Another BDS Charade: United Church of Christ’s ‘Divestment’ From Israel - by Dexter Van Zile

...It just goes to confirm what most people have concluded all along: anti-Israel divestment resolutions are just a charade, a put-on used to generate hostility toward the Jewish state and its supporters in the US. The whole point of the divestment resolutions was not to get church institutions to sell stock, but to use divestment motions to turn the floor of church-wide assemblies into venues for anti-Israel witch trials. It was all a con, just a con.

Dexter Van Zile..
Algemeiner..
03 January '19..

It was a charade — nearly every last word of it.

A few years ago, the United Church of Christ (UCC), a mainline Protestant denomination in the US that regularly condemns Israel while remaining virtually silent about jihadist violence against Christians in places like Iraq, Syria, Egypt, and Nigeria, said it was going to put its money where its mouth was by divesting from Israel. But it hasn’t happened.

Four calendar years after enacting a divestment resolution that called on church entities to refrain from owning stock in companies that do business with Israel’s defense establishment, the denomination’s pension fund is still invested in blacklisted stocks.

Here’s the rundown:

In 2015, the UCC’s General Synod voted — with great fanfare — to divest itself from companies doing business with Israel. In a resolution that passed with 80 percent support, the General Synod accused Israel of, among other things, subjecting Palestinians in Gaza “to military attacks using deadly force beyond that necessary for Israel’s acknowledged need for self-defense.” (General Martin Dempsey, Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, contradicted this assessment soon after Operation Protective Edge came to an end in 2014, declaring that Israel went to “extraordinary lengths” to avoid civilian casualties during its fight with Hamas. But attendees at the UCC General Synod decided they knew better, and concluded otherwise.)

The same resolution called on UCC church bodies — including the UCC’s Pension Boards — to sell their stocks in companies “profiting from or complicit in human rights violations arising from the occupation of Palestinian Territories by the state of Israel.” The resolution cited companies by name — Caterpillar, Motorola, Hewlett-Packard, G4S, and Veolia Environmental. “We are calling and urging all UCC-related entities to stop bringing wood to the fire of this conflict of human rights,” said Rev. Richard Edens, a supporter of the divestment resolution at the UCC’s 2015 Synod.

The vote generated a lot of publicity for the denomination, but it didn’t have the impact its supporters said it was going to.

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