The Middle East Affairs Council, a pro-Arab group, called a press conference today to endorse the Palm Sunday sermons of three Christian clergymen opposing Israeli practices in Jerusalem. The Council presented in its behalf the Rev. Alfred C, Forrest of the United Church of Canada, a notorious anti-Zionist, anti-Israel hate monger; the Rev. Joseph L. Ryan of Jesuit University in Baghdad; Prof. Norton Mezvinsky of Connecticut State College; John Davis, former Commissioner General of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA); and John Richardson, the Council’s secretary-treasurer.
Forrest hailed the Very Rev. Francis B. Sayre, Jr., of the Washington Cathedral, one of the three Palm Sunday speakers in question, as one “who spoke prophetically of one of the world’s most distressing situations.” Dean Sayre had said that the Israelis were “oppressing” Jerusalem’s Arabs and granting them “neither voice nor happiness in the city that is the capital of their religious devotion, too.”
Ryan, who last year testified against Israeli practices at a House subcommittee hearing, said today: “Dean Sayre’s words were strong. The institutional violence which he exposed calls for strong protest. Many Christian and Muslim Palestinians in Jerusalem will be heartened to learn that American clergymen in the capital of the United States have raised their voices in behalf of the oppressed.” Richardson congratulated Dean Sayre on his comments.
In comments issued after the press conference, the Rev. Arnold F. Keller, Jr., pastor of the Lutheran Church of the Reformation and president of the Council of Churches of Greater Washington, termed the Palm Sunday sermons as “provocative rhetoric.” Rabbi Marc H. Tanenbaum, interreligious affairs director of the American Jewish Committee, remarked: “The irony of ironies is that Jesus of Nazareth would be far more at home entering the unified Jerusalem today under Israeli jurisdiction than he would ever be in the plush pews of the Washington Cathedral.”
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