Surprise? Rabbis for Human Rights Helps World Council of Churches Engage in Damage Control - by Dexter Van Zile

...What EAPPI and now RHR have done is single out and magnify the impact of Israeli security measures in a way that legitimizes the hatred of Israel and Jews living in the West Bank. This behavior brings to mind a passage from RHR’s 2004 letter which warns that “People of conscience must act in awareness that the singling out, magnifying and sanctifying of Jewish sins has always been at the core of the terrible evil that we know as anti-Semitism.”

Dexter Van Zile..
Algemeiner..
10 February '19..

Almost fifteen years ago, the Israeli nonprofit Rabbis for Human Rights (RHR) lambasted the Presbyterian Church USA (PCUSA) for demonizing Israel. It happened after the PCUSA passed a divestment resolution at its General Assembly in 2004. In addition to calling on the church’s money managers to divest from the Jewish state, the resolution portrayed Israel as singularly responsible for the suffering caused by the Arab-Israeli conflict.

In response to this outrage, RHR published a letter condemning the church for failing to offer “one word of criticism to the government of the Palestinian Authority despite its manifest multitude of profound sins against God and the Human Rights of Palestinians and Jews.” RHR also condemned the PCUSA for ignoring “the homicidal ideologies that have so sadly taken hold among some of our Palestinian neighbors.”

The letter closed with a call for the PCUSA to repent of its actions and to rethink its “relationship with the Jewish People and their State.” It was one of the most principled and unequivocal condemnations of Christian antisemitism to come down the pike since BDS became all the rage in mainline Protestant churches.

The folks at RHR must have lost this letter in their archives, because these days they are defending — not rebuking — another Christian institution that is facilitating in the same process of demonization that the PCUSA engaged in a decade and a half ago. To make matters worse, the group’s president, Rabbi Levi Weiman-Kelman, engaged in the same type of one-sided discourse that RHR condemned in 2004.

(Continue to Full Column)

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