Fresh off an anti-Israel film series, Washington, DC-area Episcopalians at St. John’s Norwood in upscale Bethesda, Maryland and elsewhere have once again taken the lead in demonizing Israel by hosting Reverend Naim Ateek. This Palestinian Anglican known for his anti-Semitic outbursts against Israel addressed St. John’s on May 16, before participating in more vitriol the next day at Washington, DC’s anti-Israel Jerusalem Fund.
St. John’s rector, Sari Ateek, introduced the church’s evening lecture by noting that Naim Ateek, often called the “Desmond Tutu of Palestine,” is the “father of Palestinian liberation theology. He is also the father of me.” Before the overwhelmingly white and older audience of about 90 in the church nave who came to hear the founder of the anti-Israel Sabeel Palestinian Ecumenical Liberation Theology Center, Sari noted that most were St. John’s members. The audience also included Sari’s fellow Friends of Sabeel North America (FOSNA) member Steve France, who sits on the Episcopal Diocese of Washington, DC’s Companion Diocese Committee—Jerusalem (CDCJ). France’s associate from the film series, the Palestinian-American Zeina Azzam, also attended.
In his lecture, the Israeli citizen Naim Ateek suggested a neo-Marcionite approach to the Old Testament, in which Christians could cherry-pick the Jewish scriptures and thereby supersede any imputed Jewish theological chauvinism. In the Hebrew Bible, “some of it is palatable and beneficial for Christians,” he stated, while criticizing the scripture passages of Numbers 33:50-56 and Deuteronomy 7:1-7 displayed in his Powerpoint presentation. “Do these two texts reflect the God that we have come to know in Jesus Christ” and the “love of God?,” Ateek rhetorically asked, to which he answered that they reflect a “tribal God understanding.”
Ateek’s warped theology that denied any particular Jewish national claim to the Holy Land complemented his fabricated history that condemned Zionism as immoral imperialism. In order to “tell the story of Palestine,” one of his Powerpoint slides on the “Palestinian Loss of Land” used a thoroughly discredited map series, while another deceptively distorted an 1895 diary entry from Zionist founding father Theodor Herzl. Another slide cited the “arc of the moral universe” quotation oft-attributed to civil rights icon Martin Luther King, yet contrary to the St. John’s audience, the Zionist King condemned anti-Zionism as antisemitism.
In Ateek’s false utopian vision, universal humanistic values would transcend Jewish atavistic particularism with the abolition of Israel’s Jewish state within an Arab-Jewish binational, unitary Palestine. “One state” is the “ideal solution: Equal democracy for all citizens, Israelis and Palestinians,” stated the slides, while the “pro-Israel lobby is powerful” with “blind support to Israel.” The slides’ listed “Reasons for hope” included that Ateek’s oft-touted political partner, the radical Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), “is very active,” and “Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions [BDS] are working” to destroy Israel with political warfare.
Accordingly, Ateek condemned President Donald Trump’s recent decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s historic capital. Ateek stated that Muslims have “governed Jerusalem hundreds of years more than the Jews.” Yet only Jews, not Muslims or anyone else who conquered Jerusalem in the past, have ever had a capital in this city often neglected by Muslims throughout history.
Nonetheless, “many of us are weeping, are sad, for what has happened to Jerusalem,” Ateek stated. Trump’s “blunder…just gave Jerusalem on a silver platter to one religion, to one group, and totally disregarded the specialness, the holiness of the city of Jerusalem to the Muslims and to the Christians.” Ateek did not explain how Israeli sovereignty over Jerusalem, the city’s historically most tolerant governance, far more liberal than any Jordanian or Palestinian administration of the Holy Land, infringed upon Christian and Muslim holy sites.
Before a small audience of about 20 the next day, Jerusalem Fund director Mohamed Mohamed continued Ateek’s theme while introducing his panel. Mohamed stated that Trump’s Jerusalem decision will “erase the rights of Palestinian Muslims and Christians” and referenced Jerusalem’s international corpus separatum status under the 1947 United Nations Palestine partition plan. He ignored the fact that this temporary status was to precede Jerusalem’s (and its Bethlehem district’s) ultimate disposition in a referendum among Jerusalem’s Jewish-majority population, who presumably favored Israel.
Ateek’s views on Jerusalem coalesced with his fanciful claims to his sympathetic listeners that Arabs such as he consistently opposed Israel nonviolently. At St. John’s, he stated that recent Gaza riots incited by Hamas as cover for terrorism against Israel appeared to him to be peaceful protests, in which “thousands of Palestinians have been killed and wounded because they were defending their right for Jerusalem.” “We don’t believe that we can champion in any way violent revolutions or violent resistance,” he said the next day. This is rich coming from an author of the 2009 Kairos Palestine Declaration, with its praise for Palestinian terrorists who “have given their life for our nation.”
Ateek’s fellow speaker, FOSNA Executive Director Tarek Abuata, outdid Ateek by whitewashing a century of Arab terror against Zionism with analogies to the American civil rights movement and Mahatma Gandhi. At St. John’s, Abuata referenced the landmark 1965 civil rights march over Selma, Alabama’s Edmund Pettus Bridge, and said that “Gaza and justice in Palestine is the Edmund Pettus Bridge of our day.” Seemingly wanting to sing “We Shall Overcome” with Hamas jihadists recently killed by Israeli forces, he decried that in the “past two days of the Gaza murders, the appalling silence of a lot of our churches has been deafening.” Given that the Episcopal Church has rejected BDS, despite the wishes of many at St. John’s, he stated that “sadly the Episcopalian Church is behind on divesting.”
The next day at the Jerusalem Fund, Abuata ludicrously claimed that nonviolence “has been practiced for the past 100 years by Palestinians,” as if Muslim Arab collaboration with the Nazis against Jews never existed. He recalled that Congressman Steny Hoyer once asked Abuata about the Palestinians, “Where are your Gandhis? Well, 60 of them were shot in the past two days.” “If you are not with Palestinian justice and prophetic action now, you would not have stood with Martin Luther King” during the civil rights movement, Abuata scandalously claimed. Like Ateek, Abuata slandered Zionism as opposing an “anti-racist God that is inclusive of all.”
In contrast to a supposedly peaceful Muslim-majority Palestinian population, Christian Zionists were characterized by Ateek and his fellow Jerusalem Fund speakers as “extremist Christians.” The speakers highlighted the outlandish beliefs of various Christian Zionist individuals in order to create a strawman caricature of Zionist thinking, which actually has a respectable and broad-based tradition in Christian history. Mohamed stated that “powerful Christian Zionists work to foster Armageddon and the destruction of both rival religions” of Judaism and Islam. Meanwhile, Ateek continued his de-Judaizing of the Bible by discussing how the Judean Jew Jesus, who lived long before the name Palestine existed, was a “Palestinian living under foreign occupation.”
Joining Abuata and Ateek at the Jerusalem Fund, the David Duke-endorsed crank Max Blumenthal similarly defamed Zionism as simply an accessory to antisemitism. Zionism, he stated, is a
collaboration between anti-Semites in the West, who would like a West free of Jews, and traditional Zionists who believe that antisemitism is actually a force that can help propel Jews into making Aliyah or emigrating to the Holy Land and helping drive this project of colonization.
For Blumenthal, such Zionist perfidy continued today, as the “Jewish world is in a moral freefall because of Zionism” and its role in “Western empire.” In particular, the “weapons industry in the U.S. relies on this special relationship with Israel,” in which Israeli Jewish soldiers “are being incentivized to kill in order to increase profits.” The audience laughed when he noted his libelous comparison of genocidal jihadists in the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) with Israel, the “Jewish State of Israel in the Levant” (JSIL).
Blumenthal preached to the choir, including not only France, but also his CDCJ and FOSNA colleagues Thomas Getman and Paul Verduin, as well as the CATO Institute’s “libertarian for sharia” Imad-ad-Dean Ahmad. One regular Jerusalem Fund attendee, an older Arab Christian man from Nazareth, Israel, reiterated his usual refusal to say the name Israel. “Our country was occupied and we called it something else. I don’t want to even talk about that. So Palestine is now occupied Palestine,” and “that’s the only way we should pass the word to everyone,” he stated.
Ateek’s Washington, DC, speaking tour makes perfectly clear why, as he noted at St. John’s, synagogues consistently refuse to host him as a speaker, despite his myopic protestations that “I am not ant-Semitic.” Nevertheless, he deserves scrutiny from critics who enter his partisan rallies of the anti-Israel faithful, no matter how displeasing his allied zealots find such increasingly identifiable ideological interlopers. One woman at St. John’s purposely sat in a crowded pew next to this author as he was typing notes on his laptop, and suspiciously asked, “Is this going to go on Jihad Watch?” Yes.
Cicero says
I wonder if Prince Harry and Duchess Rachel. Megan knew of the track record of the AmericanEpiscoalinas before inciting Reverend Curry t9 speak. After all Rachel Megan might have indirect ancestral links with that part of the world.
This is only my opinion I must stress . It is not a definitive statement .
JawsV says
Since you brought it up, the media is going nuts that Meghan’s bi-racial. But, she looks white. Without being informed I would have never guessed African heritage as recently as her mother.
About Curry, he’s described as Presiding Bishop and Primate of the Episcopal Church of the United States. Easy to see they Africanized the wedding due to Meghan’s 1/2 heritage, also with the cello player and the gospel “Stand By Me” ladies. I didn’t listen to Curry. Anyone have a brief synopsis of his remarks?
R Russell says
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OhV0PL49d3Y
Kepha says
My wife and I watched the royal wedding. Here’s my take on Michael Curry.
Michael Curry is actually a 20-year-old white college sophomore Social Justice Warrior in blackface trying to live up to a Hollywood caricature of an old-fashioned African-American evangelical preacher.
Speaking as a [mostly] white Evangelical, I note the near complete absence of any reference to God as the sovereign over human history (in the context of which those “let justice roll down” comments make sense); and no sense of how, in Jese the Messiah, God has visited and redeemed his people.
Dr. Joyce Faison says
First Megan is Black. The American rule of one drop does not suddenly change when it comes to a royal wedding (See Mountbatten and hisRussian wife who was a direct decent of Pushkin or Queen Charlotte). Second, the Episcopalian Church, an offshoot of the Anglican Church, changed its name after the Revolutionary War. There is no such thing as an African Episcopalian part of the wedding service. They should have followed the service in the Book of Common Prayer. As a Black American and a confirmed Episcopalian, I found that the service was off putting. Megan l, however, looked beautiful.
JawsV says
No, Meghan (there’s an h in there) is 1/2 black. Like Obama. But, she looks white. Without knowing her mother is African I would have thought she’s 100% white.
Charles says
Dr. Joyce Faison …however, the Anglican “church” is a break-away from true Christianity founded by Jesus Christ. Henry the 8th needed to pay off his aristocrat chronies with the plundered goods of the Catholic Church. So he established his own “church”.
JawsV says
Charles, as an Episcopalian I resent your ridiculous and erroneous comment. First, Protestantism is true Christianity and Jesus has everything to do with it. Second, Henry 8 founded his own church, the Church of England (no quotation marks needed), so he could marry his 2nd wife Anne Boleyn. The Pope would not grant him a divorce. You need to read up on Tudor times because you’re woefully ignorant on the subject.
Thanks Pope Clement 7 (a Medici) because Anglicanism was desperately needed along with the preceding Protestant Reformation originated by Martin Luther.
gravenimage says
For what it’s worth, her mother is mixed race as well.
J D S says
Why would anyone want to associate them selves with a church that allows demonizing the Jews……Don’t they know that no matter what…the Jews are still a special people to God. If not so the Jews would have vanished long ago. wake up and get out of that church……
Don’t you know…..JESUS, GODS SON, IS A JEW!!!
JawsV says
What in the heck are you ranting about?
gravenimage says
Jaws, J D S is right–Jesus was a Jew.
AlphaDelta says
Is Jihad now defined as anything challenging Israel’s place in the world?
You would have to put half of Christendom in that category. The half that aren’t sheep.
JawsV says
Christendom’s been fighting Islam since the 7th century as after 622 (Islam’s official start date) Islam began cutting a swath through the Judeo-Christian Middle East countries and into Spain in 711 and onward into southeastern Europe.
gravenimage says
It looks as though “AlphaDelta”–a poster I have never seen commenting here before–wants ravening Jihadists to destroy civilized Israel, murder the Jews, and turn this modern democratic nation into another Islamic crap hole like Gaza. *Ugh*.
By the way, the *only* place in the Middle East where Christians are not oppresseded and may worship freely is Israel. With her destroyed, they would be as threatened as those now in Dar-al-Islam. The idea that this is what “half of Christendom” wants is just grotesque.
That Jews–or Christians–who don’t want to live under Shari’ah law are “sheep” is sickeningly false.
WPM says
Israel has a right to exist the Moslem nations and people will not recognize this, Israel has a right to protect its people from being murder and from terror attacks .Israel is a very small nation surround by a vast sea of hate that is it place in the world 2018.Israel is the canary in the coal mine of Islamic hate Jihad what the Islamics want to do to Israel they want to do to the whole non-Islamic world .Right now Israel is very isolated small surrounded, so it is easy target for violent and non-violent Jihad . Useful Idiots of the West help to advance this non-violent Jihad by buying into false victimhood of violent protest at the fences pushed by advance by a terrorist organization Hamas ,to put the West on notice that Israel is wrong for protecting itself and its people. Israel has a right to make any city inside itself the capital .America support that right by putting our embassy in Israel in Jerusalem .All nations have borders ,all nations have the right to protect their people from violent invaders and terrorist organization that plan and promote violence against their people that is what Hamas does .
gravenimage says
+1
RichardL says
These people are an embarrassment to me. And I am RC.
AlphaDelta says
RC is an embarrassment to God, just ask the pope.
gravenimage says
What problem does “AlphaDelta” have with the pope, since he has no issue with violent Jihad?
Shawn says
What does this have to do with jihad. Theres nothing wrong with criticizing israel. This guy isnt even muslim hes a palestinian christian
JawsV says
Israel doesn’t deserve criticism. Only Islam deserves criticism. Bravo Israel! Boo Islam!
gravenimage says
Another creep who wants to see ravening Muslims destroy Israel. *Ugh*.
WPM says
It is Jihad because it is backing terrorist goals over a country founded on laws the golden rule leaders voted in due process, over a violent tribe who want to kill all Jews and push them into the sea it leaders have said so over the last 70 years..
AlphaDelta says
Don’t take it so personally, Islam wants to convert or kill everyone. The irony of it is, it is Jews who are facilitating the collapse of Europe with the mass migration of Muslims. George Soros is a case in point, but I doubt he does much without consulting the Zionist Rothschilds.
You’re beloved “golden rule” leaders are terrorists, as much as is the US. Israel has no more right to exist than any other state, and was brought into “existence” by foreign declaration, as a means to destabilize the region and exploit oil resources. Otherwise, christendom was fighting the barbarians to stop the spread of caliphs throughout Europe.
Little did these Christian countries understand Israel would be there undoing, or perhaps they will rise up and throw off the yoke of oppression from their leaders. Remains to be seen. It’s hard to do without a means to defend oneself.
dumbledoresarmy says
You’re talking absolute nonsense when you claim that it is “jews who are facilitating the collapse of Europe with the mass migration of Muslims’.
Classic Jewhatred is to blame Jews for whatever bad thing is currently going on.
And your claim that the Israelis and the USA are ‘terrorists’ is nonsensical.
And so is your claim that Israel was “was brought into “existence” by foreign declaration, as a means to destabilize the region and exploit oil resources”.
Rubbish. Nonsense. The region was destablised, massively, 1300 years BEFORE, … by the invention and expansion of Islam. If there were no Israel, the region would still be racked by jihad – precisely as it was in all the preceding centuries when Jews lived as powerless, abused, exploited near-slave dhimmis in their own homelands and in other places – places such as Yemen, or North Africa, or Egypt, or Iraq, where their presence LONG predated the rise of the abominable Death Cult, the Religion of Blood and War, that is Islam.
gravenimage says
+1
JawsV says
Just can it with your “Zionist Rothschilds” you Jew-hater AlphaDelta. Yes, Israel has every right to exist. And no, Jews aren’t destroying Europe, Christians are by letting in the Moslem hordes.
JawsV says
No joan I’m not wrong. The leaders of Europe letting in the Moslem hordes are all Christians. May, Merkel, Macron — Christians. Yeah OK I agree they’re ignorant and stupid and don’t know a fig about Islam. Yes, Trump and Obama are both Christians, with a lot of Islam-sympathizing on Hussein’s side. All of the above attend church, they are Christians.
Yes, concerning Islam they’re ignorant and stupid. That’s how it is.
gravenimage says
Jews are a tiny minority in Europe–they don’t control immigration policies there.
And I see we have someone posing as Christian who sneers at the idea of the Golden Rule. Notably, Islam does not have a Golden Rule.
Indiana Tom says
just gave Jerusalem on a silver platter to one religion, to one group, and totally disregarded the specialness, the holiness of the city of Jerusalem to the Muslims and to the Christians.”
Still trying to figure out why and how Jerusalem is holy to Muslims.
Aisha stated Mohammed never left the building on his journey.
No far away Mosque existed at the time of his trip.
Al Aqsa Mosque being in Jerusalem is a fairly recent invention.
Muslims pray towards Mecca, not Jerusalem.
The Kaaba is a pagan building.
Muslim paraphernalia on the Temple Mount is the Abomination That Causes Desolation.
Granddaddy says
So the fake church is alive and well in Washington, DC, also. This is not Christianity. And it has nothing to do with Martin Luther King, Jr. Jesus never taught such crap.
JawsV says
Not a fake church. A true church. Yep, Protestantism is Christianity. No, it’s not crap at all. It’s your ignorant comment that’s crap, Granddaddy.
Charles Soper says
These myopic and ignorant folk have neglected their own roots, let alone their Biblical root (Rom.11.18), they’d be astonished to find Shaftesbury, Bickersteth, Simeon, Ryle and a host of other of the cream of Anglican witness who advocated for Israel’s constitution, decade before Herzl was born!
AlphaDelta says
Wrong millenia. Early Jews existed in the 8th century BCE. Mohammedism wasn’t until the 8th century CE. You’re off by 1600 years.
JawsV says
Mohammedanism started in the 7th century, 622. So, you’re off. Jews existed for 3,000 years before Jew-hating Islam.
gravenimage says
Washington, DC-Area Episcopalians Hate on Israel
…………………..
Just unconscionable.