[The following, by Will Spotts, is crossposted from The PC(USA) on Israel and Palestine.]

#2 Presentation of One-Sided Information

Many Christian groups have provided information on the Middle East that is marked by a consistent pattern of one-sidedness. Some Christian Zionist groups have advanced one-sidedly pro-Israel narratives. Far more common, however, are the one-sidedly anti-Israel narratives presented by many mainline denominations and interest groups - including the PC(USA). These take the form or 'resources' for congregational worship and education, of trips to the region, of hosting visitors from the region, of presenting information to members of congress or national governmental officials, of hosting conferences claiming to be about 'peace with justice', and of issuing statements for use by national agencies of the denominations.

The information often offered by PC(USA) employees, networks, and offices has several salient features: a complete list of Israeli misdeeds (some real, some imagined); a systematic failure to mention Palestinian misdeeds (even the most egregious of these are only tangentially acknowledged with a qualification that they find their ultimate source in 'the occupation'); contacts with like-minded persons only (in all visits to the Middle East, and all hosted speakers); the systematic omission of historically relevant details; the inclusion of (verifiable) factual errors and distortions of history; the consistent misrepresentation of the actual text of UNSC resolutions; the presentation of unfounded statistics; and a persistent failure to correct information that has been proven false (specifically, false information is initially offered, it is challenged, and no mention is made that it was false - at best such information will stop being included in presentations).

As with the issue of Israeli exceptionalism, a couple of rationales are consistently offered to defend this practice. Here again, an observer would do well to examine these rationales more carefully.

A. One rationale offered for provided unbalanced resources is the assumption that there is a fundamental imbalance of power between Israelis and Palestinians which confers an imbalance of responsibilities on the parties and calls for an unbalanced response by churches. This notion was advanced by the PC(USA)'s Vernon Broyles (among many others) in The Christian Century. In a letter to members of the New Covenant Presbytery, the PC(USA)'s Clifton Kirkpatrick reiterated the same argument:

This rationalization attempt runs into two problems. First, it makes an assertion about a power relationship that it does not actually establish. Who, for example, is considered in this relationship? Are neighboring countries that take an active role in the conflict relevant? How about the UN? The burden of proof justifying an imbalance of reaction rests on the one advocating that imbalance.

Even were this imbalance established, the rationalization for offering one-sided information would still fail. It might suffice to warrant an imbalance in a church's response, but it would never justify an imbalance in process. After a church organization had thoroughly explored the matter, it would be free to take a stand that reflected a legitimate situation on the ground. However, we are not talking about the PC(USA)'s response - we're talking about their gathering of data upon which to base any response. Bias in that process is unjustifiable because it makes formulating any coherent analysis of the situation on the ground impossible. It may perhaps be that the officials who advanced this argument arrogantly presume that they have analyzed the situation - and are therefore justified in lying to members of the organization about it. However they may regard their action - this rationalization of it is not workable.

B. Another rationalization offered for the provision of one-sided information appeals to the notion that the American media is biased in favor of Israel, therefore by being biased against Israel, church organizations are merely providing balance. This argument has been offered by the PC(USA), the United Methodist Church, and several other denominations on a variety of occasions. When it commended a film, Peace, Propaganda, and the Holy Land as a "study resource for children and youth", representatives of the PC(USA) had this to say:

Christie R. House, the editor of the United Methodist Church global ministries magazine, New World Outlook, expressed much the same thinking:

Some of the difficulty engendered by this rationalization is self-evident. The PC(USA) quote seems to suggest that bias is a bad thing, yet the PC(USA) fully embraces bias when presenting an extraordinarily biased film to children and youth.

But this rationale also contains three embedded false assumptions, and it is in itself an appeal to the baser natures of its hearers. 1. It assumes that people have some familiarity with the facts of the conflict between Israelis, Palestinians, and neighboring states. This is demonstrably untrue - in surveys, many Americans have had difficulty locating the State of Israel on a map. In order to provide balance by offering one-sided information people would have had to already be familiar with the other side. 2. It assumes that the 'mainstream media' actually offers the Israeli viewpoint - or even a particularly favorable view of Israel. This also is manifestly false. In the film commended by the PC(USA), the BBC was held up as an exemplar of balance - in spite of the BBC's record of gross bias and the findings of the Balen Report. 3. And it assumes that the American media is somehow controlled in order to provide favorable coverage of Israel. Any bets who the controllers of the 'mainstream media' are supposed to be? But it is also an encouragement to people to consume their particular brand of biased information because it plays on those people's egos. It suggests that to do so would make them somehow superior to those who rely on the 'mainstream media, the internet, and many books on the subject' - apparently because the reader who accepts their biases is better informed. This ego-appeal is particularly troublesome because anyone who has spent more than five minutes looking into it will discover that there are numerous conflicting narratives about virtually every issue involved. Some of these are legitimate perspectives; some are deliberately deceitful; others are accidentally false. The policy of church organizations like the PC(USA) providing one-sided information does nothing to help a person who genuinely seeks to understand the situation.

Additionally, some of the same faulty rationalizations offered to attempt to justify Israeli exceptionalism have also been applied to the distribution of one-sided materials. They remain as insufficient to justify this practice as they were to warrant an excessive negative focus on Israel. In any case, to provide people with one-sided information is inescapably an attempt to prompt people to take sides based on a falsehood. This is not necessarily antisemitic, but it is fundamentally deceitful and completely inexcusable. Such attempts at deceit are never Christian practices, therefore any church organization that indulges in them violates its own claimed beliefs. That this deceitful practice targets a specific people group raises serious questions. It is a form of defamation, and that it seems to be tolerated among church members uniquely in the case of Israel compounds the problem.

#3 Religious Imagery of Demonization

When speaking about the conflict between Israelis, Palestinians, and neighboring countries, the PC(USA) has partnered with a variety of Christian groups in indulging a peculiar practice. These tend to employ a specific set of religious images: comparisons of Israel to Pharaoh, comparisons of Israel to King Herod, references to the Israeli crucifixion system, references to Israelis trying to put stones in front of the tomb of Jesus, labeling the creation of Israel as 'the original sin', labeling Jesus the first Palestinian shaheed.

Except for being tailored to the Palestinian cause, these are, for the most part, familiar tropes of liberation theology. In liberation struggles the use of this set of images serves two purposes. First, they provide comfort to the unempowered who can identify their struggles with the sufferings of Christ or other heroic biblical figures. Second, by casting their opponents as biblical evil figures, those who invoke this set of images can effectively demonize those opponents.

The first usage has some merit; it can be very effective at offering comfort and encouragement. The second usage is more troubling. It is this second usage - that of biblical demonization - that is being employed by the PC(USA) and its partners. [This is readily apparent when PC(USA) sources repeat or publish the use of such imagery - because the intended audience is clearly not the group these organizations regard as unempowered. The fact that this imagery is directed at a US audience eliminates any other possible use than that of swaying public opinion against the chosen opponents of these organizations through demonization.]

In many other favored historic liberation struggles this might have been an acceptable practice; when it is employed by Christian organizations against the only Jewish state, it acquires a number of complications. There is a very long history of the use of this set of images by Christians against the Jews that has caused untold misery and bloodshed. That fact cannot be ignored by any responsible person.

Although officials within the PC(USA) and other Christian organizations that use these images have been made aware of the problematic nature of their language of contempt, these have failed to distance themselves from it. This failure evidences, at the very least, a callous disregard for the danger that has always been historically inherent in language of this type. This may not be overt antisemitism, but it displays a type of depraved indifference to the familiar language of historic antisemitism.

Will Spotts

[Previous: Part I, Part II.]