WHERE CREDIT IS DUE
Pay close attention because you’re about to read something that doesn’t show up here all that often. I’m going to say really nice things about Katharine Jefferts Schori because in this particular situation, the Presiding Bishop is exactly right:
Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori and President of the House of Deputies the Rev. Gay Clark Jennings have said that a draft letter pressing the Executive Council to intervene in the implementation of the Episcopal Church’s policies on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is extremely unhelpful and disregards due legislative processes.
“Just as we don’t proof-text Scripture, we don’t proof-text resolutions, and our polity does not provide Executive Council as an appellate process,” Jennings told ENS after seeing a copy of the draft letter.
“Each triennium, however, faithful Episcopalians who disagree with a decision of General Convention work to craft new legislation for a new convention, and that process is open to all of us.”
But this really isn’t about Episcopal polity. It’s about something far more serious.
“Our work must begin by listening to those who live and work and have their being in the midst of the current conflicts, and equally attend to the conflicts in our own communities,” Jefferts Schori told ENS.
“We cannot build a lasting peace by directing or imposing strategies on others. We can encourage non-violent and transparent methods like those Jesus and his disciple Martin Luther King, Jr. did.”
That’s the Presiding Bishop’s polite way of telling the author or authors of this letter, “Are you people freaking kidding me?!!“ Because this might be the single most venomous Episcopal statement on the Middle East that I can ever recall reading. It’s quite long so I’ll just provide a few examples of its repusive rhetoric.
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.
All peoples who have experienced oppression, including indigenous peoples who have known what it is to be dispossessed of their land, understand the Palestinian issue.
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.
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 [A "city" which dates all the way back to 1948 - Ed] 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? Why is it that our government could not recognize the rights of Palestinians to status as a non-member observer state at the United Nations? Why do our country’s leaders embarrass us as a nation by being on the short end of the UN vote, 138-9, and expose our irrational bias? We are mystified that Washington lives in a bubble of unreality in its blind support of an immense injustice perpetrated every day on the Palestinian people, and foments anger across the Middle East and the world.
There’s the usual totally meaningless boilerplate.
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.
Told you.
We assure all Jews in Israel and everywhere that we too share a commitment to Israel’s 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. We affirm the right of Israel to be at peace with her neighbors, but insist it be through the prism of justice as we believe Dr. King would insist.
Translation: blah, blah, blah. I am, of course, not a Jew; the children of Israel just wrote most of my Bible. But it seems to me that if you feel the need to go out of your way to claim that you’re not an anti-Semite, then you have a serious Jew problem.
As our Church stated in 1991, we differentiate between anti-Semitism, which we abhor, and legitimate criticism of the state of Israel, especially as Israel imposes an unjust system of occupation upon another people.
Apparently, using loaded terms like apartheid constitutes “legitimate criticism of the state of Israel” in Episcopal circles these days.
And there you have it. There’s no history here, no current affairs, no interest in discovering what led up to the current Middle Eastern situation. Israel and Israel alone is the villain and that’s that.
This letter seems to have quite a bit of mainstream Episcopal support. Former House of Deputies head Bonnie Anderson and doddering old fool Ed Browning signed their names to this letter as did Gene Robinson, Leo Frade, Brian Grieves and Winnie Varghese while international Anglican leftist airheads like Jenny Te Paa and Uncle Dez also indicated their enthusiastic approval.
So it’s good that the Presiding Bishop wants to kill this atrocity. Because she knows, or should know, that letters like this one will annihilate whatever’s left of her church’s ability to speak to this issue. Choose one side, as this letter clearly does, and the other side no longer has any reason to listen to you.
Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori and President of the House of Deputies the Rev. Gay Clark Jennings have said that a draft letter pressing the Executive Council to intervene in the implementation of the Episcopal Church’s policies on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is extremely unhelpful and disregards due legislative processes.
“Just as we don’t proof-text Scripture, we don’t proof-text resolutions, and our polity does not provide Executive Council as an appellate process,” Jennings told ENS after seeing a copy of the draft letter.
“Each triennium, however, faithful Episcopalians who disagree with a decision of General Convention work to craft new legislation for a new convention, and that process is open to all of us.”
But this really isn’t about Episcopal polity. It’s about something far more serious.
“Our work must begin by listening to those who live and work and have their being in the midst of the current conflicts, and equally attend to the conflicts in our own communities,” Jefferts Schori told ENS.
“We cannot build a lasting peace by directing or imposing strategies on others. We can encourage non-violent and transparent methods like those Jesus and his disciple Martin Luther King, Jr. did.”
That’s the Presiding Bishop’s polite way of telling the author or authors of this letter, “Are you people freaking kidding me?!!“ Because this might be the single most venomous Episcopal statement on the Middle East that I can ever recall reading. It’s quite long so I’ll just provide a few examples of its repusive rhetoric.
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.
All peoples who have experienced oppression, including indigenous peoples who have known what it is to be dispossessed of their land, understand the Palestinian issue.
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.
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 [A "city" which dates all the way back to 1948 - Ed] 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? Why is it that our government could not recognize the rights of Palestinians to status as a non-member observer state at the United Nations? Why do our country’s leaders embarrass us as a nation by being on the short end of the UN vote, 138-9, and expose our irrational bias? We are mystified that Washington lives in a bubble of unreality in its blind support of an immense injustice perpetrated every day on the Palestinian people, and foments anger across the Middle East and the world.
There’s the usual totally meaningless boilerplate.
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.
Told you.
We assure all Jews in Israel and everywhere that we too share a commitment to Israel’s 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. We affirm the right of Israel to be at peace with her neighbors, but insist it be through the prism of justice as we believe Dr. King would insist.
Translation: blah, blah, blah. I am, of course, not a Jew; the children of Israel just wrote most of my Bible. But it seems to me that if you feel the need to go out of your way to claim that you’re not an anti-Semite, then you have a serious Jew problem.
As our Church stated in 1991, we differentiate between anti-Semitism, which we abhor, and legitimate criticism of the state of Israel, especially as Israel imposes an unjust system of occupation upon another people.
Apparently, using loaded terms like apartheid constitutes “legitimate criticism of the state of Israel” in Episcopal circles these days.
And there you have it. There’s no history here, no current affairs, no interest in discovering what led up to the current Middle Eastern situation. Israel and Israel alone is the villain and that’s that.
This letter seems to have quite a bit of mainstream Episcopal support. Former House of Deputies head Bonnie Anderson and doddering old fool Ed Browning signed their names to this letter as did Gene Robinson, Leo Frade, Brian Grieves and Winnie Varghese while international Anglican leftist airheads like Jenny Te Paa and Uncle Dez also indicated their enthusiastic approval.
So it’s good that the Presiding Bishop wants to kill this atrocity. Because she knows, or should know, that letters like this one will annihilate whatever’s left of her church’s ability to speak to this issue. Choose one side, as this letter clearly does, and the other side no longer has any reason to listen to you.
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