Posted on 10/24/2005 7:03:12 PM PDT by SJackson
JERUSALEM – Christian Zionists are teaming up to encourage greater investment in Israel, hoping to counteract a campaign by a pro-Palestinian group that has encouraged mainstream Christian denominations in the U.S. to divest from Israel.
The International Christian Embassy Jerusalem (ICEJ) held its annual Feast of Tabernacles celebration in Jerusalem last week.
The ICEJ – in conjunction with the Brussels-based International Christian Chambers of Commerce (ICCC) and the Federation of Israeli Chambers of Commerce – urged Christians to invest in Israel at a press conference last week.
The week-long ICEJ conference coincided with the holiday of Sukkot. This year more than 5,500 Christians from more than 70 nations – the largest number in the organization`s 26-year history – attended the festival.
(Christian Zionists believe that the Bible promises the Land of Israel to the Jewish people as an eternal inheritance.)
The “invest in Israel” initiative comes at a time when a number of churches in the U.S. have chosen to divest. Rather than fight the divestment campaign by lobbying individual companies or churches, the ICEJ and the ICCC are taking a positive approach, said ICEJ Executive Director Malcolm Hedding.
“In light of the troubling church divestment campaign ... our ministry has committed to redoubling its efforts to promote Christian investment in Israel,” Hedding said.
The Presbyterian Church USA led the divestment parade by launching an anti-Israel campaign in July 2004. The World Council of Churches and several other liberal denominations followed suit.
ICEJ spokesman David Parsons said he wanted to make it clear that his organization was not opposed to investment in the Palestinian people.
“We have a 25-year track record of humanitarian assistance to the Palestinian Arabs of this land, whether Muslim, Christian, Druze – just so long as it`s responsible, fully accounted for and it̓s not helping feed the terror chain,” he said.
Investing in the Palestinians is acceptable, he said. But, he added, attacking and de-legitimizing Israel is something the ICEJ will stand against.
For years, the ICEJ has sponsored programs to help meet the material and social needs of disadvantaged and disabled Israelis, both Jews and Arabs alike, and it has helped more than 60,000 Jews to immigrate to Israel.
This year one of the ICEJ`s projects included raising a half-million Euros (nearly $600,000) to help fund a therapeutic swimming pool for handicapped children in the southern Israeli coastal city of Ashkelon.
The feast celebration also infuses millions of dollars of income into the Israeli economy – more than $15 million in this year alone. But the new investment initiative aims to challenge Christians to invest in businesses here.
While there is already some Christian investment in Israel there is not enough, said Dale Neill, president of the ICCC. Christians should be encouraged by the resilience of the Israeli economy, said Neill.
“Look what the economy has survived [in the last five years],” said Neill.
“The economy is not based on tourism as much as people tink.”
During the last five years of Palestinian terrorism, tourism plummeted to all-time lows. But according to Uriel Lynn, president of the ICC, since former finance minister Benjamin Netanyahu began to implement his new financial policies in 2003, the Israeli economy has been growing.
“It`s a very stable economy,” said Lynn. This year the growth rate of the economy will surpass five percent.
“The growth rates [here are] the envy of countries in Europe,” he said.
According to Neill, the ICCC is working in conjunction with the ICEJ and the ICC to try to overcome some of the technical difficulties that make it hard for foreigners to invest in small- and medium-sized businesses in Israel.
Without elaborating, Neill said that part of the new thrust is to try to find ways to overcome those difficulties, to create the possibility for business opportunities in Israel and to make creative new kinds of investment funds in order to make it possible for someone with even a small amount of money to invest in Israel.
The divestment campaign has lost momentum – primarily because congregants didn`t always back the church hierarchy`s decision to divest – and has not had a financial impact on Israel yet, said Rabbi Abraham Cooper, an associate dean at the Simon Wiesenthal Center in California.
But left unchecked, it could have serious ramifications for Jewish-Christian relations in America, he said.
”There is a small group of activists within the church...who are very devoted to their worldview and their worldview is exclusively focused on the Palestinian narrative,” Cooper told journalists.
“It has not yet impacted [the U.S.] in terms...of spawning anti-Semitism or anti-Semitic acts on the ground because I don`t think that this political campaign has yet reached the grass roots level,” said Cooper.
“But if it`s left unattended it will absolutely have a negative impact.”
I wasn't aware that there is such a thing as a real Christian who isn't a Zionist.
If you'd like to be on or off this middle east/political ping list, please FR mail me.
Amen to that brother. I'm just a mensch. These twerpy old lind Protestant churches (and you know who you are) preaching divestment from Israel are flat wrong. Most of your members don't agree with that any more than they do having openly practicing homosexuals in positions of leadership. Tell you what. I'll invest $100 in Israel and you invest $100 with the palislimians and in ten years I'll be rich and you won't have a dollar.
Before I get written up for gay bashing, let it be known I regularly do a few things that don't agree with my church covenant either, but I dont' wear them on my sleeve nor do I have or seek a leadership position in my church. If everyone had to find a church they agreed with 100%, there woudl be about 200 million churches in this country with 1.5 members each. I may be a hypocrite, but if a hypocrite is standing between you and God, the hypocrite is closer than you!
OK that's enough preaching from the peanut gallery.
For parents, The Rugged Bear carries lots of children's clothes made in Israel. My wife and I bought several outfits of Israeli origin for our daughter this past weekend.
There isn't. Not anymore than white tent headed lynch mobs were Christians.
PS. The Chicano population of Texas and California was tiny.
The Lord's Supper is celebrated at this congregation in the confession and glad confidence that, as He says, our Lord gives into our mouths not only bread and wine but His very body and blood to eat and to drink for the forgiveness of sins and to strengthen our union with Him and with one another. Our Lord invites to His table those who trust in His Words, repent of all sin, and set aside any refusal to forgive and love as He forgives and loves us, that they may show forth His death until He comes.Because those who eat and drink our Lord's body and blood unworthily do so to their great harm and because Holy Communion is a confession of the faith which is confessed at this altar, any who are not yet instructed, in doubt, or who hold a confession differing from that of this congregation and The Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, and yet desire to receive the Sacrament, are asked first to speak with the Pastor or an usher. For further study, see Matt. 5:23ff; 10:32ff; 18:15-35; 26:26- 29; 1 Cor. 11:17-34;
These cards are generally filled out by those in attendance, Lutherans and NonLutherans alike, who wish to commune.
If your faith is in accordance with the Lutheran Confessions, you can commune.
For a more detailed treatment of this subject refer to: Admission to the Lord's Supper
8 Therefore the LORD Almighty says this: "Because you have not listened to my words,9 I will summon all the peoples of the north and my servant Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon," declares the LORD, "and I will bring them against this land and its inhabitants and against all the surrounding nations. I will completely destroy them and make them an object of horror and scorn, and an everlasting ruin.10 I will banish from them the sounds of joy and gladness, the voices of bride and bridegroom, the sound of millstones and the light of the lamp.11 This whole country will become a desolate wasteland, and these nations will serve the king of Babylon seventy years.
Hab 1:6-12
6 I am raising up the Babylonians,that ruthless and impetuous people, who sweep across the whole earth to seize dwelling places not their own. 7 They are a feared and dreaded people; they are a law to themselves and promote their own honor. 8 Their horses are swifter than leopards, fiercer than wolves at dusk. Their cavalry gallops headlong; their horsemen come from afar. They fly like a vulture swooping to devour; 9 they all come bent on violence. Their hordes advance like a desert wind and gather prisoners like sand. 10 They deride kings and scoff at rulers. They laugh at all fortified cities; they build earthen ramps and capture them. 11 Then they sweep past like the wind and go on- guilty men, whose own strength is their god."
12 O LORD, are you not from everlasting? My God, my Holy One, we will not die. O LORD, you have appointed them to execute judgment; O Rock, you have ordained them to punish.
"I may be a hypocrite, but if a hypocrite is standing between you and God, the hypocrite is closer than you!"
A hipocrite can never be close to G-d.
Following this logic, no people can claim any national jurisdiction over any land 'cause the entire world was created by G-d and thus belongs to G-d. I believe that is true but should we get of Israel's back and concentrate on our own relationship with G-d?
Christian Zionist ping!
If the natives want to purchase land back from us, sure. Which is exactly what the returning Jews did. The point is the so called Palestinians have less legal right to the land than the Jews, considering the Jews repopulated Palestine. The majority of Palestinians there now came after 1948 to fill jobs.
Exactly. I suppose my ancestors should have stayed in the praeries during the recession. I mean what right did they have to move into and populate the west coast?
Israel is a sovereign country and they have the right to defend it. They are our allies.
However, it is very unkind and untrue for you to call me a bigot.
"The Lutheran Church--Missouri Synod has never understood or applied the historic practice of close[d] Communion in such a way as to mean that only LCMS members are permitted to commune at LCMS altars. The official position of the Synod is that not only are members of other Lutheran churches with whom we are in altar and pulpit fellowship invited to commune with us, but also that in certain extraordinary cases of pastoral care and in emergencies members of churches not in fellowship with us may be given Communion. The Synod stated, for example, in 1986 "that pastors and congregations of The Lutheran Church--Missouri Synod continue to abide by the practice of close communion, which includes the necessity of exercising responsible pastoral care in extraordinary situations and circumstances" (1986 Res. 3-08 "To Maintain Practice of Close Communion")."
I do apologize. I let the issue get me overly emotional.
Thank you. I appreciate you being a gentleman.
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