Presbyterian Church (USA) Makes Controversial Divestment Move Against Israel

The largest U.S. Presbyterian church narrowly voted Friday to divest from three multinational corporations that it said supply Israel with products that promote violence in occupied Palestinian territories.

The divestment, vehemently opposed by many of the nation's prominent Jewish organizations, and hailed by many pro-Palestinian activists, passed by seven votes after hours of tense and complex debate. It means the Presbyterian Church (USA) will sell its shares of Motorola Solutions, Caterpillar and Hewlett Packard, worth about $21 million.

The vote at the church's biennial General Assembly, meeting this week in Detroit, was 310 to 303. It makes the 1.76-million member church the largest religious group to vote for divestment, an issue that has been fiercely debated in recent years among mainline Protestants. The Episcopal Church and Evangelical Lutheran Church in America both have rejected divestment. Presbyterians have discussed divestment for a decade, and a similar vote was defeated by a slim margin two years ago at the last church assembly.

There was an audible gasp on the floor in at the COBO Center in downtown Detroit after the motion passed. "In no way is this a reflection of our lack of love for our Jewish brothers and sisters," Heath Rada, the church assembly's moderator, told the assembly afterwards.

But opponents described it as exactly that.

"This decision will undoubtedly have a devastating impact on relations between mainstream Jewish groups and the national Presbyterian Church (USA)," said Rabbi Steve Gutow, president of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, whose organization was one of several major Jewish groups that had flown rabbis to Detroit to plead against divestment. Gutow, in a statement, described the vote as stemming from a "deep animus" in church leadership against "both the Jewish people and the State of Israel."

Supporters of the wider Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, or BDS, described Presbyterian divestment as a victory, though the measure the church passed Friday evening separated itself from the movement.

Divesting from the three companies is "not to be construed or represented by any organization of the PC(USA) as divestment from the State of Israel, or an alignment with or endorsement of the global BDS (Boycott, Divest and Sanctions) movement," said the text of the Presbyterian's overture.

The vote, amended several times on the assembly floor, also supported interfaith cooperation, the right of Israel to exist, and a two-state solution. In addition, it said the church should strive for "positive investment" in nonviolent efforts that help everyday Israelis and Palestinians. An effort supporting "positive investment" was passed at the church assembly in 2012, and the church has since invested close to a $1 million in education, renewable energy and microfinance in the Palestinian territories, according to Elizabeth Dunning, moderator of the church Mission Responsibility Through Investment committee.

Dunning said the church singled out Caterpillar because its bulldozers have been used to demolish Palestinian homes. Motorola Solutions, she said, was selected because the Israeli Defense Force buys the company's communication technologies. She said the church targeted Hewlett-Packard because the Israeli Navy has used its products to coordinate the blockade of the Gaza Strip and because its biometric scanners are in place at checkpoints.

In a prior interviews and statements, Motorola and Hewlett-Packard representatives have defended their products and cited their safety and human rights protection measures. A Motorola Solutions spokeswoman said the company's checkpoint equipment helps "people to get to their place of work or to carry out their business in a faster and safer way." Caterpillar has said it doesn't sell its equipment directly to Israel, but to the U.S. government.

Pro-divestment speakers at the convention on Friday said the church has tried over the years to discuss its concerns with the companies, to no avail.

"These companies have failed to modify their behavior and continue to profit from Israeli human rights abuses and non-peaceful pursuits," said the Rev. Walt Davis, a professor emeritus of San Francisco Theological Seminary and member of the Israel/Palestine Mission Network.

The network, a strong divestment supporter made up of Presbyterians, came under intense criticism this week by Jewish and pro-Israel activists, who had attacked not only its position on divestment, but also "Zionism Unsettled," a booklet it published that was sold in the church's online store. It called Zionism a "false theology."

More than 1,700 rabbis signed a letter to the church asking it to oppose divestment and criticizing it for selling the network's literature. Major Jewish groups, including the Union for Reform Judaism and the Anti-Defamation League, came out against the pamphlet and divestment. Abraham H. Foxman, ADL national director, said Friday that church leaders have "fomented an atmosphere of open hostility to Israel" and that the vote sent a "painful message" about Jewish-Presbyterian relations.

Rabbi Rick Jacobs, the president of the Union for Reform Judaism, twice addressed Presbyterians on the assembly floor to plead against divesting -- including offering to set up a meeting for church leaders with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu if they voted it down. He said the church was not only choosing divestment, but "separation" from Israel and Jewish allies. "So be it," he added.

In one move that did align with pro-Israel groups' goals, but was largely overshadowed by divestment, the church voted down a proposal to boycott all Hewlett-Packard products.

The church is not the first religious group to divest, though it's the biggest and most influential. The Friends Fiduciary Corp., which coordinates investments for 250 Quaker groups, divested from Caterpillar, Motorola Solutions and Veolia Environment in 2012. Last year, the Mennonite Central Committee decided to not "knowingly invest in companies that benefit from products or services used to perpetrate acts of violence against Palestinians [and] Israelis." Although the United Methodists voted against churchwide divestment in 2012, its General Board of Pension and Health Benefits decided last week to sell its stock in G4S, a prison and security services company, after members asked questions about its work in Israel and the Palestinian territories.

Not all Jews came out against the Presbyterian vote. Jewish Voice for Peace, a pro-divestment group based in Oakland, California, and Washington, D.C., sent several rabbis, many of the Reconstructionist denomination, to lobby in Detroit.

"We are grateful the church voted not to profit from the suffering of Palestinians under Israel's 47-year-old occupation," said Cecilie Surasky, the organization's deputy director. "Now that U.S.-backed peace talks have proven to be ineffective, we hope that others, including Jewish institutions, will follow suit. Divestment has become one of our best hopes for change."

PressTV - US ‘open to discussions’ with Iran over Iraq: Kerry

US Secretary of State John Kerry says the Obama administration is “open to discussions” with Iran and does “not rule out” military cooperation with the Islamic Republic to help resolve the crisis in Iraq.

Militants from the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) have taken control of some key northern Iraqi cities including Mosul, the country’s second-largest city, and Tikrit, the birthplace of former Baathist dictator Saddam Hussein.

The militants, who have posted pictures of their atrocious acts against Iraqis online, have vowed to continue their offensive towards the capital Baghdad but Iraqi armed forces have advanced toward their strongholds. Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has warned that the militants have nowhere to hide.

In an interview with Yahoo News on Monday, Kerry said Washington is “open to discussions” with Tehran if Iran can help end the violence.

“We're open to discussions if there is something constructive that can be contributed by Iran, if Iran is prepared to do something that is going to respect the integrity and sovereignty of Iraq and ability of the government to reform,” he said.

Asked if the United States would seek possible military cooperation with Iran, Kerry said the Obama administration does “not rule out anything that would be constructive.”

Kerry’s remarks come as a number of US officials, including Rep. Peter King (R-New York) and House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Michael McCaul (R-Texas), have warned that the ISIL militants pose the greatest threat to the United States since the September 11, 2001 attacks.

Some US officials have already said that Undersecretary of State William Burns may discuss the recent crisis in Iraq with an Iranian delegation during nuclear talks in the Austrian capital, Vienna, which begins on Monday and will end on Friday.

However, Iran has repeatedly said that its delegation only discusses the country’s nuclear energy program during the negotiations with the five permanent members of the UN Security Council – Britain, China, France, Russia, and the US – plus Germany.

ISH/HRJ

The Presbyterian Church’s Tough Love Of Israel -Sam Bahour

Sam Bahour is a Palestinian-American business consultant in Ramallah, the West Bank, and blogs at epalestine.com

AP Photo / DAVID ZALUBOWSKI

The 2 million-member Presbyterian Church (USA) is about to make history in the Middle East, yet again. In the coming days, local delegates from the Church will travel to Detroit to attend the 221st Presbyterian General Assembly to consider a set of eight overturesthat ask church leaders to review support of two states for Palestine and Israel in light of unfolding facts on the ground. Other issues to be considered are backing of equal rights and unblocked economic development for all inhabitants of Israel, and divesting from the likes of Caterpillar, Hewlett-Packard, and Motorola Solutions. The Church is clearly stepping up to the plate and realigning its policies with its values.

Political America and Corporate America should be taking note.

Reminiscent of the struggle against Apartheid South Africa, the Church is poised to step in where successive US administrations have failed to hold Israel accountable to international and humanitarian law, not to mention sheer common sense.

The U.S. has paid never-ending lip service to the need to end Israel’s 47-year military occupation of the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip. During the past two decades, the U.S. has coupled lip service with the monopolizing of a peace process that has led the international community to a dead end; not to mention leaving Muslim and Christian Palestinians on the ground, in the occupied territory as well as in Israel, standing naked in front of a state bent on militarily controlling another people and discriminating against over 20 percent of their own non-Jewish population. Presbyterians have had enough and are taking the lead to change the equation and stop the damage being perpetrated by Israel.

Political America should not take lightly the new reality that mainstream churches and civil society have reached a point where they can no longer blindly repeat calls for a resolution based on “two states” when Israeli actions on the ground, by way of continued illegal settlement building and much more, have created a single state reality between the Mediterranean Sea and Jordan River. Secretary of State John Kerry alluded to exactly this at the outset of the last failed round of U.S.-led negotiations when he testified to the House Foreign Affairs Committee in April 2013 and noted, "I believe the window for a two-state solution is shutting, I think we have some period of time – a year to year-and-a-half to two years, or it's over." The Presbyterian Church is crying out from the highest mountain it can that for a two-state solution not to be “over” immediate action must be taken. They are calling for the Church to review this core issue over the next two years.

Corporate America should also be closely following the Presbyterian General Assembly’s proceedings.

In the 2012 Assembly, delegates addressed the issue of divesting from firms that benefit from or contribute to Israel’s military occupation by attempting to pass a resolution calling for divestment from Israel. When the so-called pro-Israel lobby got word of this, they mobilized to introduce and pass a counter overture that promotes “positive investment” instead of divestment. In a perfected Orwellian move, these lobbyists publicly promote investment in Palestine, while simultaneously turning a blind eye to the systematic Israeli polices strangling the Palestinian economy.

Investment in Palestine -- without divestment from the Israeli occupation -- only continues to underwrite the status quo of military occupation. For investment to be successful occupation must be dismantled and sovereign control of Palestine’s economic resources passed to the Palestinians.

In this month’s Assembly, the divestment resolution will be brought to the floor once again for a vote. Now it comes at the heels of Secretary’s Kerry’s failed blitz to resolve the conflict and a momentous trip by the Pope to Bethlehem where he prayed at the illegal Separation Wall. The US-based organization, Jewish Voice for Peace, recently noted that the Israel lobby’s efforts have included offering Presbyterian leaders all-expenses-paid trips to Israel. Presbyterians can use this opportunity to straighten the White House’s spine based on what the administration already knows: Israel is intentionally blocking progress in the peace talks while jeopardizing US strategic interests in the region, not to mention the fate of Palestinians and Israelis alike.

Palestinian civil society and Palestinians -- Christians and Muslims -- have urged everyone interested in seeing peace with justice to divest from the occupation and to invest only where the occupation does not benefit. We struggle to remain hopeful while a cement wall as high as 24 feet tall snakes through our homeland. After all, we do not seek a beautified prison. We want the prison walls dividing Palestinians from Palestinians to come tumbling down, and that will not happen unless economic pressure is placed on Israel to end the occupation. Thus, the upcoming Assembly’s overture that calls for divestment from firms benefiting from the occupation, while affirming “Occupation-Free Investment in Palestine,” is spot on.

Palestinians did not invent the non-violent tool of divestment. After unsuccessfully trying to secure their rights using a multitude of other means, Palestinians have focused their efforts on non-violent methods of resisting military occupation that have been used throughout history by others: boycott, divestment, sanction, international law, civil disobedience, diplomatic efforts, economic resistance, and the like. Supporting these tools is supporting non-violence; the alternative is to push Palestinians into using violent means of resistance. If nonviolence is deemed unacceptable then violence becomes that much more likely.

The upcoming Presbyterian votes provides an important opportunity to say yes to nonviolence as the means to overcoming Israeli occupation and discrimination.

Sam Bahour is a Palestinian-American business consultant in Ramallah, the West Bank, and blogs at epalestine.com.

Ralph Nader: GM Must Pay Big for What Was Clearly an Institutional Cover-Up

Top management must be held accountable for a pattern of inaction and the auto company's uncommunicative committee structures.

   The ongoing and tragic General Motors debacle involving the mishandling of the fatal ignition switch defect reached its latest milestone with the release last week of a company-commissioned 315-page report by former U.S. Attorney Anton Valukas. Valukas condemned GM’s “troubling disavowal of responsibility” that led “to devastating consequences.” He declared that for more than a decade, the facts about these faulty switches that took the lives of motorists by stalling and depowering the vehicles thrashed around an “astonishing number of committees” inside GM’s sprawling silo-like bureaucracy.

The Valukas Report concluded that there was no cover-up, even though GM’s new CEO Mary Barra attributed the delay to a “pattern of incompetence and neglect.” She dismissed mid-level employees, some senior level managers, disciplined five others and installed new executives to supposedly shape up the place.What Valukas delivered for top GM management was concisely described by Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), who said, “It seems like the best report money can buy. It absolves upper management, denies deliberate wrongdoing and dismisses corporate culpability.”

In her speech to 1,000 GM employees, Barra began to get at the core problem when she declared that employees should report failures to their supervisors and, if that doesn’t work, to “contact me directly.” This is not remotely the right sequence. Few employees would expose their careers to such potential retaliation by the “cover their rear” attitude of the GM hierarchy.

The report cites what has become known as the “GM nod”: “The GM nod, Barra described, is when everyone nods in agreement to a proposed plan of action, but then leaves the room with no intention to follow through, and the nod is an empty gesture.” Other witnesses explained the “GM salute, a crossing of the arms and pointing toward others, indicating that the responsibility belongs to someone else.”

Meanwhile, year after year, nearly 3 million Chevrolet Cobalts and Saturn Ions, among others, carried this lethal but easily fixable defect, resulting in highway crashes, deaths and injuries. Not until February of this year did GM announce the recall of millions of these cars. Nor did the Department of Transportation act to compel such a recall, even though it knew about the defect for years. Finally, this year, it fined GM the maximum sum of $35 million.

How can top management not be held accountable for such apattern of inaction, such a miasma of evasive, uncommunicative committee structures, such a malfunctioning chaos of mortal information not being passed on to the top officials of the company? Taken together, it clearly was a 13-year institutionalcover-up.

Clarence Ditlow, longtime GM watchdog and head of the Center for Auto Safety, which I co-founded, called the Valukas report“little more than an elaborate whitewash that buys into GM’s arguments that it was a bunch of incompetent engineers, lawyers and mid-level managers who were fired as a result.” Ditlow argues that “GM has a corporate culture where denying safety problems has been prevalent and taking responsibility for safety defects has been rare.” He also faulted the report’s “buying into the company’s argument that this is just an airbag defect – yet stalling has been the subject of over 300 safety recalls from all companies from 1966-2013. The Valukas report ignores the 2004 death and injury Early Warning Reports (EWR) filed by GM on the models covered by the ignition switch recall through 2013.”

Incredibly, the ignition switch hazard was classified as a “customer convenience issue,” rather than an urgent safety failure. But as former National Highway Traffic Safety Administration physicist Dr. Carl E. Nash told me, GM has a long history of denial, delay, cover-ups and blaming everyone but itself for millions of serious defective motor vehicles.

GM is bracing for the results of the Justice Department’s criminal investigation, the Securities and Exchange Commission’s probe, and the two Congressional Committees’ ongoing inquiries, all of which lie ahead. But on its own, GM must act to compensate the bereaved families and the injured survivors in product-defect crashes both before and after its 2009 bankruptcy and its $50 billion government bailout. The kangaroo court of corporate bankruptcy dissolved existing personal injury claims, stripping the victims of their constitutional rights to have their day in court.

Secondly, shuffling personnel and rearranging committees will not do the job Barra says she wants done. What will be effective is if she establishes an independent ombudsman who confidentially receives complaints from internal whistle-blowers and reports them directly to GM’s CEO and President, as well as to the Department of Transportation. As Nassim Taleb wrote in his recent book Antifragile, nothing is more productive of accountability than top bosses having “skin in the game.”

Providing a monetary incentive to the reporting employee for saving the company a boatload of trouble and averting highway tragedies will also help. Companies often give money to workers who suggest dollar-saving ways to run production or distribution lines. GM can certainly do the same for internal life-saving reports by conscientious GM personnel.

Ralph Nader is a consumer advocate and author of Unstoppable: The Emerging Left-Right Alliance to Dismantle the Corporate State.

Time to unmask apartheid Israel

PressTV - Time to unmask apartheid Israel: Analyst

It is high time that the true face of the apartheid Zionist regime was laid bare to the world, an analyst writes for Press TV.

“It is time to set the record straight on Israel’s apartheid policy and genocide against Palestinians and to confront the enemies of truth,” Christof Lehmann wrote in a column for the Press TV website.

The analyst’s column was in reaction to last Friday’s Israeli police raid on the offices and studios of the Palestinian Broadcasting Corporation (PBC) in the occupied East al-Quds (Jerusalem).

“The incident sends a clear message. Those behind the propaganda, the denigration, and the dehumanization of Arab land are afraid of the truth,” wrote Lehmann.

The Israeli regime, aided by the United States and European governments, Lehmann said, is heavily investing in “propaganda industry” to portray Arabs as “villains and sub-human” in media and Hollywood-funded films.

“The challenge is to go to any lengths to deconstruct the stage set for Arab land; to show the true face of Palestine and the true face of Zionism,” wrote Lehmann, adding,  “Tear down the stage set for Arab land and you will be surprised how different the world looks.”

The analyst added that the Israeli seizure of Palestinian lands constitutes an “illegal military occupation.” 
 
He said that “silence” vis-à-vis the “decades-long extermination of Palestinians” by the Israeli regime amounts to “complicity.”

More than half a million Israelis live in over 120 illegal settlements built since Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories of the West Bank and East al-Quds in 1967.

Israel is currently faces a widening boycott campaign by some European businesses over its illegal settlement activities on the occupied Palestinian land.

Two of Europe’s biggest financial institutions have boycotted transactions with Israeli companies involved in the illegal settlement construction.

The European Union has also blocked all grants and funding to any Israeli entity based in the illegal settlements.

KA/HMV/SL