You are posting a comment about...
WCC and Gaga Both Targets of Islamist Threats
Call me crazy, but maybe the Central Committee of the World Council of Churches should invite Lady Gaga to appear at the organization’s upcoming Assembly scheduled to take place in Korea in 2013.
Yes, I’ll admit it. Gaga’s presence at the Assembly might be a bit disconcerting to the pastors and bishops attending the event. Let’s face it. Gaga dresses in a manner that might scandalize some people.
But with the proper chaperone, maybe a tolerant pastor from a mainline Protestant church in the United States, Gaga could very well add some star power to the proceedings, which very likely will revolve around the sins of the Jewish state.
It’s not something you’ll read about in the press, but Gaga and the WCC have something in common. Both Gaga and the WCC were prevented from holding events in Jakarta, Indonesia by threats from Muslim extremists. It happened to the WCC in the 1970s and to Lady Gaga just a few days ago.
Jutta Sperber, author of Christians and Muslims: The Dialogue Activities of the World Council of Churches and Their Theological Foundation (Walter de Grutyer, 2000), provides a tantalizing bit of detail when she reports that in August 1974 “In reaction to threats from fundamentalist Islamic circles, the site of the WCC Assembly was shifted from Jakarta to Nairobi.”
Almost 40 years later, Muslim extremists are at it again, using threats of violence to veto a concert by Lady Gaga.
This raises a question. Is Islamist intolerance a new phenomenon in Indonesia, as Benedict Rogers suggests in a recent Op-Ed in the New York Times or is it an old problem that is just now getting the attention it deserves?
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
%20(2).jpg)
.jpg)
