The Reformed Pastor

O most holy Millenium Development Goals, Offspring of the most glorious United Nations, we lift this cup to you in praise and thanksgiving. You have delivered us from irrelevance, and given us meaning and purpose in life. You have given us targets through which we may, if it be the will of your Parent, save the world. We thank you that through your mighty media hand you have smited our enemies, the vile conservatives who have doubted your holiness and righteousness, and who because of their unbelief in your Parent have been mean to us. O most blessed Lord MDGs, lead us into all truth, and preserve us from any hint of political incorrectness, that we may forever and always be your loyal servants, at least until 2015 when you will be re-evaluated by your marvelous multinational Parent. Accept this offering, by the power of your Holy International Bureaucracy, for the UN’s sake. Amen.

–From the Liturgy for the Eight Commandments

(Picture via StandFirm. Liturgy excerpted from the Prayer Book of the United Church of the Zeitgeist.)

Sometimes there just a harmonic convergence in what you come across. This morning I read a piece from Jeff Walton of the Institute on Religion and Democracy about the Sabeel conference in Boston weekend before last. It was specifically about the divestment effort aimed at Israel by Sabeel and its allies. What caught my eye was this:

Underlying the discussion was an assumed equivalence between democratic Israel today and the white-ruled South Africa of the 1980s. “We need to use the tools used to dismantle apartheid in South Africa,” said Palestinian-American legal activist Noura Erekat. Erekat argued that a three-stage process employed against South Africa—first divestment, then boycotts, and finally sanctions—was needed to “take on Israel’s character as an ethnocratic state motivated by demographic ambitions.” (Emphasis mine.)

Well, soon after reading that, I saw this at Little Green Footballs:

New research shows there was Arab inter-state “collusion” to persecute Jews in Arab countries after Israel’s creation, former federal justice minister Irwin Cotler [of Canada] and Jewish rights scholars will announce today in New York.

While it is known up to 850,000 Jews left Arab countries after the post-war division of the Palestine mandate, the group is holding a news conference to highlight a rediscovered Arab League “draft law” that suggests a pan-Arab conspiracy was at play.

The new assessment comes just ahead of a major Israeli-Palestinian peace conference in Annapolis, Md., where the rights of millions of descendants of up to 600,000 Palestinian refugees of the Arab-Israeli conflict will be discussed — but not the rights of Jews squeezed from Arab countries.

Without the inter-Arab draft, the measures individual Arab states took against their Jewish citizens may not have been so widespread, the researchers will say. Only 8,000 Jews remain in 10 Arab countries today that once hosted many more.

“We will show that the various state sanctions in Arab countries did not occur haphazardly, but were the result of an international collusion organized by the League of Arab States at the time to set in place a blueprint for the denationalization of their Jewish nationals, the sequestrations of their property and the declaration of Jews as enemies of the state,” Mr. Cotler said. (From the National Post of Canada.)

What the Arab states did doesn’t excuse any Israeli misconduct, of course. But it would be nice if Sabeel and its friends in the American mainline churches would acknowledge, just once, that hundreds of thousands of Jews, with centuries-old roots across the Middle East, were dispossessed and expelled by countries that now demand, along with Sabeel, the demographic destruction of the one state in the Middle East that would have them.