What Happened at the Berkeley Sabeel Conference

The Presbyterian Church's Synod this year rescinded a resolution to divest from Israel that had run for two years after a small band of radicals managed to get control of the Synod's board and pushed through the divestment scheme. Even though the last Synod meeting voted to end the divestment by the Church, those from the pro-divestment clique on the board were still trying to tell people that it had not been
revoked when it had. The Church's leadership was doubly outraged when they learned this clique had spent $4 million dollars of the Church's money on anti-Israel literature.

Attacking Israel through the US Church system has become part of the modus operandi of the Internatioanl Soldiarity Movement. The colleges proved to be a good workable plan to try and get American youth to hate Israel, a pluralistic democracy, and support a Palestinian state in its place. Of course, the Palestinian state will be just another Arab-Muslim dictatorship, a government with a lifestyle that will be anathema to these same youths if they only understood the implications. Now, the Churches are next.

The ISM tactic of trying to equate Israel with apartheid South Africa is just a scam on the American psyche and is part of this scam. When Arabs run around screaming they want to kill Jews for Allah, the American public is turned off. Hence, the tactic, encouraged by American communists and anarchists, allied with the Arabs and Muslims, of trying to appeal to an American audience, and primarily a young naive one at that, is to elicit false sympathy by claiming the Palestinians are suffering worse than the blacks did in South Africa. This appeals to some well-meaning people who do not understand the revolutionary "code speak" used by the ISM (terrorism=legitimate resistance, security fence=apartheid wall)who might think they are supporting a humanist campaign. They are in fact, supporting a totalitarian campaign of anti-Semitism.

The rest of this church-oriented movement is driven by replacement theology, the notion that the Christian church is replacing the Jews in the Holy Land contrary to what the Bible says. Arab Christian leaders try to claim Jesus was not a Jew but a Palestinian (Arafat did so too). The foundation for this thinking is grounded in anti-Semitism pure and simple.

Not all of the Presbyterian Church was willing to abandon this anti-Israel platform or give up on divestment. St. John the Worker's Church in Berkeley has become a regular meeting place for the ISM and its comunist and anarchist acolytes to rail against Israel's existence in a subtle way: they can claim they are seeking a nonviolent end to the conflict between the Palestinians and Israelis because that sells to mainstream audiences; but they are, in fact, making war on the Jews instead
by advocating starving them financially to weaken the Jewish state and allow its takeover in phases. Sabeel is organized as an arm of the ISM in particular for this purpose. Little known in Jerusalem or Israel proper, Sabeel, led by Palestinian Christian reverend Naim Ateek, promotes anti-Israel activity and trying to get American churches to oppose Israel as an oppressor, a violator of human rights.

It should be noted that the PFLP, the second largest group in the umbrella of the PLO is made up of Christian communist Arabs who are more interested in Arab nationalism than Islamic dominion over the world. The PFLP is a Marxist group so has held appeal and alliance with European and American communists also.

It is within this framework that the Sabeel conference was held in Berkeley last weekend. About 200 people showed up for the event, the majority it seemd over 70 years of age. The theme was nonviolence but was again code speak; this was jsut a more subtle form of violence, the violence of the Big Lie and demonizing
the Jew once again.

Huwaida Arraf, a co-founder of the ISM, was present as a keynote speaker. Ms. Arraf had admitted the ISM cooperates with Hamas, Islamic Jihad and the PFLP and has characterized any nonviolence in the Palestinian struggle as being only to serve the purposes of the violent jihad and revolution against Israelis. Her presence alone should have been telling enough about the event.

I'll go into some of the other speakers at the event a little later, but three speakers especially stand out: Craig and Cindi Corrie and Anna Baltzer.

The Corries are the parents of Rachel Corrie, the girl killed by the Israeli D-9 bulldozer in Rafah on the Gaza-Egypt border. The ISM has taken her death and tried
to present this girl as a peace activist brutally murdered by the IDF. She was, in fact, a self-avowed anarchist from Evergreen College in Washington State where she also was a friend to ISM activist Joseph Smith who later changed his name to Joseph Carr. Carr stated about Rachel that "her death was more than worth the price of the revolution." In other words, her dying for the anarchists in the ISM had immeasurable value. Carr faked photos through windowhop of Rachel's demise and even got Reuters to run them, then later retract them.

First, let me emphasize I sympathize with the Corrie's loss. Losing a child must be horrible. But in this case their child worked to kill other children in Israel, not make peace. I have the IDF army video footage of when she was killed and she was not protecting a house. She was in a trench. That footage will be posted soon with an explanation. Rachel sent an email home to her mom two weeks before she died in whcih she explained how she had helped bring the dead body of a terrorist out of a weapons smuggling tunnel.The fact that she was in such a tunnel at all suggests she was working with the Palestinians who smuggle weapons through these tunnels. Joseph Carr, on radio, claimed he was running alongside the D-9 telling the driver to stop when Rachel was killed, yet he is nowhere visible on the video.

I asked one of the organziers of the Conference if I could interview Craig and Rachel Corrie about this. They declined allegedly saying that I had written "hurtful things" about them in the past.

I merely told the truth about them and here I go again: There is somethinig repulsive about the Corries as parents. Instead of telling other parents not to let their college-aged and young adult children to go off and be fodder for terrorists like Rachel was, they embraced the ISM that she died because of. Was it for money from the PLO? Was it to find justification or meaning in her death? We'll never know.

But the Corries epitomize the idea of the "useful idiot" if they indeed believe all the information about their anarchist daughter. Cindy Corrie told the auidience how Rachel told her she was a human shield for Palestinian waterworkers "digging wells."
Supposedly the IDF was shooting at these civil employees for no reason at all and the ISM had to stand in front of them to protect them. Gaza gets its water from Israel. Had these diggers been "municipal water wrokers" their activities would have been coordinated with the Ministry of the Interior. The IDF would not shoot at them unless they were fired upon.

What else does one dig into the ground besides "water wells"? One digs tunnels. And why does one dig tunnels in Gaza? To smuggle weapons and rockets to kill Jews and other Israelis. Rachel already admitted going into such tunnels to help terrorists.
Thoes "muncipal water workers" were, in fact, Palestinian terrorists digging tunnels to smuggle more weapons. These are the facts.

I'm not surprised the Corries did not want to be interviewed. It might have upset the sinecure they now have resulting from the death of their own child. If I sound harsh, it's for good reason. Children in Sderot have been killed by weapons smuggled through those tunnels and the Corries, who should have insisted their daughter playing revolution come home, only encouraged her and now they are encouraging the children of others, in a church no less. Shame on them...

I'll discuss Anna Baltzer's representation tomorrow. It will say a lot about the ISM and how it operates...