Unholy Money, Unholy Lies: Swedish Diakonia and the UK Methodists

Source: Sweden, Israel and the Jews 

As we reported last year, in 2010 the Swedish government was funneling 800 million SEK ($111.5 mil USD) to organizations like Diakonia, a church NGO which also sponsors anti-Israel activism. Some of the funds also find their way via Diakonia and other organizations (such as SIDA) to terror-linked organizations in Gaza and the West Bank, or may be squandered through corruption and mismanagement.  As we noted regarding the Israel delegitimization efforts of these NGOs:

“In Sweden, these campaigns are a large part the contribution of aid to the Palestinians. This political lobbying is clearly not meant to get the Palestinians to the negotiation table, recognizing the Jewish state or stopping terrorism. It is solely about making Israel into a pariah state.  The top agenda items for these government-funded campaigns are: questioning Israel’s right to exist, forcing territorial concessions, and putting all the blame of the conflict on Israel.”

It must be pointed out that although Sweden is large part of this campaign as a major international donor, it is not alone. There is a linkage with other countries through Christian Aid and its activist recruiting partner Ecumenical Accompaniment Program in Palestine and Israel (EAPPI). These international organizations work to delegitimize Israel through fund-raising and propaganda. In the UK most churches (with the notable exception of pro-Israel evangelical Christians) support Christian Aid and its agenda.

The Simon Wiesenthal Center, whose representative recently visited Malmö in an attempt to promote tolerance, published a blog post which takes the UK Methodists—probably the most radical of major UK churches—to task for an article published on the official Methodist website by a church official.  The main point of the article, which purports to give Jewish and Muslim perspectives on Israel and Palestine, is that Jews use Holocaust education to justify Israel’s existence. It also complains that non-European Jewish students are being indoctrinated about an event which had nothing to do with them.
 

Of course, this was total lie. Iraqi Hitler youth and their cohorts in Baghdad committed the Farhud pogrom in 1941. The iconic Palestinian leader Haj Amin al-Husseini met with Hitler and visited Germany; he agreed to help Hitler on the condition that he would wipe out the Jews of Mandatory Palestine. These “details” and the fact that Jews in North Africa were oppressed and also killed under the Vichy regime are of no interest to the UK Methodist Church.  The church is now claiming that the article was not an “official publication”. The church rank-and file also complained about the extreme anti-Israel attitudes of church elites.

But there is a lesson here: the article link was disabled shortly after the SWC article appeared and began to spread in the blogosphere. Pressure, when correctly applied has results. Will the Methodist Conference this June be as rabidly anti-Israel as last year’s? We don’t know, but now we hope they will think twice before spreading reckless lies and smears against Israel and the Jews.

National Socialism and Anti-Semitism in the Arab World, Matthias Küntzel, JCPA

Maryland historian links roots of radical Islam with Nazi propaganda 

Elimination of the Jewish National Home in Palestine: The Einsatzkommando of the Panzer Army Africa, 1942, Klaus-Michael Mallmann and Martin Cüppers, Yad Vashem

Jeffrey Herf: The Jewish Enemy: Nazi Propaganda during World War II and the Holocaust, review by Karl Pfeifer, Engage

The Mufti and the Holocaust, John Rosenthal on Der Mufti von Jerusalem und die Nationalsozialisten by Klaus Gensicke, Policy Review (The Hoover Institution)

Middle East Anti-Semitism, by Dr Denis MacEoin, A Liberal Defence of Israel blog

Abdel Aziz Rantisi: "the question is not what the Germans did to the Jews, but what the Jews did to the Germans"

Book: Hitler's Jihadis : Muslim Volunteers of the SS, by Jonathan Trigg