Posted on 02/19/2008 6:37:08 AM PST by Presbyterian Reporter
Among the latest exploits of the United Methodist Women’s Division is a children’s book intended to instill anti-Israel themes among Methodist younsters. Innocuously called, “From Palestine to Seattle; Becoming Neighbors and Friends,” the booklet portrays Israel as an oppressor of Palestinians while omitting all mention of terrorism. It was written by Mary Davis, a former United Methodist missionary in “Palestine,” where she led “study tours,” whose political content no doubt was predictable.
The United Methodist Women’s Division, with over $60 million in assets, $30 million in annual income, and nearly 700,000 members, is one of the most powerful women’s groups in America. Its mostly older members, strung across over 30,000 local churches, earn money for their New York-based headquarters with bake sales, Christmas bazaars, and church suppers. Few among them realize that their donations fund causes of the radical left, including anti-Israel activism.
In the children’s story, a Seattle Methodist pastor just returned from “Palestine” shares a letter from a young Arab boy in Bethlehem with his own children. The Arab boy, Tarek, has never been to McDonald's because the closest one is in Jerusalem, and travel there requires a pass by the Israelis. Naturally, the American children are disturbed. In an ongoing pen pal exchange, Tarek asks the American children why their country thinks all Palestinians are terrorists. The Americans are embarrassed. They summon up the nerve to ask Tarek why passes are needed to travel to Jerusalem.
Tarek responds that Israeli soldiers require passes, and that Palestinians without them are turned away, whether they are going to their jobs, or to hospitals. “How can people be so unfair?” the American children ask their pastor father. The father is unsure how to answer. But he helps them begin another correspondence with a little Israeli girl, who recounts that her cousin, an Israeli soldier, has been imprisoned for refusing to guard the “checkpoints” because “they were wrong and they were hurting people.”
Fascinated by what they have learned about all this injustice, the American children decide to accompany a Methodist missionary to “Palestine.” They see for themselves the dreaded checkpoints. “Looking up, they saw a soldier with a gun sitting in a watch tower,” the book records ominously. A helpful illustration shows the van full of frightened American children surrounded by armed Israeli soldiers and lots of barbed wire. With their missionary guide and a local Presbyterian minister, the children journey on to Jerusalem, where they visit Tarek’s family.
The American boy is awakened at dawn by a “strange chanting voice,” but Tarek reassures him that it is only the Muslim call to prayer. Even more exciting, Tarek’s friend later invites the American children to a mosque. Of course, they love it! It has “beautiful crystal lights” and wonderful carpets. The imam explains that just as the body needs food, so does the soul need “prayer breaks.”
Coincidentally, the American children are in Bethlehem just in time for a “Children’s Peace March.” Hundreds of children assemble with clerics and local officials to march for “peace.” The Americans make their own sign proclaiming: “Seattle Kids for Peace.” After the march, the young demonstrators assemble at the Church of the Nativity.
The next day, the American children get ready to visit Jerusalem. Their Arab friends expect to be left behind, because they know “it is very unusual for West Bank children to cross the checkpoint into Jerusalem.” But the Presbyterian pastor surprises them with passes! He explains that Palestinians under 12 years of age can sometimes get passes. Why is this so? The concern about teen-age Palestinians is not explained, of course. Happily, the children journey together to Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, and eventually Nazareth. The children also attend meetings of “Together,” an Israeli “peace” group. At the tour’s end, the children pledge to reconvene in America. “Today at the Sea of Galilee, Next year in Seattle!” they excitedly proclaim, spoofing the well known Jewish promise of “next year in Jerusalem.”
“From Palestine to Seattle” is accompanied by a more detailed teacher’s guide. “How would you feel if you were not allowed to visit a certain place?” the teacher is instructed to ask the children, so as to understand how Palestinians must hurt when Israel demands travel passes. “Say that Palestinians are sometimes not allowed to go into some areas of Israel,” the teachers are instructed. “Sometimes they are kept away from going to the places where they work or are kept away from their own farmlands.” The children are never told the reasons for this purportedly outrageous restriction. The children’s Israeli friend, Miriam, tells them of her fear about a “bomb.” But the children never hear who or what might ignite such a bomb. Unlike the helpful picture of the gun-toting Israeli soldiers scaring the children, there are no illustrations of Palestinian suicide bombers blowing up children and adults.
The teacher is also urged to ask the children to remember brave people who “took a stand,” like Martin Luther King, Jr. or Rosa Parks. Queen Esther and Daniel in the Bible are also cited. They are reminded of the Israeli soldier in the story who “took a stand” by refusing to man an Israeli checkpoint. There are no similar examples cited of taking a stand against Palestinian terror or Islamist repression. Presumably that would be too complex for the children, who are instead encouraged by the teacher’s guide to gather a pile of stones. They are to be told that in “Palestine,” stones can represent the rubble left when Israelis have bulldozed Palestinian homes for having done “something” against the Israeli government. Stones can “also be the means by which a young person resists the presence of Israeli soldiers in the town.” Palestinian youth “sometimes throw stones at the soldiers.” Likewise, in ancient times, the stones could “mark a holy place,” the teacher’s guide recalls, in a helpful comparison.
Teachers are asked to tell the children how the pass system for Palestinians resembles the pass system under Apartheid South Africa. “Apartheid is similar to the pass system that exists for Palestinians,” the teacher’s guide asserts. Then the children are to sample the injustice of the pass system themselves in a game in which some children are denied juice and grapes if they don’t have the right pass. Such fun! And such learning! The teachers are admonished: “Remind the children that when people are denied things that they believe everyone should have, they feel bad and sometimes they become angry.”
The children are asked to recreate the “Children’s Peace March,” to make placards and march in the hallway, while waving flags. There’s also a time for prayer. The children are asked to learn how Muslims pray by spreading a blanket on the floor and bowing their heads down five times as they pray for peace. “Share with children that sometimes courage is needed to resist evil,” the teacher’s guide sternly instructs.
Will future United Methodist Women’s Division books for children offer similar opportunities to “resist evil” on figurative trips to Saudi Arabia, North Korea, Iran, or Cuba? Perhaps the children could watch the Saudi religious police beat unveiled women, or visit North Korean secret prisons where dissidents are starving, or hear Iranian clerics call for liquidating the Jews, or witness Cuban secret police tear gas democracy demonstrators. Sadly, the left-wing activists at the Women’s Division New York headquarters, funded by the dollars from ten thousand church bake sales, do not have much interest in resisting those kinds of evil.
Mark Tooley is director of United Methodist Action at the Institute for Religion and Democracy.
bookmark
Dinosaur Mainline church deathwatch.
“My name is Tarek and I’ve never been to a McDonald’s therefore I could not blow it up. I also live in Bethlehem where your Jesus was born and if you infidels ever try to visit there I’ll kill you too.”
Note author of article.
The more immediate problem the Methodist church has is the warping of the Scripture that some in the Methodist pulpit and Methodist conferences are trying to pass of as Gospel.
from CAMERA:
http://www.camera.org/index.asp?
x_context=2&x_outlet=118&x_article=1449
February 13, 2008 by Dexter Van Zile
Methodist Manual Maligns Israel, Stereotypes Jews
The Women’s Division of the General Board of Global Ministries of the
United Methodist Church, a denomination that is considering divesting
from Caterpillar in protest of Israeli policies at its upcoming
General Conference, has published a “Mission Study” by Rev. Stephen
Goldstein, an ordained Methodist Minister who serves as Assistant
General Secretary for the Mission Personnel Program Unit of the
General Board of Global Ministries.
Rev. Goldstein portrays the Jewish people as too paranoid, and
psychologically scarred to be trusted with self-determination.
Accompanying this “Mission Study” is an equally distorted “Study
Guide” prepared by Rev. Sandra Olewine which encourages people to
embrace an anti-Israel narrative through a process of dialogue,
meditation, and worship. (For length considerations, this analysis
will limit itself to the text prepared by Rev. Goldstein.)
The main thesis of Rev. Goldstein’s blurry, inaccurate and one-sided
hagiographic treatment of the Arab-Israeli conflict is that Israelis
are too obsessed with the Holocaust to affirm the humanity of the
Palestinians and too crippled by their history of suffering to take
the risks needed to make peace. In his text, Rev. Goldstein, a Jewish
convert to the United Methodist Church, portrays Israel as exhibiting
the same characteristics of Jewish life and Judaism that he found
repellent and dissatisfying as a youth while growing up in Fort Lee,
New Jersey............
[long article]
http://www.camera.org/index.asp?
x_context=2&x_outlet=118&x_article=1449
Collections sent to the Women’s Division by local churches in the Virginia Conference of the United Methodist Church, for each of the 18 districts in the Va Conf:
ALEXANDRIA TOTAL 85,495
ARLINGTON TOTAL 53,474
ASHLAND TOTAL 46,738
CHARLOTTESVILLE TOTAL 27,767
DANVILLE TOTAL 48,092
EASTERN SHORE TOTAL 22,919
FARMVILLE TOTAL 31,236
HARRISONBURG TOTAL 55,723
LYNCHBURG TOTAL 46,779
NORFOLK TOTAL 92,794
PENINSULA TOTAL 54,252
PETERSBURG DISTRICT 59,795
PORTSMOUTH TOTAL 48,579
RAPPAHANNOCK TOTAL 79,531
RICHMOND TOTAL 54,689
ROANOKE TOTAL 59,442
STAUNTON TOTAL 48,724
WINCHESTER TOTAL 62,638
VA CONF. TOTAL $978,667
There are just over 1200 churches in the Virginia Conference, so the “average church” sends:
Conf / 1205 $ 812
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
February 13, 2008
Contact: Sr. Ruth Lautt, O.P., Esq.
Christians For Fair Witness on the Middle East
(212) 870-2320
Fair Witness Is Disturbed By Methodist “Mission Study”
Christians for Fair Witness on the Middle East (”Fair Witness”) is deeply disturbed by the profoundly unbalanced manner in which “Israel-Palestine: A Mission Study,” published last year by the United Methodist Church, General Board of Global Ministries, Women’s Division, depicts the conflict in the Middle East.
According to Sr. Ruth Lautt, Fair Witness National Director, “the volume is so replete with factual errors, misrepresentations, material omissions and distortions that we have to question the intentions of the authors Revs. Stephen Goldstein and Sandra Olewine. As just one example, the Mission Study completely distorts the period and events leading up to the Six-Day War. It blames the outbreak of war on ‘Israeli aggression’ while largely ignoring the historical record that Israel was defending itself after the collective Arab armies lined up on Israel’s borders and vowed openly to annihilate the Jewish state.”
“Even more disturbing,” says Rev. Dr. Archer Summers, Senior Minister, First United Methodist Church, Palo Alto, California “is the blatant attempt to portray Jews and Israelis in as damning a light as possible. The Mission Study engages in overt stereotyping of Jews as belligerent, inherently racist and vengeful and even resorts to exploiting the history of the Holocaust by portraying Israelis as so psychically damaged by this event that they are now indifferent to human suffering and seek to victimize non-Jews in a vengeful sort of manner.”
“As is the case in most situations of conflict, neither side is completely without blame here. The Methodist Mission Study, however, makes no attempt to present the facts and the history of this conflict in an honest or balanced way. Our churches must make a serious effort to listen to all voices so that we can work cooperatively for peace, rather than merely condemning and attacking one side,” adds Sr. Ruth.
A full analysis of the Mission Study is now available on the Fair Witness website:
www.christianfairwitness.com
All the churches on this list belong to the National Council of Churches which promotes socialism/communism and have become wings of the Democrat party. Most have no interet in saving the souls of their parisioners.
• African Methodist Episcopal Church
• The African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church
• Alliance of Baptists
• American Baptist Churches in the USA
• Diocese of the Armenian Church of America
• Christian Church (Disciples of Christ)
• Christian Methodist Episcopal Church
• Church of the Brethren
• The Coptic Orthodox Church in North America
• The Episcopal Church
• Evangelical Lutheran Church in America
• Friends United Meeting
• Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America
• Hungarian Reformed Church in America
• International Council of Community Churches
• Korean Presbyterian Church in America
• Malankara Orthodox Syrian Church
• Mar Thoma Church
• Moravian Church in America Northern Province and Southern Province
• National Baptist Convention of America
• National Baptist Convention, U.S.A., Inc.
• National Missionary Baptist Convention of America
• Orthodox Church in America
• Patriarchal Parishes of the Russian Orthodox Church in the USA
• Philadelphia Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends
• Polish National Catholic Church of America
• Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)
• Progressive National Baptist Convention, Inc.
• Reformed Church in America
• Serbian Orthodox Church in the U.S.A. and Canada
• The Swedenborgian Church
• Syrian Orthodox Church of Antioch
• Ukrainian Orthodox Church of America
• United Church of Christ
• The United Methodist Church •
When my old UMC church here in Jackson, MS had a pastor who started spouting off some strange theology, and the music minister was caught diddling the help, the Bishop (one of those who wrote the petition against President George W. Bush having his library at SMU) promptly fired the minister and got a Trinitarian preacher in there, along with a strong music minister.
Why? Because the tithing went into the crapper and they couldn't fund their little pet leftie programs.
ping
Goldstein is a [censored] [censored] [censored] disgrace of a Jew, but there is an unfortunate truth to that statement. Many of Israel's problems are caused by a ghetto/pogrom/shtetl mentality that many can't seem to shake. However, all Israelis have done a fine job in spite of our handicaps.
bump
I call bullshiite. The bigger the church, the more likely the corruption hidden within.
Smaller churches are FAR less likely to fall into Unchristian practice, simply because their membership IS Christian, in a practicing sort of definition.
The bigger the (proddy)church, the more likely the corruption.
BTW, DW=Catholic.
Hoist upon one's own petard. D'oh!
bttt
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