Christian Opposition to Israel Requires a Christian Response - by Dexter Van Zile

...Given their dependent status, Jewish leaders in the United States are not in any position to complain about the ineffective response offered by their friends and allies in the Christian world, but they can no longer kid themselves about what has happened in the American mainline. And neither can Christians themselves.

Dexter Van Zile..
Algemeiner..
19 November '18..

“Is our alternative truly only between malevolent enemies and condescending friends?”

That tortured query was issued by Hannah Arendt in 1941, after Jules Romains — a prominent French writer and longtime PEN president — complained that Jews were not sufficiently grateful for his efforts to save them from the Nazi menace. After fighting for the passage of a resolution condemning antisemitism at a meeting of PEN (over the objections of H.G. Wells) and helping Jewish intellectuals escape France after the Nazis took over, Romains was angry at the apparent ingratitude from Jews for his work on their behalf. And he said so publicly.

“You complain in fact very loudly and articulately about the ingratitude of Jews for whom you have done so much,” Arendt wrote in response to Romains’ complaints.

But at the risk of alienating a protector of Jewish lives, Arendt declared that the last thing Romains should worry about was whether Jews were grateful for his good works. By protecting the lives of Jews and helping them escape their fate under Nazi rule, Romains was defending the “freedom and honor” of the people of France who were also under the boot of the Nazi regime, she said. Arendt went on to ask if Romains understood that the “arrogant demand for gratitude from a protector cuts deeper than the open hostility of antisemites?”

The underlying message that Arendt had for Romains was that by standing in solidarity with Jews during their time of trial, he was protecting the better parts of himself and the country he called home. In other words, Romains’ work on behalf of Jews in France wasn’t just about Jews, but France as well.

If Arendt were alive and watching the efforts to staunch the flow of anti-Zionism that has taken root in mainline Protestant churches in the US today, she might utter a tortured query similar to the one she offered in 1941. It would go something like, “Is our alternative truly only between malevolent enemies and ineffective friends?”

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Kindling Evangelical Hostility Toward Israel - by Dexter Van Zile

...There are no images of hooked-nose Jews with long, serpentine hands trying to seduce white women from Europe on the walls of the piano bar, but there may as well be. The stuff on the walls is creepy, scary and edgy enough to give viewers something to pretend to think about as they wander around. The overall effect of the art on display at the Walled Off Hotel is to leave visitors with the feeling that Israel is a very bad, bad country and that visitors are part of the elect capable of seeing just how bad the country is. It seems to work on this crowd. CATC attendees, well-to-do Evangelicals from the United States and Europe, looked at the exhibits with admiring eyes, as if they were young, naïve children at a haunted house on Halloween, with the unseen Jew as the monster.

Dexter Van Zile..
Jewish Policy Center..
Fall '18..
Link: https://www.jewishpolicycenter.org/2018/10/09/fomenting-evangelical-hostility-toward-israel/

This past spring I attended the Christ at the Checkpoint Conference (CATC), a biennial event organized by Bethlehem Bible College, an outpost of Christian anti-Zionism located in Beit Jala. The conference gives Palestinian Christians in the West Bank an opportunity to demonstrate their value to the corrupt tyrants who control Palestinian society (and protect Christians from jihadist violence) by demonizing Israel to Evangelicals from North America and Europe. The message offered at these conferences, which have taken place every even-numbered year since 2010, is that Evangelical support for Israel hinders the ability of Christians in the Middle East to live in peace and share their faith in Muslim-majority countries in the region. Speakers also seek to elicit feelings of guilt from the Western Christians while downplaying the problem of Arab and Muslim supremacism and Jew-hatred. With this narrative, Westerners are encouraged to expiate their guilt over Western colonialism by embracing a narrative that portrays Jews and their homeland as an obstacle to all that is good in the Muslim and Arab Middle East.

A few hours before the first night session of the conference, organizers escorted twenty or so attendees from the Orient Hotel, the conference venue, to the nearby “Walled Off Hotel” where they were exposed to anti-Zionist propaganda produced by Bansky, a charlatan who has turned anti-Israel contempt into a consumable art form that privileged young Westerners can purchase to demonstrate their authenticity and solidarity with the oppressed peoples of the world.

The walls of the hotel’s piano bar are covered with paintings and sculpture that portray Israel’s security barrier as something out of a horror movie. One painting, for example, showed a dozen children sitting in swings circulating around an Israeli-built guard tower. On another wall hung a particularly gruesome sculpture of Jesus Christ hanging on the cross with scythe-like blades extending from the horizontal bar of the cross and a stretch of rope (a noose?) hanging from beneath Christ’s feet.

When Lutheran peacemakers give license to Hamas violence while blunting Israel’s ability to protect lives - by Dexter Van Zile

Until the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America’s leaders and peacemakers stop treating Hamas like Voldemort in the Harry Potter universe — as the one who must not be named — they will be continue to act, whether they mean to or not, as shills for the organization, just as they did in their most recent statement.

Dexter Van Zile..
CAMERA..
20 August '18..

For one reason or another, mainline Protestant peacemakers find it difficult, if not impossible, to speak openly and directly about Palestinian violence against Israeli civilians. In particular, they can’t say the word “Hamas,” the name of an antisemitic terrorist organization that seeks Israel’s destruction and which has launched thousands of rockets into Israel.

Hamas, the group that mainliners cannot name, does a lot of really bad things and causes a lot of suffering. It hides its rockets in schools and hospitals, teaches children to hate Jews, and has encouraged Palestinians to gather at Gaza’s boundary with Israel to give cover for armed terrorists seeking to penetrate the security barrier. It recruits people to serve as human shields, steals food and fuel from rank-and-file Palestinians to give to its leaders, and takes cement allowed into Gaza to rebuild peoples’ homes and uses it to build attack tunnels into Israel. But because mainliners can’t — or won’t — say the word “Hamas,” mainliners have a tough time confronting the bad things it does.

Because of the mainline refusal to speak about Hamas’s bad acts, the peacemaking narrative offered by mainline activists and the churches that support them is profoundly distorted. In the mainline narrative about violence in the Holy Land, anti-Jewish violence is mostly unremarkable, while Israel’s efforts to protect Jewish lives and welfare is inherently blameworthy. Hamas terrorists get a pass for terrorizing Israelis and Israelis are condemned for fighting back.

The overall effect of Christian peacemaking rhetoric is to give license to Palestinian violence while blunting Israel’s ability to protect the lives of its citizens.

One recent example of this phenomenon is evident in an action alert issued on Aug. 16, 2018 by the “Peace Not Walls” campaign of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA). The action alert begins with the following paragraph:

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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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How a Westmont Scholar's Depiction of Jewish Settlers as the "Repugnant Other" Hinders Peace - by Dexter Van Zile

...In this anti-historical and demonizing frame, modern-day Jews are an amalgam of the evil Romans and corrupt Jewish leaders who conspired to murder Jesus in First Century Jerusalem. The Palestinians are marginal and innocent first century Jews living under Roman occupation. Israeli peace activists (whose credibility was destroyed by Arafat’s refusal to make peace when he had the chance) are stand-ins for Jesus who weeps over the inability of those stiff-necked Jews in Jerusalem to know and do the things that make for peace. Anyone who applies this frame to the Israel-Palestinian conflict is not a peacemaker, or even a hitchhiker, but a sleepwalker through the Holy Land

Maybe Bruce Fisk has done the world a favor

Dexter Van Zile..
CAMERA..
16 July '18..

Apparently, it’s an occupational hazard for Christian Bible scholars to think ill of Israel and its Jewish citizens. This tendency doesn’t afflict every Christian scholar of the Bible, but the fact is, some of the people who should be most committed to preaching a Biblical message of love and forbearance have a difficult — if not impossible — time offering much consideration to Israeli Jews. Some of these scholars say and write hateful falsehoods about Israeli Jews who attempt to defend themselves from hostile attacks from their Palestinian neighbors, many of whom are motivated by an virulent antisemitism rooted in the Koran and Islamic doctrine.

New Testament scholars in particular are vulnerable to the temptation of casting modern day Jews into the frame of Jewish and Roman villainy laid out in the Gospels. By using these frames to interpret the conflict, these Christian scholars do not promote love or peace, but instead broadcast a contemptuous and hateful commentary on the Israel-Palestinian conflict that demonizes Israelis and gives Palestinians a pass.

This scripturally-rooted narrative of Jewish villainy offered by Christian scholars like Naim Ateek, Walter Brueggeman and Gary Burge has helped pave the way for a resurgence of antisemitism in the Western church. This narrative has engendered indifference to the suffering Israelis have endured over the past several decades and given license to Palestinian violence and hostility against the Jewish people.

It is as if the early church fathers who sought to destroy the prestige of the Jewish people in order to promote the ascendancy of Christianity have come alive again in the 21st century to work their evil against the Jewish state.

Modern-day practitioners of these old/new polemics ignore the warnings offered by Jules Isaac in his book, The Teaching of Contempt. In this text published in 1962, Isaac laments how anti-Jewish hostility remained a persistent aspect of the Christian faith, despite numerous warnings about the evils of antisemitism from church leaders. “There is a Christian anti-Semitism,” he wrote. “Whether conscious or unconscious, it is perennial and virulent, of great scope and intensity.”

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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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