With impeccable timing, the British Anglican General Synod —
the Anglican Church’s highest governing body — has voted for a
campaign of economic attacks on Israel just as Hamas is settling
into power.
The General Synod resolved to disinvest in “all companies
profiting from the illegal occupation.” Singled out is Caterpillar
tractors, whose machinery has been used to build Israel’s security
wall and to level buildings suspected of being used by terrorists.
(It apparently escaped the General Synod’s notice that Caterpillar
machinery is also used by the Palestinians.) The Church
Commissioners hold about $3.65 million in Caterpillar.
The subtext behind this is that it is illegitimate for Israelis
— or, let us be frank, Jews — to try to defend themselves from
terrorism. Dr. Irene Lancaster, of the Centre for Jewish Studies at
Manchester University, said the vote marked “a very black day for
Anglo-Jewish relations… The writing is on the wall for the Jews
of Great Britain, 350 years after they settled here.”
Former Archbishop of Canterbury Lord Carey, normally the most
gentle and diplomatic of men, told the Jerusalem Post that
the vote made him “ashamed to be an Anglican.” Lord Carey
previously warned that such a policy would “disastrous” for peace
efforts in the region. He said Israelis already felt traumatized by
attacks on them and this would be “another knife in the back.” The
chairman of the Council of Christians and Jews, the Rt. Rev.
Christopher Herbert, Bishop of St. Albans, also attacked the vote
as “unbalanced.” A counter-motion by pro-Israeli Anglicans was not
allowed to be put.
The present Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, supported
the vote, but the second most senior Archbishop, John Sentamu of
York, abstained. Bewilderingly, Williams then apologized to the
British Chief Rabbi, regretting the vote which he had supported as
“specially unfortunate… at a time when, as we are well aware,
anti-Semitism in a growing menace and the State of Israel faces
some very particular challenges.” That, I suppose, is Anglicanism
for you.
The Bishop of Chelmsford, the Right Rev. John Gladwin, said
Christians in Palestine were in despair. Although recent reports
have indicated a high level of Muslim persecution of Christians in
Israel, Bishop Gladwin blamed the Israeli government for their
plight.
Bryan Reuben, Emeritus Professor of Chemical Technology at
London South Bank University, wrote in the (London) Times
of 21 February: “Where are the protests about the banning of
churches in Saudi Arabia; about the destruction of Taibe, a West
Bank Christian Village, by Palestinian Arabs; about the persecution
of Burmese Christians, and so on? What about divesting from the
firms supplying the bulldozers that Robert Mugabe uses to destroy
Zimbabwean villages?”
Numerous statements have been put out by various church bodies
attacking Israel security measures with no criticism of terrorism
against Israel or with weasel-word attempts to justify it, like the
Anglican Peace and Justice Network’s statement that “it is the
Occupation in its many facets that foments violence and fuels the
conflict,” as though Israel is to blame if Hamas fits out
brainwashed children as suicide-bombers.
To emphasize further the brilliant timing of the general synod,
an all-party Parliamentary committee inquiring into anti-Semitism
in Britain has just begun hearing evidence. Henry Grunewald,
president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, said
anti-Semitism had increased since 9/11 and “it’s worse in some ways
than at any time since Jews have lived here.” The number of
anti-Semitic incidents in Britain has doubled in the past five
years, a period that has seen literally thousands of terrorist
attacks on Israel.
The temper of the times — and the peril facing the people of
Israel — is indicated not only by the murder of Jews in France and
elsewhere and the international Cartoon Jihad (in which Williams
apparently supported the Islamicist position, claiming the cartoons
“cast a shadow over Christian-Muslim relations”), but also by the
fact that a recent poll of British Muslims found that two-fifths
regard Jewish civilians as legitimate targets. Abu Hamza, recently
and very belatedly jailed for inciting murder and race-hatred, has
claimed: “We do not want Jews to pull away from Palestine, we want
them to be buried there,” with “their skulls and bodies” used as
landfill under the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. British poet and
Oxford don Tom Paulin called for the killing of Jews on the West
Bank, claiming in an Egyptian paper: “I think they should be shot
dead. I think they are Nazis, racists and I feel nothing but hatred
for them,” and that “I never believed Israel had the right to exist
at all.” Paulin continued after this to be a regular contributor on
BBC2’s “Newsnight Review” arts program. There have been several
cases of students and others being refused admission or publication
by British academic institutions for the simple — and admitted! —
reason that they were Israelis or Jews.
Oxford University simultaneously held an anti-Semitic “Israel
Apartheid Week,” hosted by the Palestinian Society (not a
registered University society, and which was acting illegally in
using the University’s name), sanctioned by the University’s
Student Union. Flyers stated it was to commemorate the “30th
anniversary of the international convention for the suppression and
punishment of the crime of apartheid.” Posters put out to publicize
the festival showed Israeli soldiers beating a Palestinian man with
maps of Israel (described as Palestine) and South Africa. The
festival’s themes were Apartheid and Zionism, divestment and
resistance. Despite protests by Jewish students, university
authorities failed to intervene, thus condoning the intimidation
which many Jewish students obviously felt.
Mark Steyn has quoted Paul Oestreicher, Anglican chaplain of the
University of Sussex: “I cannot listen calmly when an Iranian
president talks of wiping out Israel. Jewish fears go deep. They
are not irrational. But I cannot listen calmly either when a great
many citizens of Israel think and speak of Palestinians in the way
a great many Germans thought and spoke about Jews when I was one of
them and had to flee.”
This suggests, as Steyn points out, a kind of moral equivalence
between building a defensive security wall to protect civilians
from terrorism and threatening to launch a nuclear Armageddon.
Archbishop Carey is right to feel shame for his church.
