By Max Samarov, The Jerusalem Post.
I’ve spent the past three years witnessing and helping defeat Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaigns on campuses across North America, so I am rarely surprised by the depravity of anti-Israel activists.
But BDS doesn’t limit itself to campuses, so this year I’ve had the distinct misfortune of witnessing it in action at the national meetings of two Protestant churches – the Presbyterian Church (USA) and the United Church of Christ (UCC). Last June, PCUSA passed a resolution to boycott and divest from companies deemed “complicit” in Israel’s alleged misdeeds against Palestinians, and last week the UCC passed a similar measure.
I attended last year’s PCUSA Middle East Committee hearings and watched the UCC proceedings live online. In both cases, I was shocked to see people who should know better buy into BDS’s cheap propaganda about the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, its blatant misrepresentations of its own agenda and its manipulative tactics.
During the long PCUSA hearings, I listened to seemingly earnest Presbyterians viciously slander Israelis, accusing them of subjecting Palestinians to “biblical scale enslavement” and poisoning Palestinian livestock.
When pro-BDS speakers weren’t echoing classic anti-Semitism, they whitewashed the killing of Israeli children by racist terrorist groups like Hamas as “resistance.” In a bold display of dishonesty, they told the committee that their proposal was unconnected to global BDS and its goal of eliminating Israel as a Jewish and democratic state. Of course, this didn’t stop them from bringing in Rifat Kassis, a “special guest” from the West Bank who works closely with the Palestinian BDS National Committee.
Kassis spoke constantly during the committee’s deliberations, and never disclosed his affiliations.
I and many of my fellow attendees were outraged and would have spoken out, but we weren’t allowed to: almost all of the speaking time was allotted to anti-Israel activists. BDS supporters had infiltrated the leadership of the PCUSA and rigged the debate.
The UCC proceedings were no better.
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I would file this under, “what else is new”. Much like their cohorts in both academia and establishment media, liberal religious organizations are zone of intolerance, hate, and enforced group-think. Where voices outside of the new orthodoxy are stifled, silenced, and those who speak or write to the contrary marginalized and intimidated.
It is not that the PCUSA is an anti-Semitic organization, ether in doctrine or confession, but it allows such voices a platform and means to broadcast their message of race hate and identity theology and politics. As the organization further makes distinctions between “good” and “bad” Jews. Good Jews for the PCUSA are those who supported the BDS actions of Detroit, bad Jews, anybody else. End of discussion.
The pro-Israeli lobby funded by millions of dollars in propaganda money of course does not like BDS. To question the tactics of Israel usually receives a charge of anti-Semitism. But the fact is the country of Israel is practicing forms of apartheid and a real denial of human rights.
I have been there and I have seen it.
Both sides of this whole issue have made mistakes, however when Hamas, just think a renamed “PLO” won the election years ago that’s when the crap hit the fan, so it’s clear enough to me that something has to give here, but throwing Israel under the bus was NOT the way to do it.
If it was possible for me to be even more ashamed of being associated with PCUSA, then I would be.
Once again PCUSA proves itself as a self-absorbed, leftist, progressive, apostate political shill; using dead Presbyterians’ donations to bully/persecute our Jewish friends.
Amen, brother. This is scary dangerous and we’re walking right into the sludge with no questions asked. Welcome back to 1932.