In the mythology of the anti-Israel and anti-American Religious Left, Caterpillar Tractor is the chief corporate war criminal under girding Israeli imperialism. Gladly imbibing this myth, the United Methodist Church’s lobby office has just voted to advocate dissolution of church investments in Caterpillar.

It is not the first church group to target the ostensibly villainous Caterpillar.

Last year, the Church of England briefly flirted with divesting from Peoria-based Caterpillar to protest its sale of bulldozers, subsidized by the U.S., to Israel. According to the justifying lore, Israel mindlessly bulldozes Palestinian homes and property to clear the way for Israeli settlements. The English church’s anti-Israel action prompted an enormous uproar. A church committee quickly concluded the Caterpillar was not guilty of all the crimes alleged against it, and the divestment idea was dropped.

And also last year, the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) similarly rescinded its more longstanding and broader divestment policy aimed against Israel, acceding to arguments that divestment did not necessarily equal Middle East peace after all.

But the Religious Left will not let go of Caterpillar so easily.

At its September directors meeting, the Capitol Hill based-United Methodist General Board of Church and Society unanimously approved a call for divestment against Caterpillar. This agency is the largest Religious Left lobby in Washington, D.C., with an annual budget of $5 million and two dozen staffers, all of them advocating left-wing causes in the ostensible name of 7.9 million U.S. United Methodists.

Reportedly, the United Methodist pension agency owns 75,000 shares of Caterpillar stock valued at about $6 million out of its $15 billion in assets. According to the lobby group’s resolution: “Bulldozers and other heavy equipment manufactured and sold by Caterpillar, Inc. as well as equipment supplied by others to the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) are still used for the illegal destruction of Palestinian homes, orchards and olive groves in the Occupied Territories, and to clear Palestinian land for illegal Israeli settlements, segregated roads and the Separation Barrier.”

Lamenting that the sinister Caterpillar has continued “its role in the occupation” despite the furtive efforts of responsible investors to “change its policies,” the Methodist lobby office resolution called upon “all Christians of good conscience to join us in applying every peaceful form of economic political and social pressure at their disposal, including but not limited to divestment, product avoidance or boycott, moral suasion and shareholder action, to persuade Caterpillar to cease and desist such sales.”

The lobby office is asking The United Methodist Church, at its Spring 2008 General Conference to “divest of all equity and debt holdings of Caterpillar” by January 1, 2009. Individual Methodists are also to be asked to divest themselves of any ties to the dreaded Caterpillar.

An original draft of the lobby office’s resolution had specifically affirmed Israel’s right to exist “within permanent, recognized and secure borders.” Obviously not wanting to appear in the least bit sympathetic to Israel, the final resolution instead equitably advocated secure borders equally for both Israel and “Palestine.” The statement also accurately quoted The United Methodist Church’s official stance, ratified at its 2004 General Conference, opposing Israel’s “military occupation,” the “confiscation of Palestinian land and water resources, the destruction of Palestinian homes, the continued building of illegal Jewish settlements,” etc.

Needless to note, United Methodist statements do not acknowledge that Israel has, with Caterpillar bulldozers, destroyed Israeli settlements when ceding lands in Gaza and the West Bank to Palestinians, in not very successful ploys for peaceful accommodation. There is also no inclusion in the church statements about Israel’s destruction of Palestinian dwellings when they have been used as cover for underground arms shipping tunnels, or have been the homes of suicide bombers.

With crocodile tears, the United Methodist lobby resolution insisted: “We have a special concern for our fellow Christians living in the Holy Land of Christ’s birth,” where “severe hardship and economic deprivation mark daily life under the Israeli occupation. The lobby office’s deep interest in the plight of Christians in the Middle East is naturally confined only to those perceived to be suffering thanks to Israel. Christians suffering under Muslim Palestinian overlords, not to mention the various Islamist tyrannies and theocracies that surround Israel, naturally do not visibly perturb the United Methodist social justice advocates.

Mythology rather than reality governs the United Methodist lobby office. For the Religious Left, the United States and Israel are innately oppressor nations, each of them culturally guided by insidious forms of imperialistic Christianity and Judaism. Caterpillar, based in America’s heartland, is the perfect capitalist tool of Christian America’s avaricious and imperial relationship with the Jewish nation. This juicily irresistible myth provides an appealing paradigm for the Religious Left, which has been hankering for a good international boycott ever since the fall of apartheid South Africa.

Probably the United Methodist Church’s General Conference, meeting in April 2007, will reject the lobby office’s appeal for divesting from Caterpillar. The Religious Left will then develop new mythologies and targets in its endless campaign to portray Israel and the U.S. and the world’s main oppressor states.