
its true character was well known:
There is another side to CAIR that has alarmed many
people in positions to know. The Department of Homeland Security refuses
to deal with it. Senator Charles Schumer (D-NY) describes it as an
organization "which we know has ties to terrorism." Senator Dick Durbin
(D-IL) observes
that CAIR is "unusual in its extreme rhetoric and its associations with
groups that are suspect." Steven Pomerantz, the FBI's former chief of
counterterrorism, notes that "CAIR, its leaders, and its activities
effectively give aid to international terrorist groups." The family of
John P. O'Neill, Sr., the former FBI counterterrorism chief who perished
at the World Trade Center, named CAIR in a lawsuit
as having "been part of the criminal conspiracy of radical Islamic
terrorism" responsible for the September 11 atrocities. Counterterrorism
expert Steven Emerson calls it "a radical fundamentalist front group
for Hamas."
It is worth pausing here to point out that Hamas is, in fact, the leading terror organization fighting Israel today.
Its 1988 Charter, the
Mithaq,
is a testament to jihadi intransigence, the absolute opposite of
peacemaking. It calls for the slaughter of all Jews in the world, and
declares:
"Initiatives, and so-called peaceful solutions and
international conferences, are in contradiction to the principles of the
Islamic Resistance Movement... "There is no solution for the
Palestinian question except through Jihad. Initiatives, proposals and
international conferences are all a waste of time and vain endeavors."
Has no-one in the UCC the wit or decency to repudiate this unsuitable
connection? Or, in their wider dealings with Islamic groups, to raise
the fact that many Muslims across the Middle East have been killing,
expelling, and humiliating Christians for a very long time, but
especially in recent decades? Will they not admit that the expanding
exodus of Christians from the West Bank and Gaza has been precipitated
by extremist Muslims and the Palestinian authorities? That under the
Palestinian Authority since 1995, the number of Christians has
plummeted? Palestinian gunmen seized Christian homes -- compelling
Israel to build a protective barrier between them and Jewish
neighbourhoods -- and then occupied the Church of the Nativity, looted
it and used it as a latrine.
In Bethlehem today, Christians comprise a mere one-fifth of their
holy city's population. In Gaza, most Christians have fled in fear of
attacks from Hamas gunmen. If there was ethnic cleansing of Palestinian
Christians, it was under Muslim rule: two-thirds of Christian Arabs left
the areas between 1949 and 1967, the period when Jordan occupied and
annexed the West Bank, and Egypt controlled Gaza -- years before Israel
governed those areas.
Building bridges between faith communities is commendable for any
church; but to do so in such an uncritical fashion, failing to raise
authentic Christian concerns about Islamic persecution, exhibiting the
worst possible naïvety about Islamic radicalism and terrorism, and
turning with such vehemence against the Jewish world passes far beyond a
decent and -- should we not say it? -- Christian expression of faith.
Mistakes and falsehoods such as those we encounter throughout the
UCC's misnamed guide to "Promoting a Just Peace in Palestine-Israel,"
each one seemingly trivial, cannot be dismissed as the results of a
moment's inattention. Much effort has gone into the writing of this
Guide, and factual errors, which take up so much of the text, must to a
large extent be conscious. But there can be no excuse for this degree of
carelessness in such an important document, given the number of lives
that have been lost, are still being lost, and may well be lost in
future in the course of this unending conflict.
If a body of Christians really cares about Palestinian lives, Muslim
and Christian alike, not to mention the lives of Israeli children, the
lives of everyone on either side, then supporting an illegal and
fanatical use of violence by telling lies and permitting distortions in
order to incite an anti-Semitic hatred that will embolden and activate
further terrorist attacks, is beyond measure a contradiction of
normative Christian ethics.
The UCC cannot continue to assert its association with Jesus Christ, a
man of peace, when they so openly espouse the cause of Palestinian
"resistance" that embraces violence as a solution above any form of
peace-making. Christ said "Blessed be the peace-makers," yet here is a
Christian church that blesses men of violence.
Dr. Denis MacEoin, an Irish and Britain citizen, is a
scholar of Islam and an active supporter of the State of Israel. He
serves as a Distinguished Senior Fellow at the Gatestone Institute.
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