Bill Sutter’s Remarks to the UN Conference on Anti-Semitism
Many thanks to the panelists who have helped make this conference a worthwhile occasion. I note that among the panelists were a Roman Catholic and a person from a mainline Protestant denomination.
There is another group that is also well represented in society, one that enthusiastically supports Israel and strongly opposes anti-Semitism. Our numbers are greater than the combined membership of all the mainline denominational Protestant churches. And perhaps we are approaching the size of the Roman Catholic Church. We are known as evangelical Christians; and I am here representing one of many such Christian organizations. Ours is The Friends of Israel, headquartered in southern New Jersey.
Evangelical Christians as a group, with few exceptions, are not morally blind to the actual and proposed slaughter of Jewish people in Israel and elsewhere around the globe. We deplore the fact that it is dangerous today to be Jewish in vast areas of the world. We condemn, in the strongest possible terms, the actions underway against Jewish people in Europe: the desecration of Jewish cemeteries in France; the spread of hate-filled, anti-Jewish slogans in Holland and other countries.
Even here in the United States, there is on-campus anti-Semitism in such places as nearby Rutgers University in Central New Jersey. Jewish students there have been targeted. Their dorm rooms and their Hillel House Jewish student center have been defaced with swastikas. I’m sure many of us here today were together at Rutgers that evening last October as part of the 7,000 people who stood in solidarity with those students against the vicious anti-Semitism they had been experiencing.
For us evangelical Christians, Zionism could never be racism. Zionism is the survival of the Jewish people! Zionism is the self-determination of the Jewish people!
Going forward, from here and at this time in history, we as evangelical Christians stand as dependable friends of the Jewish people in opposition to surging anti-Semitism worldwide. Thank you.
