Lovely.
In case your invitation was lost in the mail, here it
is:
An invitation to an international dialogue
between religious leaders and political figures:
“Has not one God created us?”
The significance of religious contributions to
peace
It is an honor to invite you to participate with religious,
cultural, and political leaders in a conversation about the role of
religions in tackling global challenges and building peaceful
societies at an Iftar — a dinner to break the Ramadan
fast.
In the presence of His Excellency Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the
President of the Islamic Republic of Iran
In the interest of space, I’ll shorten the rest. The inviters are
listed as His Excellency Miguel D’Escoto Brockmann, President of
the General Assembly of the United Nations (the foreign minister of
Nicaragua); His Excellency the Rev. Kjell Bondevik, former Prime
Minister of Norway and President of the Oslo Center for Peace and
Human Rights; and “distinguished religious leaders.”
I hate formality, don’t you? Let’s just re-do the invite in
good, old fashioned American style.
Hey gang! Hitler’s coming to town and we’re throwing him a
party! Want to come?
Let’s start the focus here with some of the American “religious
leaders” involved in this dark little soiree “in the presence of”
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Their organizations are listed as follows:
American Friends Service Committee, Mennonite Central Committee,
Quaker United Nations Office, Religions for Peace and the World
Council of Churches.
Of those (and the Mennonite Central Committee deserves special
mention as a leader in the blame-Israel-first crowd), two groups —
Religions for Peace and the World Council of Churches — involve my
own denomination, the United Church of Christ. You may have heard
of the UCC in this space before. It is the home denomination for
Senator Barack Obama’s now ex-church, Trinity UCC in Chicago. For
that matter, while Obama has since left Trinity because of his
famous dust-up with Trinity’s retired pastor the Rev. Jeremiah
Wright, he has given no indication that he has decided to leave the
larger UCC denomination. He remains still, until he decides
otherwise, a UCC member. Obama has said clearly he will make no
decision on his future UCC membership until after the election,
sending a clear message that the UCC’s political antics are simply
too much baggage for him to worry about during the campaign. And
doubtless hopes that no one notices the remaining connection. This
is, apparently, the religious version of voting “present” in the
Illinois State Senate, for the Senator has said not a critical word
of his denomination’s relationship to the Ahmadinejad dinner.
Presumably he sees nothing wrong with the dinner just as he saw
nothing wrong with his primary pledge to meet with the Iranian
leader were he, Obama, to win the White House.
But whether Obama is afraid to step up to the plate with his own
denomination or not, someone from the United Church of Christ needs
to be directing questions at the UCC’s leadership over the church’s
role in this disgraceful event. Specifically, UCC president the
Reverend John Thomas should be responding to the fact he has
allowed the name of one of America’s oldest and most treasured
Protestant faiths — the faith of the Pilgrims and Jonathan Edwards
and the abolitionists — to be even remotely associated with the
groups staging this dinner.
Let’s be crystal clear. The inability or outright refusal to
denounce this gathering and publicly separate the UCC from both the
event itself and its organizers is a failure of leadership from the
UCC on one of the most important moral issues of our day.
Most troubling, this is not the first time that the United
Church of Christ has been trucking in some fashion with the kind of
sentiments expressed by one of the world’s leading haters of Jews.
As reported
here last April, the national leadership of the UCC has come
close to completely rupturing the denomination’s relationship with
the American Jewish community. Its ties to the Sabeel Ecumenical
Liberation Theology Center, a radical Palestinian Christian group
whose leadership has not only questioned the right of Israel to
exist but refers to the creation of the Jewish state as “Al Nakba”
or “The Catastrophe,” have caused intense Jewish anger. In 2007 the
UCC was the target of a furious statement issued by eight major
American Jewish organizations for what was politely termed
imbalance towards Israel. One group went so far as to label the UCC
“functionally anti-Semitic.”
Particularly puzzling is that way back in October 2005 Thomas
and several UCC colleagues reacted sharply and properly to Mr.
Ahmadinejad’s now infamous boast that he intended to have Israel
“wiped off the map.” The UCC was thus on record that the remark was
“hateful,” “violent” and “never acceptable in political discourse.”
Yet sentiments freshly expressed by the Iranian leader, repeated as
recently as August, that “we will witness dismantling of the
corrupt regime in a very near future,” have only added to the
portrait of a murderous tyrant determined to achieve two things:
the possession of nuclear weapons and the use of those weapons on
Israel. Under these circumstances, the reluctance of the UCC
leadership to draw the line at being associated in any way, shape,
or form with religious groups that are breaking bread with a man
who many see as a modern-day Hitler is startling to say the
least.
WHY SHOULD UCC MEMBERS be up in arms about all of this? Here’s a
snapshot of Mr. Ahmadinejad and life in Iran these days.
* Israel: As mentioned, Mr. Ahmadinejad is on
record saying that the State of Israel should be “wiped off the
map,” is a “stinking corpse” that should be destroyed and is
already “on its way to annihilation.”
* The Holocaust: Ahmadinejad has stated the Holocaust is “the
myth of the massacre of Jews.”
* Nuclear weapons: The UN’s nuclear agency has
now said its efforts to keep Ahmadinejad’s Iran from achieving a
nuclear capability has reached a “dead end.”
* Women’s Rights: According to Paul Marshall
and Nina Shea of the Hudson Institute’s Center for Religious
Freedom two women in Tehran are “currently due to be stoned to
death on allegations of adultery.” This is part of a broader
assault on women’s rights that includes beatings, lashings, and
imprisonment if caught advocating for women’s issues.
* Gay Rights: The UCC has made much of its
stand at the national level supporting same-sex marriage and gay
rights in America. Yet In Ahmadinejad’s Iran homosexuality is a
crime punishable by death, with frequent documented reports of the
execution of gays.
* Freedom of Religion: The Christian
Post reports that on September 9 — which is to say barely two
weeks ago — the Iranian parliament has approved a bill that makes
“apostasy” a crime punishable by death. The Post also reports that
six Protestant pastors have been assassinated, with one executed
under the pretense that he was an “American spy.”
* State Sponsor of Terrorism: The U.S. State
Department terms Iran as the “central banker for terrorism in
important regions like Lebanon through Hezbollah in the Middle
East, in the Palestinian Territories.”
In short, other than the fact he has repeatedly expressed an
urge to mass murder Jews, denies the Holocaust, is scheming to get
nuclear weapons to accomplish that murder, shrugs at the stoning of
women, gives his blessing to hanging gays, thinks non-believers
should be executed and bankrolls homicidal maniacs throughout the
Middle East, what’s the problem with breaking bread with Mr.
Ahmadinejad? Did we mention the role of Iran in killing American
soldiers in Iraq?
A CALL TO RELIGIONS OF PEACE was greeted with the news that the
group would not be releasing the names of attendees for “security
reasons,” a somewhat odd problem to have for participants if they
are simply chowing down with the leader of a country who is
passionately devoted to the same ideals. It is very disturbing that
repeated requests to the leadership offices of the United Church of
Christ to inquire whether there would be personal participation in
this dinner by UCC president Thomas, listed as a member of the
group’s “Council of Presidents” and/or the UCC’s Dr. Margaret
Blamberg, who is listed as a member of the group’s Executive
Council, or for that matter any other UCC official, was met with
the Nixon-like stonewall.
To be frank, that the leadership of the United Church of Christ
would even hesitate to condemn this dinner, to disassociate itself
from its sponsors or even question20what kind of company it is
keeping is and should be very, very troubling. At a minimum this
kind of thing gives the impression to the world that the UCC is OK
with the annihilation of Israel, believes Holocaust denying is
acceptable conduct for a head of state, believes the rights of
women and the lives of gays are just not that big a deal outside
the cozy confines of a General Synod meeting in America and that
those who quite deliberately are serving as “the central banker”
for terrorism — which is to say the bag man for all manner of
Middle Eastern murderers and thugs — are, well, not the business
of a respectable Mainline Protestant church. It also sends a
message to members of the UCC who have sons and daughters serving
in Iraq. The message? That the national leadership is unconcerned
at the idea of either sitting down for a religious meal with the
man who is actively trying to kill their sons and daughters — or
of lending the prestige name of the church to those that do.
The spiritual heirs of abolitionists will not be found here.
In the words of one of my church’s favorite theologians,
Reinhold Niebuhr, who was troubled enough to write in 1940 of the
appeasement approach of many liberals to the original Hitler, it is
a seriously bad idea not to understand “what it means to meet a
resolute foe who is intent upon either your annihilation or
enslavement.”
Mr. Ahmadinejad has made his intentions clear. Even as this is
written Iran is being thrust down a path that can only lead to
horror. Whatever the response of the United States government, of
the Bush administration or a potential Obama or McCain
administration, the role of the United Church of Christ is to be,
as Martin Luther King once said, a “drum major for justice.”
There is neither justice nor peace in Mr. Ahmadinejad’s quest
for a second mass murder of the Jews. There is no peace in his
relentless quest for nuclear weapons. There is no justice in his
brutal treatment of Iranian women or gays. This evening, as the
tyrant glides up to the Grand Hyatt, he will be greeted by a
protest from men and women of all faiths. Beth Gilinsky, the leader
of Women United, has quite remarkably brought under one tent a
force of unlikely allies who will be carrying that drum major’s
baton together. From Iranian women to American Catholics, from Jews
to Southern Baptists, from defenders of Traditional Values to the
gay Log Cabin Republicans, from Arabs to a member of the Israeli
Knesset to members of America’s 911 families.
But not, it appears, a single leader representing the United
Church of Christ.
And in that, there is shame.
(Update)
Jeffrey Lord is a former Reagan White House political
director and author. A newly elected member of the UCC’s Penn
Central Conference Board of Directors and a UCC church Council
president, he writes from Pennsylvania.
