The World Council of Churches (WCC) recently received favorable coverage in a section of India's English media which hailed it as a liberal Christian organization that opposes war and proselytism.Hans Ucko, a head of the WCC, while apparently denouncing conversions through the use of force or inducements, advocated “the mission of God, to which the church as well as people of other religious traditions may be called to participate.”
In other words, he preferred conversions by other means.
A primer on the history of the WCC which is closely linked to the Holocaust during which Hitler annihilated six million Jews is in order.
The Nazi system was the culmination of 2,000 years of Christian anti-Semitism. As Elie Wiesel, 1986 Nobel Laureate, aptly stated, “the Nazi system did not arise in a void but had its roots deep in a tradition that prophesied it, prepared for it, and brought it to maturity. That tradition was inseparable from the past of Christian, civilized Europe.”
The New Testament alone, as Professor Norman Beck has shown, has 450 anti-Semitic verses. Jesus himself ushered in religious anti-Semitism when he infamously called the Jews “a brood of vipers” and “the children of the Devil.”
In a milieu where Christianity gained political ascendancy, the church expanded this false stereotyping with an arsenal of anti-Semitic rhetoric and declared all generations of Jews sinful.
This resulted in centuries of persecution, ghettoization, and Inquisition of the Jews.
In the 16th century, Martin Luther of the Protestant schism whipped up Christian frenzy by urging his followers to ethnic cleanse and kill the Jews and to burn the Jewish schools and synagogues.
The Nazis hired more than a thousand Christian chaplains to serve in the German armed forces and reprinted Christian literature. Hitler wanted to setup a unified Christian church of Germany.
He declared that he had drawn his inspiration from the church in his persecution of the Jews.
The Nazi songs and hate literature that targeted the Jews derived their material from Christian scriptures – often verbatim. One such was the popular German hate song, “The Devil is the father of Jews,” which comes from John 8:44.
The Holocaust was the inevitable culmination of two millennia of anti-Semitic propaganda and hate mongering. In the concentration camps, the Nazis taunted their Jewish victims earmarked for death with the question, “What is your Christian name?” to which sometimes the defenseless Jews defiantly retorted, as poignantly recaptured in the movie Escape from Sobibor, “I have no Christian name. Do you have a Jewish name?”
Churches of every stripe – Protestant, Evangelical, Russian Orthodox, and Roman Catholic – eagerly participated in the Holocaust when they actively turned the defenseless Jews over to the Nazis or when the clergy themselves massacred the Jews. Some of those murderers such as Cardinal Alojzije Stepinac are being proclaimed saints today.
After the Second World War ended, the Roman Catholic church pronounced Hitler a beloved son of god. As Mark Aarons and John Loftus (Unholy Trinity – the Vatican, the Nazis, and the Swiss banks) have shown, the Vatican also setup the notorious Ratline to guide the Nazi fugitives to safe houses in the Christian strongholds of Argentina and South Africa.
It is with this shameful legacy that the WCC is connected. Daniel Goldhagen (Hitler's willing executioners – ordinary Germans and the Holocaust) shows that in 1933 Bishop Otto Dibelius of the Evangelical Church in Germany blamed the Jews for the “corrosion of civilization.”
Otto Dibelius advocated prohibiting Jewish immigration into Germany and called for the “peaceable, bloodless deaths of all Jews still left in Germany.”
In 1965, Dibelius was elected the president of the WCC. In the aftermath of the Holocaust, only a Nazi church could have elected a person that called for the destruction of the Jews as its president.
This election also proved that WCC's public posturing since 1948 calling for the end of anti-Semitism is a dishonest facade to merely whitewash its anti-Semitic past.
This suspicion is further confirmed when one notices that the WCC continues to advocate the antisemitic passages of the New Testament as well as is made up of the very churches that partnered with Hitler in the genocide of the Jews.
The media unhesitatingly branded the Hindutva movement fascist even though there has never been any connection between Hindutva and the Nazis, and when in fact Hindutva groups have been ardent supporters of the Jews and Israel just as Hindus have always been the only defenders of the Jews throughout the entire Jewish history. Why would the same media hail a Nazi church? Is it merely because the journalists are completely ignorant of the history of the Holocaust? Is there something more sinister?
It is well known that the USA government actively contributes to the evangelization of India under the guise of faith based initiative. Christian churches have collectively launched Project Joshua, and have devised pin code-wise tactics to convert all Indians to Christianity. Government reports show that the USA channeled at least 2,500 crore rupees into India in 2005-2006 alone through Christian missionary organizations. A substantial part of this funding is controlled by powerful groups such as Worldvision which are partners of the Nazi church WCC.
The favorable coverage accorded the WCC is paralleled by the positive coverage Worldvision receives in India's English media. This usually translates into more funding for these organizations from the MNCs as well as Indian corporate houses, most of whom might be unaware of WCC's Nazi past. It is also paralleled by the organized campaigns of the church to ban the Da Vinci Code and more recently to suppress the telecast of the documentary on the most exciting archaeological discovery, The Lost Tomb of Jesus.
Have some journalists abandoned all ethics to turn themselves into propagandists for Nazi church?
Is it merely a coincidence that the evangelical groups increasingly control India's English media while Nazi churches receive favorable coverage and archaeological discoveries that militate against Christian claims are hushed up?
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