“Violence in God’s name is not only an obvious corruption of Scripture, it demonstrates an appalling disregard for the loving and just God who commands us to live together in peace. What is especially painful is that this recent violence took place during a celebration of the birth of the one who Christians call the Prince of Peace and who Muslims call a holy prophet.”

These sentences, included in a Jan. 15 letter sent by Michael Kinnamon, General Secretary of the National Council of Churches to officials of the Coptic Orthodox Church in the United States, can be easily dismissed as a naïve response to the recent murder of several Christians in Egypt.

The statement’s gloss that “violence in God’s name is … an obvious corruption of Scripture” seems, in light of what we have learned about jihadism in the past few years, like a bit of wishful thinking.

As Richard Rubenstein has argued in his most recent book Jihad and Genocide (2010, Rowman and Littlefield), moderate Muslim scholars who seek to relate to non-Muslims on the basis of equality “are at an enormous disadvantage” because “the behavior of contemporary Islamists resembles that of Muhammad and his conquering successors farm more than do the behavior of values advocated by … more moderate Saudi scholars.”

Rubenstein continues: “The Islamists have fewer problems of literal interpretation of those verses in the Qur’an that refer to jihad and the global ambitions of Islam than do the [moderate] Saudi Scholars.” (Page 41) In other words, for the people responsible for anti-Christian and anti-Jewish violence in the Middle East, attacks like this are not a corruption of Scripture, but its fulfillment. And a plain-text reading of Scripture seems to support their case.

Until organizations such as the NCC and the World Council of Churches come to grips with this reality, they will be unable to provide the intellectual and leadership necessary to confront the problem of jihadism in the Middle East and the rest of the world. (In sum, these institutions cannot help moderate or formulate a response to a problem they will not bring themselves to acknowledge.)

This is why the NCC’s statement cannot be dismissed out of hand. The fact that the NCC has even acknowledged that the violence perpetrated against the Coptic Christians (and a Muslim security guard) was perpetrated in God’s name is cause for hope. Given the NCC’s historical silence about the mistreatment of Coptic Christians in the Middle East, the fact that NCC issued such a statement at all is simply put, just short of a miracle.

The NCC’s prophetic voice has, like a lot of other church related organizations supported by mainline churches in the U.S., have had a frog stuck in its throat when confronted in Muslim and Arab misdeeds that call for admonition and correction. As reported previously, when Coptic Christians approached the National Council of Churches in 1977 in an effort to elicit a churchly word on their behalf, they were stymided by politics, according to Isaac Rottenberg, a former staffer at the organization.

Now the organization has at least taken a step in the right direction, just as it did when it condemned Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s hostile rhetoric in 2008.

Arianna Huffington – Founder of the Huffington Post

A disturbing investigative piece published on the internet site Front Page Magazine exposes how the Huffington Post is allowing rabid anti-Israel and anti-Jewish commenters to repeatedly post comments.

The piece provides evidence that such commenters are allowed to continue posting despite the the Post’s own policy forbidding expressions of racial and religious hatred. Some of these commenters have posted thousands of times despite the Huffington Post’s claim that it both pre-and post-moderates its comment boards. Read the whole thing.

The Huffington Post is not the only news site that is allowing and possibly encouraging such vitriol. Other news sites with a strong anti-Israel bent, like the Guardian are publishing similar comments. Meanwhile, there are disturbing reports that these same sites have blocked the comments from those attempting to correct the distortions of the Israel-haters.

The International Solidarity Movement’s repeated references to “nonviolent” resistance — on their About Us page alone the word is used eight times — has always been suspect.

After all, the extremist group’s co-founders Huwaida Arraf and Adam Shapiro clearly support and encourage violence, having written that suicide bombings are “noble” and that Palestinians “must” engage in violence alongside nonviolence:

Nonviolent resistance is no less noble than carrying out a suicide operation. … The Palestinian resistance must take on a variety of characteristics — both nonviolent and violent. But most importantly it must develop a strategy involving both aspects. No other successful nonviolent movement was able to achieve what it did without a concurrent violent movement …

As if that weren’t disturbing enough, it seems clear now that, to many in the group, the “nonviolent” part of that combination includes arson, beatings, stoning, and murder.

A statement today by ISM London, published as a comment on the Guardian website, asserts that “the Palestinians’ own long tradition of non-violent resistance has a lot to teach us all, from the protests and strikes against the British occupation in the 1930s onwards.”

The Palestinian “protests and strikes” in the 1930s, which were fueled by Palestinian leader and close Nazi-ally Haj Amin al Husseini, centered on the general strike in 1936 (which, it should be said, was more about demanding the British implement anti-Jewish discriminatory policies than about ending the British occupation). Here are but a few examples of what that year “teaches us” about nonviolence:

On April 15, the strike was kicked off by the killing of 2 Jews. Within a month of that first killing, 21 Jews were killed by Palestinian Arabs, including seven Jews on April 19 and five the next day in Jaffa, and two elderly Jews murdered in Jerusalem on May 13. Houses were burned in Beit Shean, and a Jewish bus was fired upon near Beit Dagan.

Three Jews were shot dead as they left a cinema on May 16. Arabs threw a bomb at a bus on June 5, injuring 5 Jewish passengers. A 16-year-old Jewish boy was killed on July 9, a 7-year-old was killed on Sept. 19, and nine children were injured in a bombing of a school on July 23. Many buses were ambushed, thousands of trees uprooted, cattle killed, wheat burned, and holy sites desecrated.

By the time the strike was called off in October, 80 Jews were killed.

These events have “a lot to teach us all,” ISM says. The question is, do they teach us more about the group’s willingness to misrepresent history, or about their view of “nonviolence”?

AP reports:

The New York Times plans to charge readers for full access to its Web site next year, reviving an idea that fizzled twice for the newspaper. This time it’s betting that it will be able to wring more revenue from readers without crimping its Internet ad sales.

Under the plan outlined Wednesday, the Times will adopt a “metered” system that will allow readers to click on a certain number of stories for free each month before fees kick in. A metered system is designed to draw casual readers with free articles while getting fees from people who want to dig deeper on the site.

The controversy in Canada provoked by a speech given by Jason Kenney, Canadian Minister of Citizenship, Immigration and Multiculturalism in December needs a bit of unpacking, particularly in light of recent Ynet article which stated that the Canadian government had recently decided not to fund Kairos, a welfare agency supported by Canadian churches, because of its support for efforts to promote divestment from Israel.

The YNET report states:

The Canadian government has recently decided to cut back or entirely withdraw the funding to organizations that encourage a boycott of Israel or Israeli products, including pro-Palestinian and Christian groups.

One such organization is the Kairos welfare agency, which lost $7 million – half of its annual budget. Kairos is a social apparatus serving 11 Catholic and Protestant groups and churches promoting the “liberation theology” within the Canadian legal and educational establishments.

Canadian Immigration Minister Jason Kenney said that the agency’s budget was cut back in light of its anti-Semitic positions, adding the group preaches for recognition of such terror organizations as Hamas and Hezbollah while rejecting the Jewish people’s right for a state.

In fact, the Canadian government did not cut the organization’s annual budget, but denied a grant application filed by Kairos. Moroever, the government’s decison was not related to the organization’s anti-Israel stance but was largely due to funding priorities of the Canadian government.

Nevertheless, the controversy over Kenney’s speech in Jerusalem did, thanks to the work of Canadian journalists, draw attention to the organization’s discriminatory attitude toward Israel, which the organization’s leaders have apparently tried to obscure.
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Watch the CNN video Infections ‘Out of Control’ about Israel’s amazing medical rescue efforts in Haiti.

CNN’s Elizabeth Cohen interviews Dr. Jennifer Furin of the Harvard Medical School who states:

No one except the Israeli hospital has taken any of our patients.

Cohen goes on to say the following about the Israeli field hospital:

I am just amazed….I am just amazed at what’s here. This is….this is….like another world compared to the other hospital. Imaging department, I mean imaging….my god….they have machines here. They have actual operating rooms and….it’s just amazing.

A heartwarming story of Israel’s humanitarian efforts in Haiti. Israeli doctors delivered a baby boy at an emergency field hospital Israel set up in Port-au-Prince, and the appreciative Haitian mother promptly named the child “Israel” in recognition of the Jewish state’s efforts on behalf of her child.

Read complete story here.

“Iraq reclaims a Jewish history it once shunned,” proclaims the headline of Rebecca Santana’s AP article today. Good news, right? The lengthy article ostensibly examines the intentions of the Iraqi authorities seeking the return of Iraqi Jewish archives taken and restored by Americans during the Iraq war, and includes the claims by Iraqi authorities that they genuinely seek to preserve “our cultural heritage.”

Meanwhile, completely unmentioned by the AP, Iraq’s Antiquities and Heritage Authority is reportedly erasing all signs of Judaism at the holy site of Ezekiel’s tomb. Just two days ago the Jerusalem Post reported:

For centuries Jews, Christians and Muslims came to Al-Kifl, a small town south of Baghdad, to visit the tomb of the Prophet Ezekiel and pray.

The distinctive Jewish character of the Al-Kifl shrine, namely the Hebrew inscriptions and the Torah Ark, never bothered the gentile worshipers. In the 14th century a minaret was built next to the shrine, but the interior design remained Jewish. The vast majority of Iraq’s Jewish community left some 60 years ago, but Shi’ites took good care of the holy site.

Until now.

Recently “Ur,” a local Iraqi news agency, reported that a huge mosque will be built on top of the grave by Iraq’s Antiquities and Heritage Authority, while Hebrew inscriptions and ornaments are being removed from the site, all as part of renovations.

Prof. Shmuel Moreh of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, winner of the 1999 Israel Prize in Middle Eastern studies and chairman of the Association of Jewish Academics from Iraq, speaking to The Jerusalem Post on Wednesday, confirmed the report.

“I first heard the news of tomb desecration from a friend of mine who is a German scholar. After visiting the site he called me and said that some Hebrew inscriptions on the grave were covered by plaster and that a mosque is planned to be built on top of the tomb. He told me that he found the changes at the tomb disturbing and warned me that I’d better act quickly, before any irreversible damage will be inflicted,” Moreh said.

“I had contacted Mr. Shelomo Alfassa, US director of Justice for Jews from Arab Countries, and told him about this situation. Then I saw the report from the Ur news agency, mentioning the decision of the Antiquities and Heritage Authority to build a mosque and to erase the Hebrew inscriptions and ornaments,” Moreh said.

He asked friends to check out the developments at the site. The most recent to visit the shrine said that some of the inscriptions are now hidden by a layer of plaster.

Iraqi press reports claim that the building must be destroyed because of its poor condition. However, Alfassa believes that Iraq’s Antiquities and Heritage Authority “has been pressured by Islamists to historically cleanse all evidence of a Jewish connection to Iraq – a land where Jews had lived for over a thousand years before the advent of Islam.”

Iraq “reclaims” Jewish history indeed. Reclaims and destroys. Send feedback to [email protected].

C-SPAN Executives Susan Swain and Brian Lamb

As Jeffrey Goldberg has discovered, communicating with C-SPAN executives about their network having become a platform for anti-Semites to spew hatred isn’t easy. Unlike virtually every other media outlet, C-SPAN refuses to return phone calls, letters and emails from dissatisfied viewers. This is the case even though C-SPAN considers itself a public service, devoted to promoting a smooth-functioning and interactive democracy.

Goldberg has persisted, though, and on January 14 reported he’d elicited a written statement from Terry Murphy, the network’s VP for Programming, who wrote:

The call-in program has been a fixture of the C-SPAN networks for nearly all of our three decades. Our mission statement commits us to providing the audience with “direct access” to our guests on an “open basis”. The live, town-hall format of the program can occasionally give rise to distasteful statements by callers making it to air, and the January 4 call is an example. We air approximately 400 calls per week and this kind of language is not typical of the vast majority. Program hosts, whose role is to facilitate the dialogue between callers and guests, are certainly permitted to step in when a caller makes ad hominem attacks or uses obscenity or obviously racist language. Given that this involves quick judgment during a live television production, it’s an imperfect process that didn’t work as well as it should have that day.

First, the “live, town-hall format” does not “occasionally give rise to distasteful statements” but often — sometimes many times a week, even multiple times in a single segment — gives rise to raw, unadulterated, anti-Jewish ravings. The outpouring of bigoted attacks on Jews by callers to the network should long ago have caused CEO’s Brian Lamb and Susan Swain, as well as other senior executives, to take action.

Indeed, if program hosts are “certainly permitted to step in” when callers make bigoted statements, why don’t they? What are they waiting for? Do they think the crude, conspiracy-mongering callers who blame all the world’s ills on Israel and its supporters have a valid point?

Do members of the C-SPAN Board of Directors condone this?

And if not, what are they waiting for?

Walter Brueggemann, a giant in the world of Old Testament theology and interpretation, has affirmed the notion that the Arab-Israeli conflict is solely the fault of the Jews.

Such an assertion will be met with disbelief from admirers his work which includes David’s Truth, his commentaries on Genesis, First and Second Samuel and Message of the Psalms.

Still the fact remains that in Brueggemann’s view, Jewish self-understanding can reasonably be regarded as the root cause of the fighting between Israel and its adversaries in the Middle East.
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