UK: Church of Scotland: There is much that is rotten in Israel going right back to its foundation

With so much hatred against Jews and Israel, even arrogantly going so far as denying its right to exist, it is not surprising that for this and other reasons European Christians are leaving their churches in droves, but leaders don't seem to have learned the lesson.

Via The Algemeiner: 

Scottish Jews have cautiously welcomed the Church of Scotland’s decision at its annual General Assembly to reject the BDS campaign targeting Israel, as well as its rebuke of Hamas over the group’s continuing denial of the Jewish state’s right to exist. 

The decisions were approved despite searing condemnations of Israel made by many speakers at the assembly. Long-regarded as a stronghold of anti-Zionist activism, the Church has come in for heavy criticism from British Jews in recent years over its uncompromising stance on Israel. But at this year’s Assembly, an amendment to a resolution on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was successfully passed that expressed the Church’s “deep concern in regard to Hamas’s continued declaration…that Israel does not have the right to exist.” 

A motion that urged “the adoption of economic measures to pressure the state of Israel to comply with international law” was also rejected by the Assembly. Arguing against the move, the Reverend Paraic Reamonn, minister of St. Andrew’s Jerusalem, stated that Church support for BDS would amount to “reckless endangerment of its institutions and activities in the Holy Land.” Reamonn did not say whether he had received specific information from the Israeli authorities to support his fear. 

In a speech to the Assembly to mark the publication of a report on the centenary of the 1917 Balfour Declaration — in which the British government expressed support for the establishment of a “national home for the Jewish people in Palestine” — Reamonn declared, “There is much that is rotten in the State of Israel, and what is fundamentally wrong goes right back to the foundation of the state.” 

However — in what some observers identified as an important shift — Reamonn appeared to back away from the Church’s previous, even more hardline positions about Israel’s alleged sole responsibility for the Palestinian refugee issue. “In truth, there are many parties to this conflict,” he said. “It’s easy to point a finger at the State of Israel as the party chiefly to blame, but in truth there is enough blame to go around.” 

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