RUTHFULLY YOURS

On June 12, three Israeli teenagers — Naftali Frankel and Gilad Shaer (both age 16) and Eyal Yifrah (19) — were kidnapped near the town of Gush Etzion, an Israeli settlement in the West Bank. They were taken, apparently by Hamas terrorists, while hitchhiking to their homes. Frankel holds dual U.S.-Israeli citizenship.

Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu has blamed the kidnappings on the terrorist network Hamas, which has a long track record of kidnapping Israelis. Hamas’s raison d’être, explained in its charter, calls for the destruction of Israel by violent jihad. In the crackdown on Hamas that Netanyahu ordered, almost 300 Hamas suspects have been arrested, including some of its senior leaders.

Called “Operation Brothers’ Keeper,” the Israeli sweep against Hamas appears to be more than a brief exercise. The Israelis are employing drones, anti-terrorist raids and putting pressure on known Hamas operatives and officials to reveal where the boys are. They have reportedly searched over 1,000 homes and other buildings. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, who only a few weeks ago presided over the “reconciliation” between his Fatah party and Hamas said, “Those who kidnapped the three teenagers want to destroy us. We will hold them accountable.” But his Hamas partners-in-government don’t take Abbas seriously.

According to senior Hamas official Salah Bardawil, Hamas is ready to ignite a third “intifada,” i.e., a terrorism campaign against Israel, if it continues its “occupation” and searches of the West Bank area don’t end quickly. Two Palestinians were killed resisting Israeli searchers. And, in no coincidence, an Israeli teenager was killed in a cross-border attack from Syria into the Golan Heights.

The Hamas/Fatah reconciliation is not enough for some Americans to look askance at the Palestinians’ agenda and their terrorist activities. Just this weekend the Presbyterian church of the United States adopted by a narrow vote a measure requiring the church’s $21 million dollars in stocks of three American companies — Caterpillar, Hewlett Packard, and Motorola Solutions — to be divested because those companies supply products and technology that abets Israeli actions in Palestinian territories.

Although the Presbyterians’ decision included a last-minute effort to refuse alignment with the global BDS Movement, the decision speaks for itself. The BDS Movement, an ideological attack on Israel, is intended to make it a pariah among nations equivalent to North Korea. BDS Movement activists had lobbied heavily in favor of the decision because one of the primary goals of the BDS Movement is to have companies, governments, and academic institutions boycott Israel.

The BDS Movement said of the Presbyterians’ decision:

The Palestinian BDS National Committee, the largest coalition in Palestinian civil society that is leading the global Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, warmly welcomes the brave decision of the Presbyterian Church (USA) general assembly in Detroit to divest its holdings from three US corporations — Hewlett Packard (HP), Motorola Solutions and Caterpillar — on the basis of their well-documented record of complicity in the oppression and denial of human rights of Palestinians.

The Presbyterian leaders were too timid to embrace the BDS Movement outright, so they decide to pick and choose their action just like Democrats who claim allegiance to their president and party but say things such as “I love Obama but I don’t like Obamacare.”

As Herb London and I explain and document in our new book, The BDS War Against Israel, the BDS Movement, which the Presbyterian Church has now made partially an ally, aims to destroy Israel. Its agenda supports boycotts, divestment, and the idea of international sanctions against Israel because the Palestinians have failed to destroy the Jewish state through war and terrorism. It’s a new strategy in a very old war.

The BDS Movement has chosen a platform of lies to foster its goals. It follows Mao’s dictum that a lie repeated a hundred times becomes the truth. Do the Presbyterian elders believe that Israel is a racist, apartheid state? Those are among the lies disproven in our book.

Rev. Jeffrey DeYoe is a member of the steering committee of the Presbyterian Church’s “Israel/Palestine Mission Network.” He said, “There are leaders in Jewish organizations in America who are attempting to paint this as Presbyterians against the Jews — that’s not true.”

Rev. DeYoe should reconsider those words.

Among the BDS Movement’s lies is the allegation that Jewish religious law sanctions massacres and genocide, even of children. In Tsarist Russia the forged hoax, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, alleged a blood libel that Jews secretly drank the blood of gentiles. Omar Barghouti, the chief spokesman of the BDS movement, writes in his book Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions: The Global Struggle for Palestinian Rights that:

It is crucial to note that fundamentalist interpretation of the Halacha, or Jewish law, openly justify massacres, even genocide (as in mass murder of “non-Jewish” civilians, including children) in what is termed a “war of revenge” or “necessary war.” A war of necessity in fundamentalist teachings would be waged against the entire “enemy” population without sparing anyone. The only limit is on committing any act that might lead to more injury of the Jewish community in retribution. So if a massacre of, say, ten thousand Gentiles would cause damage to Israel that outweighed the “benefits,” it should be avoided. This is the sole consideration that is allowed in such fanatical religious teachings, which have become dominant among the religious Zionist community in Israel and beyond and have seeped into the thinking of the general Israeli public in many ways.

As our book proves conclusively, this is an horrific lie equal to the “blood libel” of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

The Presbyterian Church has about 1.8 million members in 10,000 churches throughout the United States. When the liberals who dominate the church decided to support the Palestinians’ BDS Movement, they did so to protest the supposed oppression of the Palestinians by Israel, which is a figment of the BDS Movement’s political imagination.

The Presbyterian Church is certainly nothing like Hamas, but it treads closely upon embracing other supporters of the BDS Movement such as CAIR — an instrumentality of the Muslim Brotherhood — which tries to pass itself off as a civil rights group. CAIR, we should remember, shut down a showing of Honor Killings, a movie about the Islamic practices of “honor” killings of young women, genital mutilation and other such horrors. They claimed the movie was “Islamophobic.”

Well-meaning American liberals such as the Presbyterian Church leaders have a habit of ignoring facts inconvenient to their politics. But as my sainted law partner, Billy Butterfield, used to say, the facts are what they are and we’re all stuck with them. I hope that Presbyterians across the nation read our book, and learn what the facts really are. If they do, they cannot but demand that their church’s leaders recant their declaration of boycott against companies doing business with Israel in the West Bank.