Oklahoma Christian Conference Hosted Vicar Who Promoted Jewish 9/11 Conspiracy
Rev. Stephen Sizer. Image by PressTV/YouTube
A recent conference sought to promote peace for Palestinian Christians — but was marred by accusations of anti-Semitism.
Christ at the Checkpoint USA, a four-day conference in Midwest City, Oklahoma, drew in about 150 evangelical Christians, Religion News Service reported. It was born out of a conference by the same name in at Bethlehem Bible College, south of Jerusalem in the West Bank, according to RNS.
The American version had the same mission: Give a voice to the Palestinian Christian community. The conference’s name, however, caused many to pause.
One of the guest speakers was Rev. Stephen Sizer, a retired Anglican vicar who has linked on his blog to sites that deny the Holocaust and accuse Israel of being behind the 9/11 terror attacks.
“Sizer’s presence at a ‘peacemaking’ conference hosted in part by the United Methodist Church Foundation in Oklahoma is a shock,” Dexter Van Zile, senior Christian media analyst for the pro-Israel group CAMERA, told the Jewish News Syndicate. “Sizer’s animus toward Israel and his disdain for Jews is well-documented.”
Rev. Darrell Cates, the Oklahoma conference’s director, said the conference was important because the plight of Christian Palestinians is often overlooked.
“The Christian community is primarily Palestinian, and they have an experience and a witness to the faith and to the gospel that is largely discarded or discounted and dismissed by most evangelical Christians in the United States,” he told RNS. “I think it’s because they’ve never really heard it.”
Cates denied that the conference is anti-Semitic and said it’s more complex than being pro- or anti-Israel.
“It’s a really complicated situation that takes humility and understanding and insight on how to be part of the situation in a helpful way and not just with an unconditional, unquestioning loyalty to either side,” he said.
Alyssa Fisher is a news writer at the Forward. Email her at [email protected], or follow her on Twitter at @alyssalfisher
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
