Mick Hartley

Giles Fraser in the JC – The Church of England delegates should hang their heads in shame over the ‘Israel genocide’ motion:

As the debate on Israel/Palestine began at the General Synod of the Church of England on Sunday evening, the chair of the debate issued some words of advice, given the sensitive nature of the matter at hand: “Can I ask members to consider carefully the language that they use.” They didn’t. And what followed was a disgrace.

The motion being debated was proposed by the Diocese of Carlisle – basically Cumbria – which the 2021 census tells me has some 50-150 Jews living there. With this extensive experience of living amongst Jewish people, the Carlisle Diocese has urged the General Synod to receive a number of documents written by Palestinian Christians that condemn Israel as a “colonial, settler, and exclusionary entity” – yes, they use that horrible word entity – and that “Genocide is a cumulative process – one that began in the minds of the settler-colonial powers of Europe when they denied the image of God in others and legitimised death, domination and slavery. We consider the State of Israel, established in 1948, to be built on racism and the ideology of ethnic or religious superiority.”

It is important to note that this document doesn’t say that the Israeli government response to the massacre of October 7 was so excessive that the word genocide comes into view – they go way further than this and say that Israel was a genocidal project from the very beginning.

Back in 2018, the Bishops gathered in Oxford to adopt the IHRA definition of antisemitism. They fully accepted this definition “including all examples, without qualification or exemption.” Amongst the examples the IHRA uses as instances of antisemitism includes “claiming that the existence of the State of Israel is a racist endeavour”. The document Kairos II that I quoted from above is therefore by any reasonable reading a clear and blatant piece of antisemitism, voted on by the Bishops thus: 25 yes, 0 No, 5 Abstentions.

I have said that language matters, so let me explain one thing, for fairness’ sake. Synod did not formally approve the Kairos II document, or “receive” it; rather it voted to “hear” it. You may not think that matters, and I don’t particularly. As the Bishop of Blackburn rightly noted “such nice distinctions make no difference at all to how we are heard on the ground.” Even so, this little verbal manoeuvring will be the fig leaf that the Church will rely upon to distance themselves from what they have just done….

My old friend Jonathan Sacks, who went to a Church of England school of course, used to say that the value of the Church of England was that it could hold the ring for minority religions in this country. It has now forfeited that right.

What is so depressing is that the Church thinks it has done something brave here. As delegates leave this York Synod to return home some will pass by Clifford’s Tower, where in the Middle Ages 150 Jews were cornered by the mob, facing forced baptism or death. Many chose to take their own lives. I hope the delegates from Synod will hang their heads in shame.

As David Collier notes, the C of E ignores the killings of Nigerian Christians – many of them Anglicans – and the plight of Christian girls in Pakistan, while Archbishop of Canterbury Sarah Mullally flies off to Palestine to chat with terrorist supporters. They’ve realised that antisemitism, once so popular in Christian circles, has come back into fashion.

In the meantime they’re obsessed with making reparations for slavery. Yes, it’s guilt and self-loathing all the way down.

How can they ever make up for all their sins? The Crusades! Perhaps donate half of C of E churches to our Muslim brethren by way of compensation. All those cathedrals! Imagine the humble cottages of the peasants knocked down to make way for these embarrassingly grandiose and pompous structures where the wealthy paraded their ill-gotten wealth. Knock them down and build social housing in their place.

And then, led by the Most Reverend and Right Honourable the Lord Archbishop of Canterbury Sarah Mullaly holding the cross high, they all parade in their finery down the beach and into the sea, for their final act of self-abnegation.