Friday, April 21, 2006
Jon Haber at Bearing-Witness.org has a thoughtful essay on the PC(USA)'s choice of Rev. Gretchen Graf to lead the committee that will be dealing with Middle East issues at the next General Assembly, as well as what such a choice implies about the Church's worldview when it comes to Middle East issues. (For background, see: PC(USA) Committee Moderator: '9/11 an act of faith and courage' and PC(USA) Reverend Graf Responds)
Conspicuously absent from Rev. Graf's list of those Americans sending a message to the world through their actions are the American solders who ended a decade of tyranny in Afghanistan and many more decades of brutal rule by Saddam Hussein. Again, contemporary political labels (Left, Right, Anti-War, Pro-Peace, Pro-Freedom) make it difficult to think about, much less talk about warriors as agents for good. And yet Reverend Graf was bold enough to present the 9/11 hijackers in the context of their own self-identification, as committing " an act of faith and courage, a carefully planned statement against what they saw as the evils of a corrupt and oppressive nation." Is it too much to ask that America's post-9/11 military actions be judged as something other than violent retribution and revenge? While I may or may not consider the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq to be "just wars" aimed largely at liberation, a review of the life of Afghan women pre- and post-Taliban (among other considerations) at least gives such an argument a legitimate place at the table.
While Rev. Graf's arguments – reviewed fairly and in their entirety – seem like avoidance of difficult questions disguised as confronting them, it should be stated that she has gone miles further in addressing these contemporary challenges than have church leaders who appointed her to oversee their committee on Middle East issues...
Read the rest. The thing the mainliners dabling in Middle East peace don't get is that most of us see them as profoundly unserious people pursuing simple poses in complicated times.
kudos to Solomonia for having the Gretchen Graf story first.
About a year ago, thanks to the sophistication of the PC-USA main website, I easily found the email addresses of about 25 PC-USA congregations --mostly in rural or semi-rural areas-- within some 40 miles of my home in De Kalb, IL. I sent them each copies of the following:
>Dear Neighbors:
>Here's my email to the Presbyterian New Service that you might find interesting:
"The PC(USA)'s controversial Israel divestment initiative is up across the blogosphere again right now and you will probably be receiving considerable feedback on this in the coming days.
In the interests of coming up with my own fair-minded analysis of the situation, I have been surfing through quite a bit of material from various sites representing PC(USA) factions.
Among them was the official Presbyterian News Service release dated 11 Nov 2004 regarding the dismissal of two PC(USA) staffers at its Louisville HQ, following the flap over Hezballah's obvious exploitation for domestic consumption of a PC(USA) fact-finding visit to a site in Lebanon.
The PNS release described the venue as 'the Khiam Detention Center, a former Israeli prison and torture site in southern Lebanon, which is now a Hezbollah-run museum and memorial.'
Could you please provide to me the proven details known to PC(USA) of any 'torture' suffered by the inmates at Khiam at the hands of the Israelis. Otherwise I will have to assume that PC(USA) has accepted this inflammatory terminology solely on the basis of Hezballah's assertion that torture took place at Khiam.
I look forward to your speedy reply..."
With the exception of one auto-respond advising that their anti-spam software had rejected by message as originating from an unregistered correspondent, I got no feedback at all from any of the churches to whom I sent this message. I received neither a response to nor an acknowledgement of my original note to the Presbyterian News Service contact address.
Appalling!
Alan Potkin
Nice letter, but the PCUSA is stonewalling on this. Most pastors seem to think that if they ignore it - and make certain their congregtations don't hear about the controversial anti-Israel actions taken by the national leadership - the whole thing will just go away.