UK Methodists Whitewash Slurs
UK Methodists Whitewash Slurs

Background (by the writer):

The UK Methodists are holding their next Conference at the end of June, and a Christian Palestinian speaker who refutes the criminality of suicide bombers will give a presentation at the Conference. This is a link to a Methodist pro-Israel blog.

What appears below stands as background material for the next virulent round of anti-Semitic rhetoric which will pour out of the Conference. The Methodists are significant because they are arguably the most anti-Israel church among the major groups in the UK. Last year they wholeheartedly adopted Sabeel's "Israel as crucifier of Palestinians" model. At the same time they reject any legitimacy of the specifically Jewish covenant with God for the land of Israel; they deny the firm link between Jews today and our Biblical past.

They also attack Christian Zionists. There are many pro-Zionist and pro-Israel Christians, but it is important to remember that they are not unopposed..

The Jewish blogosphere has been full of condemnation of what the UK Methodist Church termeda “background document” on Israel and Palestinians. In it Dr. Elizabeth Harris claims that Israel uses Yad Vashem as a propaganda tool to indoctrinate young Israelis.

Ironically, Harris’s article on the official website, “Jewish and Muslim Perspectives on the Land of Israel-Palestine”, was written while
she was Inter Faith Coordinator. She opposes the alleged creation of an “Ethos of Victimhood” also among “Oriental” Jews she saw there—whose families, the author claims, were unaffected by theHolocaust. This was the worst section of an article that was full of bias and misrepresentations.

Yet, when exposed, these Methodists functionaries simply whitewashed their statements without admitting they had promoted offensive lies.

In March I wrote to the current Inter Faith Coordinator and Dr. Harris with documentary proof that Nazis persecuted and murdered non-Ashkenazi Jews in Greece, North Africa, and Iraq (during the brutal June 1941 Farhud pogrom in Baghdad). I respectfully requested that they correct or retract their document.

Neither of these things happened. Harris wrote back to me, saying she didn’t mean that non- Ashkenazim weren’t “welcome” at Yad Vashem. On re-reading the article, the racist assumptions jumped out—one, that she and her quoted colleague Michael Ipgrave could tell who was and who wasn’t “Oriental”, and two, that Jews are racially divided and do not concern themselves with each other’s problems. Only someone wholly unfamiliar with Jews and Israeli society could say this.

At this point, I sent the article to Rabbi Abraham Cooper at the Simon Wiesenthal Center, along with other anti-Israel material issued by the church. Rabbi Cooper published the story and condemnation of the article spread through the blogosphere.

Suddenly, once the article was exposed, Harris wrote and claimed that she didn’t even know the article was still on the website, and that it would be removed as part of routine removal of material which was no longer current. But within a day—once it was a public embarrassment—the article link was killed.

Harris also claimed that I misunderstood her “grammatically”, and that when she referred to Orientals, she  meant “some” and not “all”.

In her email the current Inter Faith Coordinator, Joy Barrow claimed that the document was never official, and was only a set of personal “reflections”. In fact the article was linked on the UK Methodist webpage for “Israel-Palestine” as a complementary resource, and it also appeared in a 2007 position paper in the reference appendices; it is still available there.

These replies constitute a total whitewash of a clearly biased article. The article absolutely reflects the position of the Methodist Church elites who promote a hard-core pro-Palestinian agenda—although many of the rank-and-file are pro-Israel.

To put the official anti-Israel bias in context, representationsmade by Harris in her article are remarkably similar to official positions of the Church documented in
their current Conference Report.