World Churches Against Israel

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UK Bishops Come Out Clearly Against Israel
"Good will to all men" in UK churches, but not, apparently, to Israelis.
Giulio Meotti
The head of the Roman Catholic Church in England and Wales has offered the Palestinians a powerful tool of propaganda: the comparison with Jesus’ passion.
“We are to be freshly attentive to the needs of those who, like Jesus himself, are displaced and in discomfort”, Archbishop Vincent Nichols said during his Christmas Mass sermon at Westminster Cathedral. “A shadow falls particularly heavily on the town of Bethlehem tonight … We pray for them tonight”.
It would have been more in keeping with Nicholas’ mission to mention hundreds of Christians losing their lives to Islamic terrorism and oppressed by Palestinian Muslim dictatorship.
Nichols’ sermon has an historical value, because now the entire Christian hierarchy in the UK, Catholic and Protestant as well, is part of the global battle against Israel.
There is a virulent animosity towards the Jewish state in the established churches in Britain, which promulgate inflammatory libels against it.
Recently Barry Morgan, the Archbishop of Wales, compared Israel to apartheid in South Africa. “The situation resembles the apartheid system in South Africa because Gaza is next to one of the most sophisticated and modern countries in the world – Israel”, said Morgan.
The Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, spiritual leader of the worldwide Anglican Communion, joined the Church of England’s General Synod, which voted to disinvest Church funds from “companies that make profits from Israel’s occupation”.
Archbishop Morgan said in a lecture on the relationship between religion and violence: “Messianic Zionism began a policy of cleansing the Promised Land of all Arabs and non-Jews rather than co-existing with them”.
But there has been no such “cleansing” at all in the disputed territories. The only attempt at “cleansing” has been the Palestinian attempt to kill as many Jews as possible.
According to Canon Andrew White, replacement theology is dominant and present in almost every church, fueling the venom against Israel.
The revised version of “Whose Promised Land?”, a highly influentiual book by the Anglican thinker Colin Chapman, recycles the worst Christian anti-Jewish theology. “When seen in the context of the whole Bible, however, both Old and New Testaments, the promise of the land to Abraham and his descendants does not give anyone a divine right to possess or to live in the land for all time because the coming of the kingdom of God through Jesus the messiah has transformed and reinterpreted all the promises and prophecies in the Old Testament”, writes Chapman camouflaging anti-Jewish replacement theology, which helped fuel burnings at stake and pogroms during the Middle Ages, as a dispassionate analysis of the conflict of Israel and the Palestinians.
According to Bishop John Gladwin, a separate Palestinian state would be merely a “first step”. “Ultimately, one shared land is the vision one would want to pursue”.
A Palestinian cleric, Naim Ateek, has an immense influence in contemporary British Christianity, not least through his Sabeel Centre in Jerusalem. Ateek’s denunciations of Israel include imagery linking the Jewish State to the charge of deicide that for centuries fueled anti-Jewish bloodshed.
For example, Ateek wrote about “modern-day Herods” in Israel, referring to the king who the New Testament says slaughtered the babies of Bethlehem in an attempt to murder the newborn Jesus.
At the beginning of the XIX century, the UK Christian clergy was a driving force behind the Zionist enterprise, inspired by a brave interpretation of the Bible. A century later, British Christianity is one of the major producers of blood libels against the Jews.
(The writer is an Italian journalist with Il Foglio who also writes for Arutz Sheva. He is the author of the book "A New Shoah", that researched the personal stories of Israel's terror victims, published by Encounter. His writing has appeared in publications, such as the Wall Street Journal, Frontpage and Commentary.)

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The World Council of Churches' Anti-Israel Policies

Interview series: Christian Media analyst Dexter Van Zile: Only Israel is condemned, while Copts are killed in Egypt, Arab Christians persecuted in Muslim countries. WCC has two bodies working to end the "occupation".
From Dr. Manfred Gerstenfeld
“The World Council of Churches, an umbrella organization for 349 Protestant and Orthodox churches founded in 1948, has been largely hostile to Israel, particularly during times of conflict. WCC institutions demonize Israel, use a double-standard to assess its actions and from time to time de-legitimize the Jewish state. They have also persistently denied the intent of Israel’s adversaries to deprive the Jewish people of their right to a sovereign state.
“The WCC’s use of double standards against Israel is frequent. When it condemns Israel, the WCC speaks loudly and unequivocally about the ‘terrible’ things done by the Jewish state. When one of Israel’s neighbors does something much worse, the WCC descends into pious incomprehensibility that leaves readers wondering exactly who did what to whom?”
Dexter Van Zile is Christian Media Analyst for the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA). His writings have appeared in numerous American Jewish newspapers, as well as in the Jerusalem Post, Ecumenical Trends, and the Boston Globe.
Van Zile says that a few among many examples over the decades are representative of the WCC’s recurrent anti-Israelism: “The WCC’s response to events in Lebanon in the 1970’s and 1980’s was simple. In their declarations, the WCC failed to hold the PLO accountable for its actions, but vociferously condemned Israel. It offered vague and diffuse condemnations of massacres in Lebanon in those decades, failing to provide details about either the identity of the victims, or the identity and motives of the perpetrators. Yet when Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982, WCC institutions forcefully condemned Israel, while attributing malign intent to it.
“The Middle East Council of Churches has prevailed upon the WCC to condemn Israel. On the other hand, the Russian Orthodox Church was able to prevent the WCC from condemning the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in the 1980’s.
“In 2005, the WCC’s Central Committee expressed support for the anti-Israeli divestment campaign in mainline American Protestant churches. After the Presbyterian Church (USA’s) General Assembly passed a divestment resolution which stated that Israel’s ‘occupation” was at the root of violence against innocents on both sides of the conflict – as if anti-Semitic incitement in Palestinian society had nothing to do with the conflict – the WCC’s Central Committee issued a “minute” lauding the decision. “This action is commendable in both method and manner, uses criteria rooted in faith, and calls on members to do the ‘things that make for peace’ (Luke 19:42).
“In June 2010, WCC General Secretary Olav Fykse Tveit issued a public statement lamenting the confrontation that took place between Israeli commandos and passengers on board the Mavi Marmara, part of the Free Gaza Movement’s flotilla, which attempted to bring Turkish-trained jihadists into the Gaza Strip using Western peace activists as cover.
“Tveit mischaracterized the events, writing: “We condemn the assault and killing of innocent people who were attempting to deliver humanitarian assistance to the people of Gaza, who have been under a crippling Israeli blockade since 2007.” Tveit went on to denounce “the flagrant violation of international law by Israel in attacking and boarding a humanitarian convoy in international waters.” This was a lie, as international law permitted Israel to act as it did.  
“The WCC has even established two bodies – the Ecumenical Accompaniment Programme in Palestine and Israel (EAPPI) and the Palestine Israel Ecumenical Forum (PIEF) – with the singular purpose of ending Israel’s ‘occupation’ of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. There is nothing similar concerning any other country.
“The WCC’s attitude on the persecution of Coptic Christians in their homeland of Egypt is radically different. Copts have been subjected to mob violence and their churches have been burned on a regular basis. They are demonized on television and the internet by Muslim extremists, accused of kidnapping Muslim women and forcing them to convert to Christianity when in fact Coptic women and girls have been raped and abducted and forced to convert to Islam by their neighbors.
“The WCC has expressed its worry about the situation of the Copts in Egypt. What is remarkable however, is the absence of any condemnation of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces – which governs Egypt – for failing to protect Coptic Christians. It also does not speak in a forthright manner about what is happening. Neither do 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.
“One conclusion is inescapable: The WCC’s obsession with Israel, claiming that it is the source of all the troubles in the Middle East, has made it impossible for the organization to address an ongoing campaign of religious cleansing perpetrated by Muslim extremists against Christians in Muslim-majority countries in the Middle East and elsewhere. Consequently, these Muslims can engage in a slow, grinding campaign to eliminate Christianity from the Middle East without effective challenge from the World Council of Churches.”