Another example I might have added would be from Canon Naim Ateek of Sabeel who uses Christian antisemitic imagery to attack Israel.

For example, he has written that the Israeli government crucifixion machine is operating daily in the occupied territories.

Of course in the West there is a similar effect that assumes all terrorism in recent years is Islamic based until they have evidence to the contrary (at which point some media outlets [FOX] stop calling it terrorism).

It all depends who is seen as the "other".

Solomon would just "cut that baby" in half and sit back to see who would rather choose life for the "baby" or death.

Often a baby requires more influence than just one parent to grow. What if that "baby" had the best of both worlds?

Whats's your point?  I can find examples of North American clerics preaching antisemitism, homophobia, anticatholicism, Islamphobia. Hatred and religion often go hand in hand.

The point is not so much in the article, as it is in the obvious prejudice of the person posting it here.

What can I say,  kick the ever loving shit out a region for a few decades and they'll believe some crazy things.

What's our excuse?

As-salaamu alaikum

-Omni

 I am sure you know  and I wish to make clear to others:

The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is a fraudulent antisemitic text purporting to describe a Jewish plan for achieving global domination. It was first published in Russia in 1903, translated into multiple languages, and disseminated internationally in the early part of the twentieth century. Henry Ford funded printing of 500,000 copies which were distributed throughout the United States in the 1920s.

Cheers!

There is hate everywhere...one person/ group against the other. Luckily, we are blessed to live in a relatively peaceful place  and have the opportunity to look at the issues without living them. The more people argue about who hates who more, the more hate rears it's ugly head. How do we stop it and cultivate more peace? Why aren't we having more conversations about that? I don't have the answers, but I would love to participate in a discussion about how to bring about real tangible peace.

Kimono,

I think you've made the key point: We have to stop the hate and cultivate peace.

I addressed this in a previous posting in relation to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict::

One of the most important and neglected provisions of the Oslo accords is the requirement for the Palestinian side to cease its anti--Israeli incitement.

As long as the Palestinian leadership continues to preach that Israel is evil and illegitimate, as long it continues to propagate antisemitism, peace doesn't stand a chance. 

Even in the unlikely scenario that the two sides sign a piece of paper, peace won't follow. "Idealistic" young Palestinians will continue to try to make things right by strapping on bombs or firing missiles to kill Jews.

So what should we do to support peace?

Personally, we can support groups like One Voice which work toward peace on both the Palestinian and Israeli side.

Institutions - such as our government and the UCC - can urge the Palestinian side to engage in peace education: to stop naming streets, schools, and soccer teams in honour of terrorists.

To cease antisemitic and anti-Israeli incitement in Palestinian mosques and media, but instead to celebrate the millennia of Jewish history in the land and to acknowledge the legitimacy of the Jewish state.

The Canadian government is already doing a good job in this regard, but institutions such as the United Church - which like to regard themselves as champions of peace - in fact contribute to the demonization of Israel and thus to the continuation of the conflict.

Step One for the UCC - if it actually wants to promote peace - should be to stop circulating the Palestinian Kairos document, which is a wonderful example of demonization in religious clothing.

I also tried to devote a discussion to one particular peace initative, but it got little response, here:

http://www.wondercafe.ca/discussion/global-issues/peace-initiative

It is very sad and I find it completely unacceptable.  There is much anti-Semitism among the Orthodox in certain countries (Russia is bad), but the North American branch seems much better, perhaps because it has many converts from other more Christian sects.

Happy Genius,

Thanks for posting the explanation of the Protocols. Antisemitism has been a concern of mine for a long time, and I forget that most people don't know much about it (and no reason they should).

Though of course there are also people like Witch who don't want to know and calls me prejudiced because I've posted one article by an Iraqi writer and another by a couple of Jewish writers on antisemitism.

I'm not sure which she dislikes: me posting something by an Arab, by a Jew, that's against antisemitism, or all of the above.

EO,

Good to hear from you - I've missed your posts.

I expect antisemitism is less common in North American orthodox churches because the U.S. has always been more welcoming to Jews than Europe and in Canada, too, (at least since the war), and the greater tolerance has rubbed off.

...I don't know Brian. The politics of it all is vast and complicated , I get overwhelmed and, not being Palestinian or Jewish living in the middle east, not being from North or South Korea, not being from Northern or Southern Ireland, not being from China or Tibet for other examples, I admit, I don't understand the history and politics of other places in the world  very well. I can't understand it like those living there because it is not a lived experience for me having been born and raised in Canada. Canada is a huge  diverse place with room for people of all ethnicities and faith backgrounds, and I wish the rest of the world could have the rights and opportunities we have. We have made progress in making peace with First Nations in this country...and I fear that taking a combative stance, even if only in words, on every issue in every part of the world can be an incitement to violence in some other way...like, if you plug one hole in the boat, another one pops up somewhere else in the world.

                                                                                                                                                                        If we could all focus on peace, be charitable and kind, in every thought and every interaction with all our might...that includes our politicians as they are people too, as well as each of us, maybe we'd move in the right direction in all of the problems that exist in the world. It sounds very Polly-Anna, I know, but I am so sick and tired of the blame, the fear, the vitriol,  the sensationalism. I hate noone. I think there's plenty wrong in the world and the roots of conflict run deep and have led to dangerous problems in the world. I don't know what to do...but what I don't want to is join any movement that becomes part of another reason for someone or some place to hate someone else. That's the best response I can give right now...I'm suffering from thinking about global problems burn-out at the moment.

Kiimio,

I don't think anyone has to engage themselves in global problems. I think being good and kind in your personal life and taking the best care of you and yours that you can are the primary responsibilities for all of us.

I do post about global issues and about the Palestinian-Israeli conflict in particular because in its own small way the UCC is making the problem worse, and I'm sure the large majority of UCC members would like to make it better.

Brian, I know we don't have to engage in it...but as global citizens the conflicts and problems in the world and in the news and affect us all. It's hard to watch, but irresponsible not to be aware.

Crazy, but I watch the news and hear of some leader saying something to another leader, and I think, "Why did he say that? If I were him I would have just given the other guy a hug"...can you imagine?...the laughter itself might release tensions and go a long way to opening up trust and constructive dialogue...realistically that would never happen--it's not macho enough-- we're so far off from it, but one can daydream.

So, what I can do right now is send out a virtual hug to all those who need one.

If UCC is over-emphasizing the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, they are only following the trend in virtually all the main-stream media.

I may take the time to post about a very analogous situation, the case of Nagorny Karabakh in the Caucasus.  It was taken over by the Armenians from Azerbaijan after the Soviet Union collapsed (Armenia had a large military base on its territory and so it had a ton of weapons).  They drove out all the Muslims, and some were killed.  They continue to occupy about 14% of Azerbaijan.

It has received almost no publicity and most people are not even aware of it.  The Azeri's are very upset about this, but they have virtually no diaspora in the West and many people have never heard of them.   To make matters worse, Iran, which continually rages about Israel, has always had very relations with Armenia.  This goes back centuries, apparently the Amenian language is full of Persian loan words, indicating a long historical association.  There are many Armenians living quite happily in Iran and Iran trades with Armenia and has good relations with it.   

Talk about hypocritical!

I was going to post about it earlier but I became so discouraged after beating my head against the wall arguing with Graeme that I gave up on this site and swore I would not come back.  But I came back to read, and saw your post, so I felt I should comment.

Perhaps I will yet get around to a post on Nagorny Karabakh.   My previous attempts to discuss foreign affairs in remote parts of the world have drawn very, very little interest however.

This of course is part of the problem with Israel/Palestine.  Since they hear about it continually everywhere, they start to think it is the only place in world with a refugee population!  If you, Brian, have any ideas on how to raise people's awareness, please let me know.

EO,

You're certainly right about the media ignoring the situation in Nagorny Karabakh - this is the first I've heard of it.

And I certainly share your frustration with the level of discussion on this board.

There are of course many posters who seem to be reasonable and well-intentioned human beings - Happy Genius, Kimmio, Chemgal, Waterfall, etc. Mostly we don't seem to hear a lot from such reasonable people, I expect because they don't have pre-packaged prejudices (or maybe they have real lives to lead or I'm just not involved in discussions where they take the lead).

But for the usual suspects who join into the conversations I'm interested in, the general theme seems to be that 'we're just as bad - or worse,' which I believe you've pointed out before.

This idea that we're just as bad is almost always irrelevant and generally untrue. To support such ridiculous perspectives the general technique seems to be to find some area of resemblance - however trivial - and pretend it proves the case.

Note the discussion about the Iranian authorities locking up people for having squirt gun fights.  Graeme announces that the same thing happens in the West.

Now, of course, everyone who lives in Canada knows this is simply absurd. Our police don't go out arresting people for having fun. Every day of the year, people gather for all sorts of purposes and basically do whatever the hell they want. I'm sure even Graeme has heard of music festivals, the Caribana parade, the gay pride parade, etc. And as long as they don't injure others or smash property, our police hang around and act helpful.

But, says Graeme, during a (violent) protest, our police might arrest someone wielding a squirt gun.  Relevance to the discussion? None. Does it prove that we're just as bad? No. It just proves that Graeme will not distinguish between a meteor and a baby bottle, because after all, they're both made out of atoms.

Another common technique is to simply invent things. 

Rev Matt, for example, posted the lie that Stephen Harper blamed the Norway terrorist attacks on Muslims. Did he invent this himself or borrow it from some far left website? Who knows? When challenged for posting a straightforward slander, the Reverend Matt simply doesn't reply.

Similarly, Alex writes that “Harper only calls something a terrorist act when referring to acts of violence by Muslims.” It takes about two seconds to prove this is simply untrue – e.g. who was it that added the Tamil Tigers to Canada’s list of banned terrorist organizations?

Or, like Motheroffive, when challenged about her belief that Canada’s foreign policy is driven by Islamophobia, she says she simply believes it – which at least is honest.

But I do think it’s important to distinguish posters such as Alex who seems like a decent human being (even if I do disagree with everything he posts) and people like Graeme and Witch who seem to be driven by bitterness and anger.  Such people are simply trolls and, as with all trolls, the best policy is not to feed them.

I am going to send away for another copy of Thomas de Waal's book about it, I can't find my copy.   I will eventually post about it.

Nagorny Karabakh means "Mountainous Black Garden" or "High Black Garden."

"Nagorny" is a Russian word for mountainous.  "Kara" is the Turkish word for black. Yes, the Azeri's speak a language related to Turkish and the Armenians suffered terribly at the hands of the Turks in WW I, however the Azeri's had nothing to with that.   

It would be as if a furious Israeli thought he should attack England because they speak a language related to German. 

Don't expect it to sway people like Graeme, who will simply resort to their usual argument that we all just as bad, because we killed off the natives in the Americas (which is not even true, I have spent most of time on this site arguing with Graeme about this.  I grant him that the Europeans did not treat the few who survived the onslaught of Old World diseases very well, but he won't admit there was even an onslaught of Old World diseases.   We killed them, deliberately).

There are big differences between being a Zionist and being a Jew, and big differences between being anti-Zionist )which I am) and anti-Semitic (which I'm not). Similar differences exist between Christians and right-wing fundamentalist Christians, Moslems and Jihadists. And it needs to be remembered that the Jewish state was carved unilaterally out of Palestine by the Allies at the end of the Second World War, not least because of anti-Semitic attitudes in the U.K., Canada and the U.S.

Talk to people in Europe and the Middle East and you'll find a lot of resentments for the way the Allies treated people and imposed governance with a lot of disdain for local aspirations and sentiments... like trading the Baltic states off to Stalin, "repatriating" Cossacks to face firing squads in Russia; letting angry partisans wreak their hatred on German-speaking Bohemians in northern Czecheslovakia.... and the creation of Israel in a completely high-handed way. For many people in these regions, the time scale that's relevant. and has consequences in their daily lives, go back to the 1930s and before, and the Second World War's very complicated impacts are still working themselves out.

By and large, people who've grown up in the "New World" are totally out of touch with the history, the cultures or the politics involved. We lumber in with attitudes founded on incomprehension. And we've seen a succession of American presidents propose peace plans from their positions of power that have been simply naive and insensitive.  

Before we can understand it, we need to look at our real historical role, actions and motivations. We have largely swept all of this under our carpets of contented conceit. A place to start some in depth thinking is to look into the 1939 voyage of the St Louis. Then look into the histories if the Balkans, the Baltic states and the Arab countries after 1900. You'll soon be surprised at how much healing has happened, how much injustice  we've been complicit with, how wronged so many people and nations have been. 

The New World's role has been well-intentioned for the most part (except for some of the most craven greed) and guilt's not the right response. But we do need to learn the importance of LISTENING more keenly and LEARNING more conscientiously before we rush in with judgements and opinions that are worthy, really, only of buffoons.

I wonder which project is going to be finished first:

1. The Mining of all Israeli borders with transgenic mines that only detect non-israelis and reconfigure their subject into 'Israelis'.
2. The billionare's plan to relocate all of Israel, building by building and the dirt, to a safe place in the USA.
3. Another billionaire's plan to relocate the 'Palestians', shack by shack with the dirt, to a safe place somewhere near the badlands in Alberta.
4. Another billionaire's plan to inject into the atmosphere, food & water around 'Israel' a potent dose of DMSO & MDMA to engage the populaces in Forced Empathy.
5. The supersecret plan to, using a transgenic spray, to reconfigure everyone in the Middle East to the same 'race', mentally as well.
6. The Miming of the Syrian & Israeli border.  Trained by the Marceau Institute, these mimes do such moves as Exploding In the Wind, Please Play Well With Others, Is that a Bomb or Do You Want to Mate with Me?
7. Programmed nanodrones will be sent out to the Middle East and will cut out all the supernatural and nasty bits of the  various Holy Books and do some complicated neurosurgery on certain Authorities so that their views of their Holy Book won't be promoted anymore.

And so it goes :3

I think we're forgetting that many Palestinians -- the ones who haven't been booted out of Israel to refugee camps in other places, Lebanon in particular -- are Israelis (but not Jews) who are being or have been harassed from their homes by their Israeli government, or by Zionist "settlers" (many of them recent arrivals from the West) who are at loggerheads with the Israeli government; and that the Palestinian Israelis face unique restrictions on work, education, freedom of movement and health care access, etc. by virtue of their ethnic identity. They are not all Moslem, far less jihadists, and some are Christian. Some are secularist, like some Israelis of Jewish extraction.

It's generally considered a bit presumptuous for a person who's been here only a couple months to be calling people who have been here over 5 years "trolls".

That's OK. In that five years I've seen your kind come and go, many times. You weren't the first bigot to come here trying to make a name for himself. You won't be that last. Chances are, you won't even be remembered.

Witch: I was thinking of making a similar comment of behalf of you and Graeme, but I put it aside to reflect over a bit... not about your status as a  denizen of the forest... but about my butting in inappropriately. So I'll just "second" you.

Witch:  hear hear!  Brian from Toronto's rhetoric would probably work better if you weren't an already established old timer here at the WC meritocracy :3  Still good to have one of the WC Knights around.

Anyone care to comment on why the situation in Nagorny Karabakh receives no publicity, and no one at UCC cares about it all, even though hundreds of thousands of Muslims were driven from their homes and about 20,000 killed?  

(It also resulted in Armenians being expelled from Azerbaijan, the same tit for tat type of thing that results in mass expulsions of Jews from Arab countries in the wake of the creation of Israel).

These Armenians are our fellow Christians.  Should we not put our own house in order before going after Jews?   

Agreed the behaviour of Canada and US with regard to the Jewish refugees was disgraceful.

Agreed that sending unwilling Soviet citizens back to the USSR was a dreadful mistake, but I think it was committed more in ignorance than anything else.  I could be wrong.

As for the Baltic states, and in fact all of Europe that fell under Stalin, there was very little the West could do, short of starting another war with Stalin.  Stalin occupied the Baltic states, the reality was that nothing could be done.   

Agreed that the explusion of millions of Germans from the Sudentland (in Czechoslovakia) and from the parts of eastern Germany that Stalin decided to help himself to, has received very little attention compared to other aspects of WW II.  The Soviet forces were particularly brutal, as there was extensive rape, looting and killing involved.  But then again, Hitler's armies had been horrifyingly brutal in the USSR.   The US and other English-speaking forces did not experience any land invasion of their home countries, much less what the USSR went through.

I think the Allies agreed to the Sudentland, perhaps because they were at that point, convinced that the Germans could not co-exist with anyone else.  It is hard to retroactively judge this.   There has been two devastating wars, and no one, absolutely no one, wanted a repeat.

That said, many millions of Germans who were not Nazi supporters suffered terribly.   One of those situations where there seems to be no good solution.