Confusion, IPMN and what I really want to say-still lies

Sometimes I do get confused. I will admit to confusion. I originally put up a posting which began with what I thought was a link to a Palestinian Orthodox site. My friend David Fischler informed me that as near as he could tell, “The web site is run by a collection of people connected to the Malankara Orthodox Church of India, and is run out of Chicago." (I have now deleted that posting)
 
So I did a bit more exploring including sending off an e-mail to a contact address on the “The Orthodoxy Cognate Page – OCP Media Network,” site. That was where the article “Israeli Persecution forces Christians to Emigrate,” written by Muslim, Khalid Amayreh was posted. I originally found it because the Israel/Palestine Mission Network of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) linked to it on their twitter page.

A George Alexander answered my e-mail with the statement that:

We truly understand your concerns about the article. OCP Media Networks features various article all around the globe. There has been extreme sentiments in the article, but at the same time we cannot rule out the recent attacks on Christians by some extreme Jewish organization.

We apologize for any hurt the article has caused.

But he did not tell me where the web site originated. However, I sent him a link to my first posting on this subject and I saw someone from Abu Dhabi (On my feed) reading the posting. That is the United Arab Emirates.

To add to it I found this great article on the same site,  “The Orthodoxy Cognate Page – OCP Media Network”: “Bethleham’s Last Christians.” The source is from a Jewish news site, Y Netnews, the original article I was concerned about was from what appears to be a Palestinian or Arab news site, Alresalah Press. So it is fairly clear that OCP Media Network is simply gathering news.

I am left with blaming my own confusion but also with blaming the Israel/Palestine Mission Network of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) for linking to the article “Israeli Persecution forces Christians to Emigrate.” They of course, unfairly, would not link to "Bethleham’s Last Christians." Therefore I wish to emphasis what was wrong with the first article by placing that part of my last posting below.

"The article the IPMN linked to is “Israeli Persecution forces Christians to Emigrate.” The article is found at the site “The Orthodoxy Cognate Page – OCP Media Network,” but the article is written by a Muslim, Khalid Amayreh. Amayreh never really points to any contemporary persecutions except to mention the wall which of course has to do with security and radical Islamic extremism rather than Christianity. Instead he begins with the 1948 war that Israel fought against five Arab nations, insisting that the destruction of several Arab Christian villages by Israeli forces was because they were Christians.

Indeed, Amayreh’s whole thesis is that the Jews inherently hate Christians.

He writes, “I knew too well and all along that Israel had been persecuting and tormenting Christians since time immemorial …” And he attempts to use the sacred books of the Jews against them. Amayreh has slipped into other centuries; he is seemingly infected by anti-Semitic writings which were ultimately challenged with the challengers winning. But sadly falsehood is never left to die.

Amayreh dredges up many of the anti-Semitic ideas that plagued the 18th and 19th centuries. In fact, these are the actual ideas that fed into the Nazi era. They have to do with the Talmud. Citing author Yisrael Shahak, author of Jewish History, Jewish Religion: The Weight of Three Thousand Years, Amayreh lists the various sins of the Talmud.

Besides the understanding that the Jews tried Jesus for “idolatry, inciting other Jews to idolatry, and contempt of rabbinical authority,” Amayreh also states that the Talmud teaches that Jesus is accused of witchcraft, “whenever an orthodox Jew mentions the name Jesus, he or she must recite the following curse: ‘May his name is [sic] damned, and memory erased.’”

Amayreh dishonestly pleads:

Would people like Pat Robertson and John Hagee, who pretend to be the spiritual guardians of Christianity, or even the Holy See, approach their Jewish friends and plead to them to see to it that this vulgar literature is expurgated from the Talmud or at least not taught in hundreds of Yishivot or Talmudic schools throughout Israel.

Amayreh goes on to write of “Chesronot Shas.” It should be noted that while true history informs us that it was the Catholic Church that censored those portions of the Talmud, Amayreh states that it was the Jews themselves.

One web site, The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, which counters anti-Semitism, explains the Chesronot Shas this way:

Hesronot Shas (or Chesronot Shas ) -Medieval censors banned portions of the Talmud which they believed contained Jewish libels against Jesus and the Christian holy family, though these are not mentioned by name. The banned materials were circulated as a separate book called Hesronot Shas. Today they have been reintegrated into most editions of the Talmud, and the Chesronot Shas is also freely available in Hebrew. Anti-Semites continue to insist that that Chesronot Shas is a secret Jewish book that outlines the Jewish plot against non-Jews, Jewish hatred of Christianity and the Jewish plan to take over the world

Amayreh uses it to defame the Jews. Among other things he writes. “it has been established that the omissions use the most vulgar and abusive epithets to describe Jesus and his mother, such as calling him “the son of a prostitute and a Roman soldier, who learned witchcraft in Egypt and who beguiled Jews to worship him as an idol.” Jesus, who is called Balaam the son of Beor the soothsayer, is also boiling in a huge cauldron in hell, full of excrement and human semen.”

Now to connect this back to Yisrael Shahak and his book Jewish History, Jewish Religion: The Weight of Three Thousand Years, it has been noted by other Jewish scholars that Shahak used information from a much earlier anti-Semite, Johann Eisenmenger (1700) who wrote, Judaism Unveiled, Judaism Discovered, Judaism Revealed, and Judaism Unmasked. In 1871 August Rohling wrote the Talmud Jew which was also a rehash of Eisenmenger’s book.

George L. Mosse gives a great deal of information on the false information about the Talmud in his book, Toward the Final Solution: A History of European Racism. Supposedly among other absurdities Rohling wrote that the Talmud was “full of exhortations to cheating, lustfulness, usury, and hatred of Christians.” He also insisted that the Talmud “regarded Christians as servants of Baal and that it permitted Jews to take any amount of interest from Christians, to practice sodomy and violate their women.” And further, in the Talmud “Christians were called swine, dogs and monkeys.” So we have a line that goes from Eisenmenger to Rohling to a Jewish anti-Semite` Yisrael Shahak.

But it is all carried forward by a Muslim anti-Semite, Amayreh, and linked to by a Presbyterian organization, IPMN, whose communications head must surely believe the lies. What neither they or the Orthodox site realize is that one of these books was tried in a court of law and lost.

Mosse adds to his information:

Rabbi Joseph Bloch of Vienna, an eccentric outsider, took Rohling to court and obtained a judgment (1885) that “not a single text exists in the whole of the Talmud in which Christians or pagans or idolaters are given the name of an animal.”

Sadly Mosse concludes with this, “But this made no more difference to the myth than the final exposure in a Swiss court in 1934 that The Protocols of the Elders of Zion were a forgery.”

In less than seventy years after Rohling wrote the book the Talmud Jew, Hitler would come to power. In slightly more than seventy years after the publishing of the Talmud Jew 6, 000, 000 Jews would be dead. How easy to tell lies or to point to, link to or uphold those who tell lies. How hard, impossible, to undo the years of horror brought on by those lies.

At this point one must point at the IPMN of the PCUSA because of their constant linkage to anti-Semitic articles in defense of their own prejudices. And as David Fischler points out in his posting, Presbyterians for Hate, “This is the kind of stuff that the IPMN is recommending their followers read. This is the organization that will be leading the charge for PCUSA divestment. This is a group that the denomination ought to have repudiated long since, but which still resides in the good graces of its leadership.”