MCC and WCC to Break Bread With Holocaust Denier
The Mennonite Central Committee, a relief, development and peace agency for adherents of the Anabaptist tradition in the United States and Canada is having dinner with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Holocaust-denying President of Iran. According to the Jerusalem Post, the dinner, which will be attended by representatives from the World Council of Churches, the American Friends Service Committee and Religions for Peace, is scheduled to take place on September 25, 2008.
Maureen Shea, director of the Episcopal Church’s Office of Governmental Relations in Washington, D.C. (and chair of Churches for Middle East Peace) told the Jerusalem Post that “Meeting with people does not mean you agree with them. The more there is inflammatory language going back and forth, the more we feel there needs to be a way for our two countries to communicate.”
In 2007, the MCC organized a trip to Iran in 2007 during which Christians from the U.S. asked Ahmadinejad to cut back on the anti-Semitic rhetoric. Four days later he told a group of clerics in Sudan that “the Zionists are the true manifestation of Satan” and that “[t]oday the Zionist regime is a symbol of hedonism and the manifestation of the ugly soul of some usurper powers that support it.”
Abraham Foxman, national director for the Anti-Defamation League, condemned the MCC and the other organizations involved in the dinner.
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