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TechnoratiOne of Mainline Protestantism's harshest critics of Israel is United Methodist missions official David Wildman, who commonly likens Israel to Apartheid South Africa. Wildman was also a strong advocate for anti-Israel divestment, which the 11 million member United Methodist Church rejected earlier this year, similar to other Mainline Protestant denominations.
But Wildman's anti-Israel credentials remain strong. So naturally his denomination's Capitol Hill political lobby office recently hosted a seminar for its Summer interns to hear Wildman extemporize about "justice" in the Middle East.
Relying on his usual Apartheid metaphor, Wildman declared that Israel's stance towards the Palestinians is the “most explicit institutional means of using identity-based discrimination to advance colonial land grabs.” In a report by the interns themselves that appeared on the website of the United Methodist Board of Church and Society, Wildman denounced Israel for its ostensible policies of “arbitrary arrest, illegal imprisonment, prohibition of mixed marriages, and expropriation of landed property.”
Supposedly Wildman speaks with authority, because he is the official "Executive Secretary for Human Rights and Racial Justice in Mission Contexts and Relationships at the United Methodist General Board of Global Ministries," a $150 million church agency based in New York City. That agency once eagerly supported Marxist liberation movements in Latin America and elsewhere under the aegis of Liberation Theology. But Marxism died, and Liberation Theology lives on with vigor for the Religious Left almost only in application towards Israel and the Palestinians.
The Methodist missions official was determined to share the supposed facts about the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, because “the U.S. government and media repeatedly depict the situation as a conflict between two sides: one good, the other bad; one democratic, the other terrorist.” Actually, the conflict can be blamed on colonialism, he asserted, by which he presumably meant Israel's.
It is Wildman's theme, as it is for the Religious Left as a whole, that Israel embodies Western imperialism against oppressed Third World victims struggling for liberation. "The apartheid regime was the last colonial settler regime on a continent where all the colonizers and settlers lost power," Wildman explained at a pro-Palestinian Friends of Sabeel conference in 2005 in Toronto. "The US represents a country where the settlers won and all but exterminated the indigenous population after seizing most of the land by force. Israel is one of the last places where a colonial settler project is actively seizing land from the indigenous population."
Serving as an official with the United Methodist missions agency does not preclude but instead facilitates Wildman’s extensive campaigning for anti-Israel policies such as divestment. He serves on the steering committee of the U.S. Campaign to End Divestment, a coalition of pro-Palestinian, Muslim, Religious Left, and secular left-wing U.S. groups, including the Green Party, and the once infamous (from Cold War days) but now largely forgotten Institute for Policy Studies.
Wildman seems to act as a nexis among pro-Palestinian church groups, frequently speaking to or writing for organizations such as Sabeel, Americans for Middle East Understanding and the Jerusalem Fund in Washington, D.C. Himself a former long-time anti-Apartheid activist of 20 years ago, Wildman specializes in explaining pro-Palestinian arguments to church groups, and explaining “Zionist” pro-Israel church groups to Palestinians. Continue »
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