Israel basher replaces another at head of World Council of Churches

Ecumenical Blast Against Israel, Mark Tolley, FrontPage Magazine

The departing chief of the Geneva-based World Council of Churches (WCC) slammed Israel’s "sin against God" in his August 26 good-bye to the world’s largest ecumenical group.

"Occupation along with the concomitant humiliation of a whole people for over six decades constitutes not just economic and political crimes but, like anti-Semitism, it is a sin against God," declared Kenyan Methodist minister Samuel Kobia, during his farewell to the WCC’s governing central committee.

The WCC was founded after World War II and, in the wake of the Holocaust, robustly denounced anti-Semitism as a "sin against God." Evidently equating the Holocaust on some level with the Israeli presence in the West Bank, Kobia asked his international church audience: "Are we ready to say that occupation is also a sin against God?"

On paper, the WCC is important, with 349 denominations as members, representing over 500 million Christians, or about 25 percent of global Christianity. But in truth, the WCC never fully recovered from its 1970’s alliances with Marxist liberation movements. Catholics and most evangelicals do not belong to the WCC, which friends and foes alike view primarily as the voice of declining Western left-wing Protestantism.

Read the whole piece here
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Now read this :

New Norwegian WCC general secretary supports extreme Palestinian demand
Published: Friday August 28th 2009
From Med Israel for Fred (MIFF)

Olav Fykse Tveit, general secretary in Mellomkirkelig råd (MR), was on Thursday elected general secretary in the World Council of Churches.

"We can be proud over how a Norwegian is granted such an important post in the world’s largest ecumenical organization with more than half a billion members, says Foreign Minister Jonas Gahr Støre in a press release.

Views "right of return" as "fair"

For friends of Israel and the Jewish state there is reason to grieve. Fykse Tveit supports the Palestinian demand of right to move at least five million Palestinians into the state of Israel. He has over several years been a driving force for presenting this as a “just demand” for the church, both domestically and internationally.

Fykse Tveit is yet to find how the right of return is to be solved. “It is not thereby said that it is a solution that the jews leave their homes”, Tveit said to DagenMagazinet, April 28th 2008. "There are different ways in which to accomodate the demand”, he wrote in an op-ed two days later. Is Tveit at all willing to contemplate that Jews must leave their homes? [...]

If Fykse Tveit had been preoccupied with the right of return for all large groups of refugees, his support to the Palestinians would have been more credible. If it additionally had been correspondingly attentive to a complete vindication and reimbursement of the Jewish refugees from the Arab world, it might even had been fair. But when the demand for rights of return are furthered solely for the Palestinians, and an implementation of this would mean the end of the world’s only state with a majority of Jews, one needs to ask oneself what the driving force is. It is in any case extreme."

Read the whole piece here (Norway, Israel and the Jews blog)