Reblogged from http://www.wnd.com/2013/05/the-church-of-scotlands-scandal/
Dennis Prager calls new report on Israel 'ugliest depiction of Jews since medieval times'
Earlier this month, the Church of Scotland issued a report titled “The Inheritance of Abraham? A Report on the ‘Promised Land.’”
The essence of the report is that according to the Bible, Jews have
no more attachment to the land of Israel than anyone else. Hence
“promised land” is in quotation marks in the report’s title – because
there is no promised land.
In the report’s words: “The New Testament contains a radical
re-interpretation of the concepts of ‘Israel,’ ‘temple,’ ‘Jerusalem’ and
‘land.’ When the Bible mentions ‘Israel,’ it does not mean Israel; when
it says ‘temple,’ the Bible does not mean the Jewish temple;
‘Jerusalem’ does not mean the city of Jerusalem; and ‘land’ does not
mean land.
“Promises about the land of Israel,” the report continues, “were
never intended to be taken literally, or as applying to a defined
geographical territory.”
Even during the worst excesses of Christian anti-Semitism in the
Middle Ages, it is doubtful that any normative Christian body declared
that “Israel,” “the temple,” “Jerusalem” and “the land” no longer meant
or were ever intended to mean what those words represent.
This claim is not only profoundly anti-Semitic. It is an act of
theological forgery; it makes a mockery of the Bible as a coherent
document and renders Christianity inherently anti-Semitic.
It would be as if a major post-Christian religious body had announced
that “Jesus,” “Christ,” “crucifixion” and “resurrection” had never
meant what Christians and the New Testament had always understood them
to mean. Imagine if a major Muslim body declared that Jesus means
Muhammad; Christ means Quran; crucifixion means Islamophobia; and
resurrection means the Hajj.
I have never equated criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism. But the
Church of Scotland report is not about criticism of Israel; it is about
invalidating the Jewish people and invalidating the Jews’ historically
incontestable claims to the land upon which the only independent states
that ever existed were Jewish.
- The Church of Scotland report asserts that the Bible does not
support the existence of a Jewish state: “There has been a widespread
assumption by many Christians as well as many Jewish people that the
Bible supports an essentially Jewish state of Israel. This raises an
increasing number of difficulties. … ”
- It asserts that justice and the existence of a Jewish state are
mutually exclusive: “There is a direct conflict of interest between
wanting human rights and justice for all and retaining the right to the
land.”
- It asserts that the Jews’ return to Israel has no biblical basis.
- It asserts that the notion that the Jews have or ever had a special
relationship with God – one of the most oft repeated ideas in the Hebrew
Bible – is negated in that very same Bible: “That exclusivist tradition
implied Jews had a special, privileged position in relation to God. But
the prophetic tradition stood against this.” The Chosen People is not
chosen, in other words.
- It asserts that God’s promise of the land to Abraham has nothing to
do with the Jews; it is only about Jesus: “The promise to Abraham about
land is fulfilled through the impact of Jesus, not by restoration of
land to the Jewish people.”
- It asserts that even Jesus – that proud, religious Jew – did not
believe in any special relationship between God and the Jews: “Jesus
offered a radical critique of Jewish specialness. … “
At the same time, this truly immoral document does not devote a word
to why there were Palestinian refugees: While the Jews accepted the
1947-48 partition of Palestine into Jewish and Arab states, all the
neighboring Arab states rejected the partition and invaded the Jews in
order to annihilate Israel at birth.
Nor does the report devote a single sentence to how Israel’s
occupation of the West Bank came about: In 1967, Israel’s neighbors
sought to exterminate Israel just as Iran, Hamas, Hezbollah and most
Palestinians and other Muslims in the Middle East wish to now. And that
only because of that war, won by Israel, did Israel come to occupy the
West Bank of Jordan.
Nor is a word devoted to Palestinian national honoring of their
numerous terrorists, or to the exterminationist and anti-Semitic
propaganda that saturates Middle East media or to the widespread
Palestinian support for terrorism (according to the just-released Pew
Forum poll of Muslims, 40 percent of Palestinians support suicide
terror).
And the Church of Scotland did not think it important to even hint at
what happened in Gaza after the Israelis gave the whole of Gaza to the
Palestinians: The Palestinians converted it into a terror-state that
regularly launches rockets into Israel to kill as many Israelis as
possible.
And, most vile of all, the Church of Scotland never once notes, let
alone condemns, the Muslim countries and organizations that seek to
annihilate Israel, an existential threat that no other country or people
in the world face.
The Church of Scotland has given voice to the ugliest depiction of
Jews since medieval times. The official reaction of the Scottish Jewish
community is that Christian-Jewish post-Holocaust dialogue seems to have
been a moral and intellectual waste of time. I do not agree. But if
other Christian churches do not condemn the Church of Scotland – despite
its promise to revise its report to include a statement that Israel has
a right to exist (!) – even pro-Christian Jews will wonder whether the
Scottish Jewish community’s reaction is valid.
And how did this happen? The report is a combination of medieval
Christian anti-Judaism and contemporary leftist anti-Zionism. For Jews
and Israel, that’s a lethal combination.
