Sunday, April 27, 2008
Susan Hoder, last seen on video here, let's the mask slip in two related pieces on the divestment push on the UMC site here: Bethlehem needs Christian support and at the Star-Telegram: Aiding and abetting occupation:
...In 2004, I traveled to the region. In the occupied territories, I saw the terrible apartheid that Anglican Bishop Desmond Tutu and others have described.
Throughout the West Bank, construction cranes were building Israeli settlements on confiscated Palestinian land. People of Jewish ancestry from all over the world are invited to live on property taken from Palestinians. Yet Christians and Muslims whose ancestors have lived in the Holy Land for 2,000 years and 1,300 years, respectively, cannot return...
Would someone tell this woman there's a war on, and the people whose discomfort she's empathizing with are on the other side? It didn't have to be a zero-sum game, still may not have to be, but that's the way it's turned out, unfortunately. When you teach people to hate, and you applaud murder, justice dictates you lose something in the process.
From the piece at the UMC site (for Christian consumption):
In fact, many people in Bethlehem and the West Bank descended from Christ's earliest followers and have lived there for thousands of years. Now they suffer alongside their Muslim neighbors as Israeli bulldozers destroy everything in the path of expanding Jewish settlements and the wall.
Translation: Everything was fine before those uppity Jews came along and made Christians and Muslims suffer. I'm not so sure it's just "occupation" that bothers people like Hoder.
