Love of the Land: King Abdullah's imaginative inter-faith initiative

King Abdullah's imaginative inter-faith initiative

Melanie Phillips
The Spectator
1 October 09

In Arab News, we learn that Bava Jain, secretary-general of the World Council of Religious Leaders, has described as historic and bold the two-day international inter-faith conference which opened today in Geneva. The conference is the initiative of King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia who, says Bava Jain, deserves the Nobel Peace Prize for an initiative which potentially

would have tremendous impact on world peace and stability if effective measures were taken to implement it.

The report tells us:

Delegates from 35 countries are taking part in the conference, which opens Wednesday. They include William Baker, president of Christians and Muslims for Peace in the US; David Rosen, director of inter-religious affairs at the American Jewish Committee; Pramjeet Singh Sarna, president of Delhi Sikh Gurudwara Rakab Ganj Sahib; Kuniaki Kuni, president of the Association of Shinto Temples in Japan; and Xue Cheng, vice chairman of the Buddhist Association of China.

Er...William Baker? Wikipedia tells us:

William Baker ... was expelled from Robert H. Schuller's Crystal Cathedral mission after exposure of his affiliations with extremistfar-right racist, antisemitic and Neo-Nazi groups, including chairmanship of the Neo-Nazi Populist Party.

Orange County Weekly reported in 2002:

... evidence supplied by the Anti-Defamation League shows that Baker delivered a 1983 speech to the racist Christian Patriot Defense League in Licking, Missouri, in which he made several references to [Willis] Carto’s neo-Nazi newspaper, Spotlight. A 23-page transcript of that rambling speech reveals a number of anti-Semitic remarks, including Baker's reference to Reverend Jerry Falwell as ‘Jerry Jewry.’ (Falwell is known to be friendly to Jews.) In the same speech, Baker described his disgust at traveling to New York City: ‘God help me. Why? ’Cause the first people I meet when I get off the plane are pushy, belligerent American Jews.’

... During the same period, Baker wrote and published Theft of a Nation, a 1982 book whose salient feature is its unrelenting pro-Arab, anti-Israel and anti-Jewish politics. Writing on contemporary Middle East politics, Baker stated that ‘true justice and real conciliation’ requires that ‘all Jews who entered Palestine during the British Mandate from 1917 to 1948 and after the establishment of the state of Israel should return to the various countries of their origin’ and that the ‘Zionist state of Israel . . . should be dismantled and eventually eliminated.’

Isn’t inter-faith dialogue wonderful?

Love of the Land: King Abdullah's imaginative inter-faith initiative