Episcopal Lefties Hijack MLK to Bash Israel

from Stand Firm by David Fischler 

This being Martin Luther King, Jr.‘s birthday weekend, various people are hard at work enlisting King in whatever their crusade happens to be. For the ironically-named “Episcopal Voices of Conscience,” that means using King’s name to bash Israel. In a letter to the Executive Council of the Episcopal Church, such luminaries as Gene Robinson, Bonnie Anderson, Edmond Browning, Bishops Steven Charleston and Leo Frade, and Desmond Tutu (what would such a letter be without Anglicanism’s own crazy uncle?) Demand Action Now:

“No, no, we are not satisfied, and we will not be satisfied until ‘justice rolls down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream.’”-  Martin Luther King , Jr. August 28, 1963 Washington, D.C.
Today as we celebrate the life and witness of the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King, Jr., we affirm once more that we will continue to build on his dream of a fully inclusive America, “where we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual: Free at last! Free at last!  Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!”

That has nothing to do with the issue at hand, except, I suppose, that King mentions Jews, but it does sound good.

Today we also want to invoke Dr. King’s call for justice on the land where Jesus lived his earthly ministry, the holy land that is precious to all Jews, Christians, and Muslims – the people of Abraham. We affirm that God intends for Israeli Jews and Palestinians to live together in a just peace. Dr. King reminds us that justice must be the arbiter of this conflict, and we add that truth must be its accompanist. This is the justice Jesus called for when he said, “He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives, … to set at liberty those who are oppressed.”

Um, Palestinians were free before 1967…wait, no, they were ruled by Jordanians and Egyptians. What’s that you say? TEC didn’t have anything to say about the West Bank and Gaza being “occupied” then? Well, what do you know.

Just as this church stood with South Africa and Namibia during the dark days of Apartheid, so we recognize that we need to be standing with our sister and brother Palestinians who have endured an Apartheid that Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu has described as worse than it was in South Africa.

Which is part of the reason I refer to Tutu as the crazy uncle. The differences between apartheid and the situation in the Holy Land are so great that only a mind that sees everything through the lens of apartheid could make that comparison. Here’s what I wrote on another occasion of Tutu’s apartheid-fantasizing:

[T]here is virtually no comparison between the two situations. In South Africa, blacks objected to being banished to “independent” Bantustans; the Palestinians are desperate for a state of their own (if anything, it’s Hamas and their desire for a single, Judenrein Palestinian state that most resemble the Afrikaaners). In South Africa, it was the state that beat up on its own people; in the Holy Land, the Palestinians aren’t citizens of Israel, but would-be invaders from outside. In South Africa, blacks had no rights to speak of; in Israel, Palestinian Arabs who are citizens—about one-sixth of the population—have all the rights of Jewish citizens, including the right to vote, to be elected to the Knesset, to sit in the government, even to speak out in support of their non-Israeli brethren. In South Africa, the courts facilitated the brutal treatment of blacks; in Israel, the courts protect the rights of Palestinians, even to the point of ordering the government to change many of its policies over the years (it is the Israeli Supreme Court, for instance, not the powerless International Court of Justice, that got the government to make changes in the route the security fence takes, ordering it to avoid as much as possible infringing on Palestinian-owned lands, orchards, and farms).

Yeah, other than that, it could be the same situation.

Israel must be held accountable for allowing an occupation for 45 years that suffocates the dreams of freedom that Palestinians hold every bit as much as African Americans sought on that day when Dr. King told the world that he had a dream. Occupation cannot be justified as a tool of security. Occupation is its own form of violence, a prescription for frustration and rage among those shackled under its harsh restraints.

Actually, occupation can by justified as a tool of security when withdrawal is likely to result in violence directed against the former occupiers (what’s happened in Gaza since the Israeli withdrawal in 2005 is a perfect example). As for “frustration and rage,” the Palestinians would long since have been out from under the occupation if they’d been able to control all too many of their countrymen’s murderous impulses over the years.
The writers go on to ask the Executive Council for action of various sorts that would be meaningless even if it were done, which judging by the Presiding Bishop’s response isn’t going to happen. Then, they’re back to the screed:

The truth that is so readily seen worldwide, except among our nation’s leaders, is that Israel imposes a matrix of control over the occupied Palestinian territories, locating Jewish settlements on prime Palestinian land, building segregated roads forbidden to Palestinians to connect the settlers to Israel proper, erecting a wall that causes havoc in the daily lives of Palestinians and serves as another pretext to occupy yet more land. We see check points that are used to control the movements of people on their own land where tactics of bullying, intimidation, and detention are practiced; and where the demolition of homes and the uprooting of olive tree orchards are commonplace causing further humiliation and insult, along with the destruction of livelihoods. We see what was once Palestinian East Jerusalem being subsumed through Israel’s settlement policy. We see the teeming population of Gaza held under confinement on land, in the air, and at sea….
We ask today why is it that Congress and the White House are unable to see the injustice of the occupation, where Israel is the oppressor, and the Palestinians the oppressed?

Leaving the pejorative language aside, there’s some truth in this description of conditions. What’s missing is any kind of historical, political, or military context. No hint that any of these conditions have been made necessary by Palestinian terrorism. No acknowledgement that Gaza is no longer occupied, and that the blockade is the result of continued shelling of southern Israel by Hamas. No recognition of the Palestinian refusal to take “yes” for an answer, or of Hamas’s refusal to repudiate its long-standing goal of destroying Israel. Instead, we get the standard Manichaean good Palestinians/evil Israelis propaganda.

We believe, as does our Church, in the right of the state of Israel to exist, and we are aware of the threats against it from multiple sources, which saddens and concerns us.

But which we really don’t think important enough to so much as mention the source of the threats, or to suggest ways that Israel might legitimately defend itself.

We assure all Jews in Israel and everywhere that we too share a commitment to Israel’s security and peace

I’m sure Jews everywhere will breath a sigh of relief to know that there are goys who are committed to Israel’s security and peace even as they oppose essentially every means that Israel has of ensuring said security and peace.

even as we insist that the state of Israel end this miserable occupation, which diminishes both the oppressed and the oppressor.  We affirm our commitment to non-violence and reject the use of violence from either side. We oppose the indiscriminate use of rockets fired into Israeli communities as we oppose bombs being dropped on Gaza by Israeli fighter jets.

That last sentence really tells you all you need to know about these people. Who is it that is firing rockets into Israel? Orcs?