Pastor's PageLiving or Dying with Our History
The random violence which has been repeatedly manifested in American society in recent months, shadowed Nancy and me on our summer's vacation. The lone killer (Smith), purporting to be a member of the World Church of the Creator, was doing his shooting in Chicago and Urbana and Indiana precisely on the days we were at each site. Among his victims were a black basketball coach killed in Chicago and a Korean graduate student murdered in Bloomington. His affiliation with the World Church (although he had resigned the day before his rampage) confused many people into thinking a radical Christian organization was behind his hatreds. The World Church is, in fact, no church. It is only a front name for one more neo-Nazi skinhead group and it is avowedly anti-Christian in its propaganda as well as anti-every imaginable non-white minority.
The more recent lone killer, Fuller, who murdered an American-Filipino postal worker and nearly killed five children at a Jewish day school in Los Angeles, had slightly more valid claim to a religious linkup in that he belonged to the Priesthood of Phineas or Phinehas. This Israelite priest, a grandson of Aaron, is mentioned in Numbers and elsewhere in the Old Testament as a zealous defender of Yahweh and the true faith. Coming upon a Jewish man having sexual relations with a foreign woman at a Baal site, he killed them both and was ever after presented as a model of Jewish zeal and purity.
Of course, the neo-Nazis have borrowed the name of Phineas and turned the concept of Jewish racial purity on its head by targeting Jews and blacks mainly as their mortal enemies.
There are throughout Jewish history as well as our own Christian tradition many instances of hyper zeal and religious intolerance. While I don't believe any Jewish or Christian group has ever adopted the idea of a priesthood of Phineas, many Christians have often operated as if they were divinely appointed guardians of their faith and indulged in the intolerance that religious zealotry encourages.
I was delighted to read in the August l6 IHT that for the first time since the founding of the state of Israel the history books used in the public schools will finally acknowledge other truths than the official Israelite version of the series of wars, which established and enhanced the Jewish State. Some long repressed truths are finally surfacing. Official Jewish history has always maintained that all Arabs voluntarily fled their homes at the call of Arab fanatics and with the assurance from their Muslim religious leaders that they would shortly return triumphant to their homes and lands. Now the history books allow that many Arabs were forcefully removed from their homes by Israeli military authorities for strategic and political reasons to strengthen the emerging Israeli State.
An Israeli historian, Eyal Naveh, is quoted as saying "only l0 years ago much of this (new history) was taboo. We were not mature enough to look at these controversial problems. Now we can deal with this the way Americans deal with the Indians and black enslavement. We are getting rid of certain myths.".
Every time a people are willing to look at their actual history of dealing with other peoples we improve the chance for understanding and reconciliation and place a check upon the fanatical self-appointed priests of racism who are not interested in actual history but in forging ahead with distortions and hatreds.
Pastor Gene Preston
The Rev. Gene R.Preston
14th Floor, Blk 36, Lower Baguio Villa Tel : 25516161 Fax: 25512114E-mail : gpreston@netvigator.com
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