In 2004, the United Methodist Church passed a resolution calling for “members of each congregation to study the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from all perspectives.” The call for impartiality by the largest mainline Protestant church in the United States was a laudable one, but it has since become clear that for some Methodists fair-mindedness is not on the agenda.
Within the church there are various bodies that address specific subjects of concern to the whole denomination. One of these, the General Board of Global Ministries, embarked on a yearlong, church-wide “mission study” program on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. To date the perspective presented by the program has been so predominantly Palestinian, and the effort to vilify Israel so transparent, that one can only conclude there is a campaign underway to persuade Methodists to support divestment at the denomination’s quadrennial General Conference next year.
The centerpiece of the mission study is a slick 220-page volume written by Reverend Stephen Goldstein. The book, which is published by the Women’s Division of the General Board of Global Ministries, is available for purchase on the United Methodist Church’s official Web site.
The pattern of presenting biased opinions against Israel repeats itself over and over again in the mission study — as it does in the resources and links offered on the Web site of the General Board of Global Ministries.
Take, for example, the mission study’s bibliography, which is available for downloading from the board’s Web site. The first item listed is an article titled “Remember the Liberty.” Published by a group called Americans for Middle East Understanding, the article claims Israel deliberately attacked an American Navy ship during the Six-Day War in 1967. No countervailing view is included.
Indeed, in his book Goldstein describes the incident as having been “covered up for 30 years.” To get what he calls the “full story,” Goldstein directs readers to none other than the Web site of Americans for Middle East Understanding.
In both the bibliography and the book itself, some of Israel’s harshest critics — including Norman Finkelstein, Noam Chomsky, George Ball, Robert Fisk and Ilan Pappé — are given overwhelming representation. And the bibliography’s list of recommended videos, available from Americans for Middle East Understanding, feature titles like “Children of the Nakba,” “Palestine is Still the Issue” and “Peace, Propaganda and the Promised Land.”
One section of the bibliography is titled “Jewish Religious Fundamentalism and the Place of Religion in Judaism and Israeli Society.” No comparable section addressing Islamic religious fundamentalism in Arab societies — let alone the role of radical Islamists in fomenting terrorism — is to be found.
Study mission participants are directed to download photos from the United Methodist Church’s Web site. The photos of Israelis focus on soldiers, tanks and the “wall.” The photos of Palestinians feature hugging children, a woman sewing and men smiling.
Absent from the Web site are photos showing the effects of Palestinian terrorist bombings on Israeli civilians. The message is clear.
Meanwhile, Goldstein’s narrative is plagued by severe factual errors. For instance, it describes “Baruch Goldstein’s assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in February 1994.” Rabin was shot by Yigal Amir in November 1995.
The mission study takes the view that Israel and Zionism are mostly at fault for the elusiveness of peace. It assumes the mantle of psychoanalyzing an entire society, and its tone and tenor are suffused with hostility and group stereotyping.
One example: “To this day there is a latent hysteria in Israeli life that springs directly from [the Holocaust]. It explains the paranoiac sense of isolation that has been a main characteristic of the Israeli temper since 1948…. And it has been the single most significant factor in Israel’s unwillingness to trust their Arab neighbors or the Palestinians…. Since 1948 the Holocaust and the fear of antisemitism have also created a consciousness that has contributed significantly to preventing Israel from making peace with its Arab neighbors.”
Or another: “The viewpoint of the early settlers was that of Western European colonialists. Today we would surely judge that outlook as basically racist, and it still is.” As proof of this assertion, Goldstein quotes at length the infamous “Zionism is Racism” 1975 resolution passed by the United Nations in 1975 and rescinded in 1991.
The study guide’s overall effect is to demonize Israel and those who support it. It is filled with glaring omissions, outright factual errors, misinformation and half-truths.
For example, Goldstein distorts a quote by David Ben-Gurion to supposedly prove that expelling Palestinians was always part of a Zionist master plan. In 1937 Gurion wrote a letter to his son Amos. Goldstein describes the letter as follows: “[Ben-Gurion] had written that if the Palestinians could not be removed from the country by negotiations, then ‘we will expel the Arabs and take their place.’”
In fact, Ben-Gurion wrote exactly the opposite: “We do not wish and do not need to expel Arabs and take their place.” Had Goldstein done his homework, he would also have read in the same Ben-Gurion letter, “All our aspiration is built on the assumption — proven throughout all our activity in the Land — that there is enough room in the country for ourselves and the Arabs.”
Goldstein gives scant attention to Palestinian terrorism, while condemning the security barrier that has reduced Israeli deaths by terrorism from dozens each month to practically none. He takes Yasser Arafat’s side in the failure of Oslo at Camp David. He sympathetically discusses Palestinian refugees, but never mentions that hundreds of thousands of Jews were forced to flee Arab countries as refugees.
For Goldstein, it seems, Israel is solely responsible for the Palestinians’ circumstances, while Palestinians have no active role in this conflict. Palestinians, he appears to suggest, are only victims. He patronizes them by giving their leadership, which has failed the Palestinians time and again, a free pass. And, he discounts the considerable role played by others in the region.
What can explain such deliberate distortion? Perhaps Goldstein’s own words give a strong clue.
In the study guide’s opening pages he includes an in-depth personal history, in which he shares his story of alienation from Judaism and conversion to Christianity. Raised a Jew in Brooklyn and New Jersey, he speaks of managing “to get myself expelled from Hebrew school” and walking “away from my bar mitzvah.” He describes himself in high school as “attempting to deny being Jewish. If I were an adult, I would have been labeled a self-hating Jew.”
That an important mainline Protestant denomination such as the United Methodist Church is promoting this distorted and inaccurate program reopens a troubling set of issues in Christian-Jewish relations. We must frankly ask the Methodist church’s leadership how a yearlong study that is so flagrantly insensitive and biased could have been allowed to get past a first edit — let alone endorsed, implemented and distributed.
With divestment resolutions already emerging from several regional Methodist conferences, it is difficult not to view this study mission as an effort to ensure that if, as expected, divestment is voted on at the church’s national conference next May, delegates will have been prepared to cast their votes correctly.
Under these circumstances, the Methodist leadership should now engage seriously with the Jewish community, which overwhelmingly opposes divestment from left to right. Such engagement, if it leads to a truly fair presentation of the issues, could prevent a major setback in interfaith relations.
But talk is not enough. It would be an appropriate first step for the United Methodist Church to immediately suspend this flawed and fraudulent study mission, and restart it only after a serious review of the process has taken place. The church needs to ensure that materials representing a broad spectrum of mainstream Israeli and American Jewish perspectives are fully allowed into the discussion. Not only would this be in line with the church’s own policy of studying the issue “from all perspectives,” but it would support, rather than erode, the recent decades of Jewish-Christian rapprochement.
Yitzhak Santis is director of the San Francisco-based Jewish Community Relations Council’s Middle East Project.
The leadership of Israel has itself demonized Israel. No one else is needed to do that job.
It is no accident that the leadership of several mainstream religious denominations has been taken over by lefties. Senator McCarthy, where are you now that we need you. "There, that ought to do it." Danny DeVito
United Methodist has had some of the worst teaching materials I can imagine for their Sunday School children regarding Judaism. Judaism is tokened and demeaned. Other materials that are directed to the adults also have been disdainful towards Jews and Judaism adn , at the same time, unconditionally accepting of Yassir Arafat-type Palastinianism.
It's simply amazing to read that the "viewpoint of the early settlers was that of Western European colonialists..." Obviously, there is no historical accuracy in this quote (Zionism attracted the majority of its 'olim from the Yiddish speaking world of Eastern Europe) - but that is not the point that I wish to raise. What I find to be utterly absurd is that any American would throw such a statement (rightly or wrongly) at anyone! The settlements that were to become the USA were indeed a colonial project of Western Europeans (i.e. England, and that's why English is the language of the United Methodist Church). Hebrew, on the other hand, has not been imported to this land by outsiders. Perhaps the Methodist Church should re-read some of the sermons of Jesus, and refrain from "casting stones".
The psychoanalysis of an entire society over almost 60 years [or even longer, counting the Yishuv] is problematic. Otoh, the point of psychoanalysis is to understand the motivations of an individual. Perhaps Rev. Goldstein's confusion concerning the assassin of Yitzhak Rabin can be viewed as a Freudian slip?
I am a United Methodist and totally disturbed by the direction the leadership of the denomination has been taking for the past 30 or so years. Not too dissimilar from the leadership of other mainline Protestant churches and the National Council of Churches. I am in a quandry. I love my church and its history, but I don't want any of my support going to this leadership. Please be assured that the people in the pews don't necessarily agree. My two grandchildren are Jewish....I have utmost respect and admiration for the faith.
This may very well be a biased effort with an agenda and that is unfortunate. Israel, however, has NEVER told the truth about the Liberty incident and the US has NEVER held Israel accountable for this dispicable act. It is difficult to imagine that IDF air and sea forces could attack the Liberty for 3/4 of an hour and not realize that it was a USN ship. It is especially difficult to imagine this when we realize that the Egyptian ship they claim to have thought they were attacking looks completely different from the Liberty even to the untrained eye. It is even harder to imagine this when we know that the Liberty was flying a US flag throughout the incident. In truth, the Israeli story is impossible to swallow. This is especially true in the wake of publication of declassified NSA tapes that reveal IDF force communications on scene discussing the attack on a US vessel!!! Even if we accepted the nonsense about mistaken identity, however, what justification did the IDF have for machine gunning helpless men in the water? What really happened? Did the initial attacker mistake the Liberty for an Egyptian vessel at first and then decide to finish the job? Was this a rogue action? Or did someone in the IDF hierarchy feel the US was getting too close to secrets Israel wanted to protect and gamble that LBJ would not stand up to Israel? Whatever the case, Israel needs to come clean on this.
Unfortunately the Methodist Church has not placed this summary of their views on Israel online -- they wish to earn a profit from the publication, instead -- but I observe that they have deigned to publish the table of contents and summary at .
Whoops, let me try that URL again: "http", followed by: new.gbgm-umc.org/missionstudies/israelpalestine/resources/adultstudybook/
""hundreds of thousands of Jews were forced to flee Arab countries as refuges" is one of the most glaring Zionist lies. The Jews were not forced to flee the Arab countries. They were allured to immigrate to the newly formed Zionist state, just cleansed from its native Palestinian population, by terror intimidation and physical repulsion, using propaganda, empty promises and in some case (like in Iraq) staging attacks against Jewish targets by the Israeli Mossad to frighten the Jews to flee. These historical truths are amply documented.
The Methodists are right. I support Israel, but I don't support the Israeli government whose policies are controlled by the settler movement. Israel could have had peace 20 years ago if they had gone back to the 1967 borders. I was horrified to find out that IDF soldiers are killing Palestinian children, deliberately and without any military necessity, and the IDF is not punishing those soldiers. Amnesty International, KILLING THE FUTURE: Children in the line of fire http://web.amnesty.org/library/Index/ENGMDE020052002 Real Jews cannot stand by silently without protesting and resisting while the IDF is killing children (just as we condemn the Palestinians). The real Jews are people like Leah Tsimmel, Amanda Haas, Noam Chomsky, Norman Finkelstein, Amy Goodman, and the many Jews in B'Tselem, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. I am on the side of people who oppose killing children -- whether they are Methodists, Moslems or Jews. That which is hateful to you, do not do unto others.
When Jesus the rabbi, returns to JERUSALEM the first thing He will do is send all the Methodists to HELL.
Hi Mery... Hope all is well with y'all and the Chicago weather isn't too onerous for you. This article deals with the Methodists...but I know the Evangelical Lutherans are also considering a boycott or disinvestment move and, of coures, we know about the Presbyterians (many, not all) views/actions. I thought you might find this detailed rebuttal interesting, to say the least.
Regarding the Liberty incident, the NSA never adequately explained what the premiere spy ship of the US Navy was doing 13 miles off the coast of Sinai gathering ISraeli combat radio chatter for hours while the US authorities for hours on end were telling Tel Aviv that there was no US ship in the vicinity. All other ships, including Russian ones, had heeded the Israeli request to vacate the area, as is normally the case in declared combat zones. This after the US failed to heed its written promise of heading up an international flotilla to open the blockaded Straits of Tiran that Dulles made to Eban a decade earlier in 1957 to get Israel to withdraw after the '56 Sinai war. Earlier the US had declared its neutrality in the conflict,and some soldiers on the ground noted increased resistance along the Suez Canal. With no air force, how did Egyptian troops suddenly know from where ISrael troops were attacking. So the US also has some explaining to do, and not just ISrael. Regarding the killing of Palestinian children by IDF, Hamas had been openly teaching and using children for a long time, and promising them instant martyrdom and paradise in death. Israel does not INTENTIONALLY target children, although some mostly non-Jewish members of the IDF have been indicted and convicted of such charges. There are Druze and Bedouins in the IDF, as well as some other ARabs. They have invariably been tougher than the Jewish troops. In any case, for Hamas, the death of one of their children is a WIN/WIN proposition. If they get killed, they become instant martyrs and heroes, as well as an enormously effective propaganda tools in the western press against Israel. So they can't lose by using and losing children in their jihad. So can Israel give up its own defense because the enemy puts their own children in the front ranks? It's a dilemma with no easy answer. Americans too have faced some of this in Iraq and Afghanistan.
It's always when I read something is "well-documented" but no authority is cited (as Peter Tessler does) that I grow wary. "Norman" cites something from Amnesty Int'l, but I don't find AI a credible, unbiased organization. It always amazes me that Israel-demonizers, either deliberately or ignorantly, ignore Israel's history of peace gestures (including the peace treaties with Egypt and Jordan). They almost always omit mention of the Barak's historic offer of peace in 2000 to the Palestinians, which Arafat responded to by launching a war of suicide bombings and brutal murders.
With all this the leadership of the American Jewish Community, so in thrall of left-liberalism, prefers to deal with the Establishment churches and disdains the Evangelicals and Fundamentalists who support Israel.
Since antisemitism is rapidly growing in the world, why don't the Jews start looking into how they can change to stop that growth? Did the Jews ever think of looking seriously at their religion and see that it as silly as all religions and similar to believing in Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny? How much horror and death will they continue to cause before they stop?
The Methodist Church has been growing ever more apostate. As more and more of their leadership is being taken over by leftist ideologists. They are more concerned about promoting a political agenda, than teaching Christian doctrine. The drive to divestiture is nothing more than thinly veiled anti-semitism, or at the very least anti-zionism, hidden behind a faux concern for the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. Invoking the 40 year old USS Liberty incident should give you a clue. The growing hatred of the left towards Jews should be concern. The same scapegoating Jews have had to endure from rightwing extremists is manifesting itself on the left. Derived from the same near conspiratorial view of Jews as the elitist power brokers. Whereas on the right, Jew haters have been marginalized, not so on the left. Perhaps Jews should reconsider their liberal orientation.
If they weren't so dangerous, the Methodist leadership mentioned above. and such historically ignorant Jews as theis Goldstein would be simply pathetic. I have spoken with members of the Methodist church, and apparently the National Methodist membership put up such a hue and cry about their Israeli position that they rescinded their vote to censure Israel. Obviously the work in combatting such continued defamation has to continue. After WWII many Nazis fled to the Arab world, where they were hired by Arab governments to work in Propaganda. They have succeeded exemplary. Who remembers that the Arab world was actively pro-Nazi in WWII? Anyone who thinks "land for peace", or the creation and existence of the state of Israel or Istraeli policy or or or ... has caused Arab problems should learn and ponder this history. Jew hatred has its own life, and the yet best-selling "Mein Kampf" in the Arab world should chill any politically correctnik's ignorant bones.
Did you find Amnesty International credible when they were defending Soviet Jews?
Peter Tessler said: """hundreds of thousands of Jews were forced to flee Arab countries as refuges" is one of the most glaring Zionist lies. The Jews were not forced to flee the Arab countries. They were allured to immigrate to the newly formed Zionist state, just cleansed from its native Palestinian population, by terror intimidation and physical repulsion, using propaganda, empty promises and in some case (like in Iraq) staging attacks against Jewish targets by the Israeli Mossad to frighten the Jews to flee. These historical truths are amply documented." This is antizionist propaganda. The Jews of Iraq were under attack by the Baathist regime even before the founding of Israel. There was a progrom in 1943 instigated by the Nazi allied government: Farhud (June 1-2, 1941) "A delegation of Iraqi Jews, sent to meet the Regent Abdul Illah arriving at Baghdad airport, was attacked by the mob as they crossed Al Khurr Bridge. Violence quickly spread to the Al Rusafa and Abu Sifyan districts and got worse the next day, when Iraqi policemen joined in on the attacks on the Jewish community. Shops belonging to Jews were burned, and a synagogue was destroyed. In the afternoon of June 2, British forces quelled the violence by imposing the curfew and shot violators on sight. According to some testimonies it is possible that the British delayed their entry into Baghdad for 48 hours because they wanted passions in the city to boil over and had an interest in a clash between Jews and Muslims.[4]" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farhud Your post Tessler is a tissue of lies of the anti-zioinist, antisemitic kind (take your pick).
Norman said: "Did you find Amnesty International credible when they were defending Soviet Jews?" Amnesty did a great job during the cold war supporting dissidents on both sides of the iron curtain. Currently AI has become a shill for terrorists who kill civilians. Your post about the IDF killing children is not credible.
This is just a manifestation of liberation theology. The Methodist Church has a theological problem of why Jews still exist today. The great hope was Hitler, who was supposed to solve this problem, but unfortunately for replacement theologists, Hitler didnt get a chance to finalize the Final Solution. Today, a clever alliance of historical minimalists are stating that there is no Jewish historical claim to Palestine, thus confirming Palestinian (and Methodist) claims that Palestine was stolen by rapacious Jewish real estate agents. They go hand in hand with Holocaust deniers, who deny the Holocaust to decry Israels lack of faith in the world community. Finally, "new historians" claim that the creation of Israel was the greatest atrocity in Israel (greater than the so-called Holocaust, ie Toynbee) and greater than Rwanda, Chinese famines and Cultural Revolution, etc
Dan quoting people's private conversations and diaries doesn't prove anything about Israel or Zionism. Neither Jabotinsky's nor Ben Gurion's private views are Israeli policy. Your dishonesty says more about your own bigotry than it does about the Jewish State.
To Dan: People that engage in propaganda only deceive themselves. Time you fast forward to the 21st Century... Pan-Arab initiative for peace in the Middle East "All the neighborhood, if you will, will be at peace with Israel, will recognize their right to exist," Prince Saud al-Faisal speaking on behalf of the Arab League.
it seems that Revd Stephen Goldstein is now an adult, as he says, and as such a self-hating ex-Jew (it is a mopt point whether one can be wholly an ex-Jew); how and why the Methodists have found him a valid Christian is merely a question in my mind - but from the quotes given I suspect that he does not convey a genuine Christianity to others, perhaps not even inwardly to himself. A tormented soul and one whose 'adjustment' consists of hitting at those with whom he might otherwise have identified ...I have no doubt that Israel has enacted many harsh measures but overall, in the context I would hope that a true Christian mission would be to find ways of healing. I dont see them in the quotes we have been given....
Robbins wants to rebut everything on this list he disagrees with, so he can have the last word on this: Hillel said, "That which is hateful to you, do not do unto others." Was Hillel credible? Was Hillel an anti-Semite? Was Hillel an anti-Zionist?
"We can talk as much as we want about our good intentions; but they understand as well as we what is not good for them. They look upon Palestine with the same instinctive love and true fervor that any Aztec looked upon his Mexico or any Sioux looked upon his prairie...Thus we conclude that we cannot promise anything to the Arabs of the Land of Israel or the Arab countries. Their voluntary agreement is out of the question. Hence those who hold that an agreement with the natives is an essential condition for Zionism can now say “no” and depart from Zionism. Zionist colonization, even the most restricted, must either be terminated or carried out in defiance of the will of the native population. This colonization can, therefore, continue and develop only under the protection of a force independent of the local population – an iron wall which the native population cannot break through. This is, in toto, our policy towards the Arabs. To formulate it any other way would only be hypocrisy." -Vladimir Jabotinsky (1923), who led a group that split from the main Zionist congress, and preached a militant form of Revisionist Zionism. The leaders of the Revisionists in pre-WWII Palestine founded two terrorist organizations - the Irgun, and the even more extreme Lehi. http://www.marxists.de/middleast/ironwall/ironwall.htm http://www.israelblog.org/1040190582/ "If I were an Arab leader I would never make terms with Israel. That is natural: we have taken their country . . . We come from Israel, but two thousand years ago, and what is that to them? There has been anti-semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They only see one thing: we have come here and stolen their country. Why should they accept that?" --David Ben-Gurion, Israel's first prime minister, speaking to Nahum Goldmann, president of the World Jewish Congress
Yo! What do you think about Apple Iogo? >:)
They are anti-Semites.Accept it and treat them as one would a Nazi SS since many of them left Austria after the fall of their Hitler. Others who one meets have the KKK mentality. Off course Rev Steve Goldstein has always been a self proclaimed Jew hater as was the Phila Central High grad Naom Chomsky who I was told is from a Communist supportive family. Why worry about them?
I received a card statement yesterday, and discovered that there was an unauthorized charge from the InfoSys Technologies LLC in the amount of $11.98 I wanted to resolve the problem and called their customer support number 517639-0760, but I reached their answering machine. From the message I found out that the best way to contact them would be through e-mail support@infosystemplates.net I wrote a letter about my problem to the noted e-mal address, and within 5 minutes I received a reply that the situation will be reviewed, and in about 5-7 hours, I will receive a notice to my e-mail, and then, during 72 hours they will make a refund. Today I have received a refund and want to take back all the claims for InfoSys Technologies LLC. The mistake was corrected very quickly, and they have shown themselves as a serious company. Besides, I got a free version of their software as compensation. Good work, keep it up!
During one of my "persuasion" calls for Barack Obama, a 40 year old respondent said he is voting for Obama because of information he learned on a two-month long missionary trip with Global Ministries. From that tour that focused on the misery of the Palestinians, this man believes that if Obama is President, Israel will no longer receive monetary support from the United States. I must say, as a past chairman of Women's Division of the United Jewish Appeal, a six-time visitor to Israel and a strong believer in the State of Israel, it was a frightening conversation.