Will the World Council of Churches Ever Shed a Tear for Daniel?

May 15, 2006

SWC and the entire House of Israel mourn the deaths of  the latest victims of suicide terror, Lior Anidzar, 26, married two weeks, and Daniel Wultz, 16, from Miami, FL.

At Lior’s funeral, former Israeli Chief Rabbi Lau shouted, "Who are these savages who do these things, and no one takes the hand outstretched for peace? Heaven is not for such people. For what do they give their lives? To kill innocents? This is religion? No, this is a distortion of all mercy and all religious feeling, and I want the Muslim clerics to tell the truth, that murder doesn't bring paradise."

Will the World Council of Churches Ever Shed a Tear for Daniel?
By Abraham Cooper and Yitzchok Adlerstein*

Flying overseas should have been the thrill of a lifetime for a group of high school students from Miami.  These students, however, would have gladly passed up the opportunity.  They came to pray at the bedside of a classmate who had been critically injured on a Passover visit by a Palestinian suicide bomber in Tel Aviv.  Tragically, a month later, comes word that Daniel Wultz, an athletic and gregarious 16 year old, who, amidst the prayers of his friends, briefly regained consciousness from a coma, has died.

Jews the world over mourn as Islamic Jihad leader Abu Amyun rejoices: “The meaning and goal of our lives is to fight the devil spiritually and physically. The Jews are both kinds of devils. No mercy for Jews,” he warns.  And while governments denounced the targeting of civilians at a snack stand, the influential international umbrella group for mainline Protestant denominations, the World Council of Churches in Geneva, expressed neither outrage, nor sympathy for the Tel Aviv victims.  Hardly surprising, since in the 58 years since Israel’s establishment, the WCC has never issued a single response to Arab attempts to drive the Jews into the sea.

However, the same week Daniel was struck down, the WCC did find the time to call in Israel’s ambassador to Switzerland to protest when two WCC workers were slightly injured by some Israeli teens as they escorted Arab children in Hebron. The behavior of those teens was inexcusable, but it should hardly have registered with WCC leadership.  The stitches of WCC attorneys hardly compare to the decapitation of Indonesian Christian girls on the way to school by Muslim extremists.  In Afghanistan, a man recently faced the death penalty for the crime of converting to Christianity; in Egypt, mobs did not wait for trials to kill Copts at worship.  Saudi Arabia has a better way of dealing with the insult of Christian places of worship on her soil, even in the residences of foreign workers.  It doesn’t permit them.

The WCC cannot find its voice in countries that criminalize the practice of Christianity and silently tolerates the murder of Christians; but finds nothing about Israel it can tolerate.   Even its demand that Jerusalem take “concrete steps that lead to the complete withdrawal of all settlers from Hebron and return of settler-occupied properties to their Palestinian owners", conveniently failed to note that many current Jewish settlers simply went back to property seized from Jewish residents in a bloody pogrom in 1929 whipped up by Haj Amin Al-Husseini (later a devoted ally of Hitler) that drove all surviving Jews from the city. 

Often the cruelest blow is not hostility but contempt. And the World Council of Churches’ contempt of the Jewish people’s rights in their homeland fuels what Natan Sharansky calls the three D’s:  demonization, double standards, and deligitimization.   To cite the latest example: Sweden pulled out of multinational exercises for future peacekeeping missions because, the Foreign Ministry noted, "Israel is not currently conducting any peacekeeping operations"-subtext- “and as far as Stockholm is concerned it could never conceive of a time when Israel would be involved in peacekeeping operations.”

Sweden’s ‘neutral’ biases have deep roots.  It permitted German troops to cross its territory, thus facilitating Hitler’s invasion of Norway.  On advice from its Foreign Ministry, Swedish pastors supported the Nuremberg Laws by stopping marriages between Aryan Germans and Swedish Jews, while newspapers suppressed criticism of Hitler and of the Final Solution. And in recent years, the popularity of Mein Kampf and Holocaust denial among Swedish youth prompted the intervention of an embarrassed Prime Minister.

Israel does not need Sweden’s permission to exercise her historic Jewish traditions of reaching out to the stranger even an enemy-- in time of overwhelming tragedy. When the sea spilled her terrible devastation on to Southeast Asia, one of the first to respond was Israel, which did not wait for a request or an answer to airlift field hospitals and personnel to Sri Lanka and Muslim Indonesia, who eventually thanked Jerusalem for her quick humanitarian reaction.  But Jonathan Sacks, Chief Rabbi of England, openly worries about a different storm  a tsunami of hatred against Israel and Jews sweeping across Europe, the Middle East and beyond. There is little hope to turn back this tide of religious-inspired and validated hatred, let alone envision a peaceful future for Middle East until groups like the World Council of Churches at least learn to shed a tear for Daniel.

*Rabbi Abraham Cooper is associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center
Rabbi Yitzchok Adlerstein is director of the Wiesenthal Centers Interfaith Relations