Christmas lights are shimmering, bells are jingling and carols are being sung. Children who wrote to Santa Claus for gifts are opening their presents. It is a season of good will and love, the most beautiful time for many Canadians.
This month the United Church of Canada launched a campaign in 13 cities across Canada to boycott products made in illegal Israeli settlements on occupied Palestinian lands by Keter Plastic Ltd., SodaStream and Ahava.
The boycott movement is not new. Some Christians and Jews call it anti-Semitic. Nine Liberal and Conservative senators drafted a letter condemning the implication that “Israel is guilty and the Palestinians the only injured party.” But its supporters see it as a duty to promote justice and peace and oppose oppression and injustice.
Reverend Steve Berube, a United Church minister in New Brunswick who lived in Bethlehem, stated: “At Christmas, we tell the story of the wise men. Today the Magi would hit a 30-foot-high concrete wall around the city built on Palestinian land.”Well, duh, Rev. Steve. Wise men that they were, they would know that that's the most effective way to prevent their enemies from entering their land and killing them in the most savage manner possible.
Rev. Steve's misguided passion reminded me of another rev I had read about in the Wall Street Journal. This other rev actually lives in the Holy Land full time, and is part of a small but growing Christian "grassroots movement" that sides with Israel against Arabs/Muslims (now that their Christian brethren in Arab lands are being slaughtered like, well, Jews):
In some ways, Christians in Israel more closely resemble their Jewish neighbors than their Muslim ones, says Amnon Ramon, a lecturer at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a specialist on Christians in Israel at the Jerusalem Institute for Israel Studies. In a recent book, he reports that Israeli Christians' median age is 30, compared with 31 for Israeli Jews and only 19 for Israeli Muslims. Israeli Christian women marry later than Israeli Muslims, have significantly fewer children and participate more in the workforce. Unemployment is lower among Israeli Christians than among Muslims, and life expectancy is higher. Perhaps most strikingly, Israeli Christians actually surpass Israeli Jews in educational achievement.
As a minority within a minority, Christians in Israel have historically been in a bind. Fear of being considered traitors often drove them to proclaim their full support for the Palestinian cause. Muslim Israeli leaders say that all Palestinians are siblings and deny any Christian-Muslim rift. But in mixed Muslim-Christian cities such as Nazareth, many Christians say they feel outnumbered and insecure.
"There is a lot of fear among Christians from Muslim reprisals," says Dr. Ramon. "In the presence of a Muslim student in one of my classes, a Christian student will never say the same things he would say were the Muslim student not there."
"Many Christians think like me, but they keep silent," says the Rev. Gabriel Naddaf, who backs greater Christian integration into the Jewish state. "They are simply too afraid." In his home in Nazareth, overlooking the fertile hills of the Galilee, the 40-year-old former spokesman of the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate in Jerusalem is tall and charismatic, dressed in a spotless black cassock. "Israel is my country," he says. "We enjoy the Israeli democracy and have to respect it and fight for it."...
That's the best rebuttal I can think of to Rev. Steve's hateful tirades.
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