This is a subject I’ve addressed time and again, that being, Leaders of Christian denominations within the Palestinian Authority who adhere strictly to the official government narrative (dhimmi capo clerics) and whose lying words of deception finding receptive ears in the West. Not only is this Lutheran Pastor, Mitri Raheb, a serial liar, he’s an anti-Semite as well, and should be given the stiff arm, not honors, let alone from a former statesman. What an outrage.
”Mr. Ecumenical” Bishop Mitri Raheb: “Actually, Israel represents Rome of the Bible,
The Raheb-Herzog Affair
“A Former German President Wants to Honor an Antisemitic Pastor”
by Malcolm Lowe
April 18, 2012 at 4:30 am
“[Pastor Raheb’s]words correspond to half-truths or no truths at all.” While on the one hand many of these churches have issued official statements deploring the Christian history of denigration and demonization of Jews, on the other hand they foster and fawn upon Palestinian clerics who denigrate and demonize the State of Israel.
When the German concern Media Control announced the four winners of its 2011 German Media Prize (Deutscher Medienpreis) on January 13, 2012, the choice of the fourth, Lutheran Pastor Mitri Raheb of Bethlehem, provoked a storm of hundreds of protests.
Why such a fuss? After all, even the Nobel Peace Prize is a nonsense prize if you can get it for giving a speech in Cairo. There is a website in Germany, Kulturpreise.de, that catalogues hundreds of such awards; Raheb already held some of them.
The primary cause of the protests was that a former federal German president, Prof. Roman Herzog, had agreed to come and laud the prize winners on February 24. More generally, the affair brought into the open the seething conflict between two contradictory tendencies in churches worldwide, but especially in German Protestant churches.
While on the one hand, many of these churches have issued official statements deploring the Christian history of denigration and demonization of Jews, on the other, they foster and fawn upon Palestinian clerics who denigrate and demonize the State of Israel.
Often, of course, it is distinct groups within a church that promote the one tendency or the other. When the same individual does both, it requires a considerable measure of cognitive dissonance or hypocrisy. The Raheb-Herzog Affair has provided a defining moment in this struggle.
Some Main Players
Raheb (b. 1962) is the Bethlehem pastor of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Jordan and the Holy Land. Despite claiming three thousand members, the church numbers hardly 900, including some 220 in Raheb’s congregation, but it boasts a bishop and six pastors. A hundred or more members are church employees. It is massively funded by Lutheran churches elsewhere, where 900 members would not be entitled to a single pastor. The funding has helped Raheb to build up a business consortium in Bethlehem. He also heads his church’s synod and is the most likely successor of the present bishop, Munib Younan.
Herzog (b. 1934) was a law professor who headed Germany’s Federal Constitutional Court before serving as federal president during 1994-1999. The Roman Herzog Institute in Munich was founded by admirers and seeks to promote his ideals.
