An article in the Turkish Daily News, provides another bit of evidence that “peacemaking” statements by church organizations in the U.S. have unintended consequences.

The article, which recyles the false charge that the excavation near the Mughrabi Gate of the Temple Mount “a threat to the foundations of the Al-Aqsa mosque,” uses a Feb. 9, 2007 letter from CMEP to counter Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s complaints about extremists attempting to use the excavation as a pretext to incite violence.

CMEP’s letter, signed by Executive Director Corinne Whitlach and the group’s chair, Maureen Shea, asked officials from the U.S. Dept. of State to pressure Israel to stop the excavation approximately 60 meters from the Temple Mount but failed to insist that the Palestinian officials work to promote calm amongst their followers and deal with the issue in a peaceful manner.
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The Churches for Middle East Peace, a so-called “peace-making” group has issued a letter to the U.S. Department of State, asking officials to call on Israel to halt the excavation at the Western Wall in the Old City of Jerusalem. By failing to call on the Palestinians to halt their acts of violence, the CMEP offers a propaganda victory to the PA’s Muslim Waqf, which has caused hysteria in the Middle East by falsely asserting that the construction threatens the structural integriy of Al-Aksa Mosque.

The letter issued on February 9, 2007 reads in part: “Unless Israel quickly stops the excavation work, and the planned construction, we fear that violent protests will break out in Israel, the West Bank and Gaza and far beyond.”
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James M. Wall, longtime columnist for Christian Century has made yet another error in a commentary about the Arab-Israeli conflict, but it’s unlikely it will be corrected, because the magazine’s editors have demonstrated a fundamental unwillingness to exert editorial oversight over Rev. Wall’s work.
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Paul Merkley, author of Christian Attitudes Towards the State of Israel and American Presidents, Religion, and Israel: The Heirs of Cyrus is one of the more trenchant observers of the relationship between Christian churches and the State of Israel. His recent review in Christianity Today demonstrates his ability to counter the suspicious fantasies that motivate many of Israel’s critics today.
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Jan. 25 UPDATE: No major American media outlet or wire service has followed up on this story since it first became known. Ironically, the Arab Gulf News Service and the Agence France Press (AFP) have. Are newspapers like the New York Times looking to repeat their sorry record of under-reporting the “ethnic cleansing” of Jews?

Jan. 23 entry: While the plight of Palestinian refugees who left their homes during Israel’s War of Independence is a very popular topic in the world media, the story of the hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees forced from their homes in Arab lands at the same time garners considerably less attention.

Now word comes that the story may be recurring today. Yediot Aharonot reports that:

Jewish residents of the Saada region in northern Yemen have received explicit threats to leave the area within 10 days from followers of radical cleric Hussein Badr Eddin al Houthi, according to the Saudi newspaper Al-Watan.

Following complaints from the threatened Jews, a meeting of the local authorities and the district’s sheikhs was held.

The Jews demanded they be treated as equal Yemenite citizens, and at the end of the meeting a religious verdict determining the relationship between them and the Muslims was given.

This verdict, which was also signed by Jews, did not guarantee them immunity from threats.

The report emphasizes that Yemenite Jews do NOT wish to leave their home or Yemen itself:

Yemenite immigrants in Israel have been following these developments. Masoud, a resident of Israel’s southern city of Beer Sheva who immigrated to Israel from Yemen six-and-a-half years ago said in an interview on Israel Radio that he was still in touch with his relatives in Yemen.

“Those who stayed are stubborn, they don’t want to come here…on Friday they told me that they got letters saying whoever doesn’t leave their home will be killed and have their children taken,” said Masoud.

Regardless of the wisdom of the Yemeni Jews’ decision, it behooves the press to find out more about what may become a form of ethnic cleansing in which “Arab Jews” are once again victims.

UPI is carrying the story and we hope that other mainstream media outlets will follow suit. Let’s wait and see…

After years of relative silence about the problems in Palestinian society that diminish the prospects for peace with Israel, religious leaders in Jerusalem have called for an end to violence between Fatah and Hamas, two factions that are poised to fight for dominance in the West Bank and Gaza. In a statement issued on Jan. 12, 2007, thirteen Christian leaders called for an end to violence in the West Bank and Gaza and warned against the prospects of a civil war between the factions. They also offered to act as mediators between Fatah and Hamas and called for arms to be taken off the streets.

While it is unrealistic to expect that Christian leaders will be able to act as a mediators in a Muslim-dominated conflict, or to expect that Hamas and Fatah will take their weapons off the street, the statement from Christian leaders comes at time of uncertainty when non-Muslims would have every reason to fade into the background of Palestinian society.

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Margot Patterson

Margot Patterson, a staff writer at the National Catholic Reporter, is standing by her “reporting” about Hezbollah. Despite its ongoing campaign to overthrow a democratically elected government, continued acquisition of weapons courtesy of Syria, and increasingly flagrant expressions of Jew-hatred, she still thinks the group should be portrayed as a nuanced and sophisticated political organization whose anti-Semitism isn’t worth mentioning.

In a letter to the Jewish Chronicle responding to a piece drawing attention to her indifference to Hezbollah’s anti-Semitism, Patterson asks “[M]ust every article about Hezbollah discuss its anti-Semitism?”
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A coalition of prominent Christian, Jewish and Muslim leaders calling itself the National Interreligious Initiative for Peace in the Middle East issued a statement titled “Arab-Israeli-Palestinian Peace: From Crisis to Hope” earlier this week.

This statement is much more conciliatory than the statements about the Arab-Israeli conflict typically issued by mainline Protestant churches. The conciliatory tone is probably due to the involvement of Roman Catholic Bishops and Jewish leaders in the coalition that authored the document, not on any change of heart on the part of the mainline Protestant leaders who signed the document. In fact, on one key issue — Israel’s security barrier — the document actually contradicts resolutions passed by two denominations whose leaders signed the document.
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In most instances when an institution or publication decides to withdraw an article on its Web site from public view, it redirects surfers to a page that reads “file not found” or “page not available.”

Not so with the Episcopal Church.

Rev. Canon Brian Grieves, director of the church’s peace and justice ministries, recently agreed to take down an article falsely accusing Israel of perpetrating a massacre during the battle at Jenin in 2002. Rev. Canon Grieves made the decision after being contacted by CAMERA over inaccuracies and bias on the church’s Web site.

The article is down, only to be replaced with another article about a church resolution condemning Israel for accidently shelling a chapel in Gaza in 2003. A mere “file not found” does not suffice.

A coincidence? Maybe, but in light of what the denomination has been telling people about the conflict for the past few years (and longer), probably not.
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On the heels of Peace Now’s latest report claiming that roughly 40 percent of the land used by Israeli settlements is private Palestinian land, a CAMERA analysis determined:

There can be no doubt … that the majority of land that Peace Now calls “private Palestinian land” is in fact mewat, or waste land, and therefore permanently in the public domain, with not even rights to cultivate. …

… even if Peace Now’s very questionable leaked data is technically accurate, its other “facts,” its analysis, and its conclusions are faulty, and therefore deserve little credibility.

Now, what little credibility the Peace Now report had seems to be gone. A follow-up CAMERA investigation finds that

The leaked map says nothing about rights to the land in question, only about claims to such rights. And many of these claims, such as the Jahalin claims on Ma’ale Adumim, were debunked long ago.

Read the first CAMERA analysis here, and the follow-up investigation here.