Archive for March, 2010
Is Israel a Banana Republic with a Banana History? Obama Seems to Think So.
Sunday, March 14th, 2010Thorough analysis over at Solomonia looking at the Obama administration’s recent “strategy” in dealing with Israel.
Is Israel a Banana Republic with a Banana History? Obama Seems to Think So.
Could the people who have been complaining about the “timing” of the Israeli announcement of 1600 new Jerusalem apartments — which includes pundits on both left and right — please now adjust their commentary? We’ve now found that the Obama Administration is continuing to hammer the Israelis over, not the timing of the announcement, but the substance of Jews building living space. I supposed there’s something positive in that. It’s illuminating, liberating even. Let’s get down to substance and skip the cosmetics and the diplomatic dance. Good! Unfortunately, what it says about the direction the Obama Administration is taking is nothing good.
And more on this theme from Prof. Barry Rubin:
The Palestinian Authority Walks Out of Talks with a Big Smile on Its Face
In 1994, Israel asserted, and the PLO accepted, that construction would continue on existing Jewish settlements. For the next 15 years, negotiations were never stopped by that building.
In January 2009, the Palestinian Authority (PA) stopped negotiations because Hamas attacked Israel from the Gaza Strip and Israel defended itself. Of course, Hamas is also the PA’s enemy and the PA would be delighted if Israel destroyed that group. But for public relations’ purposes, the PA had to pretend inter-Palestinian solidarity.
Then came President Barack Obama who demanded a stop to all construction on settlements in 2009. Israel finally complied but announced that it would keep building in east Jerusalem. The United States accepted that arrangement and even highly praised Israel’s policy as a major concession.
But the PA refused to return to negotiations. Why, because the construction offended it? No, because the PA’s radical forces don’t want to make a peace deal because they believe they can win total victory and destroy Israel. The more moderate forces are too weak to make a deal because of Hamas and their own radicals, though they also have some problems with mutual compromise.
Tony Blair Faith Foundation Watch: Blair courts controversial US pastor Rick Warren in bid to unite faiths
Sunday, March 14th, 2010Previous posts on Tony Blair’s “Faith”: here, here, here, here, here, here and here.
As it happens, I think that Tony Blair and Rick Warren make a fine couple. Rick with his formulaic business approach to faith and Tony with his politically correct brand of faith/s.
Truth is, if Tony really wants to do something worthwhile, then he should find a way to protect the dwindling Christians in Iraq, who have been decimated as a result of his invasion.
In the seven years since the Iraq War was launched, 2,000 Christians have been murdered and 600,000 have fled Iraq, according to Fides, the news agency of the Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples. 44% of Iraqi refugees are Christians, and many of the 600,000 Christians who remain are internally displaced persons who have had to flee their homes.
How about putting your talents, connections, ego, influence, power and money into this little problem Tony.
Former prime minister builds network of Christian allies as he prepares to launch a religious ‘offensive’ in North America
Tony Blair is preparing to launch a “faith offensive” across the United States over the next year, after building up relationships with a network of influential religious leaders and faith organisations.
With Afghanistan and Iraq casting a shadow over his popularity at home in Britain, Blair’s focus has increasingly shifted across the Atlantic, to where the nexus of faith and power is immutable and he is feted like a rock star.
According to the annual accounts of the Tony Blair Faith Foundation, a UK-based charity that promotes cohesion between the major faiths, the foundation is to develop a US arm that will pursue a host of faith-based projects. The accounts show that his foundation has an impressive – and, in at least one case, controversial – set of faith contacts. Sitting on some £4.5m in funds as of April last year, mostly gathered through donations, it is now well placed to make its voice heard.
The foundation’s advisory council of religious leaders includes Rick Warren, powerful founder of the California-based Saddleback church. It attracts congregations of nearly 20,000 and is reportedly one of the largest in the US. Warren, who has addressed the UN and the World Economic Forum in Davos, has been named one of the “15 world leaders who matter most” and one of the “100 most influential people in the world”.
His influence was confirmed in December 2008 when Barack Obama chose him to give the invocation at his presidential inauguration. But the decision angered many liberals, who see Warren as an opponent of gay rights and abortion on demand; a prominent alliance with Warren is likely to attract similar attacks on the former British prime minister.
Catholic fury over The Times’s coverage of Pope Benedict XVI
Saturday, March 13th, 2010I’m posting this one as I feel this is an important clarification on some recent news media confusion:-
Catholic fury over The Times’s coverage of Pope Benedict XVI
There is international outrage in Catholic circles over a headline in The Times this morning that many people regard as utterly misleading and part of the newspaper’s reliably biased coverage (reinforced by vicious cartoons) of anything to do with Pope Benedict XVI.
The headline, over a story by Richard Owen, reads: “Pope knew priest was paedophile but allowed him to continue with ministry.” A universally admired Catholic journalist contacted me this morning and accused The Times of (and I am toning this down for legal reasons) an extremely serious error of judgment.
Further Internet Links:
The National Association of Muslim Police (NAMP) received £90,000 in grant aid in the last two years while the Christian Police Association (CPA) received just £15,000 in the last five years.
Saturday, March 13th, 2010The following article from the Telegraph is majoring on the fact that the Home Office has been accused of discriminating against police Christian groups in favour of a Muslim police group, however, the real issue for me is whether religious groups should receive government funding at all.
A while back I posted in relation to a police Christian group and wrote:-
…..Interesting, although I am always slightly concerned when any Christian group receives funding from secular sources, especially governmental sources. I personally believe that all Christian groups should be funded from the Christian purse, even if they are providing a public service. Using public funds always adds fuel to the secularist fires and Christian funding eliminates any unwanted controlling influences.
I am now awaiting the predictable comments on this, that tax payers are funding ‘magic’ within the policing world.
Personally I think this new “row” is another example reinforcing the argument against secular funding of ALL religious groups.
The National Association of Muslim Police (NAMP) received £90,000 in grant aid in the last two years while the
Christian Police Association (CPA) received just £15,000 in the last five, despite both groups having around 2,000 members.
And the CPA even disputed those figures insisting it has only been given £10,000 over the period.
Faith-based organisations can bid for Home Office grants either for specific projects or for general funding, with officials deciding which are successful.
Don Axcell, executive director of the CPA, said other requests for additional funding had been ignored.
He said: “As a Christian charity we have to rely on the public for funds as our requests for money from government are largely rejected or ignored. Our letters go unanswered.”
Alan Craig, leader of Christian Peoples Alliance, said: “This is yet another sign of Christianity being written off the agenda.
“Christians are constantly marginalised and discriminated against by the government, who are ignoring one of this country’s principle faiths.”
The CPA was handed £5,000 in 2004/05 and £10,000 last year, according to Home Office figures, but Mr Axcell insisted the only grant the group has received is the one last year.
That was to help widen its involvement with local church groups and encouraged members of the public to “adopt a cop” by praying for the safety of local officers.
In contrast, the NAMP was given grants of £45,000 last year and in 2008/09, listed only as general funding.
Priests ought to focus on sin, not climate change. The worst way to ‘connect’ with parishioners is to offer secular fads, says Dominic Scarborough
Saturday, March 13th, 2010Interesting observations in the Catholic Herald.
I’m glad the headline mentions climate change in relation to churches as recently I came across the term eco-theologian. This term was used in all seriousness on a so called Christian website. Now tell me that Anthropomorphic Global Warming is not a religion in its own right.
In my ‘umble opinion there is a troubling trend for some churches to breathe deeply of the prevailing “spirit of the age” and then throw the Scriptures away offer a “church” fully formed through the zeitgeist prism, in the naive hope that this will make them popular and appealing to the world. Of course it doesn’t work anyway, as these churches simply morph into irrelevant clouds without rain.
How often do we hear it said that parishes have got to “connect” more with their parishioners, give them what they want, make them feel involved, help them to participate? We are constantly told that the majority of Catholics apparently don’t want too much emphasis on sin or judgment but would rather that the Church was a welcoming place that emphasised the good in people and provided a community focus. I have no doubt at all that this is true if by “Catholics” is meant the existing parishioners who occupy and control most parishes in this country today. But in what sense are they the majority of Catholics, and what, if anything, is being done for the remainder who have chosen quite deliberately to absent themselves from this vision of Catholicism?
According to the latest statistics available, those baptised into the Catholic faith in this country number as many as five million people and yet of these a little more than 800,000 actually attend Mass in England and Wales, which includes all the recently arrived immigrants. Official statistics show that nearly a third of all those who attended Mass in 2005 were over 65 and this percentage is rising rapidly. If we consider the immigrant factor and then consider all those baptised as Catholics over the past 40 years it suggests that of those children baptised as Catholics in this country since 1965, as many as 90 per cent have abandoned the practice of their religion by adulthood. The stark reality is that parishes are dominated by ageing clergy and laity and the vision we have now is being shaped largely according to their tastes and preferences. They are of a generation that was brought up by a Church that imposed on them a keen sense of moral obligation to attend Mass. They simply want to make it as diverting and pleasant an experience as possible for themselves. Unlike these older parishioners younger Catholics feel no moral obligation to attend, and thus have simply voted with their feet. It is of these, the overwhelming majority of baptised Catholics in this country, that I ask the question, if Catholicism has become about giving the people what they want, why don’t they want it?
Perhaps the answer is that for religion of any type to have any place within a modern, pluralist society it can no longer rely on outdated cultural or tribal bonds which assume people will attend even if accommodated. The Catholic Church is no longer the primary, secondary or even tertiary means by which most younger people learn about the world or form their identities and cultural views. Consequently, for the Church to try to compete with the secular world in promoting modern music, climate change awareness, fair trade or gender equality is merely playing someone else’s tune badly. If today’s young Catholics want to know about climate change they inform themselves by going directly to the sources, not by listening to what Father says about it in his homily. By branching out into areas that are not its province religion soon loses its footing and ends up appearing ill-informed, struggling to catch up with the very secular society it is meant to be guiding – particularly if it falls in with the latest fad only for that fad to disappear or be exposed as misconceived.
In the modern, free market global village the Catholic religion needs to ask itself what it is for. If it still takes seriously the God whom it claims to serve then it is still under that solemn mandate it received to present to the world that great secret it was initiated into all those years ago. This is that God exists, He has created and sustains all things, and in revealing Himself he calls all people to a relationship of faith and love; humanity is broken and God is the remedy; and the most profound human need is the need for God.
Catholicism needs to start preaching supernatural faith and repentance again and not merely reflecting the material world back at itself. If God is presented as no more than merely our own creation or self-image, and we are not understood as humans who in our very nature lack something vital to ourselves without Him, we will never succeed in attracting new people because they will simply fail to see the point of it – because there is no point to it.
We live in a society obsessed with physical beauty, perfection and material happiness and modern people are constantly showing themselves to be prepared to apply themselves even to harsh disciplines like dieting and working out in gyms to strive for these ideals. Yet at the same time we have unprecedented suicide rates and mental illness, particularly among the young. People have enough self-affirmation from the media – they are even told to buy shampoo because they’re “worth it” – and yet they clearly often don’t feel that way in their transitory relationships or in the loneliness of their individualism. Coming to a Catholic church, where they are told to rejoice because they are the “Easter people”, is not going to challenge the pub, nightclub or health spa as an experience of joy as they understand the word. If the Church can only succeed in showing them that the gulf in their life is not a car or house or cosmetic surgery and that joy is not mere sentimentality then it has a chance.
The Church already has a tried and tested remedy for this, which is, paradoxically, what many of the current churchgoers and their clergy have wanted to excise: that by encouraging people to acknowledge and confront their own sinfulness and striving to overcome it through prayer and the sacraments they will slowly and immeasurably fill this gulf with grace. For this, the Church must turn back to prayer and place God, and not itself, at the centre of this prayer. At the same time it should re-emphasise that suffering and pain are not best papered over with folksy communal singing and hand-shaking any more than they are by narcotics or recreational sex. This suffering and pain should be placed at the feet of Him whose very presence hides in the tabernacle and the image of whose physically broken humanity hangs in every church, pleading and bleeding to heal our spiritually broken humanity with an unrequited love that, if only more people could discover, they might return and share with others.
Dominic Scarborough is a lay Catholic from the south of England. A qualified barrister and former Civil Service Principal, he has a degree in Modern History from Magdalen College, Oxford. He is a regular commentator in the press and on the internet on Catholic affairs
UPDATE: This one caught Damian Thompson’s eye as well:-
Telegraph – Advice to priests: shut up about climate change, talk about sin
Georgia have announced a scheme to let prisoners shorten their jail terms by spending time in a monastery instead.
Saturday, March 13th, 2010I simply found this one from the BBC intriguing. Imagine this scheme in the UK and the shock and dismay when prison inmates discovered that time actually moves slower in some churches than in prison 
Georgian monasteries offer to take in prisoners
Officials in the ex-Soviet republic of Georgia have announced a scheme to let prisoners shorten their jail terms by spending time in a monastery instead.
The scheme for petty criminals has been proposed by the country’s Orthodox Church and government officials.
It comes as prisoner numbers in Georgia continue to rise and so too does the popularity of the Church.
It is unclear how many prisoners will be allowed to become monks or if they have any choice in the matter.
Overcrowding
To say that the Orthodox Church plays an important and influential role in Georgia is an understatement.
Some 80% of its population are said to be Orthodox Christians and its leaders have at times played a part in politics.
Now the Church has gone a step further by directly offering to help reform certain criminals by handing them a cassock and allowing them to serve out their sentence as monks.
In a joint statement, officials from the prisons ministry and the Church said they would work together to select the convicts they thought would benefit most from spending time in a monastery.
They said the purpose was to liberalise the criminal justice system, but the reality is that prisoner numbers are rising fast in Georgia.
A report last year by a penal reform organisation said the incarceration rate had risen by 300% since 2004 and that jails were badly overcrowded.
A senior cleric told the BBC he believed the Church played a positive role in society and that the scheme could work.
Roundup of Information on The Presbyterian Church (USA) Israel Debate
Friday, March 12th, 2010The Presbyterian Church (USA), which has lost approximately 1 million members over the past 25 years, is preparing to debate a number of resolutions regarding Israeli policies at the church’s upcoming General Assembly. One resolution calls for the church to convict Israel of the crime of “apartheid” while others call on the church to rebuke Caterpillar for continuing to sell products to Israel.
The information delegates will use to inform their decision comes from a number of sources which ominously enough, have exhibited a troubling hostility toward Israel. For example, the Israel/Palestine Network of the Presbyterian Church (USA), has hosted a blog which linked to an obviously anti-Semitic video titled “I AM ISRAEL” that accused Israel of controlling American foreign policy.
While IPMN’s website attracted some negative attention to the PC(USA), it will soon become a sideshow to another controversy after the publication of a lengthy report by the denomination’s Middle East Study Committee, created by a vote of the General Assembly in 2008.
This report, which includes a historical analysis that demonizes Zionism, omits important information about Arab violence against Jews in the first half of the 20th century also includes a letter to American Jews that seeks to undermine the legitimacy of mainstream Jewish leaders in the U.S.
Jewish leaders in the U.S. have responded with anger, as have some members of the denomination. Below is a roundup of useful links relating to the PC(USA)’s deliberations.
Breaking Down the Walls: Report of the Middle East Study Committee to the 219th General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (USA). March 5, 2010. This is the full report. Smaller sections of the report can be found here.
“Presbyterian Church USA Report “Offensive Attack On Judaism And Israel,” Anti-Defamation League, March 11, 2010.
“Presbydrearians,” Spengler (a First Things Blog), March 11, 2010.
“Presbyterians Seen Renewing Attacks On Israeli Policy,” The Jewish Week, March 9, 2010.
“Israel releases part one of Israel-bashing report,” Washington Times, March 8, 2010.
“Presbyterian report affirms Israel’s right to exist, criticizes occupation of Palestinian lands,” Courier-Journal.com (Louisville), March 5, 2010.
“Jewish Group: PC(USA)’s Israel Proposals Will Damage Relations,” Christian Post, Feb. 23, 2010.
“An unholy campaign: Presbyterian Church elders are poised to defame Israel,” New York Daily News, March 7, 2010.
“Presbyterian Peacemakers Offer Contradictory Messages About Jewish Sovereignty,” CAMERA, March 10, 2010.
“Presbyterian Church USA Ready to Declare War Against Israel: Take Action Now,” Simon Wiesenthal Center, Feb. 22, 2010.
“Gearing Up for Another Season of Anti-Zionism in the PC(USA),” Snapshots, (CAMERA’s blog), Feb. 20 2010.
“Middle East study team nears release of its final report,” Presbyterian News Service, Feb. 2, 2009. This article, published before the report was released, provides interesting detail about the committee’s deliberations regarding Israel’s right to exist.
Readers should also visit Viola Larson’s blog, “Naming His Grace.” Larson has numerous posts related to the PC(USA)’s stance on Israel. She has addressed the issue here, here and here. (There are numerous posts on this issue at this blog.)
For historical background about the PC(USA)’s animus toward Israel, read “Pride and Prejudice: The Presbyterian Divestment Story,” by Will Spotts, a former member of the PC(USA). Spotts left the denomination in part because of the church’s animus toward Israel.
Numerous CAMERA articles about the PC(USA) can be found here.
Lenten Discipline: Bash Israel – Groups like Churches for Middle East Peace seem determined to put Israel as well as fish into the frying pan this Lent says IRD President Mark Tooley
Friday, March 12th, 2010From the Institute on Religion & Democracy:
Church groups centered on Middle East peace are marking the time of Lent with criticism of Israel. A season of penance and fasting traditionally associated with preparing for Easter, Lent is being promoted as a time to single out Israel as aggressor.
Lenten reflections issued by Churches for Middle East Peace (CMEP) direct attention to Israel’s alleged sins and portray Israel as solely responsible for the Arab-Israeli conflict. CMEP-provided materials do not encourage the same level of attention or understanding to the role Israel’s Arab and Muslim adversaries have played in contributing to the continued existence Arab-Israeli conflict.
Agencies of mainline Protestant churches including the Episcopal Church, Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), United Methodist Church and the United Church of Christ are all members of CMEP, as are some Eastern Orthodox and Catholic groups.
One CMEP reflection written by an executive of the United Church of Christ reads “In Israel and Palestine, Israeli settlements, the separation barrier, conditions of refugees, and myriad aspects of occupation–as well as destabilizing and debilitating violence–diminish hope and dehumanize people.”
Direct references to Israel such as settlements and the separation barrier are contrasted with diffuse and vague references to “destabilizing and debilitating violence” – not direct naming of those groups responsible.
IRD President Mark Tooley commented:
“It is ironic that a sober season centered on personal disciplines and penance would be appropriated by some church groups as a time to attack others.
“As is sadly typical, Middle East church groups heap criticism upon Israel while largely ignoring the transgressions of neighboring Arab governments and the Palestinians.
“Few have an interest in the ongoing miseries of Egypt’s persecuted Coptic Christian population, while the economic embargo of Hamas-dominated Gaza is viewed as an intolerable evil.
“Groups like Churches for Middle East Peace seem determined to put Israel as well as fish into the frying pan this Lent.”
Letter-writer in National Secular Society mailout says Bulger killers went to a Church of England school where they were ‘fed violent Bible stories’.
Friday, March 12th, 2010Barbara Smoker has written an open letter to the National Secular Society as follows:
In all the media coverage on the character of John Venables [one of the murderers of Jamie Bulger] I have yet to read or hear any mention of the fact that he and his co-murderer were, at the time of their horrific crime in 1993, attending a CofE primary school where, instead of receiving moral education, they were fed violent, vindictive bible stories.
What a despicable and unfounded comment and yet the NSS felt happy to include this in their e-mailshot.
