Excellent post. Both this one and the earlier interview provided a lot of information.

One thing stood out to me: NO CHRISTIAN GROUP (I'm aware of) has mined the Koran for references to criticize suicide bombing. Some Christians feel perfectly comfortable arguing that Jews are not following the Hebrew Bible - which these Christians of course selectively interpret. But they don't try anything similar on the other side. Ever. I also note that I have not seen Jewish people haranguing Christians with the New Testament - say Romans, for example. (Yes, some Christian Zionists use this - but I have not seen members of another faith applying this same tactic TO Christians that these are using.)

That double standard is shocking (to me) once it sinks in. This may be because - as a Christian, I take it personally. But it still cries out 'double standard' and 'hypocrisy'.

I'm also wondering if people really grasp the full danger of this brand of church supported activism.

Nicely done, nicely articulated and clarified by Van Zile; I'm in 100% agreement.

These types of articulations are heartening precisely because they lend clarity to a broad and deeply based set of initiatives against Israel and - make absolutely no mistake - against Jewish identity and peoples, which is to say the particular form it takes in our own late modern era, characterized by various ideological excesses; technological and media proliferation and resulting distortions/corruptions that are readily promulgated; severely handicapped social/political conceptions; etc. It's as if it reaches demonic proportions since virtually every socio-economic, ethnic and political stratification on the face of the planet has had its own marketing director assigned to it for purposes of selling and promulgating some type of initiative against Israel. No doubt there are some cargo cult peoples on some Polynesian or Indosian islands that are not subjected to such propaganda, but it's striking nonetheless and the phenomena is worth taking note of, regardless as to how any one person might be inclined to characterize it. Examples are all too numerous, but to note another one, for purposes of contrast with Sabeel and Ateek, this Guardian article by a putatively pro-Palestinian nationalist, is one such.

And I say "putatively" because who's to say he's sincere and to be taken at face value? I'm reminded in one vein of Ho Chi Minh's putative "simple nationalism" and I'm reminded in another vein of the fact that while "Palestinian aspirations" are likely expressed sincerely by a few, within the larger scope of things they serve, consciously or unconsciously, as little more than a pawn within broader Arab and Persian Muslim anti-Israel and anti-Jewish initiatives. If that overstates things I'd be happy to be corrected, but given the mountain of historical and contemporary evidence to support this view the correction would need to be substantive, not rhetorical or otherwise insubstantial.

At any rate, a substantial and clarifying interview and one that is in fact heartening.

h/t Normblog

oops, the one sentence should read: "It's as if it reaches demonic proportions since it's also as if virtually every socio-economic, ethnic and political stratification on the face of the planet has had its own marketing director assigned to it for purposes of selling and promulgating some type of initiative against Israel."