Israel/Palestine Mission Network & My Catbird Seat: racism anyone?

Peace making surely requires discernment. And if so, Christian peace making requires Christian discernment which should include prayer and attention to biblical passages on peace and what makes for peace. Integrity, fairness and wisdom with a desire for reconciliation among warring peoples are the attributes that is generally associated with peace seeking individuals and organizations.

Thinking of peace and reconciliation in the context of the work of the Israel/Palestine Mission Network of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), one looks for purposes and meaning when considering their links to various sites on their Twitter page. Since their purpose is to advocate for the Palestinians and help bring peace to the troubled Middle East there should certainly be such connections in their links.

 Since they believe that Israel is an apartheid racist state which has practiced genocide it seems that they would link to sites which are against racism to make their case. One would think that they would at least be interested in democratic sites. And sometimes they are, but the ideological splintering in differing directions of so many extremist groups, both left and right, seems to be disorientating the IPMN.  They have forgotten what it means to honor Christ in their peace making and what it means to be objective and discerning.

There is, too often, links to sites which promote bigotry and racism. Three times in less than a week, twice on July 30^th and once on July 26^th they linked to My Catbird Seat, an information organization administered by Debbie Menon who is also the editor. The site is a sister site to VeteransToday and Veterans News Now, using many of the same writers.

But going beyond that, Debbie Menon is also the Editor-in-Chief, managing editor and writer for Veterans News Now. Always, all of these sites publish anti-Semitic material. One expects to find many bizarre articles on all of the sites, but to find an article promoting a presidential candidate of a nationalist party who insists that the United States needs to return to a time when most of its citizens were European is simply beyond belief.

Merlin Miller of the American Freedom Party in a video on the VNN site, after explaining what he perceives to be the main problems in America, states:  

When we start to put all of these pieces of the puzzle together you finally come to the conclusion that a battle is going on right now between two forces. The forces are globalism which is the Rothschild banking network, their Jewish American organizations of support within the United States, the American main street media, the political arena that they control, power, they have power, great power but we have to stand up, we have to find a way to fight that.   But the force that can fight and beat that is nationalism.* America needs to get back to its roots. We need to be a country that will stand strong again for American ideals. We were founded as a Christian nation, European derived, I have nothing against people from other countries, other walks of life, but let’s protect America’s national identity.

This was an article placed on the site by an editor—so it can be reasonably assumed that it was an article agreed to by the editorial board. So now one can see the absolute confusion and yes, even hypocrisy, of a denominational organization that links so many times to a web site, My Catbird Seat, whose editor helped to place an article on another site where she is editor-in-chief, lifting up an American fascist. All of this while calling Israel a racist nation.

When I first started writing this blog, about six years ago, I did several articles on movements which were mimicking both the right and left of pre-World War II Germany.  All groups were socialist, but some were nationalist and some internationalist. They all hated capitalism and most hated the Jewish people or Zionism. It was a confusing time—it is today also. The IPMN needs to back off from their Twitter linking and really work for peace and reconciliation. They are sending out all kinds of messages and many of us cannot believe anything they link to because they do such a bad job of discernment. Surely they don’t want to link to people or sites that promote racism and nationalism.

 

 *Thankfully when Miller mentions nationalism some people boo. It would have been far better if they had also booed when he was maligning the Jewish people of America.