By Michael Gizzi, Scanning the Heavens blog.
The Presbyterian Church (USA) is a mainline protestant denomination that has been tied up in the politics of the Boycott-Divest-Sanction (BDS) movement against Israel for more than a decade, culminating in a narrow four-vote majority in its 2014 General Assembly (GA) to divest church funds from HP, Motorola, and Caterpillar because of those company’s products being used to violent ends by Israel in the Palestinian territories. The GA tried to claim that its vote to divest was not about joining the BDS movement, but was a statement on socially responsible investment. This was wishful thinking as within 30 minutes of the GA’s vote, the New York Times immediately reported that the Church had been tied to the BDS Movement.
Two years later, the Presbyterian Church nears another General Assembly. This time, the BDS agenda is a bit more nuanced. A task force was commissioned in 2014 to examine the continued viability of the Church’s commitment to a Two State solution. Responsibility for this study fell on the Church’s Advisory Committee on Social Witness Policy (ACSWP), which recently issued a report titled Israel-Palestine: For Human Values in the Absence of a Justice Peace, that it is seeking to have endorsed by the GA this summer in Portland, Oregon, when it meets in mid-June. It should surprise no one that the report that was written mimics many of the BDS arguments that have been used again and again.
It does not take even the casual reader long to realize that this report is fundamentally flawed and dishonest at its core. On the very first page, the report provides a brief history of the conflict, in which the First Intifada is described as a “largely non-violent movement that led to the Oslo Accords.” Let that sit in for a minute. The First Intifada was a non-violent movement? What the authors of the report apparently are trying to do is to equate the Palestinian resistance, then led by Yasser Arafat and the PLO as being on the same moral level as the American civil rights movement, in which Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference used the strategy of non-violent civil disobedience to effect change. King led bus boycotts, sit-ins and marches to over-come legal segregation and accomplish voting rights for Black Americans in the American south.
Yet, the First Intifada included far more than boycotts of Israelis by Palestinians. Arafat’s uprising consisted of widespread throwing of stones, Molotov Cocktails, and assaults on Israeli citizens. It is estimated that over 1100 Palestinians and 200 Israelis were killed between 1987 and 1991.
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Much like the Wendy’s boycott, the pcusa has no business getting us in the pcusa involved in this. We’re losing members right and left, we can’t seem to fund missions, but to hear Parsons tell it that doesn’t matter because we’re rolling in the dough.
The priorities of louisville are so screwed up, that they would try to sneak this into GA is very telling of what this GA is going to look like.
There are so many errors in this article that it is difficult to know where to begin. First, the report from ACSWP does NOT say that the first intifada was like the civil rights movement, only the author draws that comparison. Second, even the civil rights movement was not 100% nonviolent just as the first intifada was not. If you don’t want to divest from companies that support injustice and death and persecution of others, what does your faith mean? As Bonhoeffer said, we are seeking a cheap grace where we can sit in our safe and privileged world and avoid contamination with those who are suffering. Go live with Palestinians for a week and experience their life. And James should go work in the fields for a week and experience their struggle. I think this is what Christ calls us to do.
I think much like the annual report on membership collapse, for the PCUSA, any overt or direct criticism of its institutionalized antisemitism is a non-event, something to brushed aside, ignored, irrelevant to their ends.
Organizations such as the ASWP, OGA, their BDS sycophants, its enablers, exist in their own closed ecosystem and ideological echo chamber where their ideas and presuppositions are parroted back to them in their own blogosphere, social contacts, and the comfort of their office space not already rented out in Louisville. To be honest I think that when folks employed by the denomination deposit their paychecks on the 15th and 30th and they don’t bounce, that’s a good week for them, organizationally. One must take their small victories whenever they find it.
Geoff, the Church is not called to spread the BDS movement, it’s called to spread the Gospel. The pcusa is not going to make a bit a difference in this situation except to make their bleeding hearts feel better. Just like the Wendy’s boycott, it’s not going to stop churches from leaving or bring back 30 years worth of losses in memebership.
The priorities of the louisville sluggers is a far left in your face social agenda, coupled with collecting as much money as possible from departing churches, if you didn’t know any better you might think this is the new business model.
Regardless, they have been fighting for two thousand years over there, all the bleeding hearts horseman, and all the bleeding men can’t put that together again.
Why not go after Saudi Arabia, you think Israel’s bad, the Palestinians are living on easy street compared to Christians in Saudi Arabia where they can be killed for their faith.
However we know this was never about Jesus Christ and His “cheap grace” as you put, it’s about the cause du’jour, the next big BDS movement, a bunch people sitting around ringing their hands about somthing they can’t fix, all this while billions are going to hell in a hand basket.
The problem is really intellectual honesty. L’ville is incapable of it. My own experience as a commissioner at Pittsburgh GA when legal counsel was explaining the Dream Act was my first experience. Rather than giving an unbaised reading or interpretation, only the elements that furthered the agenda were presented.
As an inactive Presbyterian elder, it is so frustrating to see church leadership in Louisville and in the presbyteries reduce the Grace of Jesus Christ to quibbling political rhetoric. Are there any among us who can rise above their personal politics and articulate a vision that will inspire and unite us rather than drive away those who think a bit differently? Or are church leaders so fearful of losing their pension or the admiration of their peers that they won’t even stand up and call out complete buffoonery when they see it? Unfortunately, it just looks like lazy-minded intolerance to many in the pews and that is why the denomination is declining so rapidly.
The PCUSA is no longer a church…it’s a NGO working for the political left. It no longer has the moral authority to run its mouth about anything.
I left the PCUSA years ago when it joined itself with the abortion industry after Roe v Wade. I have watched with dismay as the PCUSA has continued in unrepentance and folly eagerly adopting every wrong position including support for the antisemitic BDS movement. With members and entire congregations fleeing the denomination every year, why does it never occur to the leadership of the PCUSA to consider the possibility that God is not pleased? Recently, here in St Louis, we had the spectacle of Giddings-Lovejoy Presbytry suing Bonhomme Presbyterian Church in an attempt (which failed) to confiscate the property of that congregation when it voted to leave the PCUSA. So sad!
Hillary Clinton sent a plea to her denomination, the United Methodist Church, not to engage with the BDS movement at their recent conference. Think about that!
Has the Church been infiltrated by a multiplying majority, readily recruiting like kind, secular class? This has been done over and over in financially strong organizations. Control is gained. Historically, the religious-power institutions over people have been over-powered by governmental forces. Control over influence and the money. What does that seem like? Unfortunately, this time it seems like the seeming winners haven’t gained more members or talking strength; they are just the same people talking to the same people. No growth in power of people. The Methodists are a group of some 12 million. Bless them for their sense and direction.