Retired professor expresses concern that PCUSA is wavering on Israeli policy
By John H. Adams, The Layman Online, December 16, 2004
A retired professor at the College of Wooster in Ohio has raised questions about whether the leaders of the Presbyterian Church (USA) are wavering from the General Assembly’s liberationist view that Israel should be threatened with punishment by disinvestment of Presbyterian funds in corporations that do business with the Jewish state.
Dr. George Shull, a member of the Witherspoon Society, a liberal special-interest group, also suggests that the General Assembly Council conduct a thorough investigation of why two high-ranking PCUSA employees were fired shortly after a Presbyterian delegation met with Hezbollah’s “spiritual leader” in Lebanon in November.
“I cannot respect a decision to dismiss two (or more??) valued servants of the church until I have had authoritative answers” to a number of questions, Shull said. “The answers should be solicited from the dismissed employees as well as the dismissers. At the very least, is it not imperative that the General Assembly Council explore all of these questions thoroughly, with both the dismissed and the dismissers?”
The council has decided to conduct an investigation into the dismissals of Kathy Leuckert, the council’s deputy executive director, and Peter Sulyok, the staff leader for the Advisory Committee on Social Witness Policy.
John Detterick, the executive director of the council, announced the firings of Leuckert and Sulyok shortly after they returned from the Mideast as part of a 24-member Presbyterian team’s “fact-finding” mission. Detterick has never given a reason for firing the two employees and he said recently that it was not related to the meeting with Hezbollah.
Shull, whose questions and comments are posted on the Witherspoon Web site, compared the flare-up over the Hezbollah meeting and the General Assembly’s call for divestment with the firestorm over comments made by Dirk Ficca at a denominational Peacemaking Conference in 2000.
Ficca, a Presbyterian minister who is the executive of an interfaith organization in Chicago, suggested that there are many paths to God and asked rhetorically, “What’s the big deal about Jesus?”
Ficca’s question ricocheted across the denomination. Denominational leaders hemmed and hawed about the singular Lordship of Jesus Christ for two years before the General Assembly approved a statement in 2002 that declared “Jesus Christ is the only Savior and Lord, and all people everywhere are called to place their faith, hope and love in him … No one is saved apart from God’s gracious redemption in Jesus Christ.”
“Indeed, it is tempting to recall the Ficca experience,” Shull said. “In the course of an eloquent, sensitive discussion of interfaith dialogue Ficca posed a Christological question in colloquial language (‘So what is the big deal about Jesus?’). These words were wrenched from context in high dudgeon and huge distortion — without attention to the context, without realizing that the question led directly to a serious discussion of Christian understandings of the work of God in Christ. Some Presbyterians in high places, apparently without reading the speech itself, gasped at the colloquial words and condemned both speech and speaker out of hand. Have we suffered another knee-jerk reaction in this case?”
Shull also questioned why the denomination would shun a so-called terrorist group in its continuing consideration of what role it should play in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
“Why does the label ‘terrorist,’ applied to Hezbollah by the United States government, automatically mean that we should not talk to Hezbollah leaders, especially when our church has condemned terrorism and has also acknowledged the extreme pain under which Palestinians have suffered for half a century?” he asked. “We recall that Menachem Begin and other Israeli office-holders were labeled terrorists during Israel’s war for independence.”
A retired professor of history, Shull suggested that the PCUSA should be more attentive to liberationist groups that oppose Israel’s occupation of Palestinian areas and construction of a wall to restrain suicide bombers.
He asked, “[S]hould the objections of a particular group of Jewish leaders, with whom we are engaged in delicate conversation, automatically control our attempts to be faithful to our mission to love, to understand, to confer with, those who have come to believe that we and our allies are enemies?” he asked.
He said other Jewish groups – including the “Tikkun Community, Americans for Peace Now, Jerusalem Women Speak, and many others” are “hospitable to the positions taken by the General Assembly.”
Shull has been embroiled in the denomination’s policy about Israeli-Palestinian affairs before. In late 2003, former General Assembly Moderator Fahed Abu-Akel, who was raised in Palestine as a Christian, selected a speaker for a conference at Wooster College.
That speaker, Samir Makhlouf of Atlanta, presented a slide show that depicted the Star of David morphing into a swastika and used materials from Third Reich propaganda that alleged that the Jews were conspiring to take over the world.
Some of what Makhlouf said at Wooster was based on the spurious The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which was used by Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich as part of its rationale for annihilating the Jews. The Protocols have also been used by the Ku Klux Klan and other supremacist groups in their racist appeals.
R. Stanton Hales, Wooster’s president, issued an apology after the presentation. “Most unfortunately and to the surprise and shock of those in attendance, Mr. Makhlouf … made anti-Semitic statements about the state of Israel and about Jewish people based on documents that are widely acknowledged to be forgeries and are a direct statement of bigotry and hatred,” Hales said.
The Layman Online reported the uproar caused by the presentation and Shull responded with a letter to the Presbyterian Lay Committee’s online news service. He did not defend Makhlouf’s use of The Protocols, but said the speaker did so without knowing their origin.
“[I]t was clear that he had never encountered the widespread consensus of the scholarly world that they were faked,” Shull said. “I became convinced of this in long conversations afterward. I found no evidence, in conversations and later emails supporting the charge that he was ‘intellectually dishonest.'”
But Shull disagreed with critics who labeled Makhlouf’s remarks “virulent.”
“They were not ‘virulent;’ they were presented in conversational tone,” he said in his letter that was published on March 4 on The Layman Online.