The Reverend Desmond Jagger-Parsons does not speak for all of the United Church. More than the nine senators, who are congregants and clergy in the Unioted Church oppose to the working paper. They are called the Faithful Witness.It is the United Church of Canada that has a one-sided approach to Israel.
The authors of the paper "believe that Israel can and should be held to a higher standard than surrounding undemocratic countries or authoritarian regimes. It is precisely because of Israel's close identification with democratic ideals that is needs to be challenged." Does that mean that we should turn a blind eye to atrocities in authoritarian countries-because they are authoritarian? That is demeaning to Arab States. They are suggesting that they are not capable of respect for human rights. They get a pass bombing Israel, and denying Israel's very existence.
The reverend Desmond Jagger-Parsons refers to the harassment of the Palestinians over the past 45 years. There is no question that there are problems in Israel. Life is not perfect for the Palestinians. Life would be better if there were a peace between these two peoples. Perhaps peace would come if the Palestinians and their brothers and sisters on the Arab world stopped targeting Jewish civilians to murder them. Yesterday, once again,young Jewish Israeli citizens were murdered, in Bulgaria-because they are Jews. And land for peace hasn't worked. Israel unilaterally left Gaza and in return has bombs falling on its citizens. The United Nations, through Unesco has endorsed the Islamic University of Gaza. In May, Subhi Al-Yaziji, dean of Koranic studies at the university, called for the Islamic conquest of Spain and the Vatican. "We place our hopes in Allah and trust that the day will come when our triumph will not be restricted to Palestine." Where is your outrage?
It would be nice to know that the United Church of Canada, the Presbyterian Church of the U.S.A. and the United Methodist Church of the U.S.A., whose national gatherings have both supported boycott this year and whose teachings call for justice for all peoples, not preference of any one people or race or creed, that they are prepared to spread their concept of social justice to those who are far worse off. Yes, there is work to be done for all in Israel. But compared to the pain and suffering of millions upon millions of people in the third world: the genocidal rape of women in Africa, the cutting off of their noses and ears;the starving in Zimbabwe. Where is your outrage for those who use the child-soldiers in the Congo?
It is a matter of priorities. And for some reason, the United Church of Canada is prioritizing Israel for condemnation, over and over again.
The UCC had no objections when Canada's response to the desperate request from Jews in Europe to come to Canada was" none is too many." And now that the Jewish people have a safe haven the United Church report says the state of Israel has a right to exist but the status as a "Jewish State" is not at all clear and adds that Palestinians shouldn't be pressured to "accept Israel as a Jewish state as a pre-condition for continuing negotiation." Do not forget that Israel is the one democracy in the Middle East. Israel has Muslims, Christians and Jews in the Knesset (the parliament). Israel has people of many faiths living and working in the country. Where are the Jews in the Arab countries?There are no vibrant Jewish communities anywhere in the Middle East except Israel.
It is nice to know that the reverend feels pain for the Jews for the millenia of anti-semitism. Let us put this UCC paper into context so that there is a better understanding of Jewish concerns regarding anti-semitism and how it is dressed for the 21st century. There are approximately six billion people in the world: One billion Catholics, one billion are Muslim, 750,000,000 are Protestant and fourteen(14) million are Jews. The Jewish people have lived through Christian laws prohibiting marriage between Jews and Christians and the sharing of meals in the early 3rd century to the ghettoization of Jews in Venice in 1516 and the requirement to wear a yellow tunic and hat, to 1555 when Pope Paul IV ordered the 4,000 Jews of Rome into a ghetto where they remained for three centuries.
Over the centuries the Jewish people have lived through the pogroms in the 13th century in Frankfurt and Ortenburg; in Pfortzheim and Speyer; the murder of Jews in Mainz and Cracow, on Passover 1283; Jews in 1348, accused of causing the Black Plague were murdered in Mainz and then Oppenheim, Frankfurt, Erfurt and Cologne. Jews were accused of desecrating the host and murdered. The Jews of Trent were murdered, accused of killing a Christian boy to use his blood in the making of Matza for Passover. Jews were burned at the stake, autos da fe, in 15th century Spain at the hands of the Catholic state. After the final expulsion of 250,000 Jews in 1492, their land was given to the monasteries. Cossacks and Poles in the 17th century led by the Russian tyrants massacred Jews; children killed at their mothers’ breast or roasted alive on spits over the fire followed by pogroms throughout Russia in the 19th and 20th centuries and then, the greatest barbarism ever perpetrated on any group of human beings-the Holocasut-1.5 million shot to death and then burned; 4.5 million gassed and then cremated.
Let us not forget the murder of the Jewish Israeli Olympians in Munich 1972, the murder pf Jewish children in Toulouse in March, and most recently, Bulgaria.
