The teaching of contempt returns

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...Sadly, we now seem to be facing a case of last in, first out. The Presbyterians are now emerging as the first major Christian denomination to resume the teaching of contempt. Their latest move comes in the form of Zionism Unsettled, a wicked book produced by the Israel/Palestine Mission Network of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.).

Let’s be clear. It is not anti-Semitic to criticize Israel. The conflict between Israel and its Arab neighbors is a complex story about which decent people disagree daily. Honest and fair criticism of Israel is not only inevitable, it is welcome. The problem with Zionism Unsettled is not that it’s critical of Israeli policy. The problem is that it’s critical of Israel’s very existence. It slanders Israel, Israelis and all who support them in their struggle for survival. [font color = "red"] Like so many classic works of anti-Semitism, Zionism Unsettled is not about actual Jews living in the real world. It is instead a passion play about bloodthirsty Jews driven by their supremacist Judaism to devour innocent gentile victims. [/font]It is a big lie about the Jewish state wrapped in a Presbyterian bow. The Presbyterian Church should rush to repudiate this libel.

In order to blame Israel and Israel alone for the region’s woes, Zionism Unsettled portrays a world in which all Arab aggression, terrorism and rejectionism have been magically erased. In the Middle East of Zionism Unsettled, Arab armies never tried to destroy Israel in 1948, 1967 or 1973. And Israel never offered the Palestinians a state in all of Gaza and over 95% of the West Bank – including East Jerusalem – in 2000 and again in 2008. Worst of all, Zionism Unsettled imagines a world in which there is no such thing as Palestinian terrorism. This eighty-page document mentions Palestinian terrorism only once in passing. Gone are the massacres of 1920, 1921 and 1936. Gone are the decades of fedayeen and PLO slaughter. And gone is the second intifada and its death toll of over 1,000 Israelis. The word intifada is not mentioned even once.

In the few cases where Palestinian violence or rejection is recognized, it’s immediately rationalized. Thus the Arab Revolt of 1936 to 1939 in which hundreds of Jewish civilians were murdered was “caused by Palestinian fears of dispossession and Jewish dominance.” The Palestinians rejected the 1947 UN partition plan because the UN “granted a disproportionate share of the territory to Zionists.” The 1947/48 multi-front Arab attack on the nascent Jewish state is described as war having “broken out.” And the hundreds of thousands of Arabs who fled this war were “ethnically cleansed” by Israel. Zionism Unsettled’s effort to blame the conflict on Jews and Judaism reaches the heights of fantasy in its section on “The Inclusive Nature of Islam.” Here the authors approvingly quote a Muslim thinker who suggests that, “Zionism claims that God promised the land of Palestine to the Jews. In contrast, the Qur’an claims that God has blessed the land for the nations.”


Read more: The teaching of contempt returns | David Brog | Ops & Blogs | The Times of Israel http://blogs.timesofisrael.com/the-teaching-of-contempt-returns/#ixzz2xMhm1ZPk

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1. Jews from Arab Countries Respond to “Zionism Unsettled”

The publication has sparked profound reactions from members of JIMENA: Jews Indigenous to the Middle East & North Africa, a San Francisco-based nonprofit which aims to achieve universal recognition for Jewish refugees from the Middle East and North Africa. After reading survivors’ eyewitness testimonies, one would be hard-pressed to believe that Arab Muslim governments allowed their Jewish populations to live in peace and safety. In his “Open letter to the Presbyterian Church USA from an Iraqi Jew“, Joseph Samuels describes the ongoing brutality which culminated in the Farhud, a Nazi-incited riot in 1941 that claimed the lives of 180 Jews, destroyed Baghdad’s Jewish quarter, and forced the country’s Jewish population to live in absolute fear. “The cause of the Farhud wasn’t Zionism…[it was] purely an anti-Jewish act. At 14, I was chased by two Muslim youths with a knife for stopping them from molesting my neighbor’s teenage daughter in broad daylight. At 18, after graduation from Al A’Adadiah High School, I was refused an exit visa to leave Iraq to study in America because I was Jewish. My story is not unique. I am one of 150,000 Iraqi Jews who was discriminated against, oppressed, and forced to escape religious persecution because of my faith.” The fear of impending violence dictated and suppressed Iraqi Jewish life.

In her “Zionism Unsettled: A response from an eyewitness“, JIMENA President Gina Bublil-Waldman challenges the Presbyterian Church USA to “invite me or my fellow Mizrahi Jews to tell our story. Let your Presbyterian congregants and students hear from eyewitnesses how Jews in Arab countries suffered persecution, arbitrary arrest, torture, and harassment. Let members of the Presbyterian Church hear from eyewitnesses how we were denied the most basic human and civil rights, such as the right to become citizens, the right to vote, the right to hold public office, or hold government jobs.” In speaking from her personal experience of violent expulsion and ethnic cleansing of Jews from Libya, Gina goes on to say that “If we want to understand the refugee problem of the Middle East and find a fair and equal justice, we must take into consideration the plight of nearly one million Jewish refugees.”

- See more at: http://pressreleases.religionnews.com/2014/03/26/jews-arab-countries-respond-zionism-unsettled/#sthash.QdxtyjDt.dpuf