US Episcopalians backtrack on divestment

Welcome news from ECUSA: divestment is out, "positive investment" is in (hat tip: CANN).

(Incidentally, I'm enjoying my mental images of the clerical worthies gathering in Las Vegas. I suppose the precedent for supping with publicans and sinners is a pretty good one, but I just hope they didn't blow all the collection money in the fruit machines;-))

I'm disappointed, though, that there's little or no progress to be discerned in the ideological assumptions underlying the decision. The basic problems are understood to be firstly "violence", for which both sides are taken to task, and secondly "the Occupation", which unequivocally puts Israel in the frame and implicitly supplies an excuse for Palestinian violence. Entirely missing is any reference to the third leg of the conflict: intransigent hostility to the existence of Israel which feeds on explicitly anti-Semitic premises and legitimizes the systematic targetting of violence against Jewish civilians.

Melanie Phillips is an ever more essential read on these topics, and I'm not just saying that because of her generous plug for Christian Hate? Here she takes aim at an Ivy League academic whose disinformation campaign against Israel doesn't deserve a pass degree from the fabled University of Neasden. She comments 'I am forever meeting Arabs and Muslims who are otherwise perfectly fine people but whose view of Israel is founded on precisely such terrible distortions. ' I suspect she could have added 'Anglicans' to that sentence.