An open letter to the General Assembly Council of the Presbyterian Church (USA)
Dear Members of the General Assembly::
I read with interest Alexa Smith’s report of July 2, 2004 regarding your 431 to 62 votes to have the church's MRTI Committee study the effectiveness of putting political and economic pressure on the State of Israel, presumably to force it to concede to Arab political demands. Accoding to Ms. Smith, the Assembly has used as its model the Church’s political activities in the 1970’s when it helped to end white rule in South Africa. In the case of Israel this implies eventual elimination of Jewish sovereignty over the Holy Land, the ancient homeland of the Jewish people and the cradle of Christianity.
The Church’s current overwhelming sentiment regarding the Jewish state must be considered on the background of its decision that the rule of the European minority in South Africa was unjustified and deserved to be terminated. It is surprising, however, that the majority of the General Assembly did not realize the profound differences between those two situations:
Unlike South Africa that was colonized by Europeans who practically enslaved the black natives without any historical, religious or cultural justification, the Jewish people returned to the Land of Israel, their own 3500 year-old homeland. Denying the historical and religious rights of the Jews to their homeland implies denial of the Bible. In other words, by siding with the Arab claims, your Church seems to implicitly affirm the claim of the Palestinian Arab leadership that the Bible is a “Zionist myth” and that the Koran that declared the Jews to be descendents of apes and pigs, is the true word of God. The Koran also mandates that the Jews as well as Christians must be subservient to Muslims or be killed by them. This is the Islamic religious justification for the 9/11 atrocities and the more recent beheadings of Jewish and Christian captives by the affiliates of Osama bin Laden. I wonder how many of your assembly know that the Palestinian Arabs danced in the streets following the gruesome murder of 3000+ Americans in New York City and Washington DC. Your Assembly seems to fail to recognize the connection between the ethnic cleansing of Arabia from non-Muslims and the intended ethnic cleansing of the Holy Land from Jews and Christians.
Rev. Mitri Raheb, the representative of the Palestinian Muslim leadership, who addressed you Assembly must have failed to tell you that the Christian Arab population in the Palestinian territories has dwindled to less than 20% of their number just 15 years ago, and that many of them have preferred to live in the “cruel” “oppressive” Jewish state rather than under Palestinian Arab rule. He also did not tell you that even Christian Bethlehem is today a Muslim town. He also failed to tell you about the weekly sermons in Palestinian mosques that call for the killing of all Jews; killing that would be followed by subjugation or elimination of all Christians – Americans first of all. He also should have told you about hundreds of thousands religiously motivated Palestinian assassins trained to murder Jews and Christians worldwide.
Furthermore, unlike the militant Muslims, the blacks in South Africa did never call for killing of all non-blacks. All they wanted was self-rule, which the Arabs have today in 22 Muslim countries. The 55+ year-old repeated Arab assaults on the minute Jewish state have a single goal – elimination of the Jewish state and murder of its Jewish inhabitants. This goal has been declared by numerous Arab political leaders since the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948. Before that, the leader religious and political leader, Haj Amin Al-Husseini, participated in the massacre of European Jewry by Hitler. All the Jews can do against this brutal Arab aggression is to defend themselves by force. Why then does the majority of your Assembly contemplate giving a hand to the enemies of the Jewish people who are also the enemies of the United States?
The misery of the Palestinian Arabs is self-inflicted. Instead of showing tolerance toward people of other cultures and religions, instead of welcoming the Jewish people, the natives of the Holy Land, who have given us the Bible and instilled in us our ethical values, the Muslim Arabs are being taught by Islamic clergy to hate all non-Muslims and murder them at every possible opportunity. What is amazing is that instead of denouncing this abuse of religion, Presbyterian Christian clergy are considering joining those Muslims politically. I have all the reason to believe that if members of the General Assembly had known the pertinent facts, their vote would have been very different.
Sincerely,
Michael Anbar Ph.D.
July 5, 2004