Tuesday, June 03, 2014

MELANIE PHILLIPS: THE RETURN OF CHRISTIAN ANTISEMITISM…….

KGS

Cropping up in all of the familiar places, and will eventually filter into the right if not properly checked
The churches most easily influenced by Palestinian Liberation Theology, are those who follow the Leftist path more than their own faith. Tony Campolo, one of the firebrands of the movement, told me in written mail some 15 yrs ago or so in response to a letter of mine challenging his anti-Israel views (he said he didn’t do email at the time), that all the emphasis on the Christian world developing relations with Israel, is coming at the expense of the Muslim world ”which is more vast than the tiny state of Israel.”
Being more ”Muslim Arab orientated” according to Tony Campolo, is then more of a benefit to Christianity than maintaining strong ties with the Jewish state (he holds to the view of winning Muslims to Christianity, the Jews are proving to difficult to convert).
UPDATE: Yisrael Medad has the following: ”It was Hanan Ashrawi in Madrid in 1991 who declared at one of her press conferences I attended that “Jesus was a Palestinian”, despite “Palestine” as a name for the country began in 135 CE, a full century after his crucifixion.”


‘Jesus Was a Palestinian’: The Return of Christian Anti-Semitism

Manger Square was bedecked with huge photomontages of classic artworks featuring Christian imagery superimposed with images from the Palestinians’ modern reality. Caravaggio’s “Ecce Homo” merged with a photograph of Palestinians crossing an Israeli checkpoint on their way to Jerusalem, equating Palestinians with Jesus and his suffering.
The New York Times, May 25, 2014, reporting on Pope Francis’s visit to the West Bank
Within the Protestant world, many churches are deeply hostile to the State of Israel. They present the Palestinians as victims of Israeli oppression while ignoring the murderous victimization of Israeli citizens at their hands. This much is generally known. What is less known is the even more disturbing fact that this perverse animus is increasingly fed not by the politics of the present moment but by theology.
This is all the more striking because millions of evangelical Christians are among the most passionate supporters of Israel in America and elsewhere. These Christian Zionists believe the Hebrew Bible’s account of how God chose the Jewish people to form a kingdom of priests and promised them the land of Israel. That religious belief has turned Christian Zionists themselves into a key target for evangelization on the part of those churches that have Israel in their crosshairs—and those evangels are bearing fruit.
The Christian world likes to forget it, but the history of its relationship with the Jews is terrible. In medieval Europe, the Catholic Church used blood libels to incite the population against the Jews, converted them at knifepoint, and murdered them in great number.
These pogroms were driven by a particular demonology called replacement theology, also known as supersessionism. Going back to the early Christian father Origen (182–254 C.E.), this idea holds that, because the Jews denied the divinity of Jesus, all the promises God had made to them now belong to Christians. Exiled from God’s love, the Jews had become the party of the Devil.
After Auschwitz, this vicious theology unsurprisingly disappeared from view. But it turns out that it only went underground. For now it has returned with a fresh geopolitical impetus furnished by “Palestinian liberation theology,” itself a fusion of Palestinian political aspirations and Christian thinking.
It is a variant of liberation theology, the doctrine propounded in the 1960s to suggest that socialist revolution was the proper fulfillment of the Christian duty to the poor. In this iteration, Jesus becomes a Palestinian persecuted by the Jews while Jesus’s descendants—who knew he had any?—become today’s Palestinians, crucified in the very land that was promised to them. Their liberation would, of course, require the dissolution of the Jewish state.
These malevolent concepts, spreading from Palestinian Christians to churches in the West, are rooted in an audacious strategy adopted by the Palestinian Authority to deny Israel’s right to exist by changing Jewish history to suit its own end. Part of this strategy involves denying that Jesus was a Jew from Judea and turning him into a Palestinian who preached Islam.
Clearly, this is a tall order: Rome didn’t change the name of Judea to Palestine until 136 C.E., and Islam first surfaced in the seventh century C.E. Nevertheless, the Palestinian leadership repeatedly claims that Jesus was a Palestinian.
In his Christmas message last year, the Palestinian Authority president, Mahmoud Abbas, described Jesus as a “Palestinian messenger.” In the same month, the PA’s chief negotiator, Saeb Erekat, who had described Jesus as “Palestine’s first martyr,” said that Jesus was “the first Palestinian after the Canaanite Palestinians.”
NOTE: Read also Pamela Geller’s interview with Bat Ye’or on the Palestinization of Europe.
PG: Europe’s soul changed. That’s important; an important quote.
BY: Yes. Because it has to support the Palestinian war, jihad against Israel.
PG: It has to support barbarism.
BY: Which is support barbarism, which is to support jihad ideology which is, as well, as much anti-Jewish as anti-Christian, and which is legitimized by the evilness of the Jews and Christians or of the infidels also. It is based on that, so when Europe support this and legitimize it intellectually, and also with its heart, its soul and heart support the destruction of the state of Israel, it supported also its own evilness and its own destruction. And since this moment it follows therefore the Palistinization of Europe, of the whole mentality of Europe — the whole vision and interpretation of history and of events according to the Palestinian vision , which is the eternal evilness of its enemy Israel, which is linked also to the Christian and the West. So Europe destroyed itself. It destroyed its own, first of all, Christianity, and give in to the Palestinians to attack the Christianity in Lebanon. Because the Palestinian war was not only against Israel. The Palestinian, you have to see them as a tool or as an instrument of the Arab world to destroy Israel, and also as a channel to penetrate into Europe and Islamize Europe. It is exactly what they have done.

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