On May 10, 2016, the General Conference of the United Methodist Church (UMC) will gather at the Oregon Convention Center, hosting thousands of Methodist leaders, delegates and visitors.

This leading policy-making event meets once every four years to revise church law and adopt resolutions on current moral, social, public policy and economic issues. The conference also approves plans and budgets for church-wide programs.

This year, four new proposals in support of the anti-Israel Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement are being prepared for consideration of the general assembly during the 10-day event.

UMC is following in the footsteps of the Presbyterian Church (USA), the United Church of Christ and the United Church of Canada, who all passed resolutions boycotting and divesting from the State of Israel. The Methodists, however, are not waiting for their General Conference to get the ball rolling. In January, the UMC pension fund, last valued in 2014 at $20.9 billion, voted in favor of divesting from five Israeli banks.

According to US News and World Report,

“The pension board’s decision came at a time when divestment is gaining momentum among liberal Protestants as a tool to pressure Israel over its policies toward Palestinians. Last year, the United Church of Christ voted to divest from companies with business in the ‘Israeli-occupied’ territories. The Presbyterian Church (USA) took a similar vote in 2014.”

UMC, which represents 13 million members worldwide, is marching to the tune of the BDS drummer, banging away at the same tired anti-Israel melodies that falsely target Israel as an “evil, colonialist, imperialist” empire whose “illegal occupation of Palestinian lands” and its “apartheid” discriminatory behavior is unjustly directed against the civil rights of the “suffering Palestinians.”

The Methodists, along with influential and forceful factions, hope to satisfy their Palestinian and EU partners by censuring Israel. Further, in a sort of blundering naiveté, UMC is ignoring what is surely inevitable: the very divestment they ostensibly imagine will stop the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians may actually serve to exacerbate it.

The question then is raised: Is continuing the conflict in order to wound Israel what the Church actually wants? The answer, it appears, is a resounding yes. With the help of a well-oiled grassroots Methodist organization, the United Methodist Kairos Response (UMKR), the BDS agenda is successfully being pushed through the Church.

UMKR borrows its name from the Kairos Palestine Document. Drafted in 2009, the document was created by a group of Christians who invoked God’s name as part of their claim to His alleged favor in their war for “justice and peace” against Israel’s “occupation of Palestinian land.”

UMKR claims to be answering the calls of Palestinian Christians to “help end the Israeli occupation.” They exploit the boycott as a justifiable and effective strategy to force Israel to stop what they call the “illegal occupation of Palestinian lands.”

The Methodist organization publicly opposes anti-BDS legislation in the United States, stating that these legislative efforts “contradict the United Methodist Church’s longstanding policies of supporting economic advocacy as well as calling for an end to the Israeli occupation.”

The term “illegal occupation” is repeated so regularly by UMKR and other anti-Israel organizations that international media has used the phrase as an accepted term to describe the situation in Israel. A manifestation of “the big lie” against Israel, UMKR forcefully and repeatedly disseminates this false accusation. The entire UMKR website is peppered with references and claims of “illegal Israeli settlements.”

However, the accusations don’t stop there. Susanne Hoder, co-chair of UMKR, has gone on the record accusing Israel of ethnic cleansing against all non-Jews in Israel. In an editorial she wrote, Hoder characterizes Israel as “a society obsessed with the ethnic purity and intent on purging non-Jews from the region.” In a second article, Hoder calls on “followers of Christ” to “unite against Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Christians and Muslims.”

Accusing Israel of “ethnic cleansing of Christians and Muslims” is a preposterous and unfounded claim. Israel, the only democracy in the volatile Middle East region, is the one place people of all races and religions can live freely. Christians are not beheaded for their faith in Israel, unlike Christians living in areas controlled by ISIS. Women are not treated as second-class citizens, like in Iran and Saudi Arabia.

Hoder’s allegations against Israel highlight a greater problem of the UMKR and anti-Israel groups in general. UMKR is focusing all their attention on Israel, without acknowledging the misdeeds of the real perpetrators of the Mideast conflict. Why do the Methodists not hold the Palestinian leadership, who fail repeatedly to condemn and even encourage terrorism against Israel, accountable?

The UMKR’s anti-Israel strategy, including boycott and divestment maneuvers, is a multi-faceted campaign that includes tourism, lobbying, communications and education to undermine Israel. Each “department” espouses a divestment agenda along with an action program that undergirds its mission with a narrative of lies, innuendo and delegitimization of Israel. Palestinian responsibility for the conflict is completely ignored.

A quick look at the UMKR website features fictionalized maps of Israel that other religious groups call “false, misleading and harmful.” These are the same maps used by the international BDS movement, the Presbyterian Church (USA) and other demonizers of Israel to “educate” and brainwash their brethren with a false, revisionist history of the region.

The UMKR website also features an impressive, if frightening, list of Christian groups that partner and collaborate with the organization. The list reads like a “who’s who” of Israel-hate groups, including anti-Israel NGO’s, Jewish, Catholic and Protestant organizations, student groups and Palestinians businesses and government-affiliated institutions. Most of these groups are also signatories of the Kairos Palestine Document.

Among the highest profile partners of the UMKR divestment agenda are the World Council of Churches and Sabeel.

The World Council of Churches, with its Orthodox Catholic and mainline Protestant members, is mainly rooted in what scholars call “Supersessionism,” a 2,000-year-old doctrine that claims that because Israel and the Jews did not accept Jesus as the Messiah, they have been sidelined by God and “replaced” by the Christian Church.

Sabeel is a Protestant Palestinian Liberation Theology organization based in Israel. One of the more extreme aspects of their ideology is claiming Jesus was a “Palestinian”. Friends of Sabeel groups include Christians and secularists throughout North America. They sponsor tours and Christian conferences in which they augment their regular appeals for Palestinian peace and justice with an abundance of false allegations against Israel.

As the UMKR readies its forces for the May UMC General Conference, there will likely be some attempts to defeat their BDS agenda. Some opposition will likely come from Jewish watchdog groups rather than Christian advocacy groups. However, Dexter Van Zile, a Christian media analyst and close observer of the BDS movement in churches, offers insight into opposition stemming from African Methodists, telling Gatestone Institute:

“Not all is lost. Many of the delegates to the General Conference come from Africa. They have witnessed jihad up close and personal and will likely have a much more sympathetic view of Israel’s predicament than many of the delegates who live in the relative safety of the United States. Their participation at the upcoming conference may obstruct the passage of any divestment resolutions.”

A stunning report written by Dr. Harold Brackman, of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, states:

“The BDS Movement has already fulfilled part of its potential — as a stalking horse for those seeking to destroy Israel by other means …. It’s committed not to peace but to a piecemeal elimination of Israel — not to non-violence but to blackmail. It doesn’t believe in its own distinctions between ‘targeted’ and ‘total’ boycotts.”

Brackman adds that

“those truly committed to a ‘Two State Solution’ will never serve the cause of peace by embracing the anti-Semitic BDS. Honest people have a choice between two options only: a return to currently unfashionable, always difficult, peacemaking to forge two viable, peace states or the grim alternative, stripped bare of pretenses, of a deadly specter astride a Pale Horse.”

The BDS movement is a real crime. It is not the hoped-for movement towards peace and justice, but rather a way to demonize and disarm Israel by warping public opinion. The United Methodist Church and its anti-Israel counterparts have put Israel’s neck on the chopping block of history for crimes it did not commit.

Susan Warner is a Distinguished Senior Fellow of Gatestone Institute and co-founder of a Christian group, Olive Tree Ministries in Wilmington, DE, USA. She has been writing and teaching about Israel and the Middle East for over 15 years. Contact her at israelolivetree@yahoo.com.

“Never believe anything until it has been officially denied,” people use to say in days of the Soviet Union. Today, the same seems to be true for the European Union’s migrant policy. When German Chancellor Angela Merkel engineered the EU-Turkey deal on migrants, it was widely described by the European politicians and the media as a “breakthrough”. Merkel and other EU leaders agreed on offering a down payment of €3 billion to the regime of Turkey’s President, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, in return for its promises to “stem migrant flows”.

In December 2015, nearly four months before the EU-Turkey agreement was even formalized, Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orbán accused Chancellor Merkel of working on a “secret deal” with her Turkish counterparts. President Orbán was quite specific in his claims, apparently certain that Berlin would soon reveal the details to the public.

“Beyond what we agreed with Turkey in Brussels there’s something that doesn’t figure in the agreement,” President Orbán said in December 2015. “We’ll wake up one day — and I think this will be announced in Berlin as soon as this week — that we have to take in 400,000 to 500,000 refugees directly from Turkey.”

President Orbán was ridiculed for his claims. European Commission Vice President Frans Timmermans dismissed President Orbán’s allegations of a secret deal with Turkey as “nonsense”.

Bloomberg News reported the German and French outrage to President Orbán’s allegations at that time:

“France and Germany are working together to manage the flow of migrants, which is a challenge to everyone,” French government spokesman Stephane Le Foll told reporters in Paris on Wednesday. “Last weekend the union reached an agreement with Turkey,” and Orban should be aware of the details since he was there, Le Foll said.

A German government official, requesting anonymity because EU-Turkey talks are ongoing, said Orban’s claim that Germany made a secret deal is false.

As it now turns out, PM Orbán was right about a “secret deal” all along. According to the latest revelations made by the German newspaper Die Welt, Chancellor Merkel, along with Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte, had agreed to accept 150,000 to 200,000 Syrian migrants from Turkey into the EU without consulting other European member states.

Pictured above: German Chancellor Angela Merkel meets with Turkey’s President, Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Ankara, on February 3, 2017. (Image source RT video screenshot)

Die Welt reported on March 13, 2017:

Contrary to previous information, German Chancellor Angela Merkel (CDU) and Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte made concrete commitments on a legal refugee quota during the negotiations on the refugee deal between the EU and Turkey. Merkel and Rutte promised directly to bring in 150,000 to 200,000 Syrian refugees to Europe from Turkey each year…

The plan agreed upon by Merkel, [Turkey’s Prime Minister] Davutoglu and Rutte was presented the following day as an unexpected suggestion by Turkey. The heads of the state and governments agreed on a “voluntary intake due to humanitarian reason” in the final document of the summit.

The exact number was not revealed to the European [leaders] by Merkel, Davutoglu or Rutte. The three heads of government reached an understanding on the number 150,000 to 250,000 through a gentleman’s agreement. This has been confirmed by several individuals involved in the negotiations.

There is a plausible reason why Merkel and Rutte are still hiding these migrant figures from the public. Both Rutte and Merkel have to face their voters this year and are looking at a real prospect of anti-mass immigration parties making strong gains in the March and September general elections respectively.

Regardless of any secret dealings, however, the idea of importing hundreds of thousands of migrants into Europe fits seamlessly into what seems to be Merkel’s agenda of transforming the German and European demography.

In September 2015, before the migrant crisis could even fully unfold, Germany’s Vice-Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel declared that country could absorb up to 500,000 migrants each year.

In a government report published last month by the German newspaper Rheinische Post, experts recommended an annual intake of up to 300,000 migrants a year for the next 40 years, to counter lower German birth rates. According to these official estimates, Germany will have to take in 12 million migrants to keep the current size of the German population — 82 million — stable through 2060.

As they embark on a bizarre social engineering project on a continental scale, members of Germany’s political class evidently do not see the need to consult even their own electorates. Instead, they apparently believe in creating irreversible facts on the ground. They are even proposing a contingency plan to thwart a potential backlash from the population. In case of any future national referendum, Germany’s Federal Commissioner for Refugees and Migrants, Aydan Özoguz, recommends giving voting rights to migrants permanently residing in Germany.

Considering the ironclad support for Merkel’s “Refugees Welcome” policy in the German media and across the political establishment, there seems to be a consensus within Germany’s political establishment to keep the floodgates of mass-migration open, no matter how high the price.

For Merkel and Germany’s political elite, the victims of Islamist terror attacks across Germany or the hundreds of women who were sexually assaulted in Cologne’s central square on New Year’s Eve are merely roadkill on the Autobahn leading to their promised multicultural paradise.

Vijeta Uniyal, a journalist and news analyst, is based in Germany.

Turkey can sometimes look like a bad joke. Turkey sits in the lowest ranks of any credible index measuring press freedoms and the rule of law.

Reporters Without Borders, for instance, in its 2016 report, put Turkey into the 151^st place out of a list of 180 countries — ranked below Pakistan, Russia and Tajikistan.

In this year’s Rule of Law Index, released by the World Justice Project, Turkey ranked 99^th out of 113 countries, scoring worse than Nigeria and Myanmar.

Turkey’s leaders, nevertheless, recently condemned the state of press freedoms in Europe and the United States. An official statement claimed that press freedoms had a problematic and restrictive state in “Western democracies such as, France, Germany, England, Sweden, Spain, Netherlands and the USA.”

But not all Turkish news is equally amusing. On Dec. 10, a twin bomb in Istanbul killed 44 people and injured more than 150. The perpetrators were an urban branch of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which has been fighting for a Kurdish homeland since 1984. The conflict has already taken nearly 40,000 lives.

The aftermath of one of the two December 10 bombs in Istanbul. The attacks killed 44 people and injured more than 150. (Image source: CCTV America video screenshot)

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan himself announced the more recent bloody picture. Calling for a “national mobilization against all terrorist organizations,” Erdogan said that 1,178 people have been killed since July 2015 in Turkey’s fight with the PKK. Bomb attacks by the Islamic State (ISIS) claimed another 330 lives. Those numbers exclude 248 people who died during the bloody coup attempt of July 15, as well as 9,500 apparent PKK members who were killed by Turkish security forces. Turkey also claims that it killed 1,800 ISIS members since July 2015.

These numbers put the total death toll at 13,056 in a span of less than 17 months.

This is not a winning war for any party. From the point of view of asymmetrical warfare, Erdogan’s struggle looks futile. If, in Erdogan’s numbers, Turkey has killed 9,500 PKK fighters in 17 months and the organization is still capable of striking the heart of Turkey’s biggest city, Turkey’s security and intelligence officials might wish to rethink their warfare strategy. More importantly, politically, Turkey’s diagnosis is problematic. Erdogan claims that terror keeps taking lives in Turkey merely because “dark external forces were acting against Turkey’s interests.”

In Erdogan’s laughable narrative, the entire world of major powers has united to conspire against Turkey, solely with the aim of stopping the rise of this Muslim nation where per capita GDP is less than $10,000. The goal of this allegation is to keep a majority of Turks united behind their beloved leader. But it has not, and will not, solve Turkey’s decades-long dispute with its Kurdish minority.

Turkey’s Kurdish problem is not a military one. On the contrary, the military aspect of the problem is the consequence, not the root cause. Turkey’s Kurds have been demanding a homeland since the 19^th century — long before the modern Turkish state was born in 1923. Both the Ottoman and Turkish states, however, have viewed the Kurdish problem as a military matter that should have a military solution. They have been wrong. It is time that Ankara rethinks its diagnosis about the Kurdish dispute. The Turks can start by asking themselves why their Kurdish compatriots choose to live in mountainous hideouts, fight, kill or be killed. They have a sentimental, romantic longing for a homeland.

Erdogan’s theory, that the evil West is trying to stop Turkey’s rise, fails to explain any of the several Kurdish uprisings during a failing Ottoman Empire and a newborn, poor republic.

Turkey’s Kurdish problem is a political one. It can only be solved through political means, most notably through peaceful negotiations. Otherwise, many more days of national mourning will be awaiting Turks and Kurds.

Burak Bekdil, based in Ankara, is a Turkish columnist for the Hürriyet Daily and a Fellow at the Middle East Forum.