Those Dang Presbyterians

The PCUSA (Presbyterian Church, USA) once again thinks it's a political organization rather than a church. They'd been toying with the idea of divesting PCUSA investments from companies who work with Israel, but now have started the process. Here's Lileks risible take on the decision of the Elders of PCUSA:

The Presbyterian church - not the members, but the learned elders - has announced it will use the church’s stock holdings to target Israel for being mean to the Palestinians. But they’re not anti-Semites. Heavens, nay. Don’t you dare question their philosemitism! No, they looked at the entire world, including countries that lop off your skull if you convert to Presbyterianism, and what did they chose as the object of their ire? A country the size of a potato chip hanging on the edge of a region noted for despotism and barbarity. By some peculiar coincidence, it just happens to be full of Jews.

Doesn’t matter that one side is a liberal democracy that grants rights to women and non-Jews, and the other side has thugs and assassins for rulers and sends its kids to summer camps where they learn the joys of good ol’ fashioned Jew-killin’; doesn’t matter at all. According to the script of the hard left, Israel was created when some Europeans (hisssss) invaded the sovereign nation of Palestine, even though we all know the Jewish homeland is somewhere outside of Passaic. Then for no reason Israel invaded the West Bank and Gaza – which for some reason had not been set up as New Palestine by the Egyptians and the Jordanians, but never mind – and made everyone stand in line and get frisked. Those who joined the line in ‘67 are just getting through now. Evil Zionists.

The companies the church wishes to pressure include Caterpillar, which makes bulldozers purchased by the Israelis for the sole purpose of knocking down innocent homes of gentle lamb herders; Motorola, which among other things sells night-vision goggles that give the IDF an unfair advantage over people who want to smuggle in bombs to encourage the social-justice dialogue. The church will probably get around to boycotting Cuisinart, if the imams suggest that Jews use Cuisinart products to grind up Gentile bones for Passover pastries. Of course it’s not true, literally, but in the culture of the occupation and resistance, we must understand these things as potent metaphors. False, yes, but potent! Perhaps they could just boycott Cuisinart’s cookie-sheet division.

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