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Pro-Israel Episcopal group responds to Massachusetts bishops
2002-097-5
4/18/2002
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[Episcopal News Service]
A Massachusetts group calling itself the Episcopal-Jewish Alliance for Israel plans a response to protests by Massachusetts' Episcopal bishops last November in front of the Israeli consulate. The group will present a panel discussion of the conflict in the Middle East on April 21 in Newton, Massachusetts.
The panel includes Rabbi William Hamilton of Congregation Kehillith Israel in Brookline; the Rev. Keith Roderick, an Episcopal priest in Illinois who began working in 1982 with a group called Aid to Soviet Christians, but now heads an umbrella organization entitled the Coalition for the Defense of Human Rights Under Islamization; and Dennis Hale, an Episcopalian and associate professor of political science at Boston College.
'The Episcopal Diocese of Boston [sic] has waged an unbalanced, unfair campaign against Israel,' the group said in an announcement. 'Now Episcopal clergy and laymen, offended by these actions, are uniting with Jews to support Israel.'
The panel discussion is jointly sponsored by the Boston Israel Action Committee (BIAC) and CAMERA, the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America.
In a statement posted on the website for the Boston Israel Action Committee, the group said that 'the fundamental cause of the conflict in the Middle East is the Arab refusal to accept the reality of a non-Muslim state' and characterized the Massachusetts bishops' position as 'tragically one-sided.'
'Under constant attack, Israel has been forced to take self-defense measures which our local Bishops portray as an 'unjust occupation'--despite Israel's withdrawal of its military from Arab villages and towns in the 1990s--turning the victimizers into victims and the victims into aggressors,' the statement said. 'This is morally confused and dangerous, because it rewards terror with concessions, and in the process encourages more terror…
'We urge all men and women of good will to stand with our Jewish friends at a time when the Arab war against Israel is being advanced by terror and anti-Semitism all over the world,' the statement concludes. 'We must not let this darkness fall again.'
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