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Wednesday, 12 October 2011
Another Example of the WCC’s Double Standard
One of the most troubling aspects about the witness offered by the World Council of Churches about life in the Middle East is the double standard it uses to assess the actions of Israel and its neighbors. It has become axiomatic that when the WCC feels it necessary to condemn Israel, it speaks loudly and unequivocally about the terrible things done by the Jewish state. There is no confusion about what the WCC is trying to say. By way of comparison, when one of Israel’s neighbors does something obviously wrong, the WCC descends into pious incomprehensibility that leaves readers wondering exactly who did what to who? This phenomenon is highlighted in two posts the WCC’s Twitter feed. A few hours ago, the World Council of Churches (which goes by @oikoumene on twitter, reposted a “tweet” from the Ecumenical Accompaniment Program in Palestine Israel (@eappi) condemning Israel for demolishing “36 structures including 12 homes, displacing 35 people and affecting at least 207 others.” Such are tweets par for the course for the EAPPI, one of two WCC bureaucracies dedicated to assailing Israeli policies regarding the Palestinians. (The other is the Palestine Israel Ecumenical Forum.) Given that Twitter messages are limited to 140 characters, it is unreasonable to demand that the World Council of Churches provide any background about the home demolitions. It’s possible (and entirely likely) that the homes were built illegally, without a permit. The fact is, people lost their homes. This is sad and tragic. Underneath this tweet is another one declaring that the World Council of Churches “prays for #peace & nonviolence especially in #Egypt, #Philippines, #Zimbabwe”. The tweet then provides links to two articles describing the violence in Egypt that killed more than 24 people – the vast majority of them Coptic Christians – on Oct. 9, 2011. What is remarkable about this tweet is the lack of any condemnation of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces – which governs Egypt – for failing to protect the lives and property of Coptic Christians in their homeland. Coptic Christians have been subjected to mob violence on a regular basis in Egypt and the best the WCC can do is offer up bland prayers for peace in Egypt and throw in a reference to violence in the Philippines to boot. Coptic Christians were run over and had their bodies crushed by armored personnel carriers during Sunday’s violence. Television stations were ransacked by security personnel seeking to confiscate footage of this outrage. Eyewitnesses have reported seeing bodies of Coptic Christians dumped into the Nile River. Before Sunday’s violence, Egyptian soldiers were caught on tape beating a Coptic Christian in a manner reminiscent of the attack on Rodney King in Los Angeles in 1992. Churches have been regularly burned in Egypt. Coptic Christians are demonized on Egyptian television and on the internet by Muslim extremists, accused of kidnapping Muslim women and forcing them to convert to Christianity, when in fact it is Coptic women and girls who have been raped and abducted and forced to convert to Islam by their neighbors. Coptic Christians are leaving Egypt in droves. Events like this are happening on a regular basis in Egypt and the WCC, founded in the aftermath of the Holocaust, which began with events like those described above cannot bring itself to express the horror that such actions should elicit. But when Palestinians have their homes demolished – which is tragic – the WCC throws itself into a high dudgeon. There are a number of targets in Egypt worthy of the WCC’s ire. The Supreme Council of the Armed Forces that has governed Egypt since Mubarak’s ouster in February deserves condemnation. So does the Muslim Brotherhood and their Salafist rivals in Egypt who have incited hostility toward Coptic Christians in such a manner so as to make violence against Christians in Egypt an inevitability. Egypt – home to the largest population of Christians in the Middle East – is careening toward catastrophe and the World Council of Churches cannot speak in a forthright manner about what is happening. Neither can the National Council of Churches in the U.S., nor any of the mainline Protestant churches in the U.S. that have assailed Israel so frequently and so vociferously in the past few years. B’Nai Brith and the American Jewish Committee have condemned the outrage, while Christian organizations have remained largely silent. The historical record indicates that when and if these Christian institutions do issue statements, they will likely be appeasing and mollifying, written so as not to offend the sensibilities of Muslim interfaith partners. The record shows quite clearly that the sensibilities of Jews have not mattered much to these institutions when they felt it was time to condemn Israel for its actions. In its defense, the WCC and other institutions will assert that expressing outrage over events in Egypt will make life unsafe for Christians in that country. The conclusion is pretty obvious: The easiest way to silence the prophetic voice of Christian institutions in the West is to threaten violence against Christian populations in the Middle East. The Soviet Union used this strategy with great effectiveness during the Cold War. Now it’s being done today by non-state actors in the Middle East. This is more than a scandal or stumbling block to Christian-Jewish relations. It is also a scandal of Christian-Muslim relations. If the WCC is to be an honest dialogue partner with Muslim leaders, it has an obligation not speak forthrightly about the mistreatment of Christians in Muslim majority countries in the Middle East and the rest of the world. The WCC owes Muslims the truth, not silence, about the horrors done in the name of Islam. Sadly, it appears that the truth is one thing the WCC cannot offer. (First published in CAMERA.) Posted on 10/12/2011 1:37 PM by Dexter Van Zile
Comments
12 Oct 2011
 Hugh Fitzgerald
The WCC consists largely of people who are not terribly interested in Christianity. They've lost interest. They've substituted Peace-and-Justice Campaigns. And the Christians in the Muslim lands -- Copts, Assyrians, Chaldeans, Maronites, and in Nigeria and the Sudan and Pakistan and Indonesia and Malaysia Catholics and Protestants -- do take their Christianity seriously. And thus it is that the Western "Christians" are a bit embarrassed about the Christians who, taking Christianity seriously, must suffer and endure to remain Christians. As for Israel, there are several things going on with the disgusting way the WCC treats that country and its people, who are, and have been, and always will be, fighting to survive against a without-end Jihad that will never stop, but can be prevented from winning if everyone keeps his wits about him. One is ignorance. There are people in the WCC who know nothing or little about Islam, and do not want to understand what motivates the Arabs (and Muslims, unless those Muslims are non-Arabs and are distinctly hostile to Arabs, for both ethnic and secularist reasons, as were the Kemalist regime in Turkey and the Shah's regime in Iran) to work to destroy, through whatever means prove most effective at the time, the Infidel nation-state of Israel. They don't know, these people, the history of the Jews in Arab lands, they don't know the history of what they call the Holy Land during the past 2000 years, they don't know its more recent cadastral and demographic history, they don't know about the unbroken record of breaches of solemn commitments made by Arab states in all of their agreements with Israel (save for the lone exception of Lebanon, when it was still under Christian control). They don't know what the Mandate system of the League of Nations was all about, or how the therritory assigned to those Mandaes was carved out. They don't know the express purpose for which the Mandate for Palestine was created, nor the territory originally assigned to it. That's one -- Ignorance. Second, there is antisemitism. It is a powerful and unexpungable force in the world. It can be, through constant effort, reduced in its appeal, and those who exhibit this peculiar mental pathology mocked and made embarrassed so that, at least, they will not be able to practice and express themselves with quite the deadly effect that the last unappetizing century permitted. If there is a rock-bottom minimum of 10% of the population in the West that exhibits this pathology, and in some countries the figure can rise to 20% or more, why should one not expect that within the WCC the percentage is that hight? And given that there is a certain self-selection, so that palpable lack of sympathy for Israel on the part of this or that NGO or goody-goody group such as the self-righteous WCC will lead, in the end, to like welcoming like, and those who are most outraged by the njustice of how the WCC treats Israel are unlikely to ever be part of the WCC, ever to want to have much to do with it.
It's the very opposite of what should be done. If Islam were rightly understood, and the psychology of Muslims too, then the WCC might realize that the campaign to pressure Israel to surrender territory, to abandon its own legal and historic rights or at least be afraid, as it now appears to be, to proclaim those rights (now Israel mostly declares its readiness, its eagerness, to "make peace with the Palestinians" rather than talk about the phoniness of both that "peace-making" on the part of the Muslim Arabs, and the absurdity of this invention, the "Palestinian people"), will make the chances of maintaining the peace, which has nothing to do with a "peace treaty" when it comes to those who follow the model of Muhamamd at Hudaibiyya, even more difficult. That business of John Donne, about that bell tolling for thee. Well, it certainly is in the Middle East. If Israel is put under more pressure, so that it is reduced in size, and must exist permanently in conditions so hellishly difficult that many will leave the country, and the Arabs will have achieved, as Arafat always said they would, their goals "In stages," that will not make the Western world safter but far more dangerous. It will deprive that world of a military ally, its only certain one between Italy and the Philippines. It will deprive the West of easy access to the Holy Land, and will demoralize the West, if once again, within living memory of the Nazi murders, Jews are abandoned to their fate, the fate of being mass-murdfered. It took two thousand years for the Jews to resurrect their ancient commonwealth for the second time. There will be no third time. The demoralization felt all over the West among those who think and feel, will be significant. . Finally, any Arab and Muslim victory over Israel -- a victory achieved through a diplomatic and propaganda campaign that has been conducted without cease for more than 40 years, since the Six-Day War -- will be a danger to Western Europe (and, consequently, to North America). For such a victory will whet, not sate, Arab and Muslim appetites. The WCC doesn't know, or doesn't want to know, any of this. But others -- you and I, to start with -- know perfeclty well what is going on. And the continued spectacle of the Muslim Arabs, enjoying their freedom from despotism (in Iraq, in Egypt, and perhaps in Syria too) by making life as dangerous and unappealing for Christians as possible, surely is having some effect, not among WCC representatives, but among those believing Christians whom, supposedly, choose those delegates to represent them. |
