WIESENTHAL CENTER: PRESBYTERIAN DIVESTMENT PLAN WOULD EXPOSE ISRAELIS TO RENEWED SUICIDE TERROR AND HAMPER THE JEWISH STATE’S SELF DEFENSE

The Simon Wiesenthal Center denounced today’s announcement by the U.S. Presbyterian Church (PCUSA) to pressure U.S. companies: Caterpillar, ITT Industries, Motorola, and United Technologies for their alleged contribution to "the violence that plagues Israel and Palestine." Included in the Church’s definition is any "support for the facilitation of the construction of the separation barrier."

"The fact that this initiative is launched as Israel prepares to evacuate all Jews from the Gaza Strip and as suicide terror continues in the Holy Land and reaches as far as London, exposes a dangerous moral selectivity of politically-motivated elites who are ramming through such resolutions in mainline U.S. Protestant Churches," said Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean of the Wiesenthal Center. Rabbi Cooper, who, along with Rabbi Yitzchok Adlerstein, the Center’s point person on Interreligious Affairs, have recently lobbied leaders of the Disciples of Christ and the United Church of Christ to drop similar anti-Israel proposals at their national assemblies.

"This arrogant initiative is oblivious to the thousands of Israelis murdered and maimed by Palestinian terrorism and blind to the immediate danger that the civilian population would most certainly face if Israel’s highly-effective anti-terrorism fence were to be dismantled. As a result, by discounting Jewish lives, this campaign is functionally antisemitic," continued Cooper.

"Make no mistake," he continued. "The real goal of this politically-motivated campaign is not to foster a climate of trust between Israelis and Palestinians but to serve the extremists who seek to have Israel treated as a pariah, apartheid state and cripple the Jewish State’s ability to defend herself from the continued scourge of terrorist attacks."

Rabbi Cooper called upon members of the Presbyterian Church "to make every effort to override this functionally antisemitic campaign and instead invest in proactive, humanitarian projects that would benefit Christians, Muslims and Jews."

For more information, please contact the Center's Public Relations Department, 310-553-9036, or visit www.wiesenthal.com.