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| This golden bell fell from the clothes of a Jerusalem Temple priest between 2 to 3 thousand years ago |
I will bless those who bless you, and whoever curses you I will curse;
and all peoples on earth will be blessed through you.” (Genesis 12:3)
If the World Council Of Churches which met recently in Lebanon wanted to help christians in the islamic world, it has a strange way of going about it. With christians under severe and prolonged attack in just about every muslim country, the WCC chose to publish an attack centered on Israel, on its christian zionist supporters, and of course the USA.
Yet there is no such language used against those committing atrocities at this very moment against christians in the middle east. Why so? Why such harsh language for the USA and Israel, and western countries? Christians from Iraq and Egypt are fleeing to those western countries at this very moment, and have been for years. There is now a flood of christian refugees coming out of Egypt to these maligned western countries.
The WCC talks of 'Palestine' being central when events belie that, when arab countries are openly talking no longer so much about the hated jews but of the Iranian menace, a time when Syria is going down in sectarian islamic flames, when Lebanon is slowly but surely being sucked into the shia-sunni maelstrom.
That the WCC can talk of, "duplicity of policies of the western powers, especially the United States" at this time says less about those maligned, and very much about the World Council Of Churches which refuses to name the real culprits, those who christians really have cause to fear and to loathe.
5. Palestine continues to be the central issue in the region. Resolving the conflict between
Israel and Palestine in accordance with the UN resolutions and international law, will
greatly help in resolving the other conflicts in the region. The persistence, after sixty-five
years, of continuing dispossession of Palestinian people—Christian and Muslim alike—from
their land by Israeli occupation, continuing settlement of land inside the 1967 borders by a
nation empowered by overwhelming military strength and external alliances and influence,
is central to the turmoil in the region and exacerbated by duplicity of policies of the western powers, especially the United States. Christians have been called to condemn and act against this continuing injustice, affirming the voice and demands of Palestinian Christians, including as heard in the Kairos Palestine document.
6. Jerusalem today is an occupied city with a government which has adopted discriminatory
policies against Christians and Muslims alike. “Jerusalem is the foundation of our vision and our entire life. She is the city to which God gave a particular importance in the history of
humanity. She is the city towards which all people are in movement – and where they will
meet in friendship and love in the presence of the One Unique God.” (Kairos Palestine)
Christians look to Jerusalem as a place God blessed with the significance of His presence,
.......Jerusalem must be an open, accessible, .........inclusive and shared city for two peoples and three religions...
The description of Jerusalem as 'occupied' is laughable. Jerusalem has had a jewish majority since polls began, certainly since 1872. Any christian who doubts that Jerusalem is anything but open, free and accessible should book a ticket to Israel, go straight to Jerusalem and make up their own mind. Jerusalem was not free before Israel liberated it after being attacked by Jordan in 1967. Jordan had in 1948 blown up all of the jewish holy places and then used its cemetery on the Mount of Olives as a source of stone, to build latrines, to drive a road through to a hotel it built on the top. There was no WCC protest about this, never a mention. But jews protect freedom of worship and access to christian holy places are vilified at every opportunity.
For once Israel can sit pretty, observing the islamic madness raging all around the tiny country, a country protecting its jewish, christian and muslim inhabitants alike, without fear or favor, without discrimination, as christians and church representatives living and working in Israel well know. The WCC is willfully blind to the fact that the one country in the region where christians are safe, where the christian community is increasing in size is the Jewish State of Israel.
In a sane world, the World Council Of Churches would be busy recognizing where the real problems for christians lie, would be condemning the real perpetrators such Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood whose president Mohammed Morsy who feigns ignorance of the miseries inflicted on christians in his country (Morsy leaves the dirty work of ethnically cleansing the christians to the salafist thugs).
The WCC should be working out strategies to confront those who attack christians which might even include publicly condemning the kidnappings, the killings, the forced conversions, the raping and 'marrying' off of young coptic christian girls to salafists, of ethnic cleansing of christians from Iraq, in Syria, in Libya and Egypt, not to mention the horrors perpetrated on christians in muslim countries further afield such as Pakistan and Indonesia.
The WCC in Lebanon was however incapable of showing a lead in protecting its own people. Instead it took the easy way out targeting the traditional christian victims, the jews, and those christians who aren't blinkered, who dare to show love rather than hatred towards jews.
The World Council Of Churches should savor its Lebanon conference as with the increasing Hizbollah and sunni violence it might soon not be able to meet again in that country for some years, if ever.
But old habits die hard and the WCC dinosaurs just can't adapt to the reality and turn away from the default kicking of the Jew. Unlike a few million Jews who have built an ever increasingly successful state founded on ideals of western civilization and democracy, christians are disappearing rapidly from Syria and the wider middle east, unprotected and even unlamented by their own coreligionists.
When all the christians are gone from the middle east except Israel, christians living in the West might begin to ask what their representatives did to help their bretheren when they were being massacred and thrown out the middle east. These christians will maybe look to the Vatican for answers, and find that the archives are sealed, only accessible to carefully selected researchers. So they will search world newspapers expecting frantic condemnations by the Vatican media and the World Council Of Churches of the horrors inflicted on christians in arab and muslim countries, but they will find only condemnations of Israel, the one country where a christian community still exists, where they as ever welcome, respected and protected by the state.
And these christians will ponder also on the fact that from Israel being a country of 600,000 jews at its birth, when it fought a bitter war of survival in 1948, there are now almost 7 million jews living there.
These christians will slowly begin to understand the significance of Bilam's blessing to their own situation and realize how terribly wrong their representatives and their clerics were/are in their obsessive hatred of the Jewish People.
Dexter Van Zile has also written about this
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