08-Jan-17: Where the World Council of Churches stands as Israelis are rammed to death

The driver of the truck rammed into a crowd of young Israelis in
Jerusalem [Image Source]

A hideous, cowardly attack by a Palestinian Arab terrorist at the wheel of a heavy truck changed the lives - in the absolute worst possible way - of at least four Israeli families today.

The man drove at high speed onto a Jerusalem sidewalk and into a crowd of IDF cadets and having immediately killed several, turned his vehicle around and prepared to batter and crush some additional victims. He was forcefully stopped and will not be a terrorist ever again.

But had he survived and been caught and arrested and tried and sentenced, here is what the World Council of Churches would likely have urged its faithful followers - hundreds of millions of Christians - to do for him:

"To pray for, visit, and tend to [his] needs... no matter the reason for [his] detention... [And] for the churches in the Holy Land to remember [him] through prayers and acts of solidarity that restore to [him his] freedom with justice and dignity”.

How do we know? Because those words, very slightly changed in order to address a larger number of Palestinian Arab terrorists behind Israeli bars, issued forth from the publicity bureau of the Secretary General of the World Council of Churches, Olav Fykse Tveit, almost three years ago. Our efforts to engage with them in dialogue have been pointedly ignored over and again.

We documented the WCC's extraordinary stand in a blog post at the time ["17-Apr-14: Christian solidarity with unrepentant murderers: where's the outrage?"].

And then soon afterwards in another ["6-Jun-14: Fear and loathing at the World Council of Churches"].

And another ["11-Jun-14: Where does this strategic deafness and moral blindness at World Council of Churches lead?"]

And another ["15-Sep-16: Justice, peace, terror, truth - and the World Council of Churches"].

And this one last week ["02-Jan-17: At the World Council of Churches, a stunning theology of terror"]

The most recent of our short essays about the baffling amorality of the Christian leadership at the WCC focuses on another call by Tveit for solidarity with and sympathy for the many New Years Eve revelers murdered and injured when an Islamist gunman in the service of ISIS attacked a crowded Istanbul nightclub. Tveit, a Christian moralist and theologian, was moved to observe that

Four victims (left to right) of today's truck ramming attack:
Shir Hajaj, 22; Erez Orbach, 20; Yael Yekutiel, 20; Shira Zur, 20
May their memories be for a blessing. There are many more injured.

"Innocent people are suffering again and again. This is an evil act. This attack is particularly shocking, in the first place because there seems to have been a clear intention deliberately to target people who were simply enjoying themselves... In the face of this brutality, the human family, all people of faith and of good will, must stand together to recommit to respecting and caring for one another, to protecting one another, and to preventing such violence... God in your mercy, be with the victims and their families and those who accompany and help them.” [Quoted here]

Strong, clear and powerful words. 

But neither Tveit nor, as far as we can tell, any other WCC management team insider has expressed sentiments remotely like this for innocent Jewish victims of evil Arab-on-Israeli terror. Not today, and certainly not on August 9, 2001 when our fifteen year-old daughter Malki was murdered here in the center of Jerusalem by people doing lethal, cruel brutality in the name of Hamas. 

In fact, not ever.

We have faith in dialogue. On the one occasion when we made direct contact with WCC officials in their Geneva head office seeking it, we were bluntly told by their corporate spokesperson not to expect any response. His name is Mark Beach and at the time (mid-2014) he served as WCC director of communication. But he had zero interest in directing any communication at us. We wrote about that particular shabbiness here. (He's no longer doing that job but we don't expect a response now either.)

Instead we ask Christians - and especially Christians whose congregations are affiliated with the WCC - to condemn them for their bigotry, for their dangerous hypocrisy and for the succour they provide to bestial practitioners of terrorism. We are more than willing to provide additional background; please email us at thisongoingwar (at) gmail (dot) com

The family of the perpetrator of today's killings say they are “thankful” for what he did and are calling the killer's death “the most beautiful martyrdom”. In their ugly recourse to a religious category, are they so different from the WCC people and their grotesquely-politicized theology of terror?