With Christians being persecuted and threatened across much of the Middle East, guess which country the leaders of several major U.S. Christian denominations have decided to pick on?
That's right, the country where Christians are safest: Israel.
In case you missed it, in a letter dated Oct. 5, leaders of 15 Christian denominations -- including Presbyterians, Baptists, Lutherans and Methodists -- asked members of Congress to reconsider U.S. aid to Israel in light of "widespread Israeli human rights violations."
The signatories say "unconditional U.S. military assistance" to Israel is a factor in "deteriorating conditions in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories" that threaten the "realization of a just peace."
The letter makes no mention of reconsidering U.S. aid to countries such as Egypt, where many Christians fear for their lives and where Coptic Christian families have fled their homes in the Sinai Peninsula after receiving death threats.
As Elliott Abrams writes in National Review Online, the letter is utterly silent on the "deteriorating and truly dangerous conditions for Christians in Egypt, Syria, and Iraq."
Meanwhile, in contrast to the dramatic dwindling of the Christian population in the Arab world, in Israel the number of Christians has grown from 34,000 in 1948 to 155,000 today.
The initiative reeks of hypocrisy: Although they purport to care for Palestinian rights, the Christian leaders ignore the misery of Palestinian refugees being oppressed in countries such as Lebanon and Jordan.
Although they attack the "restrictions on movement" in the West Bank, they fail to mention, as Abrams notes, "the many ways in which the Netanyahu government in recent years has loosened those restrictions ... [or] the recent steps by the government of Israel to assist the Palestinian Authority as it faces a financial crisis."
And, of course, the signatories ignore all context. They say nothing of Israel's many attempts over the years to make peace with the Palestinians and end the occupation, or of the teaching of Jew-hatred and incitement in Palestinian society, or of Israel's evacuation of Gaza seven years ago that was rewarded with thousands of terror rockets still raining down today on Israeli civilians.
Even if you count yourself as an unabashed critic of Israel and its policies toward the Palestinians, it's hard not to see this single-minded invective against the Jewish state as unfair and hypocritical.
Ironically (or stupidly), the letter was sent a few weeks before a scheduled interfaith conference that included many of the signatories, prompting the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) to pull out...
