From Anti-Israeli Agenda Borders on Sacrilege: Last weekend, Old South Church hosted a conference sponsored by North American Friends of Sabeel entitled “The Apartheid Paradigm in Palestine-Israel” and headlined by Episcopal Archbishop Desmond Tutu. Two days of nonstop bashing of Israel, portrayed as a colonialist oppressor. Palestinian national aspirations were celebrated; Jewish national aspirations were ignored, if not denigrated. The endless wars waged by Arabs seeking to wipe out the Jewish state were characterized as aggressive wars provoked by Israel. There was no mention of suicide bombings, except possibly to justify them as understandable expressions of rage. What distresses me
Read More +From The Historical Roots of the Anti-Israel Positions of Liberal Protestant Churches: The verbal attacks and boycott calls by a variety of Western Protestant, mainly liberal, denominations, as well as the World Council of Churches, have raised new interest in the origins of Christian anti-Semitism and in particular its Protestant version. Among the Protestants’ founding fathers, Martin Luther was particularly anti-Semitic. His writings were precursors of twentieth-century National Socialist texts. Adolf Hitler, Joseph Goebbels, and Julius Streicher gladly quoted from Luther’s works. In the current anti-Israel positions of liberal Western churches, nontheological influences are probably more important. Churches have taught
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