by Ryan Jones | IsraelToday.co.il | July 15, 2011
The World Council of Churches recently sponsored a debate on the situation of Christians in the Middle East that went unnoticed by most, but which provided another huge red flag in regards to the direction the Church is going as it relates to Israel and the Jews.
Meeting in Volos, Greece, a collection of 30 theologians, social scientists, politicians and church representatives labored for five days to decisively identify the reason for shrinking Christian communities across the Middle East.
They could have saved their time and their money for other things like, you know, feeding the poor, because everyone already knew what the conclusion was going to be. Israel, and specifically Zionism, is making life untenable for Christians in the region, announced the group in its closing statement.
"…conflict situations such as Palestine...have seen significant drops in the Christian populations because of Israeli occupation," said the World Council of Churches, ignoring the myriad other reasons why Christians no longer feel comfortable or safe in a society where Hamas can win a landslide electoral victory.
In place like Egypt, where Christians are increasingly being targeted for their faith in the wake of "democratic" revolutions, the council attributed the shrinking Christian demographic to "economic and immigration realities."
This was to be expected from the World Council of Churches, a Geneva-based organization that represents 347 Protestant churches and denominations, and counts among its constituents more than 500 million Christians world-wide. In a 2007 conference in Jordan that also focused on dwindling Christian communities in the Middle East, the group called for a political crusade to end the Jews' "occupation" of their biblical lands.
When it comes to the Christian situation in the Middle East, Islam is just not a problem. It's all those pesky Jews.
The Church in general has a long history of dedicating resources to harassing the Jews and painting them as the "enemies of Christ(rians)," which the Bible specifically warns against.
Many thought we had moved beyond all that, that the horrors of the Holocaust had finally woken the Church to how wrong it had been. In fact, those Christians involved today in this new brand of Israel-bashing will most loudly protest the label of anti-Semitism. But, as the saying goes, "methinks they do protest too loudly."
What the World Council of Churches and others like it are doing is rebranding that most anti-Semitic of doctrines - Replacement Theology.
Instead of calling for their heads, this new brand of Replacement Theology sheds crocodile tears for the Jews as mistreated lost souls who once tasted God's goodness, but have since been replaced as His "chosen" because of their rejection of Jesus.
They do not hate the Jews (at least not openly), but they believe the biblical promises made to national Israel have expired. And that is where the State of Israel comes in. If God's promises to national Israel are no longer valid, then modern Israel has nothing to do with biblical prophecy or God's plan of global redemption.
And, if God's big picture plans don't include the reborn Jewish state, then these Christians feel freer to pursue their unbiblical humanist agenda - seeking what they call "social justice" for Palestinian Christians.
But Jesus never taught his followers to fight for "social justice" by seeking political sovereignty. He taught that His followers would be persecuted and should endure that situation with humility and meekness in order to reach their oppressors, real or perceived, with His message of love.
Ultimately, the aim of groups like the World Council of Churches is not biblical, it's not even about genuine social justice. Whether they know it or not, whether they accept it or not, their agenda is about advancing the cause of Islam and reversing what God is doing in this land.
Source: http://www.israeltoday.co.il/NachrichtenHeute/tabid/178/nid/22870/language/en-US/Default.aspx
The Churches Against Israel
by Giulio Meotti | Ynetnews.com | July 3, 2011
Christian blood libels revived, with Israel being painted as evil, having no right to exist.
A few days ago UK researchers announced that 17 skeletons belonged to Jews were found at the bottom of a medieval well in Norwich, England. The Jews were murdered in a pogrom or had been forced to commit suicide rather than submit to demands for conversion to Christianity.
The bodies date back to the 12th or 13th Centuries, at a time when Jewish people faced killings, banishment and persecution throughout all Europe. Those 17 Jews were killed because of "replacement theology," the most ancient Christian calumny arguing that because of their denial of the divinity of Christ, the Jews have forfeited God’s promises to them which have been transferred to the Church.
Some 10 centuries later, global Christian forums are reviving this theological demonology against the heirs of those 17 Jews: the Jews of the State of Israel. The World Council of Churches, an ecumenical Christian body based in Genève and boasting 590 million worshippers, just ended a four-day conference in the Greek city of Volos. Not a single word of criticism was uttered there against the Islamists who are persecuting Arabs who believe Jesus.
Lutherans arrived to Volos from the United States, Catholics and Protestants from Bethlehem and Nazareth, Orthodox Christians from Greece and Russia, lecturers from Beirut and Copts from Egypt. The conference declared the Jewish State "a sin" and "occupying power," accused Israelis of "dehumanizing" the Palestinians, theologically dismantled the "choseness" of the Jewish people and called for "resistance" as a Christian duty.
Photo below: Blood libels revived (Archives) by Ofer Amram
The conference denied 3,000 years of Jewish life in the land stretching between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River, took sides against the very presence of Israel, likened the defensive barrier that has blocked terrorism to "apartheid," attacked Jewish homes in Judea and Samaria invoking the name of God and conceptually dismissed the Jewish state, imagining it to be a mixture - Islamic, Christian and perhaps a bit Jewish. It even legitimized terrorism when it talked about the "thousands of prisoners who languish in Israeli jails," proclaiming that "resistance to the evil of occupation is a Christian's right and duty."
Copying Ahmadinejad’s rhetoric
In the last few months we have seen a radical and dangerous increase of attacks on Israel by the Protestant and Catholic churches. While the US is home to many Christian supporters of Israel, the groups more closely linked to global public opinion, European bureaucracy, the media industry, the United Nations and various legal forums are all violently anti-Israel and anti-Jewish. They are paving the way for a new Jewish bloodbath by the theological exclusion of Israel's Jews from the family of nations.
The patriarch of the Antioch Church, the Catholic Melkite Gregory III Laham, proclaimed that there is a "Zionist conspiracy against Islam," reviving old conspiracy theories that led to infamous pogroms. In Antwerp, once called "the Belgian Jerusalem," a highly respected and government-funded Catholic school, the College of the Sacred Heart, just hosted a "Palestine Day" replete with anti-Semitic references and activities for youngsters. One stall at the event was titled "Throw the soldiers into the sea," allowing children to throw replicas of Jewish and Israeli soldiers into two large tanks.
The most influential international Catholic peace movement, Pax Christi, just promoted a boycott of Israel's goods "in the name of love." The most hated Israeli product includes Ahava, the famous Israeli cosmetics company, whose shop in Covent Garden, London, has just been closed by the company after years of demonstrations. Strangely, Ahava body lotion tubes have been chosen as a satanic symbol of Jewish colonialism.
Today, most of the divestment campaign against Israel is driven by Christian groups such as the Dutch Interchurch Organization and the Irish Catholic group Troicaré, both funded by the EU. The United Church of Canada, a very popular and mainstream Christian denomination, just voted to boycott six companies (Caterpillar, Motorola, Ahava, Veolia, Elbit Systems and Chapters/Indigo) and South African bishop Desmond Tutu convinced the University of Johannesburg to severe all its links with Israeli fellows.
Last year the Methodist Church of Britain voted to boycott Israeli-produced goods and services from Judea and Samaria. The catholic Pax Christi is also leading the campaign glorifying Mordechai Vanunu, Israel's nuclear whistleblower who had converted to Christianity.
La Civiltà Cattolica, the Vatican magazine reviewed by the Holy See secretary of state before publication, in January opened with a shocking editorial on Palestinian refugees. Adopting the Islamist propagandist word "Nakba," just recently invoked by Arab mobs to breach Israel's borders, the paper declared that the refugees are a consequence of "ethnic cleansing" by Israel and that "the Zionists were cleverly able to exploit the Western sense of guilt for the Shoah to lay the foundations of their own state." Indeed, Ahmadinejad's rhetoric is alarmingly similar.
Israel a ‘foreign implant’
Israel’s relationship with the Vatican is different from Jerusalem’s relationship with Albania or Luxembourg for example, because the Catholic Church has more than one billion adherents and a global moral authority. At the Rome synod, Archbishop Cyrille Salim Bustros, a cleric chosen by Pope Ratzinger to draft the synod’s 44 final propositions, denied the Jewish people’s biblical right to the Promised Land. "We Christians cannot speak about the Promised Land for the Jewish people. There is no longer a chosen people", Bustros said, reviving the "replacement theology."
Edmond Farhat, a Maronite Apostolic Nuncio, who is a sort of Vatican's ambassador, described Israel’s place in the Middle East in terms of a rejected "foreign implant" that which has no specialists "capable of healing it."
Elsewhere, the current Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, Fouad Twal, named by Pope Ratzinger to represent the Catholic community in Israel and the West Bank, is sponsoring an appeal against the "Judaization of Jerusalem." Indeed, at this time, new anti-Israel policies by the most powerful Christian groups are breathing new life into Medieval doctrine that demonized Jews for hundreds of years.
The latest excavations in England suggest the Jews were thrown down the well together, head first, the kids after the parents. Five of them had a DNA sequence suggesting they were likely to be members of a single Jewish family. Some 10 centuries later, five Jews from the same Israeli family, the Fogels of Itamar, were slaughtered in their own beds. A famous Italian priest, Mario Cornioli, wrote immediately after the massacre in a subliminal justification of the killings: "What is Itamar? An illegal Israeli colony built on stolen land.”
The replacement calumny has changed its language, yet it still marks a death sentence for the Jewish people: Israelis, like Lucifer, were God's chosen but were cast out for their rebellious and evil ways, and now deserve to be obliterated from the so-called "Holy Land,” the argument goes. From Norwich to Itamar, the Jewish martyrs are an everlasting and heroic stain in this horrible, theological blood libel.
Giulio Meotti, a journalist with Il Foglio, is the author of the book A New Shoah: The Untold Story of Israel's Victims of Terrorism.
Source: http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4090528,00.html
Posted at 12:52 AM in Africa/Nigeria/Sudan, AntiSemitism/Jew-Hatred, Archaeology/Antiquities, Books/Journals/Magazines/Maps, CAIR/HAMAS/Hezbollah/Muslim/Islamic Organizations/UN, Canada, Christianity, Commentary/Opinion/Editorial, Current Affairs, Dutch Interchurch Organization , Education and/or Campus, Europe/Spain/Germany/France, History, Holocaust, Images, Iran, Islam and Contemporary Issues, Islam and History, Islamic Doctrine: Koran, Hadiths, etc, Israel, Judaism, Methodist Church of Britain, Middle East, Muslim Brotherhood aka Ikhwan, Politics/Ideologies, Protestant Church, Racism, Religion, Russian Federation, Caucasus, Sharia Compliant Financing/Sharia, The Catholic Church, The Catholic Pax Christi, The Christian Church, The United Church of Canada, The United States, The World Council of Churches, Web/Tech/Weblogs/Internet, Women and/or Children | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)
Reblog (0) | | Digg This | Save to del.icio.us | |