August 03, 2004

Dear Friend of FLAME:

You may or may not be aware that, very recently, the US Presbyterian Church, in its yearly conclave, has decided to divest its substantial investments in Israel and to make no further investment, in “punishment” of what they perceive as Israel’s human rights violations. It is a most perturbing and hateful act, and one must hope not a harbinger of similar such acts to be followed by other such religious organizations.
We have become used to such divestment decisions from leftist-leaning universities. Inexcusable and deplorable though this may be, it certainly does not have the moral power of such a hateful decision by one of the major denominations in America.
This almost unforgivable declaration and decision by the US Presbyterian Church are counterbalanced to some substantial degree by the Catholic Church, which has recently officially recognized the obvious, namely that anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism.
Dennis Prager, whom we have previously featured on our website, is a Jewish philosopher and columnist who is almost always “right on” in his opinion. Mr. Prager has written a most insightful essay on this outrageous and shameful act by the Presbyterian Church, and here it is.

Gerardo Joffe
President, FLAME

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PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH DEFAMES CHRISTIANITY

By Dennis Prager
July 20, 2004, Jewish World Review

I have argued in this column that the greatest sin is committing evil in G-d's name. As bad as the evil committed by secularists, such as communists and Nazis, has ever been, the most grievous evil is that which is committed in the name of G-d. For not only do religious evils harm their victims, they also do lasting damage to G-d-based morality, which those of us who believe in G-d and religion consider the only viable antidote to evil.

That is why Islamic terror is so evil. Not only because it targets the most innocent of people for death and torture, but because it does so in the name of Allah and Islam.

Incredibly, The General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (USA) joins the list of religious groups committing evil. In the name of Jesus, it has called for the economic strangulation of Israel. They have equated the Jewish state with South Africa during apartheid and called for a universal divestment from it.
The Presbyterians are the first Christian church to do this, and, ironically, the divestment campaign came the very week that the Roman Catholic Church signed a document equating anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism.

It takes a particularly virulent strain of moral idiocy and meanness to single out Israel, not Arafat's Palestinian Authority, or terror-supporting, death-fatwa-issuing Iran, or women-subjugating Saudi Arabia, for condemnation and economic ruin. One of the most decent societies, one of the most liberal democracies in the world, is fighting for its life against Islamic fascists who praise the Holocaust and publicly call for the annihilation of Israel — and the Presbyterian Church calls for strangling Israel!

Apartheid state? This Goebbels-like Big Lie, concocted by the world's anti-Israel and anti-American Left and by those who want Israel destroyed, is now an official doctrine of the Presbyterian Church. Israel is a nation whose population is one-quarter non-Jewish Arab, with the same rights, including voting and its own political parties, as Jewish citizens; a nation whose second official language is Arabic, the language of those who wish to annihilate the Jewish country; a nation that occupies a tiny sliver of land known as the West Bank only because Jordan, overwhelmingly composed of Palestinians, invaded Israel in 1967 in order to destroy it and thereby lost its ownership of the West Bank.

As an American who fights to preserve Judeo-Christian values as America's primary value system and preserve Christianity as the specific American faith that embodies those values, I can only say this: the G-d that the 431 leaders of the Presbyterian Church worship is not my G-d, any more than the Allah of the Islamic fascists that Israel and America fight is my G-d.

The Bible that these Presbyterians read is not my Bible.

The religious values that these Presbyterians hold are not my religious values.

This is not a difference about immigration policy, affirmative action, taxation, bigger or smaller government, welfare policies, gun control, or a myriad of other moral issues over which decent, G-d-fearing people can disagree.

This is one of the morality-clarifying issues of our time. To single out Israel for economic strangulation while that good nation fights for its life is an act of such immorality that holding that view precludes one from the title "good" or "G-d-fearing," for if they are true to G-d, I am false to Him. If they are good, I who support Israel am bad. If their Bible teaches them to strangle Israel and support Yasser Arafat, I am guided by a different Bible.
They have drawn a line. It is now time for good people, Presbyterians specifically, Christians generally, to distance themselves vigorously and publicly from this morally sick church. And it is time, once again, for Jews to realize that the enemies of the Jews in our day are to be found on the Christian Left while their friends are far more often on the Christian Right.

Many serious Christians ask, "What Would Jesus Do?" If Jesus were here, he would probably be at Israeli hospitals comforting fellow Jews who were deliberately blinded, paralyzed and brain-damaged by Jew- and Christian-hating Palestinian terrorists. He would surely not be with the Jews' enemies, among whom are now the leaders of the Presbyterian Church, USA