The Christian Post has denounced the World Council of Churches (WCC) for its historic and current antisemitism, accusing the WCC of “blatant fabrication” in its description of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
The Christian Post’s hard-hitting essay Saturday was penned by two guest contributors, Rabbi Abraham Cooper and Rabbi Yitzchok Adlerstein, both of whom occupy leadership roles at the Simon Wiesenthal Center.
The authors accuse Rev. Frank Chikane, moderator of the WCC’s Commission of the Churches on International Affairs (CCIA), of calling on Christianity “to revert to its worst medieval Jew-hatred” in a recent Zoom call.
“We need to begin to say to those who support Israel to brutalize Palestinians that the blood of the people of Palestine will be sought from them because they collaborate by allowing this system to continue,” said Chikane, a South African Pentecostal pastor.
“For those who will not work towards delegitimizing the entire system (aka the State of Israel) that facilitates daily ‘brutality’ against Palestinians, he intoned a curse, ‘The blood of the people of Palestine will be upon them,’” the essay states.
“Every day people get killed,” said Chikane, a declaration described as “a blatant fabrication” by the two rabbis, “unless he means those who are stopped in their attempt to thrust knives into Israeli civilians.”
In responding to the controversy, the WCC itself declared that during the Zoom meeting Chikane “was speaking in his own personal capacity, not as a spokesperson for the WCC.”
Nonetheless, in their Christian Post article, the rabbis assert that the WCC’s anti-Israel policy predates Chikane by decades.
The WCC “chose not support the establishment of the Jewish State in 1948, warning instead that its political complexity might invite more global anti-Semitism,” they state.
The WCC also blamed Israel for inspiring the fears of its neighbors Egypt, Syria, and Jordan at the time of the Six Day War in 1967 because of Israel’s “dynamism and possible expansion,” they declare.
In the 70s and 80s, “the WCC’s contempt for Israel continued apace,” they add. “Regularly, it condemned Israel, while failing to criticize Arab terror attacks.”
Moreover, the authors insist, while the WCC was “busy doubling down on Israel, there was little or no criticisms of the truly brutal regimes in Cuba, North Korea, Venezuela, China, and Iran.”
“The Soviets used influence to ensure that the WCC did not criticize its invasions of Afghanistan and Czechoslovakia,” they state.
The rabbis’ criticism of the WCC, especially regarding the group’s affinity for communist regimes, dovetails with testimony given by the former head of Communist Romania’s secret police in 2015.
Ion Mihai Pacepa, a 3-star general who defected to the United States in 1978, asserted that the Theology of Liberation was the creation of the KGB, who exported it to Latin America as a way of introducing Marxism into the continent.
“Liberation theology has been generally understood to be a marriage of Marxism and Christianity,” Pacepa said. “What has not been understood is that it was not the product of Christians who pursued Communism, but of Communists who pursued Christians.”
Pacepa said that Liberation Theology was born of a 1960s top-secret “Party-State Dezinformatsiya Program” approved by Aleksandr Shelepin, the chairman of the KGB, and by Politburo member Aleksey Kirichenko, who coordinated the Communist Party’s international policies.
The program mandated that “the KGB take secret control of the World Council of Churches (WCC), based in Geneva, Switzerland, and use it as cover for converting Liberation Theology into a South American revolutionary tool,” Pacepa said.
The Soviets were aware that the WCC was the largest international ecumenical organization after the Vatican, he said, representing some 550 million Christians of various denominations throughout 120 countries.
In a curious coincidence, in 1983, Chikane became the general-secretary of the Institute for Contextual Theology, a Christian think-tank inside the South African Council of Churches that promoted Liberation Theology.
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