'Massacre of Jenin?' Massacre of the truth, more like. Dexter Van Zile has challenged the Episcopal Church's continuing promotion of this tired old blood libel on its website.

He has written letters to Rt. Rev. Katharine Jefferts Schori, new Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church, and Rev. Canon Brian Grieves, Director of the Peace and Justice Ministries.

Perhaps the clearest demonstration of the distorted narrative offered by the Episcopal Church about the Arab-Israeli conflict is to visit the church’s website (www.episcopalchurch.org) and enter "Jenin" into the search engine located at the top right hand corner of the site’s front page. As of this writing (Oct. 13, 2006), the site’s search engine provides links to a total of nine articles mentioning Jenin, the scene of fierce fighting between the IDF and Palestinian terrorists in April 2002. The first of these links is a four-year-old article that falsely accuses Israel of digging mass graves at Jenin and inaccurately portrays the battle as a "massacre."

Then, by way of comparison, go to the same search engine and plug in the word "Netanya," the name of a city in Israel that was the scene of a horrific suicide bombing that killed 30 Israelis and injured 140 others in March 2002 during a Passover festival meal. As of this writing, the site’s search engine returns no links at all even mentioning this city, or the attack.

Will either of them respond to these letters? More importantly, will anything be done about the prejudice underlying all this?