United Methodist Church Protesting Over Israel: Selling share in G4S
Posted by: adonis49 on: June 21, 2014
Methodists to Sell Shares as a Protest Over Israel
LAURIE GOODSTEIN posted this JUNE 12, 2014
The pension board of the nation’s largest mainline Protestant denomination, the United Methodist Church, has decided to divest its shares in a British company that supplies security equipment to Israel for use in prisons and in the occupied West Bank.
The move comes as Israel has been trying to fend off resolutions by academic institutions, businesses and church groups to divest from companies that do business with Israel.
The Methodist Church’s investment in the company, G4S, involves only about $110,000 worth of stock holdings, said David Wildman, executive secretary for human rights and racial justice for the church’s General Board of Global Ministries. But the action is intended to have a larger symbolic impact, adding to the pressure on Israel to stop building settlements and end the occupation.
“We are on the side of people in Palestine and Israel — Jews, Muslims and Christians — who are seeking nonviolent means of resolving this conflict,” said the Rev. John Wagner, convener of the United Methodist Kairos Response, one of the several church agencies that encouraged the pension board to divest.
Methodists voted overwhelmingly at their convention in Tampa, Fla., two years ago against divestment in three other companies that do business with Israel: Caterpillar, Hewlett-Packard and Motorola.
This time, the church’s General Board of Pension and Health Benefits acted on its own, and it may consider further action when the directors meet in July, church leaders said.
Next week, the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), at its general assembly in Detroit, will consider a motion to divest from three companies that supply equipment to Israel.
At its assembly two years ago, a divestment resolution was narrowly defeated, by a vote of 333 to 331, with two abstentions.
Jewish leaders who oppose the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement, known as B.D.S., and a few who support it, plan to be in Detroit to lobby the delegates.
Rabbi Rick Jacobs, the president of the Union for Reform Judaism, has been invited to speak to the assembly. He said in a recent interview that “B.D.S. is an attack on the very legitimacy of the state of Israel, and it’s not simply a strategy or a tactic.” (attack on legitimacy of apartheid and racist policies of the occupiers)
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