"ALL CAPS IN DEFENSE OF LIBERTY IS NO VICE."

Wednesday, July 22, 2015

THE ANTI-ISRAEL STAND OF THE UCC SHOWS WHY CHRISTIANITY IS LOSING ADHERENTS

Dexter Van Zile at the Weekly Standard wrote about the United Church of Christ's anti-Israelism:
Last month the general synod of the United Church of Christ approved a resolution calling on its members and local churches to boycott products made in the West Bank. The resolution also called on the denomination's local churches and the organizations that manage UCC-related investments to divest from companies that do business with Israel's defense establishment. The same body, meeting in Cleveland, almost approved a resolution declaring Israel to be an apartheid state. This resolution received a majority of votes at the general synod, but failed to get the two-thirds supermajority it needed to pass.

The general synod’s pronouncements will not promote peace between Israel and the Palestinians. Instead, they highlight the intellectual decline of a historically important denomination whose Congregationalist roots go back to arrival of European settlers in New England in the 1600s. For the people who attend local UCC churches, the actions of the general synod should be a wake-up call.

To put it bluntly, the so-called peace activists who rule the roost at the UCC's General Synod are obsessed with Israel, which tries to prevent civilian deaths when it fights its adversaries, and indifferent to the misdeeds of radical Islamists who murder civilians in an attempt to terrorize the world.

The evidence is all right there in the general synod minutes. Since 1967, the UCC's deliberative body has passed nearly 20 resolutions about the Arab-Israeli conflict, but has failed to offer up one word of criticism of the misdeeds of jihadists who have been murdering and kidnapping non-Muslims and women in the Middle East and North Africa since the Arab Spring.

Boko Haram and ISIS have simply not made it onto the general synod's radar. When the Jewish state uses force to defend itself, the UCC's general synod responds with condemnation, but when Arabs and Muslims do bad things to other Muslims, Christians, Yazidis, Bahais, the body has remained silent. And it’s not as if the general synod, which has promoted same-sex marriage and the rights of women, has spoken up on behalf of gay men who have been thrown from rooftops in Iraq or condemned ISIS-sponsored auction of women in sex-slave markets in that country. Any Christian body remotely concerned about human rights would confront these issues and yet the UCC’s general synod has remained silent in the face of these outrages.

The body even seeks to impose its silence about Islamist violence on other people and institutions. In 2011, the general synod passed a resolution condemning Islamophobia, which stated in part, that the mistreatment of Muslims in the U.S. contributed to Muslim violence against Christians in the Middle East. With this logic, people who criticize Islam become complicit in the murder of Christians in Muslim-majority countries.

How's that for moral inversion?
Absolutely awful. They take a victimology path that absolves Islamofascists of all guilt, yet turn their backs on pretty much all Christians in the middle east. And if they end up losing adherents because of that, they shouldn't be surprised.

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