Church Chat

Most of us would assume the murder of 3,000 Americans on 9/11 is a greater disaster than the Abu Ghraib scandal, but at least one high-ranking Vatican official thinks differently:

The scandal of prisoner abuses by U.S. soldiers in Iraq has dealt a bigger blow to the United States than the Sept. 11 attacks, the Vatican foreign minister told an Italian newspaper.

In an interview published Wednesday in the Rome daily La Repubblica, Archbishop Giovanni Lajolo described the abuses as "a tragic episode in the relationship with Islam" and said the scandal would fuel hatred for the West and for Christianity.

"The torture? A more serious blow to the United States than Sept. 11. Except that the blow was not inflicted by terrorists but by Americans against themselves," Lajolo was quoted as saying in La Repubblica.

Lajolo said that "intelligent people in Arab countries understand that in a democracy such episodes are not hidden and are punished ... Still the vast mass of people — under the influence of Arab media — cannot but feel aversion and hate for the West growing inside themselves."

Meanwhile, Melanie Phillips notes the disturbing rise of blatant anti-Semitism - in the guise of "social justice" - among Protestant denominations:

Church leaders, periodicals and aid agencies are viscerally hostile to Israel — and there is a doctrinal factor involved which goes beyond fashionable attitudes. Canon Andrew White, the Archbishop of Canterbury’s envoy in the Middle East, told me that Palestinian politics and Christian theology have become inextricably intertwined. A radical Palestinian theological revisionism, which was trying to de-legitimise the Jewish state through a reworking of Scripture, had revived a largely discredited replacement theology — the ancient doctrine that the Jews had forfeited God’s love and with it all His promises to them, including the Land of Israel — through widespread contact between Palestinians and British Christians involved in humanitarian work in the disputed territories. This, he said, was having a huge impact. Christian pilgrimages only visited Christian sites in Palestinian areas, only spoke to Palestinians and spoke to virtually no Jewish Israelis.

The leader of one such pilgrimage talked to me of Zionists committing genocide against the Palestinians. The websites of Christian aid agencies represent Israel as a malevolent occupying power, with no reference to the fact that some of the refugee camps in which they work are factories for human bombs. I spoke to a bishop whose ideal was not a two-state solution but the destruction of the Jewish state -- and who implied that Israel would merit sympathy for its casualties only if it were powerless to defend itself. I spoke to a vicar who said Israel was fundamentally an apartheid state, that he hoped it would be ‘brought to an end’ by the uprising of the people, that God’s promises to the Jews had been inherited by Christianity and that the covenant between God and the Jews was conditional on their support for human rights.

The Palestinian canon Naim Ateek is revered in church circles in Britain. Yet his book, 'Justice and Only Justice', inverts history, defames the Jews and sanitises Arab violence. Modern anti-Semitism gets precisely one paragraph; Zionism is portrayed not as the despairing response to the ineradicable anti-Semitism of the world, but as an aggressive colonial adventure. Courageous Jews are those who confess to ‘moral suicide’ and who say that Judaism should survive without a state; real anti-Semitism, says Ateek, is found within the Jewish community in its treatment of the Palestinians. He uses the Bible to de-legitimise the Jewish state by misrepresenting the Jews’ relationship with God. Through tendentious history and the hijacking of scripture, Ateek vilifies the Jews as oppressors and warmakers and tells them, in effect, that their salvation lies in abandoning their state and scattering to the four winds.

Posted by damian at May 13, 2004 06:35 AM