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Thursday 2 May 2013

Scottish Church questions Jewish right to land of Israel.

The Jewish Chronicle has a comment on the latest lesson in anti-Semitism from the Church of Scotland, after Scottish Friends of Israel brought to the attention of the wider community the Church’s belief that “The Jewish people have to repent of the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians between 1947 and 1949.” See; http://www.thejc.com/news/uk-news/106939/scottish-church-questions-jewish-right-land-israel

Following the SFI post last month, Ephraim Borowski, Scottish Council of Jewish Communities director, said: "The document is an outrage to everything that interfaith dialogue stands for. It is biased, weak on sources, and contradictory, and closes the door on meaningful dialogue.

Board of Deputies vice-president Jonathan Arkush said of the report; “It is littered with misrepresentations of Jewish history, values and beliefs as well as basic factual errors”.
CCJ chief executive Reverend David Gifford reportedly said the report was ill-considered, regressive and insensitive to Jewish anxieties and the range of Israeli public opinion. “The at times unfortunate words and phrases reflect sadly on the authors and smacks of Christian superiority over Judaism.”
Ed Kessler, founder director of the Woolf Institute which studies interfaith relations, reportedly said of the report that “There is a reluctance, even inability, to appreciate that there are two narratives — one Jewish/Israeli and the other Palestinian/Arab”.
Right Reverend Albert Bogle, Moderator of the Church’s General Assembly, is a president of the Council of Christians and Jews and has yet to comment but a Scottish Christian lady recently wrote to the CoS of her concerns not only of the Islamic threat to Christians in the Middle East but of anti-Semitism endemic to parts of the Church. The then response from the Moderator was to evade her basic questions and label her concerns as “deeply offensive” and “islamophobia.” Presumably the Rt Rev Bogle would label the latest concerns of the Jewish communities in the UK equally “offensive” and “misleading”.

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