Thursday, June 11, 2015

Methodist Church missionary calls for boycott of Holocaust events

Good article on Elder Of Ziyon about a Methodist missionary, who spent over a decade in Israel and Palestine, who calls for boycott of Holocaust events. Her name is Janet Lahr Lewis, and she is the new "Advocacy Coordinator for the Middle East" for the United Methodist Church. She wrote in a recent article:
Don't participate in Holocaust Remembrance Day without participating in Al Nakba Remembrance Day. Don't visit a Holocaust museum until there is one built to remember the other holocausts in the world: the on-going Palestinian holocaust, the Rwandan, the Native American, the Cambodian, the Armenian ... You could be waiting a long time!
She wants people to remember the Nakba, but illogically calls for people not to honor the memory of the Jews and others killed by the Nazis. Her "pro-Palestinian" advocacy thus consists of antisemitism. It's ignorant, too - there is a Native American museum on the mall in Washington, which covers the history of Native peoples, including genocide, as well as being a truly magnificent museum of Native American culture and art. It is well worth visiting on its own.

The US Holocaust Memorial Museum has an new exhibition on the Cambodian genocide - Cambodia 1975-1979. In addition, there are many memorials to the genocide in Cambodia itself. The Holocaust Memorial Day Trust, in Britain, also covers the genocide in Cambodia, as well as Rwanda, Bosnia, and Darfur. In Rwanda, there are also memorials to the genocide, including an important one in Kigali. There are also many memorials to the Armenian genocide around the world, both in Armenia itself and in countries of the Armenian diaspora, including one in Watertown, Massachusetts, close to where I grew up in Cambridge. There is a significant Armenian population in Watertown, and the memorial was put up in 1965.


Clearly, Ms.Lewis is abysmally ignorant of how the many peoples who have been subjected to genocide have remembered their own suffering. She is ignorant as well of museums and institutions that remember the Holocaust among the other instances of genocide and mass murder. It's rather appalling that the Methodist church thinks of her as an expert on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

1 comment:

  1. Scratch the surface . . . Ugly, ugly, ugly. Plus monumentally stupid, as you stated. These things should be brought to the attention of the UMC. I hate the amount of deliberate ignorance that is going around now, bringing forth two millennia of stupidity. You would think. . .

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