The following is a brief exerpt from Melanie Phillips's Diary: The Anglicans lose their way: June 27, 2005. This is a must-read. Follow the link to the the full article.
It is a defining moment. With last Friday’s vote by the Anglican Consultative Council to ‘commend’ divestment from companies supporting Israel’s polices, based on a travesty of a report on Israel by the Anglican Peace and Justice Network, the Anglican church has descended into the moral abyss.
The APJN report is full of the most inflammatory lies, libels and distortions about Israel — and ....it provided the ammunition for a poisonous onslaught against Israel. The document uncritically reproduced the Arab propaganda version of Israel’s history and the present circumstances of the Middle East conflict, presenting the Arab perpetrators of genocidal mass murder as victims and their real victims as oppressors merely for trying to defend themselves.
Statement after statement is pathologically twisted. .....Israel has behaved with suicidal forbearance towards the Arabs of the territories....Yet the report does not present Israel's actions as a defence against mass murder but instead represents them as oppressive and dehumanising.
... It ...presents Israel’s military actions as a deliberate policy of oppression, whereas in fact the only reason that normal life is impossible is that the Arabs of the territories are intent on ending as many Israeli lives as possible.
It refers to the occupation of ‘Palestinian land’. But the West Bank and Gaza are not Palestinian land. They are strictly speaking no-man’s land — which was illegally occupied by Egypt and Jordan in 1948-50.
The report says the Arabs were removed from their ‘historic lands’ — by which it means Israel. But this is a rewriting of history.
...It describes the security barrier as an ‘apartheid/segregation’ wall and compares the territories to the ‘bantustans of South Africa’. But the only reason the barrier was erected was to defend Israelis from the systematic mass murder perpetrated by Arabs from the territories. The comparison with apartheid, where the majority was kept down by the minority on racial grounds, is false and libellous.
It egregiously misrepresents history, attacking Israel for ignoring UN resolutions without referring to the Arabs’ refusal to honour those bits of those resolutions which require them to end their aggression against Israel.
Outrageously, it asserts: ‘there is little will on behalf of the Israeli government to recognize the rights of the Palestinians to a sovereign state to be created in the West Bank—which includes East Jerusalem—and Gaza.’ But the Arabs were offered a state in the territories in 1938, 1947, 1967 and 2000 but refused it every time and tried instead to wipe out the Jews. Never have they rescinded their aim of ethnic cleansing and destruction of Israel.
The report not only makes no mention of this, nor of the incitement of hatred of Israel and the Jews worldwide with which the Arab world is brainwashed; instead, it directly associates itself with those aims by endorsing the right of settlement for ‘refugees’ which would destroy Israel as a Jewish state.
The venom of its anti-Jewish feeling bursts out all too plainly when it compares ‘the concrete walls of Palestine’ to ‘the barbed-wire fence of the Buchenwald camp’. Thus the Anglicans compare Jews to Nazis for a measure aimed to prevent themselves from being murdered.
This profound and vicious anti-Jewish animus is not surprising given the two men the report singles out for praise (the bad guys)....
- Riah Abu El-Assal... Among many anti-Jewish statements Bishop Riah has claimed of Palestinian Christians: ‘We are the true Israel… no-one can deny me the right to inherit the promises, and after all the promises were first given to Abraham and Abraham is never spoken of in the Bible as a Jew…He is the father of the faithful.’
- Canon Naim Ateek ...(so called) ‘peacemaker’....(who) defames the Jews and sanitises Arab violence. ....(In his writings) Zionism is portrayed .....as an aggressive colonial adventure. ..... Ateek vilifies the Jews as oppressors and warmakers and tells them, in effect, that their salvation lies in abandoning their state and scattering to the four winds.
The report enthuses that Ateek founded Sabeel....Sabeel’s own call for divestment starts with a lie, which gives a taste of its own venom: ‘The State of Israel was established in 1948 on 78% of historic Palestine leading to the displacement of most of its Palestinian inhabitants, who became refugees.’
‘Historic Palestine’.... comprised what is now Jordan, Israel and the West Bank and Gaza. .... the Jews ware allocated a small portion. With the ceasefire lines drawn up in 1949 after the Arabs tried to destroy the fledgling Jewish state, Israel was left with only 17.5% of Mandate Palestine. The Arabs had the rest. It was still not enough for them; the Jews had to be driven out from their own homeland altogether, a project which continues to this day – and which the Anglicans now support.
....In short, this document represents nothing less than an incitement to hatred against Israel and the Jews.At the meeting, two voices were raised against it (the good guys)....
- The Very Rev John Moses, the Dean of St Paul's objected to the resolution, questioned the credentials of those who prepared the report and suggested that it was biased and would inflame Christian - Jewish tensions in the UK and would not help the peace process.....
- (former) Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Rowan Williams, who proposed two amendments that softened the tone-- and he explicitly stated that this was not a call for disinvestment. Other Anglicans would appear to disagree.
‘Some six months ago, I read the undergraduate maunderings of the "Peace and Justice Network" ...It was immature, wholly unresearched and one-sided, the kind of thing...I thought that it would be kicked into the long grass when wiser heads prevailed ...Instead, the resolution was couched in careful committee-speak, putting the smallest of figleaves over its left wing posturing. Well, I don’t think the church can have it both ways. It is either a body for transcendence or for agitprop. The church, I fear, will continue to make itself more and more irrelevant. I am taking the only action of which you will take the slightest notice. I shall be stopping my £500 a year contribution to my parish church with immediate effect.’
The Anglican communion has lost its way. Its own flock must now try to rescue it from the moral pit into which it has fallen.
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