Methodist group urges divestment from Israel

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Methodist group urges divestment from Israel
Accuses Caterpillar of helping to destroy Palestinian property

The United Methodist Church's official lobby office is urging church agencies and members to divest their holdings in Caterpillar Inc. because the company sells bulldozers to Israel.

United Methodist General Board of Church and Society sponsored the resolution, accusing Caterpillar of facilitating Israel's destruction of Palestinian property.

Caterpillar, along with Israel, was the target of a lawsuit by the family of Rachel Corrie after the activist was crushed by a bulldozer in 2003 while attempting to block the destruction of a Palestinian home used to facilitate arms smuggling.

The resolution will go before the United Methodist General Conference in April 2008.

The 7.9 million member church's pension agency reportedly has $5 million in Caterpillar stock out of $15 billion in assets.

Other mainline churches, including the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) and the Church of England, recently have rejected similar measures.

However, WND reported earlier when the Presbyterian Church hosted a three-day meeting to justify to denomination leaders its decision to divest from Israel, presenting what one church elder described as a panel of "full-time, paid, anti-Israel propagandists."

The denomination's General Assembly had voted 431-62 to divest from the Jewish state. At the time, the PCUSA was believed to be the largest organization or institution to join the divestment campaign against the Jewish state. It was the first Christian denomination to do so, but later decisions reversed that.

As WND reported in June, the United Church of Christ's General Synod adopted a resolution "in support of a renewed and balanced study and response to the conflict between Palestine and Israel."

Previously, the United Church of Christ had approved resolutions calling for the tearing down of walls constructed by Israel to protect itself from terrorist attacks coming from the Palestinian Authority territories and for divestment from the Jewish state.

Mark Tooley of the IRD, said the Methodist Church is out of step.

"How bizarre that the United Methodist Board of Church and Society now is jumping aboard a long-stalled bandwagon by endorsing anti-Israel divestment against Caterpillar, when other churches are moving in the opposite direction," he said. "And does anyone really think that punishing Caterpillar will help create a peace in the Middle East?"

Tooley urged the Methodist board to examine a 2006 resolution approved by the church's Pacific Northwest Conference noting "some church groups have selectively advocated divestment of firms doing business with Israel while ignoring severe human rights abuses by the governments of Israel's neighbors."

The Northwest resolution affirmed the Jewish state as "nearly the only long-standing democracy among its neighbors in the Middle East" and declared that "selective attention to Israel's mistakes will not create peace in the Middle East."

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The Most Selective Outrage

From the FrontPageMagazine

In the mythology of the anti-Israel and anti-American Religious Left, Caterpillar Tractor is the chief corporate war criminal under girding Israeli imperialism. Gladly imbibing this myth, the United Methodist Church’s lobby office has just voted to advocate dissolution of church investments in Caterpillar.

It is not the first church group to target the ostensibly villainous Caterpillar.

Last year, the Church of England briefly flirted with divesting from Peoria-based Caterpillar to protest its sale of bulldozers, subsidized by the U.S., to Israel. According to the justifying lore, Israel mindlessly bulldozes Palestinian homes and property to clear the way for Israeli settlements. The English church’s anti-Israel action prompted an enormous uproar. A church committee quickly concluded the Caterpillar was not guilty of all the crimes alleged against it, and the divestment idea was dropped.

And also last year, the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) similarly rescinded its more longstanding and broader divestment policy aimed against Israel, acceding to arguments that divestment did not necessarily equal Middle East peace after all.

But the Religious Left will not let go of Caterpillar so easily.

At its September directors meeting, the Capitol Hill based-United Methodist General Board of Church and Society unanimously approved a call for divestment against Caterpillar. This agency is the largest Religious Left lobby in Washington, D.C., with an annual budget of $5 million and two dozen staffers, all of them advocating left-wing causes in the ostensible name of 7.9 million U.S. United Methodists.

Reportedly, the United Methodist pension agency owns 75,000 shares of Caterpillar stock valued at about $6 million out of its $15 billion in assets. According to the lobby group’s resolution: “Bulldozers and other heavy equipment manufactured and sold by Caterpillar, Inc. as well as equipment supplied by others to the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) are still used for the illegal destruction of Palestinian homes, orchards and olive groves in the Occupied Territories, and to clear Palestinian land for illegal Israeli settlements, segregated roads and the Separation Barrier.”

Lamenting that the sinister Caterpillar has continued “its role in the occupation” despite the furtive efforts of responsible investors to “change its policies,” the Methodist lobby office resolution called upon “all Christians of good conscience to join us in applying every peaceful form of economic political and social pressure at their disposal, including but not limited to divestment, product avoidance or boycott, moral suasion and shareholder action, to persuade Caterpillar to cease and desist such sales.”

The lobby office is asking The United Methodist Church, at its Spring 2008 General Conference to “divest of all equity and debt holdings of Caterpillar” by January 1, 2009. Individual Methodists are also to be asked to divest themselves of any ties to the dreaded Caterpillar.

An original draft of the lobby office’s resolution had specifically affirmed Israel’s right to exist “within permanent, recognized and secure borders.” Obviously not wanting to appear in the least bit sympathetic to Israel, the final resolution instead equitably advocated secure borders equally for both Israel and “Palestine.” The statement also accurately quoted The United Methodist Church’s official stance, ratified at its 2004 General Conference, opposing Israel’s “military occupation,” the “confiscation of Palestinian land and water resources, the destruction of Palestinian homes, the continued building of illegal Jewish settlements,” etc.

Needless to note, United Methodist statements do not acknowledge that Israel has, with Caterpillar bulldozers, destroyed Israeli settlements when ceding lands in Gaza and the West Bank to Palestinians, in not very successful ploys for peaceful accommodation. There is also no inclusion in the church statements about Israel’s destruction of Palestinian dwellings when they have been used as cover for underground arms shipping tunnels, or have been the homes of suicide bombers.

With crocodile tears, the United Methodist lobby resolution insisted: “We have a special concern for our fellow Christians living in the Holy Land of Christ’s birth,” where “severe hardship and economic deprivation mark daily life under the Israeli occupation. The lobby office’s deep interest in the plight of Christians in the Middle East is naturally confined only to those perceived to be suffering thanks to Israel. Christians suffering under Muslim Palestinian overlords, not to mention the various Islamist tyrannies and theocracies that surround Israel, naturally do not visibly perturb the United Methodist social justice advocates.

Mythology rather than reality governs the United Methodist lobby office. For the Religious Left, the United States and Israel are innately oppressor nations, each of them culturally guided by insidious forms of imperialistic Christianity and Judaism. Caterpillar, based in America’s heartland, is the perfect capitalist tool of Christian America’s avaricious and imperial relationship with the Jewish nation. This juicily irresistible myth provides an appealing paradigm for the Religious Left, which has been hankering for a good international boycott ever since the fall of apartheid South Africa.

Probably the United Methodist Church’s General Conference, meeting in April 2007, will reject the lobby office’s appeal for divesting from Caterpillar. The Religious Left will then develop new mythologies and targets in its endless campaign to portray Israel and the U.S. and the world’s main oppressor states.

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The Caterpillar campaign was started by the Palestinian Authority, which is signatory to the Arab League boycott of Israel. If some people, therefore, think that the divest-from-Israel campaign is not related to the Arab boycott of Israel, they only have to look at the Caterpillar boycott effort to realize it is.

Caterpillar has rejected calls to boycott Israel because they realized, among other things, that refusing to sell products to Israel based on information supplied in support of the Arab boycott of Israel would be a direct violation of US Import Export regulations. As such, Caterpillar, just like other businesses and municipalities such as the city of Somerville, Massachusetts, has rejected efforts to engage in the divest-from-Israel campaign. The divest-from-Israel campaign is illegal, and Divestment Watch has outlined the illegalities in complaints to the US Office of Antiboycott Compliance of the US Department of Commerce.

Some background on this action:


Background: US Anti-Boycott Law and the Divest-from-Israel campaign
 
The Arab boycott of Jewish interests started as early as 1921 - 27 years before the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948. The boycott is still in effect today under the auspices of the Arab League and its Central Boycott Office in Damascus, Syria, and includes not only products produced in Israel, but also companies that do business in or with Israel. The boycott even goes as far as blacklisting ships that have docked in Israeli ports, regardless of the cargo's point of origin or ultimate destination.

In response to the Arab boycott of Israel, Congress passed a law creating the Office of Antiboycott Compliance within the Department of Commerce in 1977. The law prohibits U.S. persons from taking certain actions in support of an unsanctioned foreign boycott against a country that is friendly to the United States. Because Israel is an ally of the United States, and our government does not sanction the Arab boycott of Israel, the law prohibits actions that further or support the Arab League boycott of Israel.

Since the year 2000, a divest-from-Israel campaign has been gaining momentum on college campuses across the United States. Boycott Watch (www.boycottwatch.org), an organization that examines boycotts and reports both sides of the story so consumers can decide for themselves what the truth is and also the parent organization of Divestment Watch, researched the anti-boycott laws and concluded that the law does indeed apply to the divest-from-Israel campaign and has challenged the campaign on its merit.

In November 2003, Boycott Watch sent a letter to the Office of Antiboycott Compliance, furnishing evidence that the divest-from-Israel campaign is a direct function of the Palestinian Authority, which is a member of the Arab League and a signatory to the Arab boycott of Israel. Later, Boycott Watch furnished additional information to the Office of Antiboycott Compliance, about the Palestinian Authority's effort to establish an economic blockade of Israel in Malaysia. This would effectively expand the scope of the boycott and the Palestinian Authority's economic warfare against Israel.

Boycott Watch reports on consumer boycotts and violations of US law pertaining to boycotts, including illegal union and foreign boycotts. As a result of the demand for information with its leading role in the legal challenge to the divest-from-Israel campaign, Boycott Watch created Divestment Watch to concentrate on the divestment issue. Boycott Watch is now advising all colleges and universities that divest-from-Israel campaigns on their campuses may be in violation of the U.S. antiboycott law.

Divestment is a form of boycott - It is the boycott of investment dollars. Divestment Watch is actively reporting on the illegal divestment/boycott campaign including campus programs that promote the illegal activity, lobbying for governmental participation in the illegal boycott, as well as business participation.

By understanding case histories and the applicable laws, individuals become empowered to warn potential participants of the illegal nature of the boycott as well as the tools to prevent such activity.

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In addition to being illegal, Christians should know better than to go up against Israel. God's hand is indeed on these peoples and His promise in regards to those that go against Israel will happen.