Edip Yüksel

“When missionaries came to South Africa, we had the land, they had the Bible. Then they told us, ‘Let’s close our eyes and pray.’ When we opened our eyes we saw that we have the Bible, they have the land.” (Kenyatta, Founder of Kenya).

You clergymen with the Bible in your hands, do not preach us love, since your love has cost us dearly.

We know that even the name of your religion is a fabrication, since according to history and confession of your own scripture, none of the disciples of Jesus called themselves Christian; the name Christian was coined years after Jesus (Acts 24:5).

Let the theology aside now. Here, I will not question the theological basis of your belief system, but I will expose the historical pattern of your political choices and practices. When we look at your record, we find you usually side by side with the powerful, the oppressors, and the warmongers! How far can you be from Jesus Christ who courageously advocated the cause of the weak, the poor, the oppressed? (Mat 19:21-24; Mark 10:21-25; Luke 6:19-38; Luke 14:13; Luke16:19-25;Luke 18:19-25).

You transform the tragedy of your historical record to a tragicomedy by the oft-repeated refrain of your songs, which loudly echoes in your churches and TV screens: LOVE, LOVE, LOVE. Yes, indeed you love. You love money, you love power, and you love deception!

You sang LOVE when you persecuted scientists and thinkers in your Inquisition courts; you sang LOVE when you hunted and burned “witches”; you sang LOVE when you invented ingenious tools and methods to torture heathens; you sang LOVE when you mobilized Crusaders to massacre Muslims living thousands of miles away; you sang LOVE when you enslaved humans from Africa and defended slavery; you sang LOVE when you deprived women from their human rights; you sang LOVE when you supported the plunder of colonialism with your missionaries; you sang LOVE when you quietly enjoyed as by-standers of Hitler’s crusade against Jews; you sang LOVE when you opposed civil rights for the children of your former slaves; you sang LOVE when your patriotism and charity money buried more than 200,000 Japanese civilians alive in their homes and crippled millions more; you sang LOVE when your great government rejected to ban land mines that each year maim and kill thousands of civilians around the world; you sang LOVE whenever your government declared war or invaded other countries under the pretext of “defense.”

Yes, you always sing LOVE while you justify and consecrate massacres, wars, assimilation, genocide, slavery, economic exploitation, and racism… You use LOVE to cover your APOCALYPTIC intention. You use LOVE to cover your deep-rooted HATE and GREED. You use LOVE to mask your putrid CORRUPTION and COWARDICE. You use LOVE like a DRUG; to deprive your audience from using their critical thinking faculties. Do not tell us that some of those atrocities were done by Catholics, or they were the evil of the past, that you are now righteous, that you are newborn Christians. You are no different! Your LOVE is just a diabolic packaging cover of a cleverly orchestrated holy deception.

You priests in ostentatious cloths, do not try to sell us love; your love is contaminated with leprosy and hypocrisy.

You sing LOVE when you support your government’s invasions, covert operations, and aggressive wars. You sing LOVE and wave your national flag to increase your government’s military spending; you sing LOVE and expect increase in your share from the patriotic profits of your weapon industry that thrives on wars around the world; you sing LOVE when your dear government supports corrupt and oppressive regimes around the world. You sing “God Bless America,” while your government blesses third world countries with covert operations, staged wars, puppet tyrants, bombs and terror.

You evangelists, do not send us your love like doves; your doves mutate to bombs in our skies bringing us nothing but death and suffering!

Now, you are opening a new chapter in your deception and evil deed. You portray Muslims as violent, which is marginally true, but much less compared to the violence of Christendom. You forget that the both World Wars were mainly fought among Christian nations; the first atomic bomb (the biggest terrorist act against civilians in history) was used by a Christian nation; and the world’s biggest weapon dealers are corporations owned by Christians… Today, you support Zionist aggression and terrorism against Palestinian people. Again, you are hand-to-hand with the powerful forces, hoping to capitalize on and exploit their victory.

You recently used the money you collect from gullible masses to send hundreds of middle class American Jews to become settlers in Palestinian’s land, to support the racist policy of the last colonial power in the world. You gave those Jewish fanatics free houses and paid for their trips, while millions of Americans are homeless and suffering in poverty. You approve billions of dollars of American aid to further the cause of Zionist colonialists. Knowing your historical record, and knowing your modus operandi, it is clear that you do not help American Jews because you love them.

You want to appear to help Jews for two reasons:

First, you know that Jews are a very successful ethnic and religious group (I will not discuss the socio-psychological reasons for this success). Though Jews comprise less than 3 percent of American population, they have the second biggest political lobby; they have great influence in politics, finance, media, film industry, and academia. More than half of students at Harvard University are Jewish. This is an extraordinary success by a nation who suffered from one of the greatest tragedies in recent history. With keen sense of pragmatism, you repeat your historical pattern of supporting the powerful, regardless of the merit of their cause. When Hitler was powerful you were against Jews. Now, Jews are powerful and you are with them.

Second, you want to fulfill your doomsday prophecy in the Middle East. You believe that there must be a big trouble and rivers of blood in that area in order your fictional Superman to reemerge and save the world. To make your fiction, which was originally concocted by St. Paul, the Pharisee son of Pharisee, to come true, at least partially, you pray for more trouble in that region. Since you know deep in your heart that your prayers are useless, to maintain trouble in “the holy lands”, you chose to support evil forces financially and politically. Yes, you help Zionists not because of your love of Jews, but because you want to add some life and flame to your centuries-old doomsday fiction! You hope that your holy fiction will come true when more Palestinians and Jews suffer in an ocean of blood!

You self-righteously depict Palestinians as terrorists. But, do you care that it was Zionist guerillas that first introduced terrorism in Palestine before the creation of Israel? Do you care that Zionists expelled millions of Palestinians from their land through systematic terror and massacres? Do you care that Jews consider themselves superior race over Arabs and treats them as second-class? Do you care that Israel was one of the few supporters of racist apartheid regime in South Africa? Do you care that Israel is perhaps the only nation in the world that legalizes torture in its jails and prisons? Do you care that the high-tech torture devices used in Israeli prisons are made in America and given away as your charity? Do you care that Israel flunks every year in the annual reports of human rights organizations? Do you care that Israel is a theocratic country? Do you care that Israeli government assassinates whomever they deem terrorist, without judicial process? Do you care that Israel defied and continues to defy numerous resolutions of UN, the very institution that helped its formation? Do you care that during the years of the first Intifada, when Palestinians had not yet resorted to suicide bombing, for every Israeli, twenty Palestinians were killed, that is 20 Arab to 1 Jew? Do you care that you and your Christian media even then depicted Palestinians as terrorists? Do you care that most of those Israelis who lost their lives were occupying colonial forces while most of those Palestinians who lost their lives were teenagers and civilians? Do you care that during the second Intifada, Israeli soldiers killed three or four times more Palestinian children than Palestinian suicide bombers (who are mostly children) killed Israeli children? Do you care that your media justify the massacres, terror and atrocities of Israeli occupying forces by describing their ruthless attacks with the word “retaliation,” or “incursion,” while depicting the desperate struggle of oppressed and displaced people for their freedom, dignity, and human rights as “terrorism”? Do you care that your media introduce the Israeli occupying forces equipped with tanks, helicopters and all kinds of high-tech weapons as victims, but label the stone-throwing Palestinian freedom fighters as terrorists? Do you care to know that British Empire labeled the freedom-seeking nations terrorists, Nazi occupying forces depicted French terrorists, that the white supremacist Afrikaners blamed South African blacks to be terrorists, and the Russian occupying forces labeled the Afghan resistance terrorists? Do you care when CAMERA, the American Jewish lobby that works to CENSOR American press, threatened MPR for its objective broadcasting of the conflict? Do you care when your so-called free press, such as CNN, publicly apologized the Jewish lobby for broadcasting the heart-breaking story of a Palestinian family?

Do you care that many equitable Jews, such as Jews for Justice, Richard Cohen of Washington Times, Noam Chomsky of MIT, and many other Jews living in Israel condemn the Zionist aggression against Palestinians and find the occupation and settlement activities immoral and outrageous (see, for instance:http://www.tikkun.org)? Do you care about truth and justice?

You priests with smile on their faces, do not shower us with your love; your love hates truth and justice!

Do you care that Israeli military has conducted numerous massacres against Palestinian people, such as, Yehida Massacre (1947), Khisas Massacre (1947), Qazaza Massacre (1947), Al-Sheikh Village Massacre (1948), Deir Yassin Massacre (1948), Naser al-Din Massacre (1948), Beit Daras Massacre (1948), Tha Dahmash Mosque Massacre (1948), Dawayma Massacre (1948), Sharafat Massacre (1951), Kibya Massacre (1953), Kafr Qasem Massacre (1956), Al-Sammou Massacre 1966), Sabra and Shatilla Massacre (1982), Oyon Qara Massacre (1990), Al-Aqsa Mosque Massacre (1990), The Ibrahimi Mosque Massacre(1994), The Jabalia Massacre (1994), Eretz Checkponit Massacre (1994), . ..Jenin Massacre (2002), and many more… Do you care to know that your ally Sharon was the mastermind behind the Sabra and Shatilla massacre where right wing Christian militias massacred more than 3000 Palestinian refugees? Do you care that the US gave “green light” to Israeli invasion of Lebanon, killing more than 10,000 civilians in 1982 and US chose not to invoke its laws prohibiting Israeli use of US weapons except in self-defense? Do you care that US-led sanctions against Iraq caused the death of tens of thousands children while strengthened Saddam Hussein, a ruthless tyrant, who was once supported by you to punish Iran?

Do you care that Israeli government have killed hundreds of thousands Palestinians, bulldozed away thousands of their homes, tortured hundreds of thousands of their young men, and continue to deny them their basic human rights, their freedom, their native land, and their right to be left alone!

We know that you care plenty about sperms, fetuses, and unborn children, but do you care about the lives of humans who are already born?

You holy men with crosses on their necks, do not utter love; your love has crossed our lands and burned it like lava!

You glorify Patrick Henry’s words in 1775, “give me liberty or give me death” against British rule that mostly interested in collecting tax, while you condemn Palestinian children who fight for their freedom against a much cruel and humiliating occupation. (Don’t tell me about suicide bombers, they are the very recent fruits of systematic oppression and torture of Zionism. I am talking about fifty years of battle between the tanks of racist occupying forces and the stones of freedom fighters!)

Do you care and hear the Palestinian Christian “Where is the outrage of Christian America when Christians in the Holy Land are facing death, destruction of their homes, immigration out of the Holy Land, and most outrageously, Israel’s attack upon Bethlehem and upon the Church of the Nativity? Tragically, even the Christian Bell ringer of the Nativity church was shot dead by an Israeli sniper. Since the founding of Israel in1948, Christians went from twenty percent of the population to less than two percent due to Israeli occupation and injustice. Sadly, most Americans don’t even know that Palestinian Christians live in Palestine under Israel’s occupation.”(May Khodr, Truth Will Set You Free, http://www.iviews.com, April 12, 2002).

Now do not fabricate lies about me as you are very good at it! I am not an atheist; to the contrary, I am a monotheist. I respect and admire Jesus greatly. I am not a radical Muslim; to the contrary I am considered an apostate by them and I am their target. I am not against Jews; to he contrary, I defend their right to live in peace and dignity in Israel or anywhere they chose to live. Though I have more Jewish friends than Arabs, I do not make any distinction between a Jew and an Arab based on their ethnicity.

Yet, I find you, ministers, priests, pastors, Evangelical clergymen, morally bankrupt. There might be a few good men among you but they are too insignificant to change your overall record. You have nothing to do with Christ, as you have no love in your hearts. I cannot help but agree with Friedrich Nietzsche’s characterization of the priestly type Christian: “the priestly type? this type of man has a life interesting making mankind sick and in so twisting the concepts of good and evil, true and false, as to imperil life and slander the world…”

You Evilgelist!

Throughout history, you have always sided with Goliaths rather than with Davids. You only give lip service to love and God. You are the enemy of love, and the enemy of God. If Jesus were alive today, he would treat you like he treated Pharisees about two millenniums ago:

“Woe unto you, you blind guides… You fools and blind… Woe unto you hypocrites…You serpents, you generation of vipers!”