Bishop: 'Israel is a terrorist state'
The background: Someone calling himself a Pakistani Presbyterian pastor--whose name is given merely as "Reverend Boiz" and has no further reliable identification--called for the church to recognize Israel. Today the bishop refused, and even went so far as to call Israel "a terrorist state." Then he said:
I wish to make it clear that my statement is based on principles and I am not trying to please the Muslim majority of Pakistan. What we see every day is enough to condemn this demand.Well, you could have fooled me. I don't know what The Right Reverend T. Nasir "sees every day," but I fail to see anything that would make Israel morally equivalent to Taliban Afghanistan, for example. I have heard that Israel recruited a spy in the United States--which spy is still cooling his heels in an American prison, and whose case is still an occasional sore point in our own relations with Israel. I have heard that an Israeli bulldozer operator ran over a protester who had the bad sense to stand in front of the bulldozer and then fall out of view. But nowhere have I heard that Israel, or any of its agencies:
- Arrested Christian missionaries, held them without a proper trial in conditions that fostered a gastrointestinal parasite infestation, and then threatened to kill them and would have done so were it not for American military intervention, or
- hosted a gang of irregulars who then flew airliners into American commercial and government buildings.
And as far as I'm concerned, Bishop Nasir is "trying to please the Muslim majority of Pakistan." That he would have to deny this specifically speaks volumes about his attitude. To paraphrase Shakespeare, "the gentleman doth protest too much, methinks."
Nasir goes on:
We have seen more than enough blood and deaths of unfortunate and forgotten Palestinians at the hands of Ariel Sharon, and as such we do not support this demand. We will go to visit the holy places only after the Palestinians get their right to establish their own homeland and start living in peace. Nothing less will be accepted by us.Then the Bishop will wait until hell freezes over, mostly because the Palestinians are not a peaceful people. If they get their own state, it will be more of a terrorist base than it already is.
The prophet Zechariah predicted all this folderol. He said that Jerusalem would be the stumbling-block (Greek skandalon, whence "scandal") of the nations. How true this is turning out to be.
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