07-Apr-17: Not everything's gloom and doom for the family of yesterday's murder-by-vehicle attacker

Single family house in Silwad: Somehow, they manage to get by
[Image Source: Israellycool]

Some follow-on reports arising from the killing yesterday ['06-Apr-17: An Arab-on-Israeli vehicle ramming attack north of Jerusalem this morning"] of a young IDF serviceman outside Ofra in a vehicle-borne terror attack.

According to Ynet today:

• Malak Hamed is the 21-year-old resident of Silwad [population roughly 6,000] who killed Elchai Tahar-Lev הי"ד and injured another soldier in that car-ramming attack on Thursday.
• He had been arrested in 2015 for trying to illegally penetrate Geva Binyamin (also known as Adam) on Jerusalem's northern edge. He was held in custody at the time and then released after three months. Evidently not long enough.
• A joint task force of the IDF, Shin Bet, and Israel and Border Police took control of the homes of Malak Hamed's extended family on Thursday night. Hamed's brother was arrested during the operation. 
• Six cars in their control were seized after being identified as stolen vehicles. In addition, NIS 40,000 in cash was seized on the suspicion of being used to fund terrorism.
• The extended Hamed family is said to be linked to Hamas. Nine members of the family have committed terrorist crimes in the Judea and Samaria districts over the years.

The Ma'an News Agency has these things to add:

• The person they call the "detained Palestinian", meaning the suspected Palestinian Arab vehicle-attack murderer, has a fuller name than Ynet reported. It's Malik Ahmad Moussa Hamed, 23. He's from Silwad, northeast of the Palestinian Arab capital, Ramallah. (Silwad has some seriously lavish living. See the photo above and this Israellycool article.)
• "Israeli forces reportedly tightened security at the military checkpoint installed at the western entrance of Silwad."
• "Locals told Ma’an that Hamed had borrowed his father’s car on Thursday morning, before driving in the direction of Ofra. They described Hamed as a calm and well behaved young man, whose two best friends, Anas Bassam Hamad and Muhammad Abd al-Rahman Ayyad, were killed by Israeli forces two weeks apart in December 2015 while carrying out vehicular attacks, adding that Hamed would frequently talk about his two friends."
• Hamas, the Islamist terrorists who control Gaza and increasingly the West Bank as well, "quickly released statements praising the alleged attack, with Hamas spokesperson Abd al-Latif al-Qanu saying that it was a response to the "continuous Israeli crimes committed against the Palestinians.""

When Hamas refer to something continuous done by Israel, it's a sign they have temporarily run out of vague and meaningless pretexts for the latest act of terror being praised. But they know their image-building demands that they blame their lethal anger on something. So they point to something continuous.

The Hamed clan may have lost six stolen cars and NIS 40,000 in cash last night. But spare the sympathy. Far from the headlines and the attention of most analysts and reporters (who invariably keep quiet about this though in many cases they surely know) they are about to start enjoying the very meaningful (in their society's terms) fruits of having a homicidal son.

First, the young murderer has just become eligible for participating in the Palestinian Authority's Rewards for Terror payment scheme which will continue, and indeed grow, as "calm and well behaved" (sic) Malik accumulates more and more time behind Israeli bars for yesterday's assault and murder. It's a no-lose situation for the family: a son who has become a celebrity, and a guaranteed cash flow starting now, plus the likelihood of an absurdly-well-paid senior position with the PA when he gets out.

And this: depending on how tuned in the refined Hamed clans-people are to spiritual matters, they are going to become the beneficiaries of kind and uplifting prayers from good Christians throughout the world. And if any of our readers think that's a joke, they need to immediately get familiar with things we have written about the World Council of Churches and Olav Fykse Tveit, a Norwegian Lutheran who is its chief executive. 

Back in April 2014 [here], the Rev Mr Tveit published a call for solidarity - between the WCC's faithful and what he called "some 5000 Palestinian men, women and children, languishing in Israeli jails". Many of those convicts are self-confessed murderers. Most of the rest are unrepentant terrorists. But undaunted, the WCC's leader called on the worshipers in its member churches 

"to pray for, visit, and tend to the needs of all prisoners, no matter the reason for their detention. For Israel and Palestine, prisoners have taken on even greater significance than in the past."

The World Council of Churches' Dr Tveit [Image Source]

That breathtaking phrase "no matter the reason for their detention" rattles in our brain even now three years later. It's meant to refer to the case of the thuggish man who murdered Elhai Tahar-Lev yesterday. (And if not, then let the WCC's director of non-communication say so publicly.) What kind of theology does Tveit practice? If we believe in mutual tolerance across religious lines, must we be tolerant of that kind of lethal pollyannaish drivel?

Tveit went on to invite 

"the churches in the Holy Land to remember Palestinian prisoners through prayers and acts of solidarity that restore to them their freedom with justice and dignity”.

For some other furious comments we made at the time, see "17-Apr-14: Christian solidarity with unrepentant murderers: where's the outrage?"

So for the Hamed clan, a little upset perhaps by last night's reduction in their sense of justice and dignity: hang in there! The World Council of Churches is on its way! And for the members of WCC-affiliated churches, we feel your shame.

15-Sep-16: Justice, peace, terror, truth - and the World Council of Churches

Like the WCC, these German activists , in their own distinctive way, stood
for "democratic, non-violent actions for justice 
and peace" in the'Thirties [Image Source]

We pay more attention in our blog to what the World Council of Churches says and does than many other bloggers. (Click for our earlier WCC posts.)

This is absolutely not because we subscribe to their dogma. By dogma, of course, we don't mean theology. Actually, theology appears to be one of the least distinctive aspects of the WCC. We mean their political viewpoints as espoused for decades by the WCC's leadership. (From experience, we know those viewpoints are rarely shared by their church-going members.) Politics far more than religion in the conventional sense is what serves as the raison d'etre of the World Council of Churches

We pay them attention because of our annoyance at the mild halo effect that unjustifiably accompanies a religious-sounding global alliance's frequent pronouncements. As we have noted here in the past, the WCC (with annual income in 2014 of 29.4 million Swiss Francs, about USD $30 million) is not just any religious-sounding alliance but 

a roof body that purports to speak for the world's major protestant churches. Here's where they list their members. In Australia, they include the Anglican, Churches of Christ and Uniting Church in Australia. In the UK, the Baptist Union of Great Britain, the Church in Wales, the Church of England, the Church of Scotland, the Methodist Church, Presbyterian Church of Wales and others. In the United States, they include the Quakers, the United Church of Christ, United Methodist Church, the Episcopal Church, the African Methodist Episcopal Church, the Presbyterian Church (USA) and many others. That's a lot of worshipers. Do they know how their religious faith is being exploited by a small coterie of self-perpetuating, Geneva-based bureaucrats? ["17-Apr-14: Christian solidarity with unrepentant murderers: where's the outrage?"]

And

the broadest and most inclusive among the many organized expressions of the modern ecumenical movement, a movement whose goal is Christian unity... breaking down barriers between people, seeking justice and peace ["About us: What is the World Council of Churches?", on the WCC website]

The WCC's Geneva-based secretary-general [Image Source]

(If you're not sure whether they presume to speak on behalf of your house of worship, we posted the names and websites of all the WCC member churches at the time in this blog post: "23-May-14: On the dignity of murderers and their victims: An appeal to Christian friends".)    

In a public call datelined September 15, 2016 (today), the WCC bureaucracy has just launched once more into a full-throated assault on Israel and Israelis, calling in the name of Christianity for more terror, more "Kauft-nicht-bei-Juden"-style boycotts of Jewish businesses and more disregard for justice and the rights of Jews and Israelis. 

Some direct-quote World Council of Churches excerpts:

1. They... called for the US to end what they described as a "wave of legislative efforts" to penalise the use of non-violent economic measures to influence policy in Israel, noting that churches have used such strategies to "advance the rights of people and further the cause of justice both domestically and internationally for many years"...
2. [They] noted that the unresolved conflict in Israel and Palestine is "primarily about justice, and until the requirement of justice is met, peace cannot be established"...
3. "Too often the structural and permanent violence against a whole people is ignored. But keeping an entire population under occupation and even in a closed area, such as Gaza, in prison-like conditions is a grave and unsustainable situation. 
4. We are also well aware that Israel is the occupying force and has commanding power over the people of Palestine and, thus, bears special responsibility for taking the initiative."
5. They called for an end to the "occupation and to settlements on occupied land, with all its grave and deteriorating dimensions for the Palestinian people, but also for Israel and the whole region beyond".
6. "We ask for full respect and protection of human rights defenders, for the rights to tell the truth, to express concern, and to take democratic, non-violent actions for justice and peace... 
7. "We are deeply concerned by Israeli legislative and other measures to curtail the work of Palestinian and Israeli development and human rights organisations, as well as the lack of transparency concerning investigations into international humanitarian (including faith-based) organisations in the Gaza Strip and the possible negative consequences to delivering critically needed aid to this besieged area."

That's a lot of euphemisms and irresponsible double-talk.

1. When they advocate "non-violent economic measures", they mean the bigotry-rich program of boycotts, divestment and sanctions or BDS, in which the World Council of Churches takes a lead advocacy role. It's an aggressive campaign initiated by a cluster of Palestinian Arab groups 11 years ago that "disincentivizes the Palestinian leadership from negotiating with Israel at present, is antisemitic [and] promotes the delegitimization of Israel" [Wikipedia]
2. Don't expect the conflict "in Israel and Palestine" (a narrow way of looking at the state of war declared by the Arab states in 1948 and in large measure still continuing) to get resolved or the terrorism conducted by the two Palestinian "states" to end so long as "the requirement of justice" for the Arabs, not for the Israelis, not for the Roths, continues to be unmet. In other words, the Arabs alone are the side to whom injustice is being served. Resolving this doesn't depend on them.
3. Gaza is prison-like, suffering "structural and permanent violence". Those tens of thousands of Hamas rockets fired at Israeli homes? The enforcement of Arab poverty by an Islamist leadership residing luxuriously in Qatar and Dubai? The ongoing misappropriation of foreign aid to ensure endless Gazan misery? All totally absent - as if they never existed. If there is a wicked person in this Bible lesson, the WCC leaders know he's not an Arab.
4. Only the Israelis as "the occupying force", the "commanding power", have the responsibility to do something peaceful. In the pseudo-redemptive theology of the WCC's preachers, the Palestinian Arabs get a permanent free pass. Though not Christians, the insiders in the two Palestinian Arab regimes understand this parable to mean: "Don't change, don't cease fire, don't consider being flexible. Just keep going while we provide protection". 
5. This exceedingly strange thing - "occupation" - is said to be not only at the heart of the Arab/Israel conflict but also the "grave and deteriorating" state of "the region beyond". Serious-minded Christians might be thinking of today's Iraq, Libya, Syria and Lebanon. Like us, are they wondering what the Christian leadership in its Geneva office complex, witness to the rapid and violent end of two thousand years of Christian life at the hands of Islamists, along with savagery on a scale that challenges the worst nightmares, are smoking?
6. Rights, justice, peace. Are both sides entitled to these? The answer is obvious.
7. This refers to Israel's recently-announced arrest and prosecution of a Hamas agent inside World Vision, and reports that additional charities active in the Palestinian Arab domains have been similarly penetrated and pillaged. The WCC has said not one word about the allegations of massive abuse of Christian charity by the bigoted, anti-Christian, anti-Jewish Islamist forces. Nor about the Gazan housing construction budgets misappropriated to the construction of attack tunnels and rockets and mortars.

We believe in dialogue. We know a person cannot be completely well-informed without hearing the opposing side's case. In April 2014, when the World Council of Churches came out with an earlier public call that involved actual praying for the freedom and dignity of Palestinian Arab prisoners, almost all of them were and are behind bars because of the anti-Jewish terrorism in which they engaged, we blogged these two posts: "17-Apr-14: Christian solidarity with unrepentant murderers: where's the outrage?" and "22-Apr-14: Attention World Council of Churches: Will you now follow your own advice and speak up for the Arabs tortured and imprisoned by the PA?"

Right after that, we sent a letter to the then (and still) WCC secretary general, Dr Olav Fykse Tveit, on April 24, 2014. We were ignored. So we sent the same again, along with copies to a number of WCC insiders, a few days later. Still ignored. Then we had a tiny flurry of exchanges with the WCC's Director of Communications. He seemed willing to engage, but then changed tacks complete. Here's the full text of his letter to us dated June 5, 2014:

Dear Mr. Roth, Yes, I believe we would have nothing further to say.  Best wishes to you and your family. Mark Beach, WCC Director of Communication

The context and additional detail are in our post: "6-Jun-14: Fear and loathing at the World Council of Churches". Here's how we summed it up: 

So take it from this non-Christian, non-Moslem couple: there's something seriously wrong with a major global-facing church roof-body that wishes freedom, justice and dignity for convicted murderers but rolls down the shutters when a family devastated by the actions of those very murderers engages them in serious, albeit critical, discussion.

We are in the midst of the Jewish season for thinking hard about sin and about the truly redemptive value of forgiveness and repentance. In that spirit, here'a a repeat of a World Council of Churches thought we expressed here in the past

We'll sign off with a word to the WCC management team sitting there in Geneva: it's never too late to do sincere repentance and to come back and openly discuss these very serious life-and-death issues - even with people as marginal as we are to your mission. ["11-Jun-14: Where does this strategic deafness and moral blindness at World Council of Churches lead?"]

And this epilogue:

We know from experience that the world has many, many Christian believers whose abhorrence of terrorism, rejection of cries for the murder of innocent children, and belief in the central role of justice and morality in 21st century life differ hugely from the messages being advanced by the WCC. We don't share their theological outlook but we feel we have a great deal of common ground with their humanity. But finding common ground with church leaders for whom calls to prayer and "acts of solidarity" that "restore" to the convicted, unrepentant murderers of innocent children "their freedom with justice and dignity” - that truly feels like mission impossible. ["6-Jun-14: Fear and loathing at the World Council of Churches"] 

UPDATE Sunday September 18, 2016: Please check out "Five Things You Need to Know About World Council of Churches" by Dexter Van Zile. Brief and highly recommended.

19-Nov-15: Time-sharing on Temple Mount: World Council of Churches knows all about it

Games Arab children play on the Temple Mount: Background here

Anyone know when Jewish hour at Al Aqsa takes place? Asking for a Zionist friend. They're not answering the phone at the WCC.

World Council of Churches | Statement on situation in Israel and Palestine | 18 November 2015 | EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE -Bossey, Switzerland... The WCC executive committee, meeting in Geneva, Switzerland, on 13-18 November 2015, accordingly expresses its grave concern at recent developments in Israel and Palestine, involving renewed violent attacks against people of both communities and measures entailing long-term time division of access to Al-Aqsa mosque and affecting access to other holy sites. Such measures further diminish hope in the realization of this vision.

You have to take off your kippah to a lavishly-funded, hugely influential group like this that can labor to produce a summary of the turbulence going on in the Holy Land for its top management and be so skewed about it.

Look at the two factors that lead their analysis.

1. That safe old stand-by, the cycle of violence, where 16 year old wanna-be knifers get stopped from doing what their leaders program them to do thereby preventing more bloodshed.
2. The most holiness-infused place in Jewish geography where Jews are forbidden to pray and are daily harassed, threatened and abused by Arabs, delusionally depicted as some sort of enforced time-share.

The appalling thing is this will reliably be swallowed up uncritically by 600 million believers, pastors and priests. (For some of our previous observations about the work of the WCC, click here.)

13-Sep-15: A roadshow and its groupies

Beloved daughter of Nabi Saleh and kinswoman/cousin to Bassem Tamimi,

this woman - Ahlam Tamimi, boastful murderer of our child - planned
and executed the massacre at a Jerusalem pizzeria. [Image Source]

Bassem Tamimi, about whom we have written several times in the past month, is in Chicago as we write this. He is in the first week of what is being billed by its promoters as a "month long spring 2015 U.S. speaking tour",

This will seem slightly odd to Americans accustomed to decidedly-non-spring weather in September and October. But that's how it is with spinners of myths and fabrications like the Tamimis of Nabi Saleh. You can believe your eyes. Or you can swallow their version of the truth. You can't do both.

UPDATE Sunday morning, September 13, 2015: "Spring" has now been silently removed from their web page. Echoes of it still appear on websites that republished the original Bassem Tamimi Roadshow flyer, like this and this and in the Google Search result below. 

Why the Tamimi roadshow was pushed back from Spring 2015 until now is anyone's guess. We can only marvel (in a distinctly non-admiring way) at the cold and calculating manner in which they engineered a viral video and matching news event - both starring underage children deliberately placed by their parents in harm's way - to give the tour some media push. These are special people in the decidedly malevolent sense of the word.

It's tremendously hard for us, as the parents of a child murdered in an attack on a pizzeria led by a Tamimi woman from his village - a woman whose killings are openly celebrated by that village and honored by the Bassem Tamimi family [here] - to know of the many public gatherings that have been organized to provide Bassem Tamimi with platforms.

It's hard as well to see how the grotesque passion of that Nabi Saleh daughter to seek the greatest possible number of Jewish children as her victims keeps getting swept under the rug by the Tamimi clan, aided and abetted by their rabid promoters and by parts of the news reporting industry.

So please don't ask any more why it galls us so much to hear Bassem Tamimi described (as the road-show website does) as a man who will "speak about his village’s work for freedom and justice". This is beyond fraud. It's complicity.

Then there's the matter of the sanctimonious, slogan-spouting sponsors who are making his encounter with open-minded Americans possible. Let's take a moment to look at them. And to see if there's anything a fair-minded person can learn about them for future reference.

We started by looking at the sponsor list from that website. Then we turned to published information gathered by NGO Monitor which does uncompromisingly professional work focused on exposing whose charity and whose tithe money is applied towards funding extremist political causes.

The result: we hereby name, and sincerely hope to shame, the groups on the list below. Please help us do that. These people are getting away with murder.

Every one of them is complicit in the stage-managed burnishing of the career path of a petty Palestinian bureaucrat (Bassem Tamimi's daily work allegedly involves issuing visas for the famously make-work Fatah-controlled regime in Ramallah where everyone whom the regime favours gets paid work) and of his home town, Nabi Saleh, a village whose population - essentially one big family - and its heroes are dedicated to the efficacy of murder in achieving goals that most decent people would be shocked to know.

• Interfaith Peace-Builders' mission statement says it "fosters a network of informed and active individuals who understand the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the United States’ political, military, and economic role in it. To build and nurture such a network, we lead delegations of people from diverse backgrounds to Israel/Palestine.” That means such groups as Parents Circle-Families Forum (about whom see our post "12-Jul-13: Behind the facade at Parents Circle, messages that are deeply disturbing to bereaved families"), Holy Land Trust, Coalition of Women for Peace (CWP), Zochrot, Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD) and numerous others with similarly anti-Israel agendas. The group supports BDS campaigns. 
• Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) calls itself the “Jewish wing” of the Palestinian solidarity movement and seeks to “end the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem.” Its executive director Rebecca Vilkomerson helpfully explains that JVP's strategy is to create “a wedge” within the American Jewish community over support for Israel, while working toward the goal of eliminating U.S. economic, military, and political aid. When people speak of radical splinter groups whose viewpoints usually begin with the highly misleading words "as a Jew", JVP is probably on the list of people whom they have in mind. 
• Friends of Sabeel North America (FOSNA): Its mission statement describes this church group as an “ecumenical grassroots liberation theology movement among Palestinian Christians” which “encourages Christians from around the world to work for justice and to stand in solidarity with the Palestinian people.” Promoting “liberation theology,” the group claims that Palestinians represent a modern-day version of Jesus’ suffering. This includes deicide imagery, and supercessionist rhetoric used to demonize Israel and Judaism. 
• Amnesty International claims to be a “worldwide movement of people who campaign for internationally recognized human rights for all” But friends of Israel have long been aware that Amnesty's stance is odd, inconsistent, and tainted by deeply political anti-Israel considerations. The organization disproportionately singles out Israel for condemnation, focusing solely on the conflict with the Palestinian Arabs, misrepresenting the complexity of the conflict, and ignoring more severe human rights violations in the region. It also distorts international law, routinely misusing terms like “collective punishment,” “occupying power,” and “disproportionate” in its condemnations of Israel’s Gaza policy. To our great chagrin and puzzlement, it has been providing a megaphone for Bassem Tamimi for years, along with his family business and a cast of blood-lusting Tamimis, without even once drilling down into the culture of violence and hatred that characterizes his clan and his town. 
• U.S. Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation is a major proponent of BDS, billing itself as “A national coalition of more than 400 groups,” working “to end U.S. support for Israel's occupation of the Palestinian West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem.” 
• Ithaca Committee for Justice inPalestine (ICJP), formed in 2014, campaigns for the Palestinian “right of return” and lobbies for a boycott of Israeli products in supermarkets. 
• Palestinian American Congress Southern California – The Palestinian American Congress (PAC) does not maintain a regular website. Its Facebook account is openly hostile towards Israel, compares Israel with ISIS and calls for anti-Israel boycotts. 
• Veterans for Peace protests against all U.S. military operations and interventions. Its mission is “educating the public, advocating for a dismantling of the war economy, providing services that assist veterans and victims of war, and most significantly, working to end all wars.” 
• Fellowship of Reconciliation: Claiming to promote reconciliation among various ethnic, national and religious groups, it is aligned with those extremists who seek to advance boycotts of anything Israeli. 
• Dorothy Cotton Institute purports to prepare and educate leaders for “a global human rights movement”, but NGO Monitor's research points to their adoption of anti-Israel "apartheid" rhetoric as well as support for BDS. When activists from DCI speak out for the rights of murdered children like our Malki, and against those who celebrate such killings - the Tamimi clan among them - we will be ready to take a more charitable view. Middle East Children’s Alliance (MECA)– The group’s stated goal is to “educate North Americans about children in the region and the brutal impact of US foreign policy on their lives.” According to the International Solidarity Movement (ISM) website, “[t]he Middle East Children’s Alliance is the fiscal sponsor for ISM-USA.” Donations for ISM’s campaign to “interfere with the construction of the annexation barrier” can be made to “MECA (ISM-USA Fund).”
• Episcopal Peace Fellowship: Another group of self-described Christians who say they "seek a deliberate response to injustice and violence and want to pray, study and take action for justice and peace in our communities, our church, and the world. We are called to do justice, dismantle violence, and strive to be peace makers". They urge BDS as the way to achieve this for "the people of Palestine and Israel” But it is plain that they are oblivious to the violence-loving creed of Mr and Mrs Bassem Tamimi, which - given that they are among the sponsors of the roadshow - is a disgrace to them and their values.
• And the improbably named Vegans Against the Occupation: NGO Monitor notes that "a significant portion of the group’s website is devoted to vegan recipes". This may be a good thing. But its members might want to call for an audit in view of the funds they are throwing at the Tamimi platform.

Without dwelling on the matter, it's impossible for people of goodwill not to notice the prominent role played by groups asserting a Christian viewpoint. That's a deeply troubling aspect we plan to come back to in an upcoming post. It's also clear that the vast problems of the Arab world, and of the Palestinian Arabs in particular - corruption, child abuse, the glorification of child-killing, the open abuse of women, the uncritical embrace of so-called honor killings of wives, sisters and daughters - all somehow slip by these people. (We expand on some of this in a previous post: "22-Apr-14: Attention World Council of Churches: Will you now follow your own advice and speak up for the Arabs tortured and imprisoned by the PA?") It's inescapable: there's something about the Jews that somehow gets their total focus.

The remaining sponsors are a grab-bag of small and large action groups who either claim to promote peace (by including it in their names) or are single-issue apologists for one or another of the bickering Palestinian factions: Massachusetts Peace Action, Alliance for a Secular and Democratic South Asia, Boston Coalition for Palestinian Rights, Palestinian House of New England, Students for Justice in Palestine. If we skipped anyone, we apologize. We really do intend for your dishonesty and/or myopia to become much better known.

Finally, here's a reminder of a request ["11-Sep-15: How devoted to non-violence are the villagers of Nabi Saleh really?" and "04-Sep-15: Mr. Human Rights Defender, a question if we may"] we have repeated several times. 

It's directed at the organizers of the Tamimi performance and the audiences and commentators who go along. Please ask yourselves whether the answer you get (assume one is given) gives you the kind of moral comfort that lets a person of conscience sleep at night. 

Bassem Tamimi, tell us in simple words: are you as delighted by your cousin Ahlam Tamimi's massacre of Jewish children as she is? Have you criticized it ever, anywhere? Will you condemn it here and now?

(The massacre we mention is described here. It's where the life of our precious fifteen year-old daughter Malki ended.)

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

Badran, depicted on a Hamas website:
His call echoes the theme of the church group's
call, taking it a step further

A question to the politically-engaged Geneva-based leadership of the World Council of Churches:

You publicly called in mid-April, via an official WCC statement of solidarity, for expressions of Christian sympathy for what you termed (this is a direct quote) "some 5000 Palestinian men, women and children, languishing in Israeli jails". When you did that, did you understand that solidarity for their cause means being solid with people who are this week whipping up the masses and calling for acts of calculated Palestinian Arab murder directed at ordinary Israelis?

We pointed out to you some time ago ["17-Apr-14: Christian solidarity with unrepentant murderers: where's the outrage?"] that many of the "men, women and children" for whom you express your compassion are self-confessed murderers. Still more of them are proudly unrepentant terrorists. 

This did not stop your chief executive, the Reverend Dr. Olav Fykse Tveit, from calling on the 500 million worshipers belonging to WCC churches around the world "to pray for, visit, and tend to the needs of all [those] prisoners, no matter the reason for their detention."

No matter the reason for their detention is exactly the expression he used. A careful and well-prepared clerical gentleman, he surely understood and meant what those words convey in their plain sense. 

So we can surmise that, for the WCC, the key thing is not that they are murderers of innocent Jews but that they are 'languishing'. Thus Mr Tveit's address called upon the Christian faithful to

"remember Palestinian prisoners through prayers and acts of solidarity that restore to them their freedom with justice and dignity”

We wrote at the time that the justice and dignity permanently and irretrievably denied to victims like our 15 year old daughter Malki (that's her photo over on the right) of Palestinian Arab savagery have failed over the past decade to rise to the level at which the WCC feels it ought to speak out. 

It's difficult for us to not notice that the WCC leadership has been consistently silent, and remains silent, about the victimhood of Israeli children, women and men.

To be fair to them, Tveit and the learned elders of the WCC are not alone in their appalling moral blindness. 

Hamas calls on armed wing to kill soldiers and settlers | Elhanan Miller | The Times of Israel | June 10, 2014, 12:48 pm | Hamas has called on members of its armed wing in the West Bank to target Israeli soldiers and civilians in a bid to ease the plight of its prisoners in Israeli jails, a party spokesman said on Monday. “We call on the men of resistance in the West Bank, primarily the Al-Qassam Brigades, to fulfill their duty in protecting the prisoners on hunger strike by targeting the occupation soldiers and its settlers,” Hamas spokesman Hussam Badran wrote on his Facebook page Monday. “The occupation must pay a high price in the blood of its soldiers and settlers until it is persuaded to solve the issue of prisoners on hunger strike. This is everyone’s task, on the individual and organizational levels,” he wrote... [Times of Israel]

This Hussam Badran happens to be someone about whom we know a thing or two. In "3-Feb-13: Little noticed, unjustly-released terrorists are in charge of the ongoing jihad attacks against Israelis", we quoted the British newspaper, The Guardian, certainly no great friend of Israeli policies, reporting on Badran's part in the 'Gilad Shalit for Terrorists' transaction of October 2011:

Fresh lilies are regularly laid at a monument by the Tel Aviv Dolphinarium bearing witness to an evening in 2001 when 21 Israeli teenagers were killed while queuing outside a nightclub. Another 132 were injured in the attack by Saeed Hotari, a young Palestinian suicide bomber affiliated with Hamas. But last week flowers arrived more in protest than in sorrow. Husam Badran, the former head of Hamas's military wing in the West Bank and instigator of the Dolphinarium attack, is expected to be among 477 Palestinian prisoners released on Tuesday in a deal to free Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit. A further 550 will be freed within two months. "It's surreal. It's beyond belief," said one young mother angrily as she looked at the monument. "I may be the only one against it, but no good deal sees the release of 1,000 killers. People say Netanyahu showed courage in agreeing to set them free, but I say he has given in to terrorism." [The Guardian, October 16, 2011]

Badran, a monstrous man, walked free in the Gilad Shalit transaction in 2011. He has been living since then in Qatar where he re-established a career doing what he knows best - plotting against the lives of Israelis, and encouraging others to execute. (A terrorist cell connected to him was penetrated by the Israeli security establishment in February 2013 with numerous subsequent arrests - see our post.) Our guess is that Badran, the convicted and unjustly freed murderer, must be thrilled to bits by the moral support given to him and his co-conspirators by the WCC via its call for "freedom with justice and dignity... [for] all [those] prisoners, no matter the reason for their detention."

If you're new to our angry criticism of the World Council of Churches, then please know that as the parents of an innocent child murdered by those prisoners, we have made sincere efforts to engage the appropriate people at WCC Geneva in discussion. We felt a mission to explain to them the very bad things they are doing and to hear their self-justifications, if they can offer any. So far, they have not.

But it's actually worse than that. As we wrote here ["6-Jun-14: Fear and loathing at the World Council of Churches"], the WCC (self-described as "the broadest and most inclusive among the many organized expressions of the modern ecumenical movement, a movement whose goal is Christian unity... breaking down barriers between people, seeking justice and peace") says via its Director of Communications that it's unwilling to get into a discussion. Here's the full text of his letter to us dated June 5, 2014:

Dear Mr. Roth, Yes, I believe we would have nothing further to say.  Best wishes to you and your family. Mark Beach, WCC Director of Communication

So take it from this non-Christian, non-Moslem couple: there's something seriously wrong with a major global-facing church roof-body that wishes freedom, justice and dignity for convicted murderers but rolls down the shutters when a family devastated by the actions of those very murderers engages them in serious, albeit critical, discussion.

We hope some of our church-going readers will see fit to pass this post around. If you're not sure, the names and websites of all the WCC member churches are here: "23-May-14: On the dignity of murderers and their victims: An appeal to Christian friends". 

We'll sign off with a word to the WCC management team sitting there in Geneva: it's never too late to do sincere repentance and to come back and openly discuss these very serious life-and-death issues - even with people as marginal as we are to your mission.

6-Jun-14: Fear and loathing at the World Council of Churches

Christian and Muslim leaders at a WCC
Geneva Conference [Image Source]

Had we read the celebrated British columnist Melanie Phillips' lucid and essential analysis of Christian anti-semitism in our day, with some focus on the role of the WCC in particular (published in Commentary Magazine a few days ago and highly recommended), we might have gotten smart enough to skip the following rather vexing chapter in our lives. Here's what we mean.

During April 2014, the World Council of Churches came out with a public call to its faithful that involved praying for the freedom and dignity of Palestinian Arab prisoners. It's in our opinion a deeply troubling and fairly ugly chapter, and one for which a strong push-back is called. 

We blogged about the WCC's campaign twice in the days that followed: "17-Apr-14: Christian solidarity with unrepentant murderers: where's the outrage?" and "22-Apr-14: Attention World Council of Churches: Will you now follow your own advice and speak up for the Arabs tortured and imprisoned by the PA?" If you have time, please take a look; we make some points that seem to have slipped past many other people.

We sent a letter to the WCC secretary general, Dr Olav Fykse Tveit, on April 24, 2014, with links to what we had blogged in the previous few days. We were ignored. This quite bothered us since, as we see it, our standpoint is not political or organizational. We speak only for ourselves, and our interest in the matter of the Palestinian Arab prisoners is pure and passionate. We felt sure the world's largest church organization would want to hear and comment.

So we sent the same again, along with copies to a number of WCC insiders, a few days later. Still ignored. 

We fired off one additional round, and this time we got a response from the WCC's Director of Communications. That correspondence, with some personal details left out to avoid unintended embarrassment to any WCC officials, eventually became part of another post of ours: "15-May-14: Knocking at the church door; not getting much response or understanding"

The Communications man at the WCC seemed to be sensitive to what was on our chests, and responded to us in a humane sort of way. You can see our exchange in the link we included in the previous paragraph. Then he explained that he was heading for 

"a week-long absence from the office [and] should be able to access email later on Monday, however, that depends on access to the Internet. Best wishes to you and your family."  

We got that on May 11, 2014. We interpreted it to mean he would be back in touch with us after the week-long absence, and perhaps sooner. The issues we had raised, after all, were non-trivial and we had some heavy points to make based on first-hand experience of terror and terrorists. The WCC's secretary-general had not himself responded at any stage, so it seemed to us that we were speaking with his proxy. 

So here's what happened next: Nothing.

Yesterday (Thursday June 5, 2014), having gotten no further WCC emails for nearly four weeks, we wrote again:

"To be sure there is no misunderstanding between us, we received nothing further from you or anyone else in the WCC after your note of May 11, below."

Here's the full text of the response from the man in charge of communications with the world on behalf of the World Council of Churches:

Dear Mr. Roth, Yes, I believe we would have nothing further to say.  Best wishes to you and your family. Mark Beach, WCC Director of Communication

It took us no more than a few minutes to compose and send a brief response, thanking Mr Beach for his candor which we said was "refreshing, and puts a clear interpretation - different from the plain meaning of the words you used - on what you wrote" the previous month when he had spoken about planning to respond, and wishing the best to us and our family. 

That's how we arrived at the insight that this is how the World Council of Churches' leadership relates to people who disagree with what we regard as their disgraceful fawning over convicted and determined murderers.

Here's a very small part of what Melanie Phillips has to say in her fine analysis, the one published a few days ago at Commentary, about a certain flavour of Christian hostility towards Israel in the 21st Century:

This hostility has been heavily influenced by the World Council of Churches (WCC), which was founded in 1948, within months of Israel’s own founding. The Middle Eastern churches that belonged to the WCC had learned to adapt their message over the years to placate the Islamic rulers of the Arab countries where they were situated. As a result, the WCC hardly ever mentions the persecution of Christians around the world. Instead, it displays an institutionalized obsession with demonizing Israel... The WCC played a key role in bringing about the UN Conference on Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia, and Related Intolerance—the anti-Israel, anti-Jewish meeting convened in Durban, South Africa, a few days before 9/11. WCC representatives demanded that the UN denounce Israel for “systematic perpetration of racist crimes including war crimes, acts of genocide, and ethnic cleansing...” The WCC is particularly influential over progressive Western churches, which subscribe to its advocacy for the world’s poor and dispossessed and which have therefore also absorbed its narrative about Israel. [Commentary Magazine | 'Jesus Was a Palestinian': The Return of Christian Anti-Semitism, Melanie Phillips, June 1, 2014]

We know from experience that the world has many, many Christian believers whose abhorrence of terrorism, rejection of cries for the murder of innocent children, and belief in the central role of justice and morality in 21st century life differ hugely from the messages being advanced by the WCC. We don't share their theological outlook but we feel we have a great deal of common ground with their humanity.

But finding common ground with church leaders for whom calls to prayer and "acts of solidarity" that "restore" to the convicted, unrepentant murderers of innocent children "their freedom with justice and dignity” - that truly feels like mission impossible.

30-May-14: Terrorism raises serious issues that ought to be on the World Council of Churches' agenda but evidently are not

Click for last Friday's post

A week ago, we posted an item that we want to draw now to the attention of people who might not have seen it, or have read it. 

Not for the first time, we are trying to achieve something we feel is constructive, something firmly against terror and those who practice it and encourage it. And we need help from you. The background is at this link: 23-May-14: On the dignity of murderers and their victims: An appeal to Christian friends. 

What we seek is to draw the leadership of the World Council of Churches into an overdue, serious and issues-based discussion. They have ignored our communications with them until now, apart from two relatively perfunctory emails we received from their head of communications (!) It may be that this is something they strongly prefer not to do. But the call by their chief executive a month ago (we described it here: "17-Apr-14: Christian solidarity with unrepentant murderers: where's the outrage?") raises ethical, moral and (yes) religious questions of a serious nature that ought to affect thoughtful Christians no less than other thoughtful people. It's disappointing to see how that discussion is being evaded. 

All support and help is welcome. We are especially hoping to attract the participation and backing of people who worship in the churches affiliated with the WCC. Those worshipers are said to number about half a billion. The names of all the member churches are listed at the bottom of that same blog post, here.

If the president of any other nation state, seeking to take its place
among the members of the international community, were to triumphantly
raise the arms of confessed, unrepentant killers of innocent civilians
as Mahmoud Abbas is doing in this August 14, 2013 UPI photo,
and declared them to be role models for his people's children,
would that raise any ethical and religious issues worth considering? 

    
We view the WCC, for all its problematic position taking, as a serious, respectable and professionally-run organization that speaks in the name of a large part of the world's Christians. As concerned and troubled as we are by public pronouncements that seem to misunderstand terrorism, we are simply an ordinary couple with  no relevant public position. In that sense, we understand the reluctance of the Geneva-base management to trouble themselves. 

But as the parents of a child murdered by ideologically-driven Palestinian Arabs, and as individuals who take an active role in the global community of victims of terror, we feel there is a learning moment here - not just for Israelis, not only for bereaved parents, not merely for people with political axes to grind - for people with mutual understanding, justice, dignity, tolerance and co-existence on their minds.

If you are willing to help us with this, or know people who might, you are invited to make make contact. If the link is not working, the email address here is thisongoingwar@gmail.com