Only a fool would try to fight an enemy without naming them. Imagine the Battle of Agincourt without the English never once calling the French, who were England’s enemy at the time, ‘the French’? Imagine also a scenario from Britain’s fight against the Nazis, where none of Churchill’s speeches mentioned either ‘Germany’, ‘Nazis’ or ‘Hitler’? It’s difficult to imagine such scenarios isn’t it? If you try to fight against an aggressive enemy and refuse to call them by their true name then you are setting yourself up to fail.
We have to name the enemy, we have to tell people about those at risk of genocide, and warn those at direct immediate risk. We have to tell people about the danger from terror. We have to name Islam as the aggressor and speak up for those who are at risk from Islamic aggression. Too often, as I wrote in an earlier article, those who are involved with interfaith work are weak, dim, cowardly people who refuse to name Islam as the enemy. However an innovative interfaith event that took place in May in Boston USA is a refreshing blast of honesty and morally correct thinking.
The Ahavath Torah Synagogue in Boston, USA held an extraordinary and powerful meeting on the 31st of March that brought together Jews and Evangelical Christians in order to speak about the danger of Islamic genocide engulfing the world’s Christians and Jews. In my view it’s a really positive move to see religious groups working together to assist those at risk of genocide by Islam and also to spread the word about it.
The Jewish News Service has lengthy report on this and I’ve reproduced part of it below. The meeting that took place in Boston was an extremely important one as this interfaith group, unlike so many others, have at least named the enemy and named the problems and named the dangers. Not for them the mealy mouthed dishonesty of the phrase ‘religion of peace’. As is usual policy for this blog the original text is in italics whereas my comments are in plain text.
Sean Savage writing for the Jewish News Service said:
Half a world away from American suburbia, Christians and other Middle East minority populations are facing extinction from Islamic terror groups such as the Islamic State. At the same time, Israel, the world’s lone Jewish state, deals with the organized terrorism of Hamas and Hezbollah as well as so-called “lone wolf” Palestinian terrorists. While these events may seem too distant for most Americans, residents of the Boston suburb of Stoughton, Mass., got a crash course on global dangers as part of an inventive interfaith event at a local synagogue last week.
The event—titled “Jews, Evangelicals, Israel—We Are in This Together: Evangelical Support for Israel and the Fight against the Genocide of Christians in the Middle East”—featured Dr. Tricia Miller and Dexter Van Zile, Christian media analysts for the Boston-based Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA), who addressed an audience of Jews and Christians about the ongoing Middle East threats and efforts to undermine Christian support for Israel.
Miller told JNS.org that such events help equip people to “counter terror and propaganda with fact, and encourage them to take action when need be,” in addition to fostering interfaith solidarity.
“I would hope people would walk away…feeling that they have learned something that they would feel equipped and emboldened to speak and take action whenever necessary on the side of truth, and that they would realize that they have friends and allies in a different faith tradition than their own,” she said.
The May 31 event was held as part of the Hausman Memorial Speaker Series, which is held in memory of the parents of Ahavath Torah Congregation’s Rabbi Jonathan Hausman. The rabbi spoke at length about the importance of Jewish-Christian relations, especially while both communities are ongoing targets of Islamic extremism.
“At this moment in history, both Jews and Christians are the primary targets of evil. Our interest in survival is not simply individual. If history has taught us anything, it is this: what begins with the Jews, never ends with the Jews,” Hausman told JNS.org.
Hausman noted that Ahavath Torah not only serves local Jews, but also the Faith4Life Church, a mainly African-American church that is associated with the Michigan-based World of Faith International Christian Center. Several evangelical Christians were in attendance May 31, including Hausman’s close friend Pastor David Marquard of Impact Church in Cranston, R.I., who even led an interfaith prayer at the conclusion of the event.
In their remarks, both Van Zile and Miller spoke about efforts to undermine evangelical Christian support for Israel.
Miller, who is an evangelical Christian, voiced concern about the Bethlehem Bible College’s biannual “Christ at the Checkpoint” conference. She explained that the conference tries to convey the message that Israel is unworthy of Christian support because it is the homeland for the Jews—the people who rejected Jesus as their messiah.
Miller noted that this message is further reinforced by efforts among some associated with the Bethlehem Bible College to separate Jesus from his Jewish identity, instead portraying him as a Palestinian who would be persecuted by Israeli forces.
Miller also described how anti-Israel messaging has made its way into mainstream evangelical discourse through anti-Israel films such as 2010’s “Little Town of Bethlehem,” which was financed by a film company associated with Hobby Lobby retail chain heir Mart Green.
According to Miller, Green’s roles as the former chairman of the Board of Trustees at Oral Roberts University (ORU), a renowned Evangelical Christian college with a proud tradition of supporting Israel, and as a leader of the Empowered21 initiative, a global Christian movement, have called into question those organizations’ future support for Israel.
At Empowered21’s annual conference in Jerusalem last year, Miller said there was “a concerted emphasis on the importance of Christian unity and the need to stand with Palestinian Christians.”
Miller said she fears ORU and Empowered21 may become aligned with the Palestinian anti-Jewish/anti-Israel movement, calling that outcome “nothing more than a new form of Christian anti-Semitism made for an evangelical audience.”
This particular meeting between Jews and Evangelical Christians is both timely and necessary. Not only is there a need to protect minorities in the Middle East region from Islamic genocide, but there is, as this article shows, a need to counter the dishonest propaganda about Israel. This dishonest propaganda is put out by the Left, Muslims and a media who has a tendency to believe the lying narrative of the Palestinian ‘Nakba’, and disregard any information that challenges that narrative no matter how true it is.
The article continues:
Van Zile addressed what he described as the failure of Western countries, including the U.S., to come to the aid of innocent Christians, Yazidis, and other minorities in Iraq and Syria who are being persecuted by Islamic State.
“Protecting minorities in the Middle East is not a major priority for the Obama administration,” he said.
In Van Zile’s estimation, part of the reason for this failure to help Middle East minorities is a subconscious fear in America about angering Muslims if Islamic extremism is more forcefully exposed.
This is an extremely worrying statement. However if we are to free both ourselves in the West and those minorities in the Middle East then we must anger Muslims. If it is any consolation, we should remember that it’s not just pointing out the existence of Islamic genocide that angers Muslims, but they are angered by just about anything and everybody that we love or call civilised. Whether it’s women’s rights, the right for minority sexualities to live without fear of death or free speech or freedom of religion, you name it, Islam hates it. We, the non-Muslims are in a catch 22 situation where no matter what we do or say or how we phrase it, Muslims will be violently pissed off.
Jewish News Service added:
According to estimates, there were roughly 1.3 million Christians living in Iraq in 2003, and now that community roughly stands at around 300,000—with many being forced to flee from their traditional homeland in Iraq’s Nineveh province due to attacks by Islamic State on regions such as Iraqi Kurdistan. Similarly, Syria’s pre-civil war Christian population has been reduced from 1.1 million to 600,000, with many Christians fleeing to neighboring countries such as Lebanon, Turkey, and Jordan, as well as to Europe.
Yet all is not lost, Van Zile told JNS.org, explaining how there are a number of organizations that are working to help Mideast Christians.
“We can give money to groups—like Open Doors, Christian Solidarity International, and the Knights of Columbus—who are giving aid to persecuted Christians in the Middle East. We can also encourage lawmakers to encourage bringing in victims of Islamic persecution into the Middle East,” Van Zile said.
“They can also encourage their lawmakers to promote the establishment of a Nineveh Plains province in Iraq. This province would be set up to provide a safe haven for religious and ethnic minorities in Iraq to protect themselves,” he added.
Van Zile said that there are lessons to be learned from the Western failure to combat genocide.
“It’s an awful thing to consider, but one metric we can use to determine how to help is this: If it is similar to something we should have done during the Holocaust to help Jews, it’s probably a good idea to do now for Christians and Yazidis in the Middle East,” he said.
This in my opinion is what interfaith really should be all about. Here you have two different faiths, which have a shared past which has not always been either peaceful or respectful of one another, working together to deal with a common problem, that of Islamic genocide.
This sort of interfaith work is many streets away from what the ‘nice but dims’ that I spoke of in my previous article on interfaith, do. Not for the Boston group the depressing spectacle of Christians, Jews, Quakers and Buddhists tiptoeing round the difficult issues, and trying desperately not to ‘offend’ the Islamic ‘community leader’ sitting in the corner like a particularily malevolent toad.
We need much more of the sort of interfaith that went on at the Ahavath Torah Synagogue and a whole lot less of the other, less useful and even ultimately more damaging sort, that has soured my own view of interfaith. The meeting at Ahavath Torah Synagogue named the problem, named the enemy and that is a major step on the road to dealing with the ongoing problem of Islamic genocide.
Please read the whole of this excellent piece via the link below.
