Some Urgent Questions for the Publisher of ‘The Christian Century’

Note: The following piece ran in The Algemeiner on January 25, 2015.
 
On Sunday, January 25, Rev. Dr. John Buchanan, editor and publisher of The Christian Century the house organ for mainline Protestantism in the U.S. – will speak about interfaith relations at the Grace Lutheran Church in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

Buchanan is giving his 7 p.m. talk just hours from a Jewish community center in Overland Park, Kansas, where, on April 13, 2014, a white supremacist killed a physician and his 14-year-old grandson, fled the scene, and then killed a woman outside a Jewish retirement home a mile away.

His three victims were not Jews, but the killer admitted that the attack was motivated by anti-Semitism. While sitting in the police car after his arrest, Frazier Glenn Miller shouted “Heil Hitler.”

The New York Times reported that he was the “founder and grand dragon of the Carolina Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.” Miller, a big fan of David Duke, was looking to kill some Jews, but in his haste decided that killing people outside Jewish-owned and operated buildings was good enough.

The attack demonstrated once again that anti-Semitism is a threat to Jews and non-Jews alike. Jews are merely the first, but never the last, targets of anti-Semitic killers.

Sadly, this is not a lesson understood by Rev. Dr. Buchanan. The masthead of the magazine he edits includes the name of James M. Wall, who promotes the type of hate that caused the deaths of three people in a Kansas City suburb in 2014. He does this by contributing to and serving as editor of a website that portrays Jews as the eternal enemy of American democracy and of humanity itself – exactly the type of propaganda that causes people to attack Jews throughout the world.

If Rev. Dr. Buchanan were serious about promoting Christian-Jewish relations, he would remove the name of James M. Wall from the masthead of the magazine he edits.

But he hasn’t.

Here’s the background. Wall, who served as editor of The Christian Century between 1972 and 1999 (with two brief sabbaticals while he worked on both of Jimmy Carter’s presidential campaigns), is currently listed as a contributing editor for the magazine.

Between 1999 and 2008, Wall served as senior contributing editor for the publication, and wrote regular columns that vilified Israel, its leaders, and its supporters in the United States.

Wall’s past columns are not why his name needs to be removed from the masthead. Wall’s name needs to be removed because the man legitimizes the Jew-hatred that caused the deaths of three people in a Kansas City suburb last year – and countless more deaths in tons of other attacks.

He does this by contributing to a website called Veterans News Now (VNN), where he is listed as “associate editor.” VNN publishes the type of articles and graphics that would have fit right in on the pages of Der Sturmer and Der Volkische Beobachter in the 1930s and 40s. No responsible commentator would have anything to do with such a publication.

Nevertheless, Wall has been serving as associate editor of VNN since mid-2012. (His bio and a list of the articles published at VNN can be seen here.)

Readers who peruse VNN’s website will discover hateful commentary about Israel, the Jewish State, and Jews themselves. Just plug words like “Zionist,” “Israel,” and “Rothschild” into its search engine (which is available at the bottom of VNN pages) and you will find Jews accused of perpetrating 9/11, conspiracy theories about Jewish bankers destroying economies, preventing important inventions from coming to market, and bringing about the decline of the United States.

The words “Jew” or “Jewish” will lead readers to similar articles. “Protocols” works too.

One VNN article (“Earth’s alpha Predator: Zionist Mafia”) published on June 29, 2013, declares that “9/11 was trademark Zionist false-flag testing of what they might get away with, a pushing of boundaries that, magically, stayed in bounds. Zionists third-rail magicians still brag about 9/11.”

This same article declares that “The whole Rothschild Usury Mill (RUM) offers only one destiny or conclusion, only one horizon: Rothschilds will own the entire planet. They are already closer to global ownership than few people other than the elite might imagine. The US has a potentially-fatal RUM infection.”

Another article posted on VNN’s website (“The Rape of Greece by Jewish Bankers,”) blames a “a Jewish banking cartel” for the collapse of the Greek economy. This article was initially published by Press TV, an anti-Semitic news organization headquartered in Iran.

There’s more. On May 26, 2014, VNN published an article (“The Relevancy of the Illustrated Protocols of Zion”). This article promotes David Duke’s updated version of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, an anti-Semtic forgery originating from Czarist Russia. Duke reports that while the original Protocols were a forgery, they still serve as a reliable guide to Jewish villainy. He writes that “the reality of present-day Jewish Supremacism—in terms of media control, financial manipulation, control of governments and outright Jewish racism—were all accurately predicted and mapped out in the Protocols.”

This is just one VNN article featuring David Duke’s anti-Semitic commentary.

These and other articles have been published at VNN during Wall’s tenure as associate editor.

Rev. Wall was editor of The Christian Century for more than 25 years, and a columnist for the magazine for another nine years. He was one of the most prominent mainline Protestant intellectuals on the American scene for more than a quarter century. He has gone over to the dark side of Jew-hatred without one word of comment in the pages of The Christian Century. If a prominent Evangelical Protestant had behaved like this, it would have made the cover of the magazine.

What Rev. Wall has done isnewsand yet the magazine will not cover it.

The folks who attend Sunday night’s lecture are in a position to ask Rev. Dr. Buchanan two obvious questions in light of his refusal to remove Wall from the masthead of the magazine he edits: Just how serious is he about promoting interfaith relations? And secondly, just how serious is The Christian Century as a journalistic enterprise?

Dexter Van Zi
le (@dextervanzile) is Christian Media Analyst for the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (@cameraorg).

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