A friend of mine gave me this link a week or two ago. It is to a blog entry written by Jim Berekley about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the role of the PCUSA. He lifted up a letter written by a group called Presbyterians in Dialogue for Peace as the example of an “evenhanded, reasonable, informed statement about Israel.” Click here to go and read the article.
Over the course of the next week or so, I will be preparing an Open Letter in Response to this group and I will be emailing it to them, to Rick Ufford-Chase (the PCUSA Moderator) and Clifton Kirkpatrick (the Stated Clerk of the General Assembly), and I’ll be posting it here on this blog. Clifton Kirkpatrick has already written them an excellent response, which you can read here.
I won’t go into the details now, but the article is just inaccurate on so many accounts, including their ideas related to the Wall, the occupation and house demolitions. Also, as I’ve been becoming much more sensitive to language and words that are used to describe situations in this part of the world, some of their language is just pure rhetoric (which I know we can all find ourselves using from time to time) that is inaccurate and presents the Palestinians an “angry†people.
Be looking for my Open Letter in Response to Presbyterians in Dialogue for Peace sometime next week.