Thoughts concerning Palestinian Christian Theologians against Israel - by Denis MacEoin

No one is suggesting that Palestinian Christians should invite their own deaths by outrightly defying the Muslim majority. It seems inexplicable, however, why these Christians prefer to join with the Islamic resistance rather than to remain silent, accept their supposedly inferior status, and refrain from overt endorsements of what Muslims view as right.

Denis MacEoin..
Gatestone Institute..
25 March '18..

It is sad but possibly to be expected that many Palestinian Christians – who are constantly under threat but have not been killed or expelled – identify closely with the cause of their Muslim fellows as they engage in often violent "resistance" to Israel and the limited Israeli "occupation" of the West Bank (Judaea and Samaria). Christians may have a long history in Syria and Palestine, but the earliest Christians, including Christ, were, of course, Jews. According to Christianity Today:

The Acts of the Apostles states that the first Christians in Jerusalem were Jews, and historians believe that even after the fall of Jerusalem in A.D. 70, Christianity in the Holy Land kept its Jewish flavor. But the Jewish revolt of Bar-Kokhba in 135 changed all this; Rome showed no mercy to the Jews and obliterated Jerusalem, renaming the city "Aelia Capitolina" and the country of Israel "Palestine." With this blow, the Christian Jewish community effectively disappeared.

As non-Jewish Christians emerged, persecution continued throughout the Roman Empire until the emperor Constantine converted in 312 and later imposed Christianity as the sole religion.

Under the Roman and Byzantine empires, the Christians of Palestine enjoyed freedom to live and worship as they pleased. In 634, however, a mere two years after the death of the prophet Muhammad, Muslim Arab forces defeated the Byzantines and took possession of Syria, of which Palestine was the southern region. "Palestine," although an ancient name, was imposed by the Roman Emperor Hadrian in an apparent attempt to sever the land even then from its Jewish roots in response to a revolt in 135 CE.

Palestine, however, was never a separate state or province, regardless of its rulers. From 1923-1948, it was the name of the area under the British mandate: during that time, everyone born there – Christian, Muslim and Jew – was officially a Palestinian, with "Palestine" stamped on all passports.

Then, in May of 1948, five Arab armies attacked Israel on the day of its birth, explicitly hoping to end the new country before it could start. The people now called Palestinians were those Arabs who fled during that war, after their leaders promised them they would be able to come back and reclaim their homes as soon as the Arab victory was complete.

That the Arabs might lose this war – which was what occurred-- was never factored into this promise. When, after the war, the Arabs who had fled wished to come back, Israel reminded them that they had not exactly been allies, and declined to admit them.

During that war of 1947-48, Jordan illegally captured and later annexed much of Jerusalem. The Jews who had lived in those areas fled. Overnight, the Christians who had stayed in Gaza and the West Bank found themselves regarded as second-class, tolerated citizens, dhimmi people with few rights, who were forced to live as outnumbered "infidels" under Muslim rule. As such, they had no legal recourse and were under continual threat for their property and lives.

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Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com. If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.Twitter updates at LoveoftheLand as well as our Love of the Land page at Facebook which has additional pieces of interest besides that which is posted on the blog. Also check-out This Ongoing War by Frimet and Arnold Roth. An excellent blog, very important work. 

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One More Chapter in Yusef Daher’s One-Man Propaganda War - by Dexter Van Zile

...Given his tendency to attack Israel, Daher would probably be one of the loudest critics of the Jewish State should a catastrophe take at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. One can only hope that Israel continues to do its job and protect pilgrims from stampedes at the Holy Sepulcher. And maybe, just maybe, Daher can abandon his vitriolic attacks on Israel and thank Israeli officials for their efforts to keep Christians safe.

Dexter Van Zile..
CAMERA Snapshots..
23 October '17..

Yusef Daher really ought to be ashamed of himself.

For at least a decade, he has used his status as executive secretary of the Jerusalem Interchurch Center — currently located in St. Anne’s Monastery near the Lion’s Gate of the Old City — to de-legitimize the Jewish state.

It’s bad enough that Daher, a Christian, has posted images on social media that valorize Palestinian violence against Israeli civilians, but to make matters worse, he has used his status as a “Christian peacemaker” to portray legitimate Israeli security measures as a violation of religious freedom in Jerusalem. The problem is that if Israeli officials did not impose some sort of crowd control on Christian celebrations in Jerusalem, people might get killed in stampedes. It's happened in the past.

Here are the details.

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Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com. If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.Twitter updates at LoveoftheLand as well as our Love of the Land page at Facebook which has additional pieces of interest besides that which is posted on the blog. Also check-out This Ongoing War by Frimet and Arnold Roth. An excellent blog, very important work. 

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Surprised That an Antisemitic Joke at CATC Peacemaking Conference Gets a Laugh?

...It was an inappropriate joke for Isaac to tell at a peacemaking conference, especially after he himself condemned the antisemitic words his fellow Palestinians have used to describe Jews. “Many [Palestinians] call Jews by names that I am ashamed to utter and sometimes it comes from religious people I call preachers of hate.”

The audience at Christ at the Checkpoint,
held in Bethlehem during the second
week of March 2014, responds to a
joke about Jews and money told by
Palestinian Christian Munther Isaac.
(Screenshot.)

Dexter Van Zile..
CAMERA Snapshots..
26 March '14..

Munther Isaac is a clever and well-educated man who did a very stupid thing at the Christ at the Checkpoint Conference that took place in Bethlehem a couple of weeks ago.

He told an antisemitic joke that, sickeningly enough, elicited laughter from Evangelical Protestants in attendance at the conference. The joke is easy to follow for people who know their New Testament.

What is most astonishing is that Munther’s joke, and the audience’s response, is all there for people to see on video here. (The joke is told at about 17 minutes and 20 seconds into the video.)

Here’s the set up.

Isaac, a Palestinian Christian and CATC conference organizer who is about to receive his Ph.D. from the Oxford Center for Mission Studies, spoke on the night of Thursday, March 13, 2014, the second to last day of the conference. The scripture he was using in his talk was the parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:29-37), which tells the story of a man being robbed and left for dead by the side of the road.

According to the parable, two religious men a priest and a Levite (Jews) walk passed him ignoring his plight. Finally, a man (known as the Good Samaritan), stops and helps him. Isaac then says the following:

By the way, the two religious people, why did they not stop? This question was asked to a Sunday school boy and the boy answered, “Well because he had no money left.”

The implication is that if the man suffering by the side of the road, the priest and the Levite, both Jews, would have stopped to help the man if he had ... money. A slight smirk can be seen on Isaac’s face before the camera cuts to the audience to show many (but not all) of them laughing.

Isaac elicits more laughter when he jokes that the reason why the two religious men did not stop was that they were on their way to a Christian conference.

Nice try, Munther, but the whole premise of the joke is based on the association of Jews with greed and money.

The Bad Habit of Lying Repeatedly and Shamelessly About Israel and Bethlehem

...This lie, as easily exposed as it is, is unbelievably resilient. It has been repeatedly debunked. And yet people keep repeating it or refuse to retract it even after they’ve been given overwhelming evidence that what they’ve said is not true. And people have seen others called out on the lie, and yet they repeat it themselves. Why? Why not invoke Qalqilya – a place in the West Bank where numerous suicide attacks were launched from? For people indifferent to Qalqilya’s history as a source of terror attacks during the Second Intifada (like many of the folks at Christ at the Checkpoint), images of this city would be very compelling. Why lie about Bethlehem?

Dexter Van Zile..
The Algemeiner..
23 March '14..

Last week, approximately 600 Christians descended on Bethlehem to attend the 2014 Christ at the Checkpoint Conference organized by Bethlehem Bible College. The organizers and presenters of this conference say that they want to promote peace between Israel and the Palestinians, but they just cannot stop themselves from engaging in an ugly propaganda war against the Jewish state.

In other words, they cannot refrain from lying about Israel, repeatedly and shamelessly.

Three times during the conference, attendees were told that Israel has constructed a security barrier that completely surrounds the city of Bethlehem. Two people called it a wall and a third described it as a wall and fences.

No matter how they describe it, the security barrier, which was constructed to stop terrorists from crossing from the West Bank into Israel, does not surround the city. Even the map of the West Bank provided in the program for Christ at the Checkpoint shows this. The eastern and southern sections of the city are not confined by a wall.

Nevertheless, on the first night of the conference, Bethlehem Mayor Vera Baboun said the city is “surrounded with a wall.” I was in the audience when she said this and there were Palestinian Christians sitting next to me who didn’t bat an eye after hearing this lie.

This was not an honest mistake. Baboun is the mayor of the city, for heaven’s sake. We all know politicians lie, but this is a bit much.

Mayor, will you please stop lying?

Then, in a short film shown to the audience on the first full day of the conference, March 11, Qustandi Shomali, a professor at Bethlehem University, said “Bethlehem is surrounded by a wall and the Bethlehem population cannot reach very easily other areas in the West Bank.”

Again, I was in the audience when this film was shown and no one in the audience voiced a word of objection. Not one word. And again, this was not an honest mistake, for Shomali lives in nearby Beit Sahour. He knows that Bethlehem is not surrounded by a wall.

Professor, will you please stop lying?

And then on Friday, March 14, the last day of the conference, Sami Awad, executive director of Holy Land Trust, a Palestinian non-profit, appeared in a short film in which he claimed that “Today, Bethlehem is a city that is completely surrounded by walls and fences. The wall completely engulfs the city.”

I was not in the room when the film was shown, but it is on Youtube, right here. It goes without saying, (but has to be said), this was not an honest mistake. Holy Land Trust is headquartered in Bethlehem. Awad works in the city. He knows the route of the barrier.

Sami, will you please stop lying?

Probably not. This is not the first time Awad has uttered this falsehood. He said it to an audience of Christians in Galveston, Texas, in 2009. He was called out on it in a piece published on CAMERA’s website in 2012. And yet he said it again two years later. Did he expect not to get caught?

The upshot is this: Three different people offered the same lie to an audience comprised mostly of Evangelical Protestants from the United States and Europe. They told people that the city in which they were currently staying was surrounded by a security barrier, when in fact it isn’t.

This lie has been repeated so many times it is astounding.

Lowe - "Kairos Palestine": From Mendacity to Megalomania

Malcolm Lowe
Hudson New York
23 December '11

http://www.hudson-ny.org/2697/kairos-palestine

Late in 2009, a small group of Palestinian Christian clergy and laity banded together to produce a document entitled "Kairos Palestine." Basically, it promoted familiar Palestinian aspirations, dressed up with some theological flourishes. Even by current Palestinian standards, it was an extreme statement. For instance, it avoided endorsement of the two-state solution for Israel and the Palestinians.

Now, two years later, the hard core of the original authors has held an anniversary conference in Bethlehem together with foreign supporters. This time they constituted themselves a tribunal before which to arraign all the churches of the world for not showing enough enthusiasm for their original document. Thus mendacity morphs into megalomania.

The utterances emerging from this conference manifest a mixture of triumph and fury. Triumph, because a number of church bureaucrats, mainly at the Middle East desks of some Protestant churches, made considerable efforts to promote their document. Fury, because the reception in churches at large has been mostly lukewarm. For instance, an attempt to promote the document in the Netherlands produced a backlash, as prominent church leaders rejected its propositions.

Indeed, there has been considerable criticism of the document by such serious Christian theologians as troubled themselves to deal with it. This writer was one of the earliest to expose its pretentions and deceptions.

Lowe - "Palestinian Theologian" Trashes "Palestinian Theology"

Malcolm Lowe
Hudson New York
10 November '11

http://www.hudson-ny.org/2573/palestinian-theologian-theology

For over two decades, parts of the Christian world have been bemused by the writings of self-styled "Palestinian Christian theologians." Since their brightest lights are Protestant pastors, they are minor figures among the overwhelmingly Orthodox and Catholic faithful of the Holy Land. But they are strangely popular in Liberal Protestant circles abroad and especially beloved of church bureaucrats.

Now one of them, Lutheran Pastor Mitri Raheb of Bethlehem, has trashed all the efforts of "Palestinian theology" to date as an irrelevant rehash of nineteenth century European theology. And what is his new starting point? Basically, nineteenth century race theory.

For decades, Raheb and his Anglican counterpart Naim Ateek have been touring Protestant churches in Europe and North America and conducting seminars in "Palestinian theology." That is: purported theological underpinning for Palestinian political aims. Students in Protestant universities have been obliged to swallow down their books and regurgitate them in examinations. Those who questioned this new orthodoxy might face serious obstacles to their academic future.

License and only License: Words of Evasion and Dishonesty from Palestinian Christian Leaders

CAMERA/Snapshots
15 December 09

If anyone had any doubt whatsoever about the intellectual, spiritual and theological bankruptcy of Palestinian Christian leaders such as Naim Ateek, Michel Sabbah, Mitri Raheb, and now sadly enough, Munib Younan, they need only look at the most recent “peacemaking” statement issued by these (and other) leaders.

The document (“A moment of truth: A word of faith, hope and love from the heart of Palestinian suffering”), issued in Bethlehem on December 11, 2009, includes all the shop-worn tropes offered by these leaders for the past decade: The conflict is all Israel’s fault the Palestinians are innocent. Israelis sin, Palestinians make mistakes. Palestinian violence is justified, Israeli violence is not. And yes, the fighting will miraculously come to an end once Israel ends the occupation. (Lutheran Bishop Munib Younan used to steer clear from such craziness, but apparently, not anymore.)

In sum, the document is a tour de force of dishonesty, self-pity and blame that has been the hall mark of Palestinian Christian commentary about the Arab-Israeli conflict for the past decade.

This should come as no surprise. The enablers of these pastors in the United States – mainline denominational leaders and activists in these churches – have given these pastors no reason to change their tune, but have instead publicized and defended statements like this as part of their “peacemaking” efforts in the Middle East.

One of the most obvious aspects of the document is the refusal of its authors to attribute any consequence to Palestinian behavior.

For example, the pastors condemn the security barrier built to stop suicide attacks from the West Bank. They also lament the Israel’s attack against Hamas in the Gaza Strip during last winter, making no mention of the years’ worth of rocket attacks into Israel from this territory. They also bemoan the checkpoints that make it harder for Palestinians to participate in Israel’s economy.

Is this suffering real? Yes. Of course it is. But at what point will leaders of the Palestinian Christian community start to address the role Palestinian violence played in bringing about the construction of the security barrier, the attack on Hamas in the Gaza Strip and the checkpoints?

Apparently, not any time soon. The document obliquely acknowledges Palestinian violence in the following passage:

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