A United Church Champion

"This report is being presented as a compromise position, but what needs to be clearly communicated to the voting delegates is that the adoption of any motion around boycotts and divestment will basically break the ties that bind us at the national level to the Jewish community."  Andrew Love, Arnprior United Church Minister

One voice of reason and one only from among all the clerics associated with the United Church of Canada?  Pity, that.  But this one man's courage is inestimable.  In challenging his own church's management to think a little more deeply of what they are on the cusp of committing themselves and their parishioners to at the upcoming triennial general council he is giving fair warning of the perilous moral direction the United Church is taking.

In the same token, the United Church hierarchy, spurred on by a minority of 'social activists' has already burdened itself with uncertain and ethically spurious decision-making on a number of previous occasions.  Which have led to the current situation, where a task force which the church calls a three-member working force has been asked to consider this ledge over which the church is preparing to fling its relations with Jews.

The previous debates were inconclusive and obviously dissatisfying to those who brought forward one initiative after another to be adopted by the church, to effectively disown good relations with Jewish communities in their midst by making a very volatile political decision to insert itself into a political-cultural-social-religious dispute taking place a world beyond Canada.  With ramifications for which the church has no answer because it has scant knowledge of the situation.

The appointed working group headed by a former moderator has brought their research to a conclusion.  The result of which is not pleasing to many of its members, including nine Canadian senators who took the unusual step of releasing a letter to condemn a proposed boycott of Israeli products, suggesting that the church "cannot maintain credibility in criticizing Israeli policies ... while relieving the Palestinian leadership of its own duty to advance peace."

A rather obvious critique that does not quite appear to have occurred to the church hierarchy.  The Canadian Jewish community itself has responded with its view on "troublesome elements" in the report.  Reverend Love has gone to quite a bit of invested bother to confront his church's leaders in their decision to give yet another full hearing to the agitators within, who would preferably like to see the United Church sign on to a complete boycott of Israeli academic exchanges and goods produced in Israel.

The boycott, divestment and sanctions campaign led by these United Church members intent on guiding their church into the same Israel-condemning stream as many Canadian academic and trade unions, comes inclusive of implementation in full of 'right of return' for Palestinian refugees.  They make no mention whatever, needless to say, of a full-bore 'right of return' and/or compensation for the 800,000 Jews made refugees from Arab lands.

Reverend Love takes exception to the report which assigns "100 percent of the blame" to Israel for the never-ending conflict between Israel and the Palestinians.  The report has also gone so far as to note that the church "acknowledge with deep regret" its policy dating from 2006, of urging Palestinians to recognize Israel as a Jewish state.  And this outrageous turn of events too Reverend Love deplores.

The Jewish community feels particularly assaulted by the working group's parallel drawn between the Holocaust and the refugee status of the Palestinians.  The report speaks of the "deepest meaning of the Holocaust was the denial of human dignity to Jews", an absurdly trivializing statement, when in reality the deepest meaning of the Holocaust was the finely structured implementation of mass annihilation of Europe's Jews.

To make such an allusion, comparing the loss of six million lives to the Palestinians' choice of eking out their refugee status as a result of an unwillingness to face reality and work toward a peaceful resolution of this 60+ year-old aggrievement that resulted from the creation of the State of Israel, represents an abhorrent lack of understanding of just how devastatingly horrible the Holocaust was in the scope of its brutal inhumanity.

Thank you, Reverend Love; you exemplify your surname: thank you for your petitition at faithfulwitness.ca