For Immediate Release

Thursday, April 21, 2005

Contact: Dennis Hale
Judeo-Christian Alliance
www.judeo-christianalliance.org
Phone: (617) 552-4165

Christians and Jews Blast Campaign Against Israel

The Judeo-Christian Alliance, an initiative of the Boston-based David Project, called on the United Church of Christ to speak the truth about violence against Jews in Israel. The JCA made the call after the denomination announced that it will consider two proposals to divest from Israel at its upcoming General Synod.

"Both resolutions are written as if occupation was the cause of Palestinian violence. Palestinian violence is the cause of the occupation," says Dexter Van Zile, JCA director and a member of the UCC. “The Palestinian violence against Israel takes place in the context of a world-wide Jihad intended to impose religious apartheid on non-Muslims. Hamas’ constitution makes that plain.”

Dennis Hale, president of the JCA said the resolutions are based on an inexcusable ignorance of the history and politics of the Middle East.

“The ignorance is inexcusable because the truth is readily available to anyone who will look for it; but in its zeal to demonize Israel, the UCC, like other mainline Protestant denominations, has taken the fatal steps from willful ignorance to appeasement and then to active collaboration with the real enemies of peace,” he said. “Like their intellectual forebears, the ‘peace in our time’ appeasers of the 1930s, the UCC and its brethren are the architects not of peace, but of unending warfare against the innocent. Their actions bring shame on Christians everywhere."

The UCC has a role to play in framing Christianity’s response to militant Islam, Van Zile says, but the denomination is unable to acknowledge there’s a problem, as evidenced by the resolutions, which make no mention of the religiously motivated hostility toward Israel.

“The leadership of the UCC is in the grips of a bad case of Jihad denial,” he says. “They can’t create a rational response to a threat they deny.”

The Judeo-Christian Alliance is an initiative of the David Project, a group that promotes a fair and honest understanding of conflict in the Middle East. The JCA was founded to give Christians in the U.S. the information they need to act with an informed conscience about the Arab/Israeli conflict.