Israel/Palestine Mission Network: Getting revenge; sweet or hateful?

Are you tired of this? I am; it is Christmas and I want to concentrate on this sacred time, celebrating the first coming of Jesus, writing about the incarnation and posting beautiful Christmas hymns. But one of our Presbyterian organizations is at war with the Jewish people and because I belong to Jesus Christ I cannot back away from this terrible time.

Saturday, Dec. 11th, the Israel/Palestine Mission Network of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) linked to an awful article about the Simon Wiesenthal Center which not only slandered the center but also its Dean & founder, Rabbi Marvin Hier. The IPMN when linking to the article written by Lawrence Swaim, wrote, “Time to point the finger back at the Simon Wiesenthal Center.”[1] Their point is bigoted and shallow. Did they even read the article?

The article “Israel’s War Against the Dead: Mamilla Cemetery and the Simon Wiesenthal Center,” is about the Museum of Tolerance that the Center is building in Jerusalem.[2] They are accused, in the article, of building the museum on top of a Muslim cemetery. But there is much more than complaints about the museum at the end of the article.

Swaim writes of the The Simon Wiesenthal Center:

The Simon Wiesenthal Center is an extreme rightwing Jewish organization, tinged by neo-fascism and with many of the characteristics of a hate organization. It is based almost completely on a vulgarized, pervasive form of religious nationalism. Its vision for Israel is consistent with the neo-fascist Jabotinsky tendency within Zionism that was modeled on Italian fascism, and it also promotes the Likudnik doctrine that Judaism itself has no practical or demographic existence separate from Israel. The SWC supports the neo-con belief in permanent war in the Middle East, and it engages in the vigorous dissemination of religious bigotry against Muslims in the US. It portrays anti-Semitism as worse than it is, partly for fund-raising purposes and partly to establish an imagined victim status. It similarly uses the Holocaust both to
discourage criticism of Israel and to justify Israel’s own violence, aggressively insisting that every criticism of Israel is really aimed at destroying the Jewish people. Above all, the SWC is a dangerous cultural force that seeks religious war as the standard for religious authenticity.

Of SWC's leadership Swaim writes:

The fight over Mamilla Cemetery is a dispute in which Rabbi Hier, the very incarnation of the charismatic but morally corrupt religious fanatic, seeks to invent a new Judaism that, like medieval Christianity, defines itself by its ability to wound and torment the underdog.

Of the membership of the Simon Wiesenthal Center the author writes:

One has the sense that Hier’s followers are primarily lower (and middle) middle-class people, perhaps small businesspersons and conservative professionals who reject Judaism’s traditional concern for social justice, whose level of cultural literacy is not particularly high, and who are attracted to the us-against-them aggression of religious nationalism.

To put it very succinctly, I consider the Rabbis at the Simon Wiesenthal Center my friends. I know them to be men of integrity. The IPMN may consider it important to get revenge against those they consider their enemies, but it seems to me that such action fails to honor the Prince of Peace. More than that, using a despicable insulting article full of fraudulent, contrived and exaggerated content to get revenge dishonors the One who is truth himself.

May God have mercy on us all.

[1] The author of this diatribe, Lawrence Swaim, is listed as Director of the Interfaith Freedom Foundation, an organization that apparently has no web site. The article was taken from a Muslim paper for which Swain writes a column, InFocus News. After clicking around on the site I could not come up with past articles, but here is an overview by the Jewish organization, The Anti-Defamation League.

[2] To read about the dispute over the Museum read the article that Swaim has written and then go to the Simon Wiesenthal Center and read their page on the Museum, read the whole page, The Museum of Tolerance, Jerusalem.

Israel is a Jewish State: IPMN's Noushin Framke would like that to end

The Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) has a policy of a two state solution for the troubled Middle East. I have been writing for over a year that the Israel/Palestine Mission Network was and is pushing for a one state solution. On November 9th I posted, Is an overture for a one state solution looming on the horizon? I was wrong about the overture but I was not wrong about the IPMN’s attitude toward a one state solution. Noushin Darya Framke of the IPMN, (She is chair of their communications committee), has written an article for Ecclesio.com. The article, Ye Shall Share the Land calls into question the very concept of a Jewish State.

There are details in the article that I am going to skip over and refer my readers to an excellent post on Framke’s article written by my friend David Fischler at Reformed Pastor. His article is “The Mask Comes Off,” and as always he carefully goes into the details. But I want, instead, to deal with this continuing arrogance that permeates the IPMN. And at the same time the great need for the Jewish people to have a Jewish State.

The IPMN’s attitude toward Israel as a Jewish State is troubling. In the article Framke quotes Tony Judt writing that she prefers his way of seeing Israel. She writes:

Judt famously called Israel an anachronism, saying it was a good idea for the nineteenth century but an idea whose time had passed in the 21st century. Judt said Israel arrived too late: “The very idea of a ‘Jewish state’—a state in which Jews and the Jewish religion have exclusive privileges from which non-Jewish citizens are forever excluded—is rooted in another time and place. Israel, in short, is ananachronism.”

The truth is Israel as a Jewish state was created for the care and safety of Jewish people. And its Arab citizens are not excluded. They can vote and hold office. They have freedom of religion. Yes, there are problems, serious problems, recently racist problems, but they are solvable but the destruction of Israel as a Jewish State is a disaster.

I have watched from my distant computer chair the speed with which the Israel/Palestine Mission Network has entered into the dark world of radical anti-Jewish thought and ideas. I have watched with fear, because rather than pushing for solutions between two peoples they have excluded anything good done by Israel and have made her the ultimate enemy. Entering the radical world of the Boycott, Divestment Sanctions movement they have embraced a movement that believes Israel should never have existed and that one state with an Arab majority is the solution.

IPMN has not entered the world of Israel at all; Israel is the other. Neither have they entered into the world of the Palestinians, but instead into the world of Hamas and Hezbollah, and further into a world of dark sinister hatred for the Jew.

Just two days ago IPMN, once again, linked to another James Wall posting in which he was suggesting that the Israelis were the source of Wikileaks. Wall was using as a source another writer who writes for Veterans Today. The article he referenced was on another anti-Semitic site, but it was also on VT since the writer, Jeff Gates, is a staff writer for them.[1]

Veterans Today is the awful anti-Semitic site that James Wall thinks “is a progressive website that sees injustice and calls it for what it is …” At the same time that Wall was referencing a VT writer, a different writer on that site was explaining that all of the United State leadership during the last presidency was controlled by the Jews (he still thinks leadership is controlled by the Jews) and he wrote:

These people must all be hanged, which is the accepted and traditional American punishment for capital crimes and especially for war crimes. They have already committed the crimes that call for their hanging, so they feel they have nothing to lose by nuking Iran and Syria for their Israeli masters. … We are up against a combination of cunning, greed and insanity that is hard to describe, let alone argue with. It can only be exterminated, as we do with dangerous or filthy insects and vermin in our homes. And when we’re dealing with rats and cockroaches, we don’t take any of them prisoner.

After writing that he wrote this about Israel:

The various agencies of the gangster state of Israel must be similarly disposed of. No more Jewish rules of conduct, and no Jewish Rule under the North American Union. Do we want to be the laughingstock of the world? I should say, do we want to continue to be the laughingstock of the world? To be big, tough Americans who let a bunch of creepy Jews run us like cattle?[2]

None of this bothers the leadership of IPMN. They are sliding into a dreadful place. But what is truly shameful is that they are themselves perpetrating the very reason that the Jewish State of Israel needs to exist. Anti-Semitism is growing around the world, it is growing in the United States, and even in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.). The IPMN’s actions, including Framke’s article, is proof enough that there must be a Jewish State.


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[1] If all of this seems confusing please see, “The Israel/Palestine Mission Network, James Wall and conspiracy theories

[2] The article is an old one written in 2006, but it was posted at Veterans Today because it was thought relevant.

The story that is always new-so held in awe

Arguments concerning the challenges to proposition 8 were given this week in San Francisco before the Federal Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. That is the referendum that was passed in California upholding traditional marriage. The Covenant Network reports that there was a rally for same gender marriage outside and that one of the speakers was their Executive Director Pam Byers. They have posted her speech and she ends with this comment.

“And as a young college friend said to our recent national conference, ‘Jesus had two dads, and he turned out all right!’”

One wants to say all kinds of things like are you suggesting the family was polygamist, meaning one wife and two husbands. Or are you equating Joseph’s relationship to God with a homosexual coupling?

But what does it really mean that Jesus had a heavenly Father and an earthly step father? Doesn’t that take in the whole sweep of God’s revelation to his church? Isn’t that the whole story of Holy Scripture? Jesus Christ, the eternal Son of the Father, taking on human flesh, living and dying for our redemption.

There are surely two Christmas stories sweeping through our Presbyterian Church. One is God’s revelation, met with awe, devotion and worship. That story is always new, it is the story saints and martyrs never grow tired of hearing. It is the push and shove that plants their feet in hard places. It is God’s promises fulfilled in history. It is God’s light that shines in our awful darkness.

The other Christmas story, the plot is somewhat the same, but the words have lost their meaning because they seem unbelievable, old and stale. So old and stale that the story can be used blasphemously to hopefully bring about something ‘new’ while putting Jesus in the funny box. It is simply a means to an end, a way to hurry on to some new vision or some new activity.

But Jesus, the Incarnation, his life, his word, his death, his resurrection, that is our story that is our song.



Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife; for the child who has been conceived in her is of the Holy Spirit. She will bear a son; and you shall call his name Jesus for he will save his people from their sins." (Matt. 1:20b-21)

The Israel/Palestine Mission Network, James Wall and conspiracy theories

It isn’t going to end soon, there are too many radical anti-Semitic sites that many of us, who don’t make a habit of reading conspiracy driven web sites, know nothing about. But obviously James Wall of Wall Writings, along with the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)’s Israel/Palestine Mission Network is very aware of such sites. They link to them, use material from their sites, and in Wall’s case, write for them.

After being totally rebuffed by moderator, Carol Hylkema, of IPMN in my plea that they not use James Wall since he writes for, praises and cites writers for such web sites, they are again linked to Wall, and he is using and is linked to another radical anti-Semitic site, Sabbah Report.

Wall has written an article entitled, “Could Israel Be Using Wikileaks to Prepare US for Air Strike Against Iran?” He begins his article by referring to Jeff Gates and quoting, with some approval, from Gates article on Sabbah Report. That article is “Wikileaks: More Israeli Game Theory Warfare.” Both writers, stuck in their anti-Semitism, are suggesting that the Wikileaks were perpetrated by Israel as a means to cast a bad light on the United States and to further war plans against Iran. And in fact all of these sites are at the moment pushing this particular conspiracy idea.

Besides Wall Writings, Sabbah Report and Israel/Palestine Mission Network, one can include, My Catbird Seat, Veterans Today, Salem-News.com and Wake Up America: Your government is hijacked by Zionism. All of these sites, and there are others, use each other’s material; they all feed off of each other. They are all guilty of spewing hate in America.

The way it works is one writer writes about conspiracies such as this article, Is the "Times Square Terrorist" more Field-based Warfare, in which Gates, the writer Wall used in his article, blames, among other things, the destruction of the two ancient Buddhist statues in Afghanistan, the destruction of the World Trade Center towers in New York, the assassination of former Pakistan Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, etc., etc. on Israel. Everyone picks up those parts that either interest them or that they find credible. And it is supposed that if enough people write about the theory it must be true.

The IPMN is starting to do this by connecting to all of the writers through Wall’s writings. It is an easy way to slam not only Israel but also the Jewish people of the United States.[1] It is an easy way to avoid doing real homework about your main subject. It is an easy way to spit on the roots of your faith and deny the grace of God given through that One Jew on the cross.


[1] One Jewish Rabbi, Rabbii Gershon Steinberg-Caudill, who comments on the IPMN Facebook links is seemingly getting a bit more discerning about what they post. after reading Wall's posting he writes, "I think the movie [Fair Game: a movie Wall uses to make his point.] should be required viewing while I do not believe that Israel has any relationship with Wikileaks.'

After another link, Encountering Peace: Five minutes to midnight, about whether Israel can be a Jewish State and a Democracy at the same time, the Rabbi states: "There CAN be BOTH a Jewish State AND a Democracy. England is a Christian State and a Democracy. It CAN be done." In what appears to be a sassy contradiction to the Rabbi, IPMN's Noushin Framke writes:"Yes. But only if being Jewish doesn't give citizens any privileges. Problem is, Israel is based on Jewish exceptionalism."

Perhaps some other friends of IPMN will start speaking out.

Please see also, "James Wall: At It Again" by David Fischler at Reformed Pastor, and Disturbing Signs of Anti-Semitism in the PC(USA) by Greg Scandlen at Greg Scandlen's American Awakening

The second Sunday of Advent

For unto us a child is born, to us a son is given …

Last night for some reason I started thinking of all my Christmases; the sad ones, the joyous ones, the just plain fun ones. I remember a Christmas when my Dad took our wagon across an icy stream, with my sisters and I bundled up, sitting on the wagon floor. We cut down one of our own pine trees and decorated it with crepe paper and popcorn. There were sleds for Christmas, and something extra for each of us. My extra was a toy nurse’s kit because until I found out that science wasn’t my favorite subject I thought I wanted to be a nurse.

If my Mom and Dad gave us a doll it was usually sitting unwrapped under the tree, just like a new baby born on Christmas morning. And there was always, bowls of fragrant oranges, the ribbon Christmas candies that come in many colors, and different kinds of nuts.

Now, each year, after Christmas I wrap our decorations in tissue paper and place them in a box and write on the top “for a holy Christmas” and then I put the next year’s date. So many memories are boxed up. There is the tiny fading tin Santa that belonged to my husband’s mother, Juanita, also her little porcelain angel that is a bell that rings. The kids use to fight over who would hang that one.

There is also the little gold colored train with a red setting that Juanita brought to hang on the tree just three days before she would die on a snowy, sleety road in a terrible car accident near Bend, Oregon. There is so much in that box.

Juanita was a young teenager during the years of the depression and the dust bowl. She traveled with her family from Oklahoma to California, living in a tent with her family. Her mother worked in the canneries in Monterey and her father; he was a hard evil man, an occultist, who helped put together the Egyptian museum in San Jose. He was proud and arrogant making his children suffer in ways that are inappropriate and impossible to write about.

But Juanita found some peace and joy in the Lord when she became a Christian. And that is what Christmas is about, finding life in the Lord Jesus Christ. Joy, sorrow, happiness in a box of ornaments, but it all circles around Jesus and the great gift he has given with his birth at Bethlehem, his life, death and resurrection.

Bonhoeffer, using Isaiah 9:6-7 writes of all the different aspects of Christ’s identity. He spoke in a sermon:

What kings and statesmen, philosophers and artist, religious leaders and moral teachers have labored for in vain is now brought about by a new born child. Here a child, born in the midst of world history, has put to shame the wisdom and efforts of the strong. A child, born of a human mother, a Son given by God. That is the secret of the salvation of the world. All the past and all future is here encompassed. The unending comfort of the almighty God comes to us, humbly and in the form of a child, his Son. That this child is born, for us, given for us, that this human child, God’s Son, belongs to me, that I know him, have him, love him, that I am his and he is mine, means that now my life depends only on him. A child has our life in his hands.[1]

[1] Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Christmas Sermons, Editor and translator, Edwin Robertson, Zondervan (Christmas 1940)

Lying to the United Nations, lying about a movement

People lie all the time that is probably why one of God’s commandments is “You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.” But when you do it before the United Nations there should be serious consequences. There of course will be before the judgment seat of God, alone, without Christ as an advocate. But then if you are a communist and probably an atheist I suppose you don’t think about such things.

Reformed Pastor David Fischler has just put up a posting entitled, “Spokesperson for the mainline.” The posting contains a video and is about Judith LeBlanc, Vice Chairperson of the Communist Party speaking to the U.N. Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People on behalf of the U.S. Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation. That is an organization that is supported by most of the mainline churches. It is the group supported by the Israel/Palestine Mission Network of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.).

In the speech LeBlanc makes several comments that are to be expected. She refers to the occupation of Palestine and states that it is a sixty year occupation. And she speaks about overcoming the complete occupation. This has been the goal of most people in the Boycott, Divestment Sanctions movement, to turn all of Jewish Israel into an Arab state.

But what is unexpected is the blatant lie that LeBlanc uses in her speech. Speaking of the need of the campaign against Israel to focus on the United States, changing its citizens thinking, she states:

There are new and important examples toward this end. In California member groups of the U.S. Campaign to end Israeli occupation successfully campaigned to place a referendum on the state wide ballot in the next election. It calls on the state to divest teacher and student worker’s retirement pension funds from companies that profit from the Israeli occupation. (Bold mine.)

But the truth is that those involved in the campaign have no idea about whether it is succeeding or not. In an interview by the Socialist Worker, one of the activists, Chris Yatooma, when asked about their success states:

Two and half months into the campaign, we don't have a realistic count of the signatures gathered. In early December, we plan to hold a statewide conference call with our county and regional coordinators to see how many signatures we have gathered at that point. Still, because most of the petitions are being circulated via the Web site and e-mail attachments, we won't have a good grasp of the numbers until mid-January.

At the web site for the ballot initiative there is no notice that the referendum is already successful. This is a ploy many in the BDS movement have been using as I explained in an earlier post, IPMN, the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions Movement and its many hoaxes...UPDATE...and now a correction. On the Divest From Israel site several other supposedly successful campaigns are listed. But at least one is a complete hoax; the other is not at the moment successful.

Not only is LeBlanc lying to the UN; the whole BDS movement is lying about what their final goal is. At the blog, Divest This, one can gather several very good resources to help those at both universities and other institutions fight against divestment. One such resource can be down loaded; it is The BDS Cookbook - Recipes for defeating BDS

In the resource is a link to a video that explains the true goals of the BDS movement. I am placing it below. To see the video of LeBlanc speaking go to “Spokesperson for the mainline.”

Who cares? An exchange of e-mails between myself and IPMN

I sent an e-mail to Carol Hylkema, Moderator of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) Israel/Palestine Mission Network, concerning their link to Veterans Today and to James Wall who not only writes for My Catbird Seat but also praises Veterans Today. Below is my e-mail and then the E-mail she sent me. The e-mail is signed by Hylkema but was sent by Jeffrey DeYoe, chair of the IPMN advocacy group.




Carol Hylkema
Israel Palestine Mission Network
Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)

Dear Ms Hylkema,

I am writing this to inform you that the person you have been linking to both on your front page and your Facebook page, James Wall, has connected to several highly anti-Semitic web sites and insists that they are not anti-Semitic. He, in fact, is writing for them. I know that he was once the Editor of Christian Century but nonetheless he is involved in radical anti-Semitism. Today you linked to his essay, Choose This Day Whom You Will Serve in which he insists that Veterans Today is not anti-Semitic. He writes:

“The website Veterans Today is not a “sludge-bucket”. It is a progressive website that sees injustice and calls it for what it is, which explains why these days, I find myself more at home with my new friends at Veterans Today and My Catbird Seat than with any Presbyterian blogger who has failed to realize that the Israeli occupation is a moral evil which must be ended. Perhaps this is a new ecumenism of the faithful.”

But this is the latest article on Veterans Today, “Dam of Lies.” It not only denies the Holocaust, it says that in World War II the Germans were the good guys. Most of the writers on the site believe the Israelis are the ones who brought down the towers in New York. And yet Noushin Framke placed a comment on Wall's posting about how the site is not anti-Semitic praising Wall and directing people to your site. And you have linked on Facebook to at least one article on Veterans Today.

To be very blunt, I and others are outraged by this and are pleading with you and/or others to do something about the problem. You, of course will not like my blog posting about this but I am sending them to you so you will hopefully understand that this is a very big problem. http://naminghisgrace.blogspot.com/2010/11/i-want-to-scream-draw-close-to-jesus.html

In the name of our Lord Jesus Christ,
Viola Larson

Cc Linda Valentine, Executive Director
Hunter Farrell, World Mission Director

Dear Ms. Larson,

Thank you for your letter expressing your concern regarding our network's endorsement of James Wall and his writings. From where we stand, James Wall is a beacon of light in a place where debate has produced more heat than light.

Mr. Wall's reference to other writers are his choice, not ours to make. As far as your concern on articles not referenced by James Wall that appear on a website that he has referenced, we feel uncomfortable practicing guilt by association. The Israel Palestine Mission Network never condones anti-Semitism and does not believe that James Wall is anti-Semitic. His record of speaking out against racism and human rights violations in the world speaks for itself and we support his work in this regard.

Grace and Peace,

Carol Hylkema, Moderator
IPMN


cc: Linda Valentine, GAMC Executive Director
Hunter Farrell, World Mission Director