Here is a first hand account by Guide to the Perplexed of the Sabeel Conference in Boston: The cult of Israel-hatred.

The hatred was obvious, but what of Sabeel's dishonesty? Well, here's a sample:

I sat down in a pew near the front and opened the folder of conference materials. The back page of the official program was entitled “Apartheid?” and was filled with quotes and maps aimed at proving the Israel-apartheid analogy. They had a line from Jimmy Carter, a line from Archbishop Desmond Tutu (the conference’s keynote speaker), and a line from—no, wait, really?—Nelson Mandela:

“Apartheid is a crime against humanity. Israel has deprived millions of Palestinians of their liberty and property. It has perpetuated a system of gross racial discrimination and inequality. It has systematically incarcerated and tortured thousands of Palestinians, contrary to the rules of international law. It has, in particular, waged a war against a civilian population, in particular children.”

Sounds rather damning, doesn’t it? And who could disagree with Nelson Mandela? There’s only one problem: Nelson Mandela never said, wrote or endorsed those words. They are the creation of an Arab journalist named Arjan El Fassed. When I exposed El Fassed's fraud earlier this year, he claimed: “There is no possible basis for Pollak to say I intended people to believe the memo was written by anyone other than myself.”

Via Open Antisemitism at Boston's Old South Church at Little Green Footballs, where the watchers of anti-semitism never sleep.

Sadly this wouldn’t happen in Britain, but in Boston more than 50 organisations plan to hold a protest against a weekend conference sponsored by Sabeel.

Solomonia draws attention to a great article about this by Dexter Van Zile, entitled Hate at the Altar.

IF A church in Boston announced that it was renting space to a self-described peace group whose leader hung nooses from trees in former slave-holding states, the interfaith community would be outraged, the church would be condemned, and the wisdom of its pastor and governing council would be called into question, with good reason....

...Sadly, Old South Church in downtown Boston is playing host to just such a group this weekend - with one slight difference. Instead of displaying a noose during a time of racial tension, the leader of the group in question - the Rev. Dr. Naim Ateek, founder of Sabeel Ecumenical Liberation Theology Center - invoked the anti-Semitic trope of Jews as Christ-killers during the second intifada, when Palestinian suicide bombers were murdering citizens of Israel....

...To make matters worse, Ateek has invoked the notion of the wandering, defenseless Jew as a good thing by writing that Jewish statehood contradicts the Jewish call to suffer. This type of language has been regarded as taboo by responsible Christians since the Holocaust, and its reemergence in Ateek's writing is as ominous as a noose hanging from a tree.

This is not peacemaking; it is demonization. Such language might have been tolerable in the Old South, but not today.
Not in Boston's Old South.

This is not specifically about Christian attitudes to Jews, but is a good satire on the sort of distorted news angle you can expect from both the BBC and too many Christian news outlets when reporting on Israeli and Palestinian stories.

Breaking news from the Gaza studio of the BBC.

Ruth Gledhill draws attention to the fact that one of the first sites summoned up by the Google search engine if you type the word "Jew" is a hate site.

In spite of a note by Google saying "We're disturbed about these results as well. Please read our note here" you might like to sign the petition, linked from Ruth's blog, asking for the removal of the antisemitic site.

A Palestinian Authority official has admitted that the siege of Bethlehem's Church of the Nativiety in 2002 was staged.

A Fatah official who served as chief of a terrorist organization that holed up for over a month inside Bethlehem's Church of the Nativity in 2002 while fleeing a massive Israeli anti-terror operation admitted in a recently released book the infamous church siege was orchestrated by Yasser Arafat's Palestinian Authority.

Israel was widely criticized during the ordeal for laying siege to the Nativity Church - where Christians believe Jesus was born - after dozens of Bethlehem-area gunmen, including wanted senior Hamas, Tanzim and the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades terrorists, stormed the structure and refused to come out. Tanzim and the Brigades are part of Fatah.

Following that admission, can we expect Church leaders who condemned Israel at the time for this cynical piece of wrong-doing by the PA to apologise? Or can we expect them to condemn the Palestinian leadership for its actions?

I think we know the answer to that.