Is this charity a good one to support?

"Is this charity a good one to support?" That's a question that Mrs NotaSheep often asks me as she decides which charities should benefit from her generous streak. Macmillan Cancer Care and the MS Society get a thumbs up but she also is drawn to charities with Christian links in the name - The Salvation Army and Christian Aid being the most commonly mentioned. The Salvation Army gets half a thumbs up form me but Christian Aid gets a definite thumbs down... I will explain why.

Take a look at Christian Aid's "Policy Reports" section of their website. It's split into 10 areas: "Poverty over, Tax, Climate change, Trade, Middle East, HIV/AIDS, Private sector and development, Disaster preparedness, Rights and justice and Occasional Paper Series". That's odd just one geographical area gets its own section - The Middle East. Let's investigate further.

How many reports are their in each policy area?

Poverty over - One report comprising two "policy papers"

Tax - 10 reports including one on Latin America, one on Africa's mineral wealth, one on Sierra Leone and several on taxation

Climate change - 11 reports on this touchstone of the "concerned left"

Trade - 12 reports on this area

Middle East - Eight reports of which seven relate to Israel & the Palestinians and one to Iraq - I will return to this area at the bottom of this list

HIV/AIDS - Seven reports

Private sector and development - Three reports

Disaster preparedness - One report

Rights and justice - Three reports

Occasional Paper Series - Three reports


So Christian Aid reference 58 reports on their website. Only one area of the world gets its own section - The Middle East and within that section one conflict gets seven of the eight reports. How peculiar...

Let's take a look at Christian Aid's descriptions of these eight reports:

1. The Middle East Quartet: A Progress Report (2008)

The Middle East Quartet (the EU, Russia, the UN, and the US) is failing to make adequate progress towards improving the lives of Palestinians or improving the prospects for peace in the region. That’s according to a new report by a coalition of 21 aid agencies and human rights organisations including Christian Aid.


2. The Gaza Strip: A humanitarian implosion (2008)

The situation for 1.5 million Palestinians in the Gaza Strip is worse now than it has ever been since the start of the Israeli military occupation in 1967. The current situation in Gaza is man-made, completely avoidable and, with the necessary political will, can also be reversed.


3. Israel and Palestine: a question of viability (2007)

Our policy report goes beyond the rhetoric to outline the essential elements we feel are necessary for a truly viable solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.


4. Lifelines (2007)

Case studies and campaign ideas to mark the start of the 40-year occupation of the West Bank and Gaza strip in 1967.


5. Facts on the ground: the end of the two-state solution (2004)

The report details the strangulation of the Palestinian economy, as more land is taken from the West Bank for settler roads and settlements.


6. Losing ground: Israel, poverty and the Palestinians (2003)

Based on Christian Aid's work with local organisations in both Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories over the last five decades, this report looks at how and why ordinary Palestinians find themselves in conditions of deepening poverty.


7. Iraq: the missing billions - transition and transparency in post-war Iraq (2003)

Our hard-hitting report exposed that the US-led Coalition Provisional Authority had not properly accounted for what it had done with some $20 billion of Iraq's own money.


8. One land and many voices: Strands of Christian thought about who lives in the Holy Land

A brief overview of theological approaches to understanding the situation in the Holy Land.


Seven reports on Israel and the Palestinians and all with a definite anti-Israel slant.

So is the Israel/Palestinian conflict the most bloody in the world? The answer is of course NO; as I blogged back in April:

"5.4 million is the number of people killed in the Democratic Republic of Congo since a 1998 civil war began. That war continues today despite numerous peace treaties.

400,000 is the number of people killed in the Darfur region of the Sudan since a 2003 outbreak of violence between the government-backed Janjaweed militias and the secular "rebels" of the region. Approximately 100 additional people were killed there a few of weeks ago. Fighting continues in Darfur today.

65,000 is the number of Sri Lankans killed since the late 1980s, most of which have been civilians. During the war in Gaza, the Sri Lankan government forces overran the last stronghold of the Tamil Tigers -- a group considered a terrorist organization by the U.S. government -- at the expense of dozens of civilians. Approximately 50,000 government troops are currently advancing through the jungle, taking aim at the rebels.

3,400 is a conservative estimate of the number of Palestinians killed by the Jordanian government in the span of 11 days during the Black September Jordanian civil war of 1970. Palestinian estimates claimed more than 20,000 dead.

1,000 is the number of Palestinians killed as of Jan. 15 in Israel's current war of self-defense against Hamas, the vast majority of which have been terrorists.


Yet it is Israel that is condemned by the U.N., the Vatican, and the rest of the world. It is Jews that are attacked all over Europe."

I was inspired to write this piece by this on Hurry Up Harry and I recommend that you take a look at the whole of that piece with its revealtions about the Baroness Tonge, connections with Interpal, Hamas and the ‘Apartheid’ Wall.

You might also be interested in this from Christian Aid Watch on Christian Aid, the United Reform Church and "how Christian Aid demonizes the Jewish state"

You might want to look around Christian Aid Watches website and not the intelligent comments such as this one:

"China has been in occupation of another country, Tibet, for over fifty years and has virtually wiped out the Tibetans' culture and religion. Why do the Christian not protest about that?
Russia is carrying out ethnic cleansing in Chechnya, without comment from Christians. How many MILLIONS have been murdered in Darfur, with no Christian protest. It seems that Christians know only how to protest against Jews - could it be that they are simply old fashioned anti semites -and defend those whose propaganda is predominately lies, such as the Jenin massacre which never took place and those who bomb innocent civilians in Israel, New York, Barcelona and London."

You might also want to read other articles on Christian Aid Watches website such as the one that starts:

"‘Over the last seven issues [Summer 2003 to Summer 2005] of Christian Aid News more than 17 pages were devoted to Israel and Palestine. Most of this coverage involved political criticism of Israel. The most coverage any other conflict zone got was 4.5 pages for Angola – barely a quarter as much. Sudan, scene of more than two million deaths in the civil wars of the past two decades and, in the UN’s words, “the worst humanitarian crisis in the world”, got 2.5 pages. These include a full page feature about a woman who makes perfume. It tells you her recipe.’"

You might want to read Seismic Shock's report on Christian Aid's advertising for a Programme Manager in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories. You will note that a "Desirable" qualification would be "Arabic language skills" but that there is

"No mention of Hebrew then, the language spoken by Israelis. So although the job offer includes communicating with the media, communicating with Israelis themselves does not appear high up on the agenda. Yet the job listed involves working in Israel as well as Palestinian territories."

How peculiar...


You might want to look at Christian Aid Watches fisking of Christian Aid News No. 24 (Spring 2004) and its slanted reporting of the Archbishop of Canterbury (Rowan Williams) and his speech on Israel and the Palestinians.

"Rowan Williams preached a sermon in Jerusalem in January 2004. Here is what Christian Aid News quotes from it:-

The security fence stands as a terrible symbol of the fear and despair that threaten everyone in this city and country, all the communities who share this Holy Land... it is seen by so many as one community decisively turning its back on another, despairing of anything that looks like a shared resolution, a shared future, a truly shared peace.

And here is the next sentence:-

It is not the only symbol of despair, of course. The dismembered bodies of bombers and their victims are still deeper signs of the refusal of a future, the choosing of darkness and mutual alienation.

I hardly need comment,"

Finally you might want to read this fromYNetNews via Commentary Magazine :

"T is a gay Palestinian who for the past 10 years has been living in Israel with his partner, an Israeli Jew named Doron. A few days ago, he heard that his father was ill, and he ventured across the border into the West Bank to visit him. When he tried to return, however, the IDF told him his permit had been lost, maybe revoked. T was stuck: he couldn’t go back home to Israel, and he couldn’t return to his village, for fear of being murdered because he is openly gay.

T was offered shelter by an Orthodox Jewish family, living in one of the settlements in the West Bank. Thanks to a generous, humanitarian gesture by one of those evil, nasty, gun-toting, messiah-heralding, baby-producing, Bible-thumping settlers, T has hope and room to breathe.

What do we learn from this? On the one hand, there’s the plight of Palestinians desperately trying to make their way out of their homeland to something better, and the trouble they face by the authorities of democratic states like Israel, and especially a security bureaucracy as lethal as its weaponry, even when they think they have permission to stay. On the other hand, there’s the touching personal story of the anonymous family of religious settlers willing to take T into their home — certainly not for the publicity (they remain unknown), and also not because they necessarily support equality for gays in society — but just because it is a mitzva to save the guy’s life.

But the biggest story, I think, is that he needed shelter in the first place. For all our hopes pinned on Abbas and the rest of the Fatah-led PA crew, it’s still a fact that an openly gay person risks his life by entering a Palestinian village. And the same is true in many places across the Arab world, and in Iran as well. The fact is that for all our desire to understand the “other,” to sympathize with the plight of civilizations different from our own and, to embrace their struggle against oppression while denouncing our own “colonialism,” the fact remains that at least part of what makes them different from us is not merely quaint or alien but reprehensible. That we are in effect extending a hand of tolerance to those who expressly renounce tolerance, and who make little effort to hide their murderous side.

Here there are no excuses to be made for Abbas: the problem with the Palestinian Authority is not that it lacks proper mechanisms for the enforcement of gay rights, that it just can’t get its anti-gay groups under its rein. The problem, indeed, is not with the regime, so much as with an entire society that doesn’t believe in gay rights and has no intention of protecting them. And that for them, the rejection of gays extends far beyond denying them civil rights into denying them human ones. Until this changes, if it ever does, why would any self-respecting Westerner take such people’s side?

When you affirm one civilization in favor of another — whether it’s your own, or that of your adversary, or just taking sides in a faraway conflict — you are affirming not just the people in that civilization but the values they cherish as well. For better or worse."