BDS Video

I guess I'm a late-comer to pointing out this video (thanks to everyone who sent me a link):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tnpilMYsR0I

Rotten Luck

I’m still trying to find some time to do a little historical unreality fiction at the expense of my old friends at JVP, but in the meantime here’s one missed news story and one observation on the Olympia boycott (something I threw out on the Co-op’s message board that I thought my reader might enjoy).

On the newfront, it looks like Johnny Lydon (aka Johnny Rotten from the Sex Pistols), who will be headlining a music festival in Israel next month, has told critics exactly what they can do with their boycott requests. And as a Pistols fan from the 1980s, I think it’s safe to say that when Johnny Rotten gives you the finger, you know you’ve been fingered.

Regarding the Olympia Co-op, it occurred to me that an interesting paradox is afoot with their decision to boycott Israeli products.

For by the co-op's own standards, boycotts are directed at those who are guilty of something that is legally or morally repugnant. The guilt of the party which is being targeted by boycott is not in dispute, even if the specifics of the punishment must be negotiated.

But if you look at the number of co-op members who are voluntarily boycotting Israel since the boycott vote was taken, that number has not risen at all. Certainly members are being forced to shop in a place where the choice to buy or not buy Israeli goods is no longer available to them, but no members have made a personal choice (moral or otherwise) to boycott the Jewish state. In fact, many members seem to be going out of their way to purchase the boycotted and other Israeli products from other stores in the area (which are volunteering to carry these goods).

In contrast, many members have chosen to boycott an institution: the co-op itself. And by the co-ops own standards, an organization targeted by a boycott is guilty (although it remains to be seen if the co-op is guilty of ethical, moral or legal failures or some other crime).

So if an institution (the Olympia Co-op) that has been judged by its own standards (and members) to be unethical, immoral or possibly something worse is now sitting in judgment of someone else (in this case, Israel), then people need to ask by what standards this condemned institution is using to establish its moral superiority?

Playing Catchup

Having inflicted a month of Presbyterian politics on my reader recently, I’m committed to not overdoing the whole Olympia Co-op thing (even though I suspect this will be one of those seemingly trivial cases that turn into a nationwide lesson on the perils of allowing the BDS virus into an organization).

So what have we missed while the Olympians have been turning from a friendly community into armed camps? Well:

1. Thanks to the tireless effort of Code Pink and friends, Ahava sales have gone through the roof. (Nice to know the whole Buycott thing is making its way so strongly from Canada to the rest of the world.)

2. Can you believe it! Another BDS hoax. In this case, the Ma’an news agency announced that Israel’s Tara dairy company had moved its factories off the Golan Heights in order to avoid having their products boycotted in the West Bank. Quite a coup, except for the fact that Tara has no factories on the Golan Heights and never did. Oops! (Hey, why let reality get in the way of a good story.)

3. Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), those tireless BDS activists, have presented their divestment case to TIAA-CREF. And TIAA-CREF has responded by saying “didn’t we tell you guys to fuck off last year?” (I’m paraphrasing.) Like a bad pickup artist, JVP lists receiving a response from CREF as a great step forward, without highlighting the fact that this response took the form of a Dear John letter.

4. My kids and I have watched both Bill and Ted movies (Excellent Adventure and Bogus Journey).

You know, those last two items give me an idea. (Are you pondering what I’m pondering?)

Stay tuned…

Olympia Co-op – Consensus

I must admit to a feeling of bewilderment.

As those of you who have been following the Olympia Co-op boycott story on this blog know, I have taken for granted that the Co-op followed its own rules when deciding whether to take part in the latest BDS project to get food co-ops to shun Israeli products.

This is what critics of the boycott were told whenever they brought up the fact that the organization’s membership was excluded from that decision. In fact, I had even urged others to take boycott proponent’s word that procedures were followed properly, asking us all to apply the Principle of Charity in this matter, as well as other matters related to the controversy.

But recent information has come my way which forced me to do something I (possibly naively) chose not to do originally: take a close look at the co-op’s policies on the matter.

If you read through this document (which the co-op itself has posted in order to explain the policies behind its Israel boycott decision) you will see no role for the organization’s board in the decision-making process related to boycotts. Rather, the power to declare a boycott rests solely with the store’s staff and the threshold they must reach to declare an official boycott is consensus. In fact, the only sentence in the policy that specifies where decision-making power rests is the following:

“The department manager will make a written recommendation to the staff who will decide by consensus whether or not to honor a boycott.”

Now in the world most of us live in, consensus is defined as “an opinion or position reached by a group as a whole.” Under this definition, consensus is either/or. Either the group as a whole agrees to something and thus consensus has been reached, or it fails to do so, in which case there is no consensus.

The recent information I have received is that the staff, in fact, DID NOT reach a consensus on whether to boycott Israeli goods. One would think that, by the Co-op’s own published policies, no consensus translates to no boycott. But apparently in this case, no consensus meant that the board intervened to declare one on its own.

A fair-minded commenter on this subject pointed out that the Co-op’s bylaws establish as one of the board’s duties (#16) to “resolve organizational conflicts after all other avenues of resolution have been exhausted” and indicated that this by-law allowed the board to make the boycott decision in light of no consensus being reached by the staff. But this flies in the face of the boycott policy itself which seems to establish “no consensus” as a legitimate position which would translate to a “no go” choice regarding a particular boycott measure.

With all due respect to the person making the case that the conflict-resolution clause of the by-laws gives the board the power to make its own decision in the absence of staff consensus, if we take this proposition to its logical conclusion then anytime the staff cannot reach consensus to go ahead with a controversial matter that is allegedly its choice to make, the board can make that decision for them, a position that essentially makes the staff decision-making power established in the co-op’s boycott policies meaningless.

At this point, I believe everyone deserves a detailed description of what exactly took place within the Olympia Co-op to determine the level of consensus within the staff and (if relevant) what "avenues of resolution" were tried and exhausted before the board set the organization's boycott policy on its own. Members certainly deserve this information, but so do we outsiders who are now dealing with Olympia’s decision as it is being broadcast around the world as a call for other organizations to also join the BDS program.

Co-op by-laws also include clause #14 which says board members must “maintain free-flowing communication between the Board, Staff, committees, and the membership”.

Let the free-flow of communication begin.

Olympia Boycott – Worse Than You Think

At first, I assumed the Olympia Co-op boycott was just another case of a well-meaning, but naïve organization giving a boycott group a friendly hearing and ending up becoming their hand-puppet. But the more I learn about what’s been going on at Olympia, the more this begins to look like one of the most appalling cases of BDS infection I’ve ever come across.

To start with, at the meeting where the boycott was decided (a meeting that included 40+ BDS supporters and not one member of the community that could represent a differing opinion – a shocking situation in and of itself) an early draft of the boycott proposal apparently anticipated that this action would divide the organization’s membership.

In other words, the co-op’s leaders not only were aware that an Israel boycott could be divisive within the membership, but fully anticipated the damage their action would cause. But they did it anyway, taking into account only the opinions of the BDSers in the room and ignoring the 15,000 other members the board was allegedly elected to represent.

Now boycott supporters have grown fond of pointing out that the organization’s boycott policy does not require boycotts to be put to a member vote (which is apparently true), indicating that the group’s leaders alone have the power to make these decisions. But these leaders must also abide by the organization’s foundational bylaws which include the following explicit board responsibilities:

14. maintain free-flowing communication between the Board, Staff, committees, and the membership;
15. adopt policies which promote achievement of the mission statement and goals of the Cooperative [one such goal including: “support[ing] efforts to increase democratic processes”]

In other words, while co-op boycott policy gives the leadership the power to impose a divisive boycott, the board’s use (or misuse) of this power to do something they knew in advance would divide the membership seems to be in clear violation of the organization’s fundamental bylaws. Did the board “maintain free flowing communication” with the membership over an issue they knew in advance would be divisive? No. Did they support “democratic processes” when they handed everything but the final vote on this decision (including wording of their boycott resolution and veto power over what products fell under the boycott) to an unelected BDS group? No again.

Since the vote was adopted, there also seems to be a concerted effort to portray all critics of that decision as crazed “right wingers” whose only response has been to threaten the staff and members of the organization. And from material that’s been forwarded to me, it seems as though the call has gone out to the global BDS movement to parrot this characterization of boycott opponents.

As an outsider myself, I can only express mild irritation that arguments I’ve been making (which I hope have been reasoned, regardless of whether or not they convince) are being ignored or mischaracterized as “right wing” taunts. But within the organization, what is one to make of the fact that one set of members (boycott supporters) are calling on outside BDS activists to smear fellow members (boycott critics) who don’t toe the BDS party line?

Olympian Folly - In Whose Name?

As noted (and accepted) yesterday, decisions regarding who and what the Olympia Co-op boycotts apparently rests solely with the co-op’s board. I say “apparently” because my only source for this information is co-op members defending that decision online. But the Principle of Charity described yesterday means one should treat such sources of factual information as reliable.

Given this, it’s safe to concede that the board acted within the organization’s rules. (There has also been some debate as to whether the co-op is violating US anti-boycott law in its decision, a less interesting question to me right now, albeit one I’ve taken up in the past.)

So if the co-op’s leadership is playing by the rules, by what right can members (and non-members like myself) be complaining?

Well consider the content of that decision for a moment. Some defenders of the boycott decision claim that we critics are interfering with the free choices of others. But remember that the Oly Co-op board did not make a decision regarding its own personal choice. Each member of the board, indeed each member of the co-op (like all of us) is free to buy or not buy whatever it pleases. If a member wants to not buy Israeli crackers in protest of this summer’s Flotilla incident, a free society allows them to make that decision, just as it would allow another member to stop buying Turkish candy in protest of Turkey’s role that incident.

But the co-op’s board is not making a personal choice. Rather, they are restricting the personal choice of others, just as they would be if they chose to ban all Turkish products, or all products containing honey, or all products that began with the letter “P” from the shelves. Now the claim is that the co-op’s board is allowed to restrict member’s choices based on its own political decisions regarding whom to boycott. But even if the organization’s bylaws allow this exercise of power, the organization’s leadership has an extra obligation - an ethical and moral obligation - to ensure that this limitation of member freedom is in the interest of more than just themselves (or of a loud but potentially small minority of members demanding the board begin a boycott).

More importantly, Oly’s boycott (which even its initiators claim covers a trivial number of Israeli goods) was meant from the beginning to be symbolic. It’s a political act to demonstrate that the Olympia Co-op, as an organization, finds a nation so repugnant that it must be punished economically (even if only in small symbolic ways). Indeed, the message being delivered worldwide by supporters of the boycott is that this is a significant event, a great step forward in the boycotter’s plan to have Israel branded an Apartheid state and punished accordingly.

In other words, the board was not voting on a simple boycott but was rather voting to add the name of the organization to the worldwide BDS program which has as its mission not the furthering of the goals of the Co-op movement, but the furthering of its own goals to de-legitimize the Jewish state. And they were making that decision not in their own individual names, but in the name of everyone who has ever been a member.

Their action, their vote, declared that this boycott represents the Co-op as a whole, not just the board but its members. Going even further, this board is simply the latest of many that have been elected since the Co-op was founded in the 1970s. But in making their decision, they are staking the reputation of the organization, a reputation built on the hard work of hundreds if not thousands of people over the course of decades, to the BDS message.

As I’ve been describing for years, this is what the BDS movement does: it tries to get well-known institutions to take part in some form of boycott or divestment so that the BDSers can claim to be speaking in the name of others, leveraging the reputation of a famous university, a age-old church, a well-known municipality, a popular retailer in order to punch above their own limited weight.

So even if the rules allow the Co-op’s leadership to do so, those leaders have an extra level of obligation to make sure they are not making a statement on a controversial matter in the name of a broad membership whose opinions they do not know. And they have an even greater obligation to not hand over the reputation of the organization – a 30+ year reputation they cannot claim to own by simply being the latest in a long line of elected boards – to the boycotters, simply because they are told (again, loudly) that BDS is their only moral choice.

If we take it as given that the formal rules allow the board to do what it did, we also have to take it as given (seeing how bitterly many members oppose the decision) that this choice was not made after gaining consent (or even talking with) members before attaching the Olympia Co-op’s name and reputation to a project many members find repulsive.

This is not the first time that BDSers have gotten their way by maneuvering the leaders of an organization to act behind the backs of the people they are supposed to represent. If you read through the divestment tale of Somerville, MA (the first BDS battle I fought), you’ll find the same dynamic.

Now Somerville survived that ordeal by coming to its senses after the doors were thrown open to outside opinions and a spotlight shown on the divestment advocates trying to manipulate the city leaders to hand Somerville’s centuries-old reputation to them before the citizenry found out what they were doing. One hopes the same dynamic eventually takes hold in Olympia.

The Principle of Charity

I had forgotten about the “Action Alert” effect whereby activists on both sides of a BDS debate call on their bases to write to decision makers at organizations like the Olympia Co-op, as well as to flood the comments section of news stories covering a boycott story like the one unfolding in Washington. So my prediction that comments would level off at the 100-150 mark (at least in the newspaper) has already been proven wrong.

With so many things being posted in reaction to the Co-op’s boycott decision, it’s tempting to shine a spotlight on clear anti-Semitic comments such as one that added the collapse of the Global Economy to the list of Israel/Jewish crimes that should be punished by BDS. Similarly, BDS advocates would probably like to highlight the stray bigoted comment posted by an anti-boycott critic to “prove” that their opponents are motivated by racism. But while throwing the other side’s nastiest anonymous commentary into your opponent’s face (while ignoring extremism on your own side) has become a familiar online debating tactic, it misses two important contributions (one broad, one narrow) that online (mostly anonymous) commentary can make to a more enlightening debate.

On the broad side, while no single anti-Israel or anti-Palestinian nastygram says that much, in aggregate the aggressive and frequently ugly debate taking place online is a good indication of what Olympia is likely to experience throughout the community in the coming weeks and months. Whenever a BDS project pitches its tents, it’s just a matter of time before the entire community degenerates into a flesh-and-blood version of an online flame war. So look to the bulletin boards to see what the Co-op’s board has given as a gift to the organization’s membership.

On a more narrower front, an active online debate does allow many if not all arguments about a controversial subject to appear in one place and while some of these arguments may be spurious or weak, many (on both sides of an issue) can be logical and strong. But are partisans on either side of a debate under any obligation to focus on their opponent’s strong arguments, rather than mercilessly take apart their weak ones? In fact (at least philosophically) they are.

In philosophy, there is a “Principle of Charity” which requires participants in debate to extend certain “benefits of the doubt” to one another. One manifestation of this principle would be to consider an opponent’s arguments in the best possible light. In a detailed discussion of this principle, the philosopher Nigel Warburton uses this example to illustrate the concept:

“… in a debate about animal welfare, a speaker might state that all animals should be given equal rights. One response to this would be that that would be absurd, because it would be nonsensical, for example, to give giraffes the right to vote and own property since they would not understand either concept. A more charitable approach would be to interpret the claim ‘All animals should have equal rights’ as being a shorthand for ‘All animals should have equal rights of protection from harm’ and then to address that.”

Of course, the Principle of Charity does not (and should not) be automatically applied to every argument and every debater. Assuming the best of a proponent of perpetual motion machines or conspiracy theories, for example, could lend legitimacy to arguments which are, on their face, simply bad or mendacious, requiring no further interpretation generous or otherwise. At the same time, much of our political debate could be made much calmer and more illuminating with a healthy dose of this Principle.

Applying the Principle of Charity to the debate taking place at Olympia (or Oly as local fans seem to call it) does not mean agreeing to the boycotter’s mendacious presentation of Middle East history or accepting their self-serving explanation of why they demand only Israel (and not far greater human rights abusers) be boycotted. Nor does it require us to shut up in the face of emotive arguments, whether those take the form of photos of blood Palestinian babies or the invocation of the dead Rachel Corrie. Rather, it requires us to search past manipulative rhetorical for an argument that is reasonable, compelling and unquestionably true.

In this case, the strongest argument I’ve come across was in response to something I posted contrasting the behavior of the Oly Co-op board with the decision by a Co-op in Davis to reject similar boycott calls. While I happen to think that Davis’ decision was based on sound judgment that Olympia would have been well served to listen to, at least one commenter has pointed out that Oly is not Davis and that the rules of the Olympia Co-op make it clear that the board has full authority to make decisions regarding whom to boycott with minimal requirements to determine if such a boycott represents the will of the membership.

In this argument, boycott supporters are saying something that is absolutely true (those are apparently the rules at the Oly Co-op) and compelling (every organization, after all, gets to make its own rules after which it is only obligated to apply those rules consistently – which the Co-op has done). So what is there to say in response to such a sound argument?

Quite a bit, as it turns out, which I’ll get to tomorrow.

BDS's Latest Victim

OK - Another institution has decided to take the plunge into the BDS waters. So let’s all set our watches for what is going to happen next.

The Olympia Co-op story is similar to Somerville and Berkeley in that the decision to join the world-wide boycott movement against Israel was made by a group of leaders (the co-op’s board) working closely with BDS activists to craft their decision, but taking into account virtually no one else that the board was supposedly elected to represent.

Now co-op rules apparently say that the board can boycott anyone they like without consulting the membership. So if we are to get into a debate about the board’s responsibility (which we will on another day), it will be a discussion of propriety and judgment vs. breaking the law or the organization’s own rules.

For now, however, we can classify Olympia as comparable to those other BDS “victories” where members of an organization, church, or city wake up one morning to discover that a community in which they’ve been a member for years is now being touted on Al Jazeera as holding a political opinion (such as the BDS Israel=Apartheid analogy) that many members finds abhorrent .

Apparently a meeting will be held in early August to discuss the decision the Co-op has already made regarding handing their reputation over to the boycott brigade. If history is any guide, this will lead to a second meeting and then finally a third when the co-op (which by now will have realized the consequences of their original decision) will have to vote to reject or double-down on this ill-conceived boycott project.

So I predict three meetings in August and September that will be increasingly populous, increasingly long, and increasingly shrill, with people who once smiled at each other in the food aisles shoving photos of bloody babies into one another’s faces, after giving many speeches that include such phrases as “blood on your hands,” “international law demands” and (of course) “Speaking as a Jew…”.

You can all get a little taste of what the Olympia Co-op’s board has wrought unto the organization by scanning the comments section of the Co-op itself, the local newspaper and this poll. As usual, comments on this subject outnumber any other discussion by a factor of 10x heading to 30-50x. And (equally as usual) those comments have degenerated into accusations of bad faith, apologia for murderers, bigotry and criminality (directed against Israel and its supporters, and the boycotters and their supporters). Given the small size of the Olympia community, I predict these comments will top out at the 100-150 mark (vs. the usual 300-500), but it should give everyone a taste of what delightful topics of conversation are in store for the community for the rest of the year.

And so BDS injects its toxins into another institution. And, as usual, it’s a friendly, welcoming organization that prides itself on its commitment to justice and human rights, even if its political choices are based more on moral vanity and political fads than an understanding of facts and issues.

While I’m no fan of politics based on striking poses, I must say there are worse sins in the universe than vain overreach. Which is why I’m left feeling kind of sorry for the Olympia Co-op over what is about to hit their community due to the ill-conceived decisions of a few, acting at the behest of a not-so-innocent BDS “movement” that is smacking its lips at the thought of dragging the circus to another community, no matter what the cost.

Olympia Snowed - Washington Co-op Boycott

BDS projects tend to come in waves or fads. In the early 90s, campus petitions were all the rage, then Mainline Protestant churches were targeted followed by student governments and – most recently – aging rockers and food co-ops.

Part of the reason behind this ever-changing list is the fact that BDS is a relatively nimble “movement,” forever ready to dance away from defeats and capitalize on even the most trivial wins. And since there are so many more of the former than the latter, divestment advocates must forever find new targets of opportunity once too many loses begin to give them a reputation as losers within a certain community.

Which is why yesterday’s announcement that a food co-op (in this case, the Olympia Food Co-op in Olympia Washington) has chosen to impose a boycott on Israeli goods was only somewhat surprising.

The location for one of the few examples of a boycott taking place in the US makes sense (Olympia is home to Evergreen College, home of ISM victim Rachel Corrie and one of the only colleges in America that’s gotten a student divestment vote through after a decade of BDS efforts on campuses). But the details of how the boycott was decided were surprising, given what happened in Davis California just a few months ago.

In March of this year, the Davis Food Co-op, like Olympia Co-op, was faced with a group of members who wanted the store to refuse to sell Israeli goods. Unlike Olympia, the decision being asked of the board was whether to put such a boycott to a member vote which led to public debates and hearings on the subject before the Co-op board made its final decision.

We’ll get to that decision in a minute, but before we do it’s interesting to note that Olympia avoided the public controversy during the decision-making process by simply making their decision without much (if any) public awareness that the matter was being discussed. And so, once again, we have another institution whose members woke up one day to discover that an organization they have been a member of for years is now being touted by anti-Israel activists across the globe as fully onboard the BDS, Israel=Apartheid, propaganda bandwagon (talk about surprises).

As described before, the reasons Davis decided to turn down requests to put boycott on the ballot were extremely interesting and are worth reading in full here. While disappointed boycott supporters claimed the Davis board’s decision was driven by Jewish community pressure and fears of legal reprisals, in fact their decision was based on principles relating to the co-op community itself, notably:

* That the boycotters were demanding that they (an unelected group of people with no fiduciary or other responsibility to the co-op as a whole) be allowed to make decisions for the entire co-op (including the board, managers and members) based on their own political agenda

* That supporting a boycott vote implied agreement with the boycotter’s characterization of the Middle East and acceptance of BDS tactics as representing the entire Co-op, not simply the opinions of a subset of members advocating for a boycott

* That the boycott would fly in the face of principles of the co-operative movement, including the Rochdale principles regarding political and religious neutrality and the Cooperative Principle regarding cooperation between co-ops (including Israeli co-ops)

Davis’ stance also highlighted that co-operatives that have failed to live by these principles and apply sound and careful judgment to where and when it will engage in political activity have created poisoned atmospheres leading to divisiveness, alienation of members, resignations and other harmful results.

Now it’s possible that the leaders of the Co-op in Olympia know all this, but are willing to ignore principles articulated not just by Davis but by the global cooperative movement in order to make a political stance that they (and they alone) know is in the best interest of their community. But it’s equally likely that this is just one more example of a group of single-issue partisans bullying an organization that lacks failsafe mechanisms (such as ways of determining if members agree with a political policy) to make a decision BDS activists tell them is their only choice.

Now that the BDSers have gotten their way, they will (as always) be on their merry way, firing off press releases and posting on newsites and blogs across the planet that Olympia Food Co-op (not simply its leaders, but every man, woman and child who shops there) is all aboard the BDS propaganda express. As usual, it will be left to those members to deal with the wreckage, and the co-operative’s leaders to explain that they have taken a principled stance when they, in fact, have just been played for suckers.

Israel is Just Great

Well “Israel is Just Great Day” came and went yesterday and everywhere I went I saw person after person showing their support for the Jewish state by wearing clothing. Thanks to the six-billion plus people who participated, and anyone who wants to take part in a similar “BDS is a Joke Week” scheduled for the first week of August can demonstrate their disdain for the aptly named divestment “movement” by going to the bathroom anytime between August 1st and the 7th.

In the meantime, news is out that Israel may be passing anti-boycott legislation that would fine Israelis who advocate for boycotts directed against the country and punish non-Israeli BDSers by (among other things) potentially denying them entrance into Israel. Despite a certain curiosity regarding how brave the self-declared courageous divestniks might be if their squalid little project was finally associated with some personal cost, in truth I remain reticent about democracies passing laws to punish political activity, no matter how odious. Some further thoughts on the matter can be found here.

And rounding out today’s roundup, BDS has scored another spectacular triumph by getting a family-owned grocery store in New Jersey to stop selling Israeli dates. This victory required the participation of family members of the enterprise (which might indicate a unique situation not likely to be replicated with more corporate retailers like Trader Joe’s). It also turns out that this boycott is another demonstration of how much easier it is to screw your friends and allies than your enemies in that the supplier of these dates (i.e., the person who will lose direct business with the grocery as a result of this micro-boycott) is a Palestinian Arab. “Sigh” indeed!

BDS and Celebrity

I seem to have gotten through the last US election without paying attention to how Bruce Willis or Whoopi Goldberg wanted me to vote. In fact, the whole notion of celebrity political endorsement has always struck me as somewhat silly.

After all, actors and actresses (even the most well-paid among them) are craftsmen, just like fine carpenters or chefs. And if they have a reputation as being wiser than members of these other professions, perhaps it is because: (1) their craft is the ability to convincingly deliver clever and articulate dialog; and (2) that dialog is provided to them by teams of writers who hone and polish words to ensure that they are clever and articulate before being placed into an actor’s mouth.

I swiped that observation from someone's online essay I’ve since lost that also brought up the interesting point that the actors who have actually gone into politics (Schwarzenegger, Reagan, the guy who played Gopher on Love Boat) have in common low to mediocre acting skills. Not that some of them (notably Schwarzenegger) have not had successful acting careers, but they have largely succeeded by avoiding roles that would stretch so-so talent past its limitations.

In contrast, much better actors who occasionally threaten to run for high office (such as Warren Beatty), never seem to work up the nerve to actually expose themselves to the will of voters. And who can blame them? If you’re Martin Sheen, why bother to run for President in an uncontrolled environment called reality when you can play the President on TV, ensuring that you win all the major fights and get all the best lines, even if you encounter occasional setbacks (sometimes triggered by fate, sometimes by your character’s tragic, but sympathetic, character flaws).

This is a long way of asking whether we should care about which celebrities are or are not choosing to visit Israel this year. After all, if Harvard or the Presbyterian Church chose to boycott or divest from Israel (neither has), that would imply that the moral weight of these centuries-old institutions was now bearing down in judgment on the Jewish state. But can the same moral weight be assigned to Meg Ryan?

Why bring up Meg Ryan, you ask? Well, apparently, her decision to skip the Jerusalem Film Festival is being hailed as the latest and greatest victory in the BDS culture wars. Oh, I’m sorry… you were asking “Who is Meg Ryan?” Well she’s appeared in a couple of Simpson’s episodes. And she was pretty funny in When Harry Met Sally in the 1980s. And she’s married to Dennis Quaid. In short, her decisions regarding what festivals to jet off to carries the same political and moral power as decisions made by Jethro Tull regarding where he will play his electric flute.

In the press releases hailing Ryan’s decision to skip Jerusalem, the BDSers also fingered Dustin Hoffman as allegedly joining their boycott, an allegation that turned out to be (surprise! surprise!) another hoax. But even if an acting heavyweight like Hoffman had joined a light comic actress in skipping a particular film festival, what does this represent beyond putting attending or not attending Israeli cultural events on the menu of moral indulgences available to the rich and famous?

Even if we accept the highly questionable notion that being dissed by a well-known (much less a not-so-well-known) actor or singer makes it easier for the next entertainer to follow the same course, what are we to make of the justifications these celebrities are using to explain their decisions? Elvis Costello nearly ran out of server space providing his long-winded, mealy-mouthed justification for screwing his Israeli fans, providing a convoluted argument that completely skirted the fact that his name was now being leveraged by BDS activists around the planet as the celebrity poster-child for their program.

But in the cake-taking department, nothing can beat this quote by singer Devendra Banhart regarding why he chose to cancel his Israel tour:

"We were coming to share a human and not a political message but it seems that we are being used to support views that are not our own. We will be overjoyed to return to Israel on the day that our presence is perceived and reported on as a cultural event and not a political one."

Note the inversion in this telling quote. After all, it is the boycotters that are pressuring celebrities to cancel their Israel appearances, and then turning around to claim (globally) that these decisions “prove” that Costello and Ryan and Banhart et al are all aboard the Israel=Apartheid program. Yet for Banhart, it is Israel that is allegedly claiming his concert tour is a political endorsement (for what he does not say).

Of all the various BDS activities, the celebrity cultural boycott lays bare the distance between rhetoric and behavior. The BDSers have made it clear that they have every intention of making a celebrity’s life hell if they keep their commitments to perform in Israel and have already demonstrated that they will exploit the name of any celebrity who caves into their demands. But the Banhart’s and Ryan’s and other first, second and third-string celebrities of the world who go down this route can always turn their acts of cowardice and hypocrisy into ones of virtue and courage by simply projecting the BDSers manipulative motives onto the Jewish state.

One of the great benefits of fame is the ability to live in a closed bubble, separate from reality and largely shielded from the consequences of your decisions. And while it’s always sad to discover a famous person has used the extraordinary bounty that often accompanies celebrity to spiral into a life of booze, drugs, and sex, at least those indulgences have the benefit of being self-destructive, rather than designed to cause harm to others whom the famous may fly over, but never meet.

New Holidays!

Apologies to my reader for the month-long obsession with the comings and goings of the Presbyterian Church. While it’s interesting to document the BDS virus (and various attempted treatments) running their course through a relatively large organization, a weeks-long focus on the subject means I missed out on both BDS Media Day on July 5th and the BDS Day of Action on July 9.

This puts me in the company of the other 6.8 billion people on the globe because, as nearly as I can tell, these BDS Days dedicated to ginning up media and action generated none of the former, and little of the latter beyond BDS activists from various countries dialing in to tell each other how wonderful they were.

Given that these and other BDS-related anniversary/celebrations are meant to showcase the vast progress “the movement” has been making, one would think that it would include an actual BDS success, rather than just report out how busy and noisy everyone is being on the arbitrary date they have set for their alleged fifth anniversary.

I say “alleged” because BDS should actually be celebrating its 10th anniversary, given that the divestment project started with the 2001 “Celebrate Racism” conference in Durban, not with the PACBI boycott announcement in 2005 that BDSers are currently using to mark the day of their birth (a date which allows them to flush a half-decade of failure from ’01-’06 down the memory hole).

With Israel’s export-fueled economy expanding at a rapid 3.6% clip the first quarter of 2010, I think it’s fair that divestment backers start demonstrating what they’ve accomplished in real terms, other than to gather in various cities to pat each other on the back and possibly vandalize a couple of grocery stores.

In the meantime, I’m declaring July 15th to be “Israel is Just Great Day,” a new holiday which asks people around the world to demonstrate their solidarity with the Jewish state by wearing clothes. As you walk the streets this Thursday (i.e., on Israel is Just Great Day) in villages, towns and cities around the world, surrounded by people wearing clothing of all colors and descriptions, just remember that every non-naked person you see represents one more person laughing at BDS while celebrating the Jewish homeland.

Hey, why should the divestniks be the only people who get to create their own ever-changing, self-serving metrics for success?

PCUSA - Victory and Nausea

I suppose I should be happy with the final outcome of last week’s Presbyterian General Assembly. Divestment was voted down (for the third GA in a row), the Middle East Study Committee’s ridiculously lopsided report was gutted (removing its most egregious sections and curbing the group’s excesses), and ugliness such as accusations of Apartheid were dismissed out of hand. And yet the experience of watching this year’s GA left me feeling profoundly ill.

My first reaction to this surprise nausea was guilt. Have I gotten so used to big and decisive victories against BDS that any sort of ambiguous outcome is disappointing? Certainly successful anti-Israel votes that called for the US government to withhold aid from Israel and the decision to denounce (rather than divest from) Caterpillar Tractor (votes that will surely be used by anti-Israel partisans to imply the Presbyterians are back on board their program) made 2010 less of an unalloyed victory for our side than in years past.

But then again (and with all due respect to the centuries-old Presbyterian Church), it’s been quite some time since an American political administration looked to the PCUSA’s governing bodies for moral guidance. And as far as denunciation is concerned, given how many times the church itself has been denounced for its immoral behavior regarding the Middle East over the last decade, PCUSA offers organizations like Caterpillar an object lesson on how to let such critiques simply bounce off a hardened shell of unquestioned self-righteousness.

Perhaps it is instead a disruption of the narrative I’ve been working under that led to this bout of queasiness. After all, I’ve been working under the assumption that most of the church’s excesses were the result of a corrupted leadership more committed to ruthless interfaith partners in the Arab Christian community than to their own members, coupled with out-of-control political activists whose only link to the church is their efforts to leverage its reputation for their own partisan campaigns. Under this storyline, the church’s rank and file were my heroes, the people that could be counted on to reverse any appalling votes that made their way out of stacked committees onto the GA floor.

But this rank and file has itself been changing over the years. As has been noted before, PCUSA is in the process of disappearing, having lost half its members just in my lifetime. But this shrinkage is not simply a matter of older members dying and no fresh blood coming in. In fact, whole churches have left and are continuing to leave the PCUSA “family,” joining other branches of Presbyterianism or Protestantism. And while these departures are driven more by conflict over social and doctrinal issues than over PCUSA’s attitudes towards the Middle East, with each departure the rump that is left behind becomes more homogeneous and less interested in listening to other opinions. And when individuals (such as Will Spotts), depart the church specifically over the ugliness that’s transpired over the years regarding divestment and other Israel-related matters, the church loses a crucial voice of conscience that should have been listened to all along.

And then there is the question of language. This was actually the third General Assembly I’ve watched via online video feed, and I must admit to having first been intrigued by the religious and spiritual vocabulary that permeated every discussion. In our secular age, it’s impressive to find people who can bring the language of faith to even mundane topics like church budget analysis.

But pulling God via “Christian Witness” into a discussion of political matters has its pitfalls (indeed, Presbyterians routinely identify these pitfalls when other churches drag the Almighty into political areas with which PCUSA leaders do not agree). At the very least, telling voting GA delegates that Witness and their spiritual conscience should drive their decisions more than the views of the members these delegates are supposed to represent implies that the spirit works far more strongly within people attending church conclaves than it does for those populating the pews back home.

And so we come to this year’s Assembly where I got to watch speaker after speaker apply this spiritual language to the most appalling, lopsided, uninformed, unfair, chilling and nasty accusations that by now have become part of the PCUSA liturgy. It was not the Deity that caused a resolution dealing with Christian-Jewish relations to be shelved, while one on Muslim-Jewish relations to be accepted. It was raw politics, the same politics that ensured that Israeli’s alleged human rights abuses would be treated with passionate scrutiny, while the human rights abuses in Muslim lands (including abuses against Christians) would be swept under the carpet.

So maybe it was watching bullying power politics pushing nasty, immoral decisions dressed up in the language of holiness that led to my aforementioned feelings of nausea. Yes, I know there were people working behind the scenes to fight this injustice who were also using the language of spirit to conduct their battles. But as these heroes continue their rearguard action to prevent the church’s reputation from sinking still deeper, they seem to be confronting higher and higher concentrations of church members who are either behaving abominably or condoning such behavior through inaction.

Why should any of us even care, I suppose. After all, there are already three times as many Jews in the US as Presbyterians and, if present trends continue, in 2-3 more GAs there will be more Reform Jews in the US than Presbyterians (meaning come 2016 the Presbyterians may have to send representatives to Jewish meetings to lobby against resolutions condemning their church).

As I’ve said before, Israel will survive the slings and arrows thrown against it by the phalanx of ruthless hypocrites who make it their life work to defame the Jewish state. But what of an organization that year by year is creating an internal reality whereby wicked behavior can be presented and celebrated as the ultimate act of goodness?

In all of history, there have been very few Lex Luthors or Magnetos leading organizations with names like The Legion of Doom or the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants. Rather, acts that we see today as the ultimate evils were, at the time, hailed by their practitioners as supreme examples of virtue. Watching this same history unfold before my eyes over the last few weeks is, no doubt, the real reason why a satisfactory outcome from this year’s Presbyterian General Assembly still leaves such an aching feeling deep in my stomach, if not my soul.

PCUSA - Moving in the Right Direction?

Because a number of US political leaders and Israel’s Prime Minister were attending last April’s AIPAC Policy Conference final dinner, security was tight which meant most of us had to wait in line over an hour to get through the metal detectors (an appliance commonly found at pro-Israel political events, although strangely enough, not at anti-Israel ones).

While most people were annoyed by this long wait, it was actually the highlight of my evening, for I got to stand next to and talk to a group of women from Aglow, a women’s Christian organization I had never heard of before. Looking at their Web site after the event, it occurred to me that this organization’s stance on many issues would likely appall Presbyterian leaders (although not necessarily rank and file members). But, as fate would have it, the Aglow member closest to me in the AIPAC mob/queue was a Presbyterian.

When I told her about what was likely to happen at this year’s denominational General Assembly, she just shook her head and informed me that this was all a game being played within the Church whereby PCUSA leaders let activists run amok in committees during the time between GA’s, but that once everyone gets together, over-the-top proposals generally get voted down by rank and file delegates. She also added that the level of nonsense that tends to emanate from GAs on the subject of the Middle East has so soured church members that do not attend or follow PCUSA politics that most churches simply ignore policies voted on at such events.

Sure enough, it looks as though common sense is beginning to peek its head into General Assembly discussions over the last 48 hours. Some of the most egregious portions of the Middle East Study Committee’s Breaking Down the Walls report have been nixed or modified for the better, and attempts to turn the MESC into a perpetual Star Chamber have been nipped in the bud. Demands to divest from Israel or have it declared an Apartheid state won’t be making it to the floor, and the general tone seems to be turning towards curbing the excesses we’ve seen coming out of the committees over the last few months.

I suppose I should be grateful that grownups seem to be ready to take the wheel on PCUSA Middle East policy, and I surely am grateful – tremendously so – to the wise members of the delegate ranks who have managed to keep an open mind despite the propaganda that passes for debate within the church.

That said, regarding the church as a whole I find it a bit strange to be ready to say “thank you” to an organization just because it’s done me the favor of not declaring my people’s national homeland a racist stain on humanity, or PCUSA’s “flexibility” in simply condemning those that do business with Israel, rather than divesting from them.

If you follow the politics of not just the Presbyterians, but Mainline Protestantism generally, you’ll find that the most divisive issues are: (1) ordination of gay clergy; (2) whether to religiously sanction gay marriage; (3) modification of liturgy; and (4) official church stances on political issues – most prominently Israel and the Middle East.

As Will Spotts has pointed out, of all these controversial issues, only votes on Israel tend to involve the church doing harm to people who are not members of the organization. There is legitimate controversy over gay marriage and other matters, but at the end of the day, it is the church itself that has to live with the consequences of decisions made in those areas. But when the church passed its infamous divestment decision in 2004, it was Israel and its friends (many of whom had never heard of the Presbyterian General Assembly before that date) who had to deal with the worldwide propaganda campaign that was built upon that decision.

In 2006, activists pushing the church to maintain its divestment policies claimed that they were a great gift by the church to friends and allies within the Palestinian Christian world that should not be taken away. But as I pointed out then, what kind of gift is it for one group of people (PCUSA) to give another group of people (Palestinian Christians) something that is not there’s to give (Israel’s reputation on a platter)?

I sincerely hope that votes that will take place between now and when the Presbyterian conclave finishes this weekend will continue to go in the right direction. But I more sincerely wish that the organization as whole finally faces up to the fact that they have a problem and stop torturing their own members (not to mention those of us who have not chosen to join their church).

And if church leaders and hardcore anti-Israel activists determine that they must give Sabeel and other allies a gift, could they please make it something they actually own themselves (such as a confession of their own sins, rather than a recitation of someone else’s). Or barring that, there’s always a Whitman Sampler.

PCUSA - Selfless or Selfish?

There is an interesting construct that has taken hold within the Presbyterian Church (and not just there) that allows Israel’s most vocal critics to identify themselves as being above concerns such as nationalism and other forms of particularism which they identify as the source of war and other misery. They are citizens of the world and, in contrast, we supporters of Israel are seen as narrow partisans, acting selfishly out of interest for a particular people or state.

As is often the case, Lee Harris (one of my favorite political philosophers) describes far better than I or anyone else can the irony of this self-identified cosmopolitanism as just another form of particularism. But for purposes of discussing what’s happening at the PCUSA General Assembly this week, I will try to make a couple of particular observations of my own.

To begin with, the type of activities we’ve been seeing taking place within PCUSA committees dealing with Middle East issues are probably best described as motivated by what I would call “vulgar cosmopolitanism,” rather than the more sophisticated cosmopolitanism described in detail by Harris.

Like “vulgar Marxism” which reduces every political discussion to some form of economic determinism (a la Naomi Klein), “vulgar cosmopolitanism” ironically defines global citizenship around level of support for a particular strain of nationalism.

The notion, for example, that a new state – a Palestinian state – is not just urgently needed, but represents the ultimate expression of justice and virtue is unquestioned by members of stacked PCUSA committees dealing with the Middle East. While they may debate whether such a state should live alongside or replace the state of Israel, the idea that there should be a 197th state, a 25th Arab state, a 51st Muslim state in the world goes unquestioned, as does the religious particularism (not to mention human rights abuses) within the Muslim world.

The PCUSA’s own “vulgar cosmopolitanism illusion” makes delegates particularly open to the harshest of partisan voices. For the easiest nationalism one can reject is one’s own. But when confronted by those who guard their own nationalism most jealously and fiercely (including countries who insist that repression of their own people is an internal matter which the “international community” has no business interfering with), the vulgar cosmopolitan is faced with a dilemma: face up to the limitation of their world view, or somehow convince themselves that by acting in the narrow interest of nationalist partisans representing a people not their own, they are, in fact, truly “acting globally.”

This attitude makes an individual or organization vulnerable to the nationalist most willing to ruthlessly exploit the language of internationalism and human rights for narrow, self-serving ends. In the case of PCUSA, this means that a group like the Palestinian Christian Liberation Theology organization Sabeel can pretty much have its way with the organization by threatening to “expose” the Presbyterians as not truly standing up for their cosmopolitan principles if they do not follow the dictates of Sabeel and its fellow partisans.

Thus, more than any time in the past, PCUSA itself has become what could best be described as “occupied territory” with individuals and organizations outside of the church setting the terms of debate within the organization and determining the limits of what can be discussed and what cannot. One need only look at this week’s committee work where concerns over Presbyterian-Muslim relations are allowed to impact not just discussion (or lack thereof) of human rights abuses (including those directed against Christians) within the Islamic world, but can also determine what can officially be said regarding Presbyterian-Jewish relations.

I’ve previously noted the irony of how the supposedly narrow goal of defending the honor of tiny Israel has universal implications while those who use universal ideals like human rights and the rule of law as a smoke screen for their narrow attack on the Jewish state are the ones sacrificing global principle for provincial aims.

To point out one additional irony: I (an alleged partisan who supposedly is concerned about nothing beyond my tribe and it’s homeland) am just as concerned (if not more so) with what the current debate will end up doing to the Presbyterian Church as I am with how this debate might harm Israel.

Yes, the Presbyterians rejoining the anti-Israel bandwagon will be a pain, but we’ve lived with that before between 2004 and 2006 and I have few doubts that any gains the Sabeel crowd makes this year will be reversed in two year’s time.

On the other hand, the Presbyterian Church - once a cornerstone of American civil society - is well along in the process of destroying itself. One can ask if anti-Israel animus is a symptom or the cause of the church losing half its members since 1965, but one cannot deny that this self-immolation is taking place.

While it would be insincere of me to claim a great history of love and support for the Presbyterian Church (although I’ve met many wonderful church members in recent years), this alleged particularist is cosmopolitan enough to understand that we are all worse off when a major element of civil society – through its own actions – either goes away or makes itself irrelevant to their own and everyone else’s lives.

PCUSA - Process vs. Spirit

I was going to write something on the social aspects of Israel bashing within the Presbyterian Church, but Dexter Van Zile beat me to the punch with his insightful comments on the subject which can be read here.

We’re a day away from when matters before the various PCUSA committees get forwarded to the plenary where votes determine whether or not measures become official church policy. As has already been mentioned, the committees have generally been stacked against Israel getting a fair shake, and those advocating condemnation of the Jewish state are calling most of the shots with regard to what information gets communicated to the full assembly. So even more than in previous years those advocating fair treatment for Israel will have to count on the good sense of the everyday Presbyterian delegate.

In thinking through the way decisions are being made in the quasi-democratic structure of the Presbyterian Church, I remembered that the synagogue I recently joined had just passed policies regard when and how the temple could take official stands (i.e., stands that spoke in the name of the synagogue) on controversial political matters.

The steps needed to get this to happen would strike some as cumbersome. First, an issue has to be brought up within a relevant committee, or (if triggered by an individual concerned temple member) would be referred to committee. It must then move up another level (to the VP of a so-called “cluster,” or group of committees) before being forwarded to the temple’s Executive Committee and then (if passed) onto the full board for a final vote, after which it becomes official temple policy.

While not required, consultation with senior clergy is highly recommended throughout the process and the clergy itself, while having more flexibility than members to take public stances on political matters, is also bound to go through proper procedures in order to officially speak for the temple as a whole.

Undergirding this seemingly excessive bureaucracy is the assumption that the temple community contains many diverse voices, particularly on the most controversial matters of the day. And while it’s safe to say that a majority of members probably fall into the political demographic associated with the Boston and Cambridge suburbs, the safeguards put in place by the procedures mentioned above are designed to minimize the chance that a members will wake up one day to discover a political message is being delivered by their temple (i.e., in their name) that they both find abhorrent and never even knew was being discussed.

Now this is not to say that Jews have gotten this system buttoned down correctly. In fact, I know of other temples, as well as secular Jewish organizations, that function much more like PCUSA than my temple in terms erring on the side of openness vs. carefulness. But while the potential harm from a process heavily weighted towards achieving consensus means my temple might someday have trouble weighing in on important matters, the downside of the alternative is now on full display at the Presbyterian GA.

As is being made abundantly clear right this minute in Minneapolis, the fact that many thousands of Presbyterians (including large numbers who will not be voting on church policies) are profoundly uncomfortable (if not openly hostile) to how the church portrays the Middle East conflict or the policies it sets with regard to the politics of the region. Yet this fact does not in any way inform what gets onto the agenda and what doesn’t.

Is the fact that members voted down divestment 95-5 four years ago something that needs to be taken into account when assessing church investment policy, or just a stumbling block that can be overridden if divestment advocates simply continue to push their agenda year after year after year, regardless of the will or interests of other members of the church? Will Presbyterians who do not follow church politics closely be happy or appalled if they discover next Monday that their church has once again become the poster child for divinely inspired political invective targeting one and only one country in the Middle East (the Jewish one)?

If this GA is like the last two I’ve watched via online broadcast, many advocates on both sides of different issues will point out that delegates have a higher calling than simply representing their constituents, a calling to speak (and vote) based on the divine spirit of Christian witness.

There is some appeal to such thinking (especially within a spiritual community) until you realize that – absent direct communication from the almighty – individuals are required to discern what Christian witness means on their own. And while I have no doubt in the quality of soul of people taking part in such decisions, we are all subject to moral weakness, including a susceptibility to being bullied or manipulated into making poor decisions at the behest of aggressive partisans telling us we have no moral choice, other than to do what they say.

It is specifically within an organization where the conscience of legislators is raised above the responsibility to represent constituents that safeguards (like those in place at my temple) are most needed. Alas, for a Presbyterian Church, the only thing standing in the way of going over the precipice one more time is the hope that the majority of delegates gathered in Minneapolis are wise enough to ignore the sirens of partisanship (which includes the very top leaders of the church) and act to restore good faith and sound judgment into church thinking on Israel and the Middle East.

PCUSA vs. J Street

I’ve talked before about the intriguing position J Street, the controversial Jewish lobbying organization that emerged in 2008, has staked out with regard to BDS. And recently the organization has chosen to openly condemn the PCUSA’s controversial Middle East Study Committee Report entitled Breaking Down the Walls.

As noted when I discussed J Street’s similar condemnation of BDS and “Israel Apartheid Week” activity, it’s an open question whether this political position represents an opportunistic attempt to shore up the group’s claim of being “pro-Israel,” or whether documents like Breaking Down the Walls truly revolts the group at a deep and fundamental level.

Just as I lack the ability to look into the souls of those pushing divestment and other anti-Israel measures at this week’s PCUSA General Assembly, I am similarly unable to discern the internal motivations of those who take positions similar to mine (as J Street has done with regard to the Middle East Study Group’s almost laughably one-sided, propaganda assault masquerading as Christian witness and peacemaking).

But even if you look at J Street’s choices cynically, they have managed to stake a claim to what represents legitimate vs. illegitimate left-wing opinion with regard to Jewish attitudes towards Israel. Which means it will be that much harder for those who have tripled down on getting Breaking Down the Walls approved at the General Assembly later this week to claim that they have any support within the Jewish community, behind the most marginal fringe.

PCUSA: And so it begins

Well PCUSA delegates are gathering in Minneapolis to begin their week-long debate on the Middle East, with (I assume) some time left over to discuss the future and fate of the Presbyterian Church in the US.

I don’t know about other writers who have spent time commenting on the upcoming PCUSA debates, but I am fully cognizant of the fact that, whatever we may have been saying about the situation within the church over the last month or two, that the fate of the organization rests solely and entirely with those delegates who have streamed into Minneapolis over the weekend.

Yes, a few hundred, maybe even a few thousand people have read what Will, Dexter, I and others have written on the subject, and some may have also visited our Bearing Witness web site to obtain some background on the relationship between PCUSA and Israel. But how many of these visitors are Presbyterians seeking to educate themselves vs. people who already agree with what we have to say (the usual demographic for a blog)? And even if some searching individuals have found their way to alternative sources of information, how can this compete with groups within the church like the Middle East Study Committee (MESC) which has the full support of the church establishment behind it to communicate its (and only its) views?

To a certain extent, this is as it should be for the debate that will be going on this week is really not about Israel at all but, rather, about the fate of the church itself.

After all, during the divestment debates in 2006 and 2008, delegates made it clear that they wanted to see a more fair, accurate and thoughtful discussion on the Middle East within the church. In fact, the MESC was created specifically for this purpose. But, once again, anti-Israel activists within this church decided that MESC was just the latest loophole to exploit, the latest committee to pack, the latest tool they could use to try to stuff their own opinions into the mouth of the church as a whole.

What is amazing about this year’s process has been that in creating the MESC, a group originally designed to take in and communicate a broader range of perspectives, PCUSA has instead spawned a report that is more biased, more unfair, more grotesquely accusative than anything that’s come before.

It’s almost as if the activists who have dragged the church into this minefield over the last two decades cannot control themselves. When presented with an opportunity to bash the Jewish state in the name of their faith, all their instincts turn to cramming in as many accusations (including more questionable theology than has ever appeared in a PCUSA document on the subject) as possible.

As we enter this week of debates, there are some positive signs within the delegate body itself. The Presbytery of Chicago, for example, has provided a heartfelt plea to reject the MESC report, and Presbyterian organizations such as Presbyterians for Middle East Peace are doing yeoman’s work trying to get another point of view injected into the discussions. And while this or that blog may not get much attention, critiques of Presbyterian actions on the part of theological scholars has raised the heat on the upcoming conference enough for anti-Israel partisans to cry foul (despite the fact that they have done everything possible to hog the microphone for the entire debate).

This is now the third PCUSA General Assembly that I’ve been covering closely and I must say that it seems at times that I am looking more at an addict than a religious institution. No matter how many times members indicate that they are not interested in a church that makes its top priority bashing the Jewish state (especially in religious terms), every two years they are back at it once again, fighting the same fights all over again.

This phenomenon is an offshoot of what I’ve referred to in the past as “The Vampire’s Kiss,” the notion that divestment, like a vampire, once invited into an organization can be virtually impossible to toss out. Having tasted the propaganda power of having their words and accusations come out of the mouth of an established organization like PCUSA, local activists demonstrate a willingness to do anything: corrupt processes and procedures, stack the deck in debate, even drag an organization to the point of ruin, to once again grasp the illusionary power of claiming to speak for more than themselves.

Sadly, if some of the nastier overtures or the MESC report itself becomes official PCUSA policy, once again thousands of Presbyterians will awake after this week to discover that propagandists are blanketing the world with accusations against Israel made in their name.

Naturally, those who have hijacked the church yet again will be too busy spreading their calumnies to notice what they have done to their brethren, especially once condemnation and ridicule start pouring onto the church itself from, among others, Presbyterians who had thought they had seen an end of this type of disgusting behavior.