From: David Virtue
Subject: As Eye See It : Anglican Shame - by Hal G.P. Colebatch
Anglican Shame
By Hal G.P. Colebatch
3/1/2006
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.
---Hal G.P. Colebatch's book Blair's Britain was selected as a Book of
the Year in the London Spectator. He is a journalist, lawyer, and author
and lectures part-time in International Law and International Relations
at the University of Notre Dame in Western Australia.
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