What is Christianity’s role as Evil once again rises against Israel? … to not be Silent… again.

MEMRI (Middle East Media Research Institute) just shared a video of an official of Hamas declaring some ideas that most people would find unthinkable. The text reads, in part, as follows:

[The enemies of Allah] “… do not know that the Palestinian people has developed its [methods] of death and death-seeking. For the Palestinian people, death has become an industry, at which women excel, and so do all the people living on this land. The elderly excel at this, and so do the mujahideen and the children. This is why they have formed human shields of the women, the children, the elderly, and the mujahideen, in order to challenge the Zionist bombing machine. It is as if they were saying to the Zionist enemy: ‘We desire death like you desire life.'”

Broken down into the four main ideas, the Hamas official is saying that:

1. The Palestinian people have developed methods of DEATH-SEEKING.
2. Death as an “industry” for the Palestinian people (at which women, the elderly and children all excel)
3. Which is why human shields are being made of the women, the children, the elderly, and the mujahideen.
4. Which is to say that the Palestinian people desire Death as the Israeli-Jewish people desire Life.g

What is the Church’s obligation (not merely its “role”) as Israel faces an enemy unlike any that it has seen before, one that embraces and teaches this worship of death among its own?  First, I would submit, to not remain silent… again.  Second, it must clear the air of the past contaminants of woeful neglect and take action to bring a screeching halt to the deafening 70-year Silence that has occurred in the wake of its 7-year Silence during the Holocaust. The Church might show its desire to be lifted up from its postmodern spiritual doldrums by acknowledging that the opportunity is NOW to be redeemed in terms of its complicity of Silence during the Holocaust as well as the Second Silence that has followed — an aftermath-related Silence embodied by the Church’s failure to teach and memorialize the Holocaust to the subsequent generation of its own youth. The Church has left the herculean obligation to carry the burden of defending the ongoing assault against human memory completely to the Jewish community – those it failed to rescue in the first instance – while failing in the second instance to join the battle against this perfidious assault on human memory known as “Denial of the Holocaust.”

If the current threat to Israel’s existence is, as some would say, a kind of “fourth reich” of institutionalized, religiously motivated hatred, precipitated by the so-called “Arab Spring” and particular to the acharit hayamim, the last days, then what more proof or inspiration does the Christian world need to: a) recognize its role to be an uncompromised source of light in the darkness, b) begin its turn (Heb. shuv) from its past failure and, c) take the leadership role worldwide as concerns teaching and remembering the Shoah? We, as Christians, must become brutally honest with the fact that just last century Christianity’s overwhelming consensus of indifference toward the tragic fate of the European Jewish community demonstrated to the entire watching world that Christians could not, and should not, be blindly trusted to behave according to its own teachings when so challenged: a truth that must be turned around and made right, also in full view of the entire watching world. Can such long-term neglect of the first instance of neglect be anything but evidence of the Church’s capacity to lapse again in terms of moral character if (when) tested again in extremis? Who will believe that we have the character to obey the Master’s principles of “love your neighbor” given our avoidance of that foundational teaching during the Holocaust? Who will believe that Christianity exists to come to the aid of those in need of rescue, as epitomized by the parable of the Good Samaritan, if we do not go back and redeem that gargantuan failure of character less than a century ago? Do we have the spiritual discernment to know the signs of the times we live in? (Matthew 16:3) Or are we too busy with the living out of our own lives to hear the sound and see the vision of the spiritual darkness now rising against the Kingdom of God, sweeping across the face of the earth? Will we remove the bushel that dims our light and commence with our obligation to God, the Jewish people, and the world? May it be so.

Only time will tell.