Hawaii, don't bother with healthy discussion with these brainwashed morons.
By a Washington, DC-based writer, Grace Halsell. Grace is the
>author of 14 books, including Journey to Jerusalem and Prophecy and
>Politics.
>
>From "What Christians Don't Know About Israel" pages 112, 126,
>May/June
>1998, By Grace Halsell
>
>American Jews sympathetic to Israel dominate key positions in all
>areas of our government where decisions are made regarding the
>Middle East. This being the case, is there any hope of ever changing
>U.S. policy? President Bill Clinton as well as most members of
>Congress support Israel-and they know why. U.S. Jews sympathetic to
>Israel donate lavishly to their campaign coffers. .
>
>The answer to achieving an even-handed Middle East policy might lie
>elsewhere-among those who support Israel but don't really know why.
>This group is the vast majority of Americans. They are well-meaning,
>fair-minded Christians who feel bonded to Israel-and Zionism-often
>from atavistic feelings, in some cases dating from childhood.
>
>I am one of those. I grew up listening to stories of a mystical,
>allegorical, spiritual Israel. This was before a modern political
>entity with the same name appeared on our maps. I attended Sunday
>School and watched an instructor draw down window- type shades to
>show maps of the Holy Land. I imbibed stories of a Good and Chosen
>people who fought against their Bad "unChosen" enemies.
>
>In my early 20s, I began traveling the world, earning my living as a
>writer. I came to the subject of the Middle East rather late in my
>career. I was sadly lacking in knowledge regarding the area. About
>all I knew was what I had learned in Sunday School.
>
>
>And typical of many U.S. Christians, I somehow considered a modern
>state created in 1948 as a homeland for Jews persecuted under the
>Nazis as a replica of the spiritual, mystical Israel I heard about
>as a child. When in
>1979 I initially went to Jerusalem, I planned to write about the
>three great monotheistic religions and leave out politics. "Not
>write about politics?" scoffed one Palestinian, smoking a waterpipe
>in the Old Walled City. "We eat politics, morning, noon and night!"
>
>As I would learn, the politics is about land, and the co-claimants
>to that land: the indigenous Palestinians who have lived there for
>2,000 years and the Jews who started arriving in large numbers after
>the Second World War. By living among Israeli Jews as well as
>Palestinian Christians and Muslims, I saw, heard, smelled,
>experienced the police state tactics Israelis use against
>Palestinians.
>
>My research led to a book entitled Journey to Jerusalem. My journey
>not only was enlightening to me as regards Israel, but also I came
>to a deeper, and sadder, understanding of my own country. I say
>sadder understanding because I began to see that, in Middle East
>politics, we the people are not making the decisions, but rather
>that supporters of Israel are doing so. And typical of most
>Americans, I tended to think the U.S. media was "free" to print news
>impartially.
>
>"It shouldn't be published. It's anti-Israel."
>
>In the late 1970s, when I first went to Jerusalem, I was unaware
>that editors could and would classify "news" depending on who was
>doing what to whom. On my initial visit to Israel-Palestine, I had
>interviewed dozens of young Palestinian men. About one in four
>related stories of torture.
>
>Israeli police had come in the night, dragged them from their beds
>and placed hoods over their heads. Then in jails the Israelis had
>kept them in isolation, besieged them with loud, incessant noises,
>hung them upside down and had sadistically mutilated their genitals.
>I had not read such stories in the U.S. media. Wasn't it news?
>Obviously, I naively thought, U.S. editors simply didn't know it was
>happening.
>
>On a trip to Washington, DC, I hand-delivered a letter to Frank
>Mankiewicz, then head of the public radio station WETA. I explained
>I had taped interviews with Palestinians who had been brutally
>tortured. And I'd make them available to him. I got no reply. I made
>several phone calls. Eventually I was put through to a public
>relations person, a Ms. Cohen, who said my letter had been lost. I
>wrote again. In time I began to realize what I hadn't known: had it
>been Jews who were strung up and tortured, it would be news. But
>interviews with tortured Arabs were "lost" at WETA.
>
>The process of getting my book Journey to Jerusalem published also
>was a learning experience. Bill Griffin, who signed a contract with
>me on behalf of MacMillan Publishing Company, was a former Roman
>Catholic priest. He assured me that no one other than himself would
>edit the book. As I researched the book, making several trips to
>Israel and Palestine, I met frequently with Griffin, showing him
>sample chapters. "Terrific," he said of my material.
>
>The day the book was scheduled to be published, I went to visit
>MacMillan's. Checking in at a reception desk, I spotted Griffin
>across a room, cleaning out his desk. His secretary Margie came to
>greet me. In tears, she whispered for me to meet her in the ladies
>room. When we were alone, she confided, "He's been fired." She
>indicated it was because he had signed a contract for a book that
>was sympathetic to Palestinians. Griffin, she said, had no time to
>see me.
>
>Later, I met with another MacMillan official, William Curry. "I was
>told to take your manuscript to the Israeli Embassy, to let them
>read it for mistakes," he told me. "They were not pleased. They
>asked me, 'You are not going to publish this book, are you?' I
>asked, 'Were there mistakes?' 'Not mistakes as such. But it
>shouldn't be published. It's anti-Israel.'"
>
>Somehow, despite obstacles to prevent it, the presses had started
>rolling. After its publication in 1980, I was invited to speak in a
>number of churches. Christians generally reacted with disbelief.
>Back then, there was little or no coverage of Israeli land
>confiscation, demolition of Palestinian homes, wanton arrests and
>torture of Palestinian civilians.
>
>The Same Question
>
>Speaking of these injustices, I invariably heard the same question,
>"How come I didn't know this?" Or someone might ask, "But I haven't
>read about that in my newspaper." To these church audiences, I
>related my own learning experience, that of seeing hordes of U.S.
>correspondents covering a relatively tiny state. I pointed out that
>I had not seen so many reporters in world capitals such as Beijing,
>Moscow, London, Tokyo, Paris. Why, I asked, did a small state with a
>1980 population of only four million warrant more reporters than
>China, with a billion people?
>
>I also linked this query with my findings that The New York Times ,
>The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post-and most of our
>nation's print media-are owned and/or controlled by Jews supportive
>of Israel. It was for this reason, I deduced, that they sent so many
>reporters to cover Is rael-and to do so largely from the Israeli
>point of view.
>
>My learning experiences also included coming to realize how easily I
>could lose a Jewish friend if I criticized the Jewish state. I could
>with impunity criticize France, England, Russia, even the United
>States. And any aspect of life in America. But not the Jewish state.
>I lost more Jewish friends than one after the publication of Journey
>to Jerusalem-all sad losses for me and one, perhaps, saddest of all.
>
>In the 1960s and 1970s, before going to the Middle East, I had
>written about the plight of blacks in a book entitled Soul Sister,
>and the plight of American Indians in a book entitled Bessie
>Yellowhair, and the problems endured by undocumented workers
>crossing from Mexico in The Illegals. These books had come to the
>attention of the "mother" of The New York Times, Mrs. Arthur Hays
>Sulzberger.
>
>Her father had started the newspaper, then her husband ran it, and
>in the years that I knew her, her son was the publisher. She invited
>me to her fashionable apartment on Fifth Avenue for lunches and
>dinner parties. And, on many occasions, I was a weekend guest at her
>Greenwich, Conn. home.
>
>She was liberal-minded and praised my efforts to speak for the
>underdog, even going so far in one letter to say, "You are the most
>remarkable woman I ever knew." I had little concept that from being
>buoyed so high I could be dropped so suddenly when I discovered-from
>her point of view-the "wrong" underdog.
>
>As it happened, I was a weekend guest in her spacious Connecticut
>home when she read bound galleys of Journey to Jerusalem. As I was
>leaving, she handed the galleys back with a saddened look: "My dear,
>have you forgotten the Holocaust?" She felt that what happened in
>Nazi Germany to Jews several decades earlier should silence any
>criticism of the Jewish state. She could focus on a holocaust of
>Jews while negating a modern day holocaust of Palestinians.
>
>I realized, quite painfully, that our friendship was ending.
>Iphigene Sulzberger had not only invited me to her home to meet her
>famous friends but, also at her suggestion, The Times had requested
>articles. I wrote op-ed articles on various subjects including
>American blacks, American Indians as well as undocumented workers.
>Since Mrs. Sulzberger and other Jewish officials at the Times highly
>praised my efforts to help these groups of oppressed peoples, the
>dichotomy became apparent: most "liberal" U.S. Jews stand on the
>side of all poor and oppressed peoples save one-the Palestinians.
>
>How handily these liberal Jewish opinion-molders tend to diminish
>the Palestinians, to make them invisible, or to categorize them all
>as "terrorists."
>
>Interestingly, Iphigene Sulzberger had talked to me a great deal
>about her father, Adolph S. Ochs. She told me that he was not one of
>the early Zionists. He had not favored the creation of a Jewish
>state.
>
>Yet, increasingly, American Jews have fallen victim to Zionism, a
>nationalistic movement that passes for many as a religion. While the
>ethical instructions of all great religions-including the teachings
>of Moses, Muhammad and Christ-stress that all human beings are
>equal, militant Zionists take the position that the killing of a
>non-Jew does not count.
>
>Over five decades now, Zionists have killed Palestinians with
>impunity. And in the 1996 shelling of a U.N. base in Qana, Lebanon,
>the Israelis killed more than 100 civilians sheltered there. As an
>Israeli journalist, Arieh Shavit, explains of the massacre, "We
>believe with absolute certitude that right now, with the White House
>in our hands, the Senate in our hands and The New York Times in our
>hands, the lives of others do not count the same way as our own."
>
>Israelis today, explains the anti-Zionist Jew Israel Shahak, "are
>not basing their religion on the ethics of justice. They do not
>accept the Old Testament as it is written. Rather, religious Jews
>turn to the Talmud. For them, the Talmudic Jewish laws become 'the
>Bible.' And the Talmud teaches that a Jew can kill a non-Jew with
>impunity."
>
>In the teachings of Christ, there was a break from such Talmudic
>teachings. He sought to heal the wounded, to comfort the
>downtrodden.
>
>The danger, of course, for U.S. Christians is that having made an
>icon of Israel, we fall into a trap of condoning whatever Israel
>does-even wanton murder-as orchestrated by God.
>
>Yet, I am not alone in suggesting that the churches in the United
>States represent the last major organized support for Palestinian
>rights. This imperative is due in part to our historic links to the
>Land of Christ and in part to the moral issues involved with having
>our tax dollars fund Israeli-government-approved violations of human
>rights.
>
>While Israel and its dedicated U.S. Jewish supporters know they have
>the president and most of Congress in their hands, they worry about
>grassroots America-the well-meaning Christians who care for justice.
>Thus far, most Christians were unaware of what it was they didn't
>know about Israel. They were indoctrinated by U.S. supporters of
>Israel in their own country and when they traveled to the Land of
>Christ most all did so under Israeli sponsorship. That being the
>case, it was unlikely a Christian ever met a Palestinian or learned
>what caused the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
>
>This is gradually changing, however. And this change disturbs the
>Israelis. As an example, delegates attending a Christian Sa beel
>conference in Bethlehem earlier this year said they were harassed by
>Israeli security at the Tel Aviv airport.
>
>"They asked us," said one delegate, "'Why did you use a Palestinian
>travel agency? Why didn't you use an Israeli agency?'" The
>interrogation was so extensive and hostile that Sabeel leaders
>called a special session to brief the delegates on how to handle the
>harassment. Obviously, said one delegate, "The Israelis have a
>policy to discourage us from visiting the Holy Land except under
>their sponsorship. They don't want Christians to start learning all
>they have never known about Israel." |
