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Take-A-Pen's Christians and Israel
Meeting Point
"For Zion's sake I will not
be silent"
(Isaiah 62:1)
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POPE BENEDICT XVI TO VISIT ISRAEL IN EARLY 2007
Reported by Tom Gross, 2
July 2006
Pope Benedict XVI will visit Israel in the first half of 2007
following an agreement between the Papal nuncio to Israel,
Archbishop Antonio Franco, and Israel's Minister of Tourism
Isaac Herzog. The visit is seen as significant both politically
and economically as the Pope will bring with him a large
entourage of pilgrims. The visit is also expected to encourage
other pilgrims to visit Israel later in the year.
The late John Paul II made a pilgrimage to Israel in 2000; he
visited sites sacred to Christianity, including Mt. of the
Beatitudes, overlooking the Kinneret (Sea of Galilee). On this
last papal visit, John Paul II was accompanied by 60,000
pilgrims, who spent 420,000 hotel nights in Israel. According to
the Israeli Ministry of Tourism, 800,000 Christian pilgrims
visited Israel in 2005, two times more than the 400,000
Christian pilgrims in 2004. |
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Invest in Israel!
Visit Israel! And write your own letter whenever divestment is
propagated by someone! |
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Christians Tackle Divestment From Israel – With Investment
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By Julie Stahl,
CNSNews.com Jerusalem Bureau Chief, October 21, 2005
Jerusalem (CNSNews.com) - Christian Zionists are
teaming up to encourage greater investment in Israel. They're
hoping to counteract a campaign by a pro-Palestinian group,
which has encouraged Christian denominations in the USA to
divest from Israel.
The International Christian Embassy Jerusalem's is holding its
annual Feast of Tabernacles celebration in Jerusalem this week.
The ICEJ – in conjunction with the Brussels-based International
Christian Chambers of Commerce (ICCC) and the Federation of
Israeli Chambers of Commerce – urged Christians to invest in
Israel at a press conference on Thursday.
The weeklong ICEJ conference coincides with the Jewish holiday
of Succoth. This year more than 5,500 Christians -- the largest
number in the organization's 26-year history -- from more than
70 nations are attending the festival.
The "invest in Israel" initiative comes at a time when a number
of churches in the U.S. have chosen to divest. Rather than fight
the divestment campaign by lobbying individual companies or
churches, the ICEJ and the ICCC are taking a positive approach,
said ICEJ Executive Director Malcolm Hedding.
"In light of the troubling church divestment campaign as well as
the ongoing rebound in the Israeli economy, our ministry as
committed to redoubling its efforts to promote Christian
investment in Israel," Hedding said.
The Presbyterian Church USA led the divestment parade, by
launching an anti-Israel campaign in July 2004. The World
Council of Churches and several other liberal denominations
followed suit.
ICEJ spokesman David Parsons said he wanted to make it clear
that his organization was not opposed to investment in the
Palestinian people. "We love them. We have a 25-year track
record of humanitarian assistance to the Palestinian Arabs of
this land, whether Muslim, Christian, Druze – just so long as
it's responsible, fully accounted for and it's not helping feed
the terror chain," he said.
Investing in the Palestinians is acceptable, he said. But
attacking and de-legitimizing Israel is something the ICEJ will
stand against, he added.
New initiative
For years, the ICEJ has sponsored programs to help meet the
material and social needs of disadvantaged and disabled
Israelis, both Jews and Arabs alike, and it has helped more than
60,000 Jews to immigrate to Israel. This year one of the ICEJ's
projects included raising a half-million Euros (nearly $600,000)
to help fund a therapeutic swimming pool for handicapped
children in the southern Israeli coastal city of Ashkelon. The
feast celebration also infuses millions of dollars of income
into the Israeli economy - more than $15 million in this year
alone. But the new investment initiative aims to challenge
Christians to invest in businesses here.
While there is already some Christian investment in Israel there
is not enough, said Dale Neill, president of the ICCC.
Christians should be encouraged by the resilience of the Israeli
economy, said Neill. "Look what the economy has survived [in the
last five years]," said Neill. "The economy is not based on
tourism as much as people think."
During the last five years of Palestinian terrorism, tourism
plummeted to all-time lows. But according to Uriel Lynn,
president of the ICC, since former Finance Minister Binyamin
Netanyahu began to implement his new financial policies in 2003,
the Israeli economy has been growing."It's a very stable
economy," said Lynn. This year the growth rate of the economy
will surpass five percent, he said. "The growth rates [here are]
the envy of countries in Europe."
According to Neill, the ICCC is working in conjunction with the
ICEJ and the ICC to try to overcome some of the technical
difficulties that make it hard for foreigners to invest in
small- and medium-sized businesses in Israel.
Without elaborating, Neill said that part of the new thrust is
to try to find ways to overcome those difficulties, to create
the possibility for business opportunities here and to make
creative new kinds of investment funds in order to make it
possible for someone with even a small amount of money to invest
in Israel.
Losing steam
The divestment campaign has lost momentum -- primarily because
congregants didn't always back the church hierarchy's decision
to divest -- and has not had a financial impact on Israel yet,
said Rabbi Abraham Cooper, an associate dean at the Simon
Wiesenthal Center in California. But left unchecked, it could
have serious ramifications for Jewish-Christian relations in
America, he said.
"There is a small group of activists within the church...who are
very devoted to their worldview and their worldview is
exclusively focused on the Palestinian narrative," Cooper told
journalists. "It has not yet impacted [the U.S.] in terms...of
spawning anti-Semitism or anti-Semitic acts on the ground
because I don't think that this political campaign has yet
reached the grass roots level," said Cooper. "But if it's left
unattended it will absolutely have a negative impact."
http://www.cnsnews.com/ViewForeignBureaus.asp?Page=\ForeignBureaus\archive\2
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”The importance of an
alliance between Asian Christians and the people of
Israel cannot be overstated.” -
(MK Dr. Yuri Shtern, Chairman of the
Knesset Christian Allies Caucus)
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Christian Allies Caucus MKs meet with
Asian Christian leaders in Korea at the second Jerusalem Summit
Asia (See Photo on our Korean page!)
Summit draws over a thousand religious, political, and business
leaders, from ten Asian countries, to Israel’s side
“Asia is Christianity’s sleeping giant"
Jerusalem, Israel – August 12, 2005 – Over a
thousand Christians from ten Asian nations gathered in Seoul,
South Korea last week for the second Jerusalem Summit Asia, 2005
on August 10-11. Following the success of the first Jerusalem
Summit Asia last year in Manila, the Kingdomizer Mission
Alliance of Korea, Asia’s largest church, and the city of Seoul
offered to jointly sponsor and underwrite the Summit in 2005 in
cooperation with the Christian Allies Caucus and Jerusalem
Summit officials. Reverend Yong-gi Cho of the Yoido Full Gospel
Church and Seoul’s Mayor Myung Bak Lee hosted the event. The
Christian Allies Caucus was represented by its chairman, Member
of Knesset Yuri Shtern, caucus member MK Chemi Doron, and Josh
Reinstein, Caucus Director. Dmitry Radyshevsky, Executive
Director of the Jerusalem Summit led a delegation of Israeli
academics who presented at the Summit.
“Building Peace on Truth: Truth-Based Media” was the theme of
this year’s Summit, which focused on strategies for defending
Judeo-Christian values in the face of the growing threat to
western civilization posed by radical Islam. *
The Asian Jerusalem Summits were inspired by the annual
Jerusalem Summit held in Israel. Dmitry Radyshevsky, Executive
Director of the Jerusalem Summit, has announced plans for a
Jerusalem Summit Africa and New Europe for the coming year. “The
threat of terrorism driven by radical Islam is global and so the
response must be international as well. Christians and Jews,
together, will meet this challenge to our way of life, and with
God’s help, we will prevail”, said Radyshevsky.
Speaking of relations between Israel and Asia, MK Dr. Yuri
Shtern, Chairman of the Knesset Christian Allies Caucus said,
“Asia is Christianity’s sleeping giant. The importance of an
alliance between Asian Christians and the people of Israel
cannot be overstated.”
(An announcement of the Knesset Christian Allies Caucus) |
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Citizen's Letter - countering more
anti-Semitism of anti-Israel church "peace movements"
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To Rev. Ken Working
Executive Presbyter, Presbytery of Santa Barbara
Dear Rev. Working, April 14, 2005
Sub: Dissociate from David Neunuebel
I am writing to express my outrage over the untruthful and
anti-Semitic statement made by the former Moderator of the
Santa Barbara Presbytery, David Neunuebel, who is an
anti-Israel activist with 'Americans for a Just Peace in the
Middle East', a group that, like Neunuebel, demonizes Israel
and insists on placing all blame for the situation in the
Middle East on Israel alone. On April 7, 2005 Neunuebel
published a letter in the Presbyterian Layman that went
beyond his habitual demonization blind hatred of Israel to
stray into overt anti-Semitism.
I have every expectation that you will immediately issue a
press release condemning Mr. Neunuebel for issuing a
statement that is both anti-Semitic and demonstrably untrue.
Mr. Neunuebel's letter, in addition contains a large number
of outright untruths. He writes that "the Zionists were in
bed with the Nazis both in Palestine and in Germany for
years during WWII." He writes that the Jews
"didn't...accept... the partition of Palestine" in 1948,"
and asserts that the Jews aim to "drive (the Arabs) into the
sea."
Obviously, the Jews accepted the 1948 partition and the UN
allotment of a tiny sliver of Palestine, it was the Arabs
who refused to accept partition, and Arab Armies that
invaded in an attempt to extinguish the Jewish State. The
phrased ambition to "drive the Jews into the Sea" was
President Nassar's war aim in 1956. Israel harbors no
parallel ambition. If it did have such an ambition, Israel
has long had the armed might to carry it out, and refrained
from doing so. Moderator Neunuebel's demonization of Israel
is repugnant.
As to the assertion that Zionists collaborated with the
Nazis, this canard is a frequent recourse of anti-Semites
and of Arab propagandists trying to draw attention away from
the very real collaboration of many Arabs with the Nazi
power. The Mufti of Jerusalem was a particularly active
Nazi. In North Africa, enthusiastic Arabs cooperated in
herding Jews into concentration camps (these Jews were saved
not by the governments of the states of which they were
citizens, but by General Montgomery who drove the Nazis out
of North Africa before they 'final solution' got fully
underway.) At present, Hamas expresses its solidarity with
Nazism by giving the Nazi salute at its rallies.
What is true is that during the war, some Zionist officials
in Romania agreed to keep their knowledge of the death camps
quiet, and the victims quiescent, in exchange for the
opportunity to move some tens of thousands of Jewish out of
the country, thus saving their lives. Whether this deal,
made at a time when all Jews in Romania lived under Nazi
death sentences, was morally defensible or not I cannot say.
I think none of us not living under a Nazi death sentence is
entitled to judge. But of a certainty, this was not the
collaboration with Nazis that Mr. Neunuebel calls it. Mr.
Neunuebel's statement is a hateful, anti-Semitic canard. It
is, moreover, a notorious canard that any well-intentioned
person would easily identify as anti-Semitic propaganda.
All of this is capped by Neunuebel citation of another
notorious piece of anti-Semitic propaganda, a bogus
"quotation" purportedly from David Ben-Gurion that is one of
several such fictional "quotations" falsely attributed to
prominent Israelis that enjoy a wide circulation among anti-Semities.
(for an explication of this bogus "quote," see: Colin
Rubenstein's review of Peter Rodgers, HERZL'S NIGHTMARE: ONE
LAND, TWO PEOPLE, Scribe, in the Australian Book Review -
Dec. 2004 - Jan. 2005 –
http://www.aijac.org.au/resources/aijac-media/cr_abr_1204.htm
)
Here is the bogus, anti-Semitic quote, as cited by Neunuebel:
'"We will expel the Arabs and take their place. In each
attack, a decisive blow should be struck, resulting in the
destruction of homes and the expulsion of the population."
(AS IF:) David Ben Gurion, Israel's First Prime Minister;
Letters to his son, 1937"
I trust that you will take immediate action to dissociate
the Presbytery from men like Mr. Neunuebel who blacken its
name by repeating anti-Semitic canards and propaganda.
Sincerely yours,
Dr. Zvi Meiri
Israel |
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SUCCESSFUL CORRESPONDENCE WITH PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH ON DIVESTMENT
April 6, 2006
Read Maurice's knowledgeable and patient letter to
the Presbyterian Church - and their positive response.
click
here |
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SWORDS INTO
PLOUGHSHARES
"The compelling love for all humanity is our core motivation" New
Monography on CHRISTIAN ZIONISM, BY DAVID PARSONS, issued by the
International Christian Embassy Jerusalem. To read an excerpt
Click here |
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Irwin N. Graulich is
a well known motivational speaker on ethics, religion and Judaism.
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A child of Holocaust survivors, he has been
successful in showing religious and secular people the need for
God-based ethics. Irwin considers himself a multi-denominational,
serious Orthodox, Conservative and Reform Jew. |
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By Irwin N. Graulich December 20, 2004
I am a religious Jew who simply loves Christmas.
In fact, any Jew or non Christian who somehow gets "offended" because the
majority religion in America makes such a big public splash about their
biggest holiday is a total fool.
Read
the complete article (article will appear in separate
window) |
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Presbyterians Challenge PCUSA Divestment Decision |
"Presbyterians Concerned for Jewish & Christian Relations" (PCJCR)
released a statement calling on all Presbyterians to work toward the
reversal of the decision of the Presbyterian Church, U.S.A.(PCUSA) to
divest its funds from certain companies doing business with Israel.
Read more |
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A
Dissenting Presbyterian View
By Richard Stoecker
It is astonishing how some liberal churches today choose to support the
cause of tyrannous, terrorist regimes, and reject the one and only democracy
in the Middle East, vies Stoecker. It is baffling that Anglican and
Episcopalian construal of Christ’s words on peacemaking should land them in
a position that would strengthen the hands of violence against innocents.
Click here to read! |
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