Justin Welby is siding with those who have abandoned civilisation for the surrender to barbarism
Jews being persecuted; Rochester Chronicle, 13th centuryLast week the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, expressed his opinion on the anti-immigration riots that have been taking place in Britain. These disorders followed the murder of three little girls in a knife attack on a school dance class in Southport that left several others injured, an attack perpetrated by the British-born son of Rwandan immigrants.
Welby, who was joined in his statement by the Chief Rabbi Sir Ephraim Mirvis, the Catholic Archbishop of Westminster, Vincent Nichols, the Chief Imam of the Scottish Ahlul Bayt Society, Dr Sayed Razawi and other faith leaders said that a “small minority has brought hatred, violence and vandalism to towns and cities across the country” with “anti-Muslim hatred and the targeting of mosques; asylum seekers and refugees attacked; violence directed towards the police and private property — all of which are a stain on our national moral conscience”. The proper response was to build “a cohesive and harmonious society for all”.
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Last week the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, expressed his opinion on the anti-immigration riots that have been taking place in Britain. These disorders followed the murder of three little girls in a knife attack on a school dance class in Southport that left several others injured, an attack perpetrated by the British-born son of Rwandan immigrants.
Welby, who was joined in his statement by the Chief Rabbi Sir Ephraim Mirvis, the Catholic Archbishop of Westminster, Vincent Nichols, the Chief Imam of the Scottish Ahlul Bayt Society, Dr Sayed Razawi and other faith leaders said that a “small minority has brought hatred, violence and vandalism to towns and cities across the country” with “anti-Muslim hatred and the targeting of mosques; asylum seekers and refugees attacked; violence directed towards the police and private property — all of which are a stain on our national moral conscience”. The proper response was to build “a cohesive and harmonious society for all”.
Times letters: Faith leaders unite against hatred and violence
A pious hope indeed. However, Archbishop Welby appears not to include in these urgent and indignant strictures hatred of Israel and the promulgation of demonising libels against the Jewish state which have led directly to attacks on British Jews. The reason, unfortunately, seems to lie in his own views.
Last month, Welby endorsed the advisory opinion of the International Court of Justice that Israel's occupation of the “Palestinian territories” was illegal. The ICJ’s opinion, which owed everything to politics and virtually nothing to law, was based on lies and distortions. As the international lawyer Natasha Hausdorff observed in the Telegraph:
The value of that opinion is ultimately undermined by the weakness of its reasoning, the misapplication of international law and the false factual basis upon which it is predicated, admirably highlighted by the powerful Dissenting Opinion of the Court’s Vice President Julia Sebutinde.
The ICJ had adopted, she went on, the virulently politicised allegations made against Israel by the UN, the court’s parent body. The ICJ had called for the ethnic cleansing of Jews from Judea and Samaria (the “West Bank”) and Israel’s capital Jerusalem, and had thus trashed the political framework established in the 1990s by the Oslo Accords, endorsed by the international community, that seeks resolution through a bilateral negotiated final status agreement.
Despite this, Welby said:
Having visited our Palestinian Christian brothers and sisters many times over recent decades, it is clear to me that the regime imposed by successive Israeli governments in the Occupied Palestinian Territories is one of systemic discrimination. Through annexing Palestinian land for illegal settlements, depriving Palestinians access to their own natural resources, and imposing a system of military rule that denies them safety and justice, the State of Israel has been denying the Palestinian people dignity, freedom and hope.
I am particularly aware of how this is impacting Palestinian Christians, threatening their future and viability. It is clear that ending the occupation is a legal and moral necessity.accused Israel of “illegal” and “systemic discrimination” against Palestinians.
This was a statement of staggering malice and ignorance. Israel is guilty of no discrimination. Its settlements are entirely legal under international law. The Palestinian Arabs live under their own governance in areas designated as such under the Oslo Accords. Israel’s military measures in these territories are undertaken solely to prevent even more slaughter of Israelis by the Palestinian Arabs who live there, and whose terrorist plots and murderous attacks nevertheless take place every day.
And far from threatening the “future and viability” of Palestinian Christians, Israel is the only country in the Middle East where they have religious freedom, are thriving and are increasing. In Bethlehem, the former Christian majority has been effectively run out of town and reduced to a rump not by Israel but by Bethlehem’s Palestinian Muslim governors.
Welby’s malice was itself put in the shade by the disgusting remarks made in the same month by Rachel Treweek, the Bishop of Gloucester. Not only did she lob the “apartheid state” calumny at Israel, but she also compared the “cruel and devastating” war in Gaza to the Holocaust and the October 7 slaughter of Israelis by Gaza Arabs and their “horrendous” taking of Israeli hostages.
Comparing Israel’s actions to the Nazis, as this bishop did, is unbridled antisemitism. To compare the barbaric slaughter of Israeli innocents to the just war Israel has had to undertake to prevent more such atrocities is moral bankruptcy of the highest order.
As Jonathan Turner, the chief executive of UK Lawyers for Israel, said:
A pious hope indeed. However, Archbishop Welby appears not to include in these urgent and indignant strictures hatred of Israel and the promulgation of demonising libels against the Jewish state which have led directly to attacks on British Jews. The reason, unfortunately, seems to lie in his own views.
Last month, Welby endorsed the advisory opinion of the International Court of Justice that Israel's occupation of the “Palestinian territories” was illegal. The ICJ’s opinion, which owed everything to politics and virtually nothing to law, was based on lies and distortions. As the international lawyer Natasha Hausdorff observed in the Telegraph:
The value of that opinion is ultimately undermined by the weakness of its reasoning, the misapplication of international law and the false factual basis upon which it is predicated, admirably highlighted by the powerful Dissenting Opinion of the Court’s Vice President Julia Sebutinde.
The ICJ had adopted, she went on, the virulently politicised allegations made against Israel by the UN, the court’s parent body. The ICJ had called for the ethnic cleansing of Jews from Judea and Samaria (the “West Bank”) and Israel’s capital Jerusalem, and had thus trashed the political framework established in the 1990s by the Oslo Accords, endorsed by the international community, that seeks resolution through a bilateral negotiated final status agreement.
Despite this, Welby said:
Having visited our Palestinian Christian brothers and sisters many times over recent decades, it is clear to me that the regime imposed by successive Israeli governments in the Occupied Palestinian Territories is one of systemic discrimination. Through annexing Palestinian land for illegal settlements, depriving Palestinians access to their own natural resources, and imposing a system of military rule that denies them safety and justice, the State of Israel has been denying the Palestinian people dignity, freedom and hope.
I am particularly aware of how this is impacting Palestinian Christians, threatening their future and viability. It is clear that ending the occupation is a legal and moral necessity.accused Israel of “illegal” and “systemic discrimination” against Palestinians.
This was a statement of staggering malice and ignorance. Israel is guilty of no discrimination. Its settlements are entirely legal under international law. The Palestinian Arabs live under their own governance in areas designated as such under the Oslo Accords. Israel’s military measures in these territories are undertaken solely to prevent even more slaughter of Israelis by the Palestinian Arabs who live there, and whose terrorist plots and murderous attacks nevertheless take place every day.
And far from threatening the “future and viability” of Palestinian Christians, Israel is the only country in the Middle East where they have religious freedom, are thriving and are increasing. In Bethlehem, the former Christian majority has been effectively run out of town and reduced to a rump not by Israel but by Bethlehem’s Palestinian Muslim governors.
Welby’s malice was itself put in the shade by the disgusting remarks made in the same month by Rachel Treweek, the Bishop of Gloucester. Not only did she lob the “apartheid state” calumny at Israel, but she also compared the “cruel and devastating” war in Gaza to the Holocaust and the October 7 slaughter of Israelis by Gaza Arabs and their “horrendous” taking of Israeli hostages.
Comparing Israel’s actions to the Nazis, as this bishop did, is unbridled antisemitism. To compare the barbaric slaughter of Israeli innocents to the just war Israel has had to undertake to prevent more such atrocities is moral bankruptcy of the highest order.
As Jonathan Turner, the chief executive of UK Lawyers for Israel, said:
Church of England bishop calls Israel’s treatment of Palestinians ‘apart...
Reading the bishop’s article and much else these days, we feel like Jews of the Middle Ages, accused of poisoning wells and murdering Christian children to make unleavened bread for Passover.
These Christian clerics are parroting the lies and distortions spewed out by the Palestinian Arabs in order to delegitimise and destroy Israel, an infernal campaign that is constantly being amplified and facilitated by the western media — and now also by Britain’s new Labour government.
These modern blood libels, which incite murderous hatred of Israel and Jews, are directly responsible for the tsunami of anti-Jewish attacks in Britain and across the west. Yet Welby has now associated himself with this vile agenda. And he has done so at a time when Israel is fighting for its life against the genocidists of Iran and Hezbollah, who have subjected Israeli civilians to ten months of missile and rocket attacks and are threatening now to unleash a far greater onslaught that will kill untold thousands of Israeli civilians. What horrified condemnations of these genocidal war crimes and escalating belligerency has Welby issued? None.
The Archbishop’s remarks were so vicious in both content and timing that they elicited a rare public protest from one of his own priests, Giles Fraser, who has an Israeli wife and Jewish children. Fraser wrote in the Mail:
But if archbishops do venture into more clearly political territory, they have to get it right. And given the long history of Christians saying stupid and downright wicked things about the Jewish people, it is doubly incumbent upon Christian leaders to demonstrate a great deal of sensitivity.
Take the term “occupation” which the Archbishop chooses to use. Yes, Israeli soldiers run the checkpoints and control much of what goes on in the West Bank. But why are they there?
Apart from the ideologically-driven settlers who are a whole different story, the reason Israel controls large parts of the West Bank is straightforwardly defensive: it really doesn't want to be there, it doesn't want its children serving or dying there, but this is where the threat comes from.
Abandoning the territory would create an undeniable risk. After Israel evacuated Gaza in 2005 — with the IDF dragging Israeli settlers out kicking and screaming – Hamas came to power only the following year.
Not only did Gazans suffer under the decades of repressive rule by Hamas, but Israel had to suffer a Palestinian government committed to the obliteration of the Jewish state. The appalling consequence of which was the October 7 massacre.
The greatest impediment to a two-state solution is that Israel is perfectly entitled to believe that a “liberated” Palestine, constituting Gaza and the West Bank, would become a launching pad for even more “from the river to the sea”genocidal murderousness.
And when the missiles once again rain down upon Tel Aviv, and when enemies invade from the north and the south, it won't be the ICJ in the Hague nor a Christian Archbishop in Canterbury that will protect them.
The Church of England has been hostile to Israel for years. It has adopted the anti-west, anti-Israel “liberation theology” of the global south, which unites it with the hard left in viewing Israel as the “colonialist” oppressors of the “indigenous” Arabs of the land of Israel. In fact, the indigenous people of the land are the Jews, and it is the Palestinian Arabs who are the would-be colonialist oppressors — as was the Muslim world of antiquity, when it formed one of the waves of occupiers of the Jewish kingdom of Judea after it was conquered and the majority of Jews were ethically cleansed from the land.
In the recent riots, thuggish elements were rightly blamed for inciting public rage and violence against Muslim immigrants through falsehoods promoted on social media — untruths such as that the attacker who murdered the Southport children was a Muslim asylum-seeker and had even been on a security watchlist. This was totally untrue. The resulting riots, ignited by these incendiary falsehoods, have led to calls for draconian sanctions against “incitement” and “disinformation” on social media — which obviously threatens a wholly illiberal crackdown on any opinions that go against the prevailing liberal consensus.
Yet other, regular incitement on the basis of falsehoods passes without any criticism from these same liberal quarters. The narrative promoted by the entire liberal establishment from the prime minister downwards and parroted by much of the media is that the counter-protesters who have taken to the streets against the “far right” rioters are “anti-racists”.
It is beyond doubt that thugs involved in those riots attacked Muslims and mosques, and even more appallingly tried to burn down an immigration centre with asylum-seekers inside it. Those crimes need to be punished with the full force of the law.
But others in those disturbances were pursuing a very different agenda. Muslims took to the streets brandishing Palestinian flags and screaming for the destruction of Israel. Just as there were lynch-mobs threatening violence against Muslims, there were also Muslim lynch-mobs roaming the streets looking for “far right” white men to attack. Yet in Stoke-on-Trent, the police astoundingly responded to a Muslim mob carrying weapons not by arresting them for seeking violence but by asking them meekly to discard their weapons at the local mosque.
These Muslim mobs have been grotesquely represented as “anti-racist” protesters or condoned as necessary for Muslim defence. Since the Palestinian flag carried by many of these “counter-protesters” and the slogans they scream represent a cause that aims not only to destroy Israel but to write the Jewish people out of their own history, they symbolise not “anti-racism” but jihadi Islam, colonialism, Jew-hatred and ethnic cleansing. They reveal an agenda that has nothing to do with the defence of an ethnic minority and everything to do with aggression towards another one.
Yet astoundingly, so-called “progressives” ignore, deny and sanitise all this, even when it unfolds in front of their eyes. On Sky News, the journalist Becky Johnson had to abruptly end a live broadcast when men in balaclavas approached her screaming “Free Palestine” and slashing the tyres of a Sky van. Yet Jess Phillips, the government minister for “safeguarding and violence against women and girls”, excused these thugs “because it has been spread that racists were coming to attack them”.
The prime minister, Sir Keir Starmer, should have said that no violence or intimidation by any community is acceptable and that all will be held to account regardless of ethnicity. But he didn’t do that. He said instead that he would defend the Muslim community from attack, and he spoke only of “right-wing” thuggery. And his government is now under pressure to crack down on “Islamophobia” — thus potentially criminalising articles like this one.
This precisely embodies the double standards which have so badly upset so many people but which are obdurately denied by both government and police.
As several commentators have pointed out, many demonstrators in these recent riots were neither thugs nor the “far right”. They were just ordinary people who wanted to register a peaceful protest against mass uncontrolled immigration and what they perceived to be a double standard in policing and the excusing or denial of Muslim misdeeds.
Examples of this double standard include the response to Islamist terrorist attacks which denies they have anything to do with Islam and which, after such attacks, prioritises defence of the Muslim community against “Islamophobia;” the classification of any criticism of Islam or the Muslim community as “Islamophobia;” the two decades of official denial of Muslim rape and pimping “grooming gangs” — offences which still continue; the apparent official indifference towards outrages such as the death threats against the Batley grammar school teacher who showed his class on free speech the images of Mohammed that precipitated jihadi murder around the world and who remains in hiding for his life as a result; the Manchester Airport incident in which a police officer caused justifiable outrage by kicking a prone Muslim in the head but where video footage emerged after almost 24 hours of the unprovoked and vicious attacks on the police by him and his family that preceded this; or the fact that the Home Secretary, Yvette Cooper, struck a far more conciliatory tone over the riots by Romanies and other minorities in Harehills, Leeds after the removal of children for their own safety from a Roma family than the vindictive outrage she expressed over the “far right” white riots.
Moreover, as Britain’s Jewish defence organisation the Community Security Trust notes in a new report, there has been a 41 per cent increase in assaults on Jews between January and June this year. The ethnicity of offenders was recorded in under a third of cases, of whom 44 per cent were white, 30 per cent Arab or North African, 14 per cent South Asian and 12 per cent black. These percentages far outweigh the proportion of Arab, Asian or black people in Britain at 0.5 per cent, nine per cent and 3.7 per cent respectively.
The government’s one-eyed, ruthlessly anti-white response to the riots, ignoring or excusing Muslim or other ethnic minority aggression as well as promoting falsehood-driven, exterminatory hostility to Israel, suggests that tragically Britain is now sealing its fate as a state whose moral bankruptcy signals its eventual disintegration.
It’s generally assumed that, since so few in Britain are now Christian believers, what the church says or does is irrelevant. Nothing could be further from the truth. Religion, or its absence, makes or unmakes a society. What the Church of England says is still a major influence in making the cultural weather. In promoting incendiary falsehoods against Israel and echoing the government’s craven double standards while it ignores or trashes the reasonable and justified concerns of millions, the Archbishop of Canterbury is not just a disgrace to his church and the despair of millions of decent Christians. He is siding with those who have abandoned civilisation for the surrender to barbarism.
Reading the bishop’s article and much else these days, we feel like Jews of the Middle Ages, accused of poisoning wells and murdering Christian children to make unleavened bread for Passover.
These Christian clerics are parroting the lies and distortions spewed out by the Palestinian Arabs in order to delegitimise and destroy Israel, an infernal campaign that is constantly being amplified and facilitated by the western media — and now also by Britain’s new Labour government.
These modern blood libels, which incite murderous hatred of Israel and Jews, are directly responsible for the tsunami of anti-Jewish attacks in Britain and across the west. Yet Welby has now associated himself with this vile agenda. And he has done so at a time when Israel is fighting for its life against the genocidists of Iran and Hezbollah, who have subjected Israeli civilians to ten months of missile and rocket attacks and are threatening now to unleash a far greater onslaught that will kill untold thousands of Israeli civilians. What horrified condemnations of these genocidal war crimes and escalating belligerency has Welby issued? None.
The Archbishop’s remarks were so vicious in both content and timing that they elicited a rare public protest from one of his own priests, Giles Fraser, who has an Israeli wife and Jewish children. Fraser wrote in the Mail:
But if archbishops do venture into more clearly political territory, they have to get it right. And given the long history of Christians saying stupid and downright wicked things about the Jewish people, it is doubly incumbent upon Christian leaders to demonstrate a great deal of sensitivity.
Take the term “occupation” which the Archbishop chooses to use. Yes, Israeli soldiers run the checkpoints and control much of what goes on in the West Bank. But why are they there?
Apart from the ideologically-driven settlers who are a whole different story, the reason Israel controls large parts of the West Bank is straightforwardly defensive: it really doesn't want to be there, it doesn't want its children serving or dying there, but this is where the threat comes from.
Abandoning the territory would create an undeniable risk. After Israel evacuated Gaza in 2005 — with the IDF dragging Israeli settlers out kicking and screaming – Hamas came to power only the following year.
Not only did Gazans suffer under the decades of repressive rule by Hamas, but Israel had to suffer a Palestinian government committed to the obliteration of the Jewish state. The appalling consequence of which was the October 7 massacre.
The greatest impediment to a two-state solution is that Israel is perfectly entitled to believe that a “liberated” Palestine, constituting Gaza and the West Bank, would become a launching pad for even more “from the river to the sea”genocidal murderousness.
And when the missiles once again rain down upon Tel Aviv, and when enemies invade from the north and the south, it won't be the ICJ in the Hague nor a Christian Archbishop in Canterbury that will protect them.
The Church of England has been hostile to Israel for years. It has adopted the anti-west, anti-Israel “liberation theology” of the global south, which unites it with the hard left in viewing Israel as the “colonialist” oppressors of the “indigenous” Arabs of the land of Israel. In fact, the indigenous people of the land are the Jews, and it is the Palestinian Arabs who are the would-be colonialist oppressors — as was the Muslim world of antiquity, when it formed one of the waves of occupiers of the Jewish kingdom of Judea after it was conquered and the majority of Jews were ethically cleansed from the land.
In the recent riots, thuggish elements were rightly blamed for inciting public rage and violence against Muslim immigrants through falsehoods promoted on social media — untruths such as that the attacker who murdered the Southport children was a Muslim asylum-seeker and had even been on a security watchlist. This was totally untrue. The resulting riots, ignited by these incendiary falsehoods, have led to calls for draconian sanctions against “incitement” and “disinformation” on social media — which obviously threatens a wholly illiberal crackdown on any opinions that go against the prevailing liberal consensus.
Yet other, regular incitement on the basis of falsehoods passes without any criticism from these same liberal quarters. The narrative promoted by the entire liberal establishment from the prime minister downwards and parroted by much of the media is that the counter-protesters who have taken to the streets against the “far right” rioters are “anti-racists”.
It is beyond doubt that thugs involved in those riots attacked Muslims and mosques, and even more appallingly tried to burn down an immigration centre with asylum-seekers inside it. Those crimes need to be punished with the full force of the law.
But others in those disturbances were pursuing a very different agenda. Muslims took to the streets brandishing Palestinian flags and screaming for the destruction of Israel. Just as there were lynch-mobs threatening violence against Muslims, there were also Muslim lynch-mobs roaming the streets looking for “far right” white men to attack. Yet in Stoke-on-Trent, the police astoundingly responded to a Muslim mob carrying weapons not by arresting them for seeking violence but by asking them meekly to discard their weapons at the local mosque.
These Muslim mobs have been grotesquely represented as “anti-racist” protesters or condoned as necessary for Muslim defence. Since the Palestinian flag carried by many of these “counter-protesters” and the slogans they scream represent a cause that aims not only to destroy Israel but to write the Jewish people out of their own history, they symbolise not “anti-racism” but jihadi Islam, colonialism, Jew-hatred and ethnic cleansing. They reveal an agenda that has nothing to do with the defence of an ethnic minority and everything to do with aggression towards another one.
Yet astoundingly, so-called “progressives” ignore, deny and sanitise all this, even when it unfolds in front of their eyes. On Sky News, the journalist Becky Johnson had to abruptly end a live broadcast when men in balaclavas approached her screaming “Free Palestine” and slashing the tyres of a Sky van. Yet Jess Phillips, the government minister for “safeguarding and violence against women and girls”, excused these thugs “because it has been spread that racists were coming to attack them”.
The prime minister, Sir Keir Starmer, should have said that no violence or intimidation by any community is acceptable and that all will be held to account regardless of ethnicity. But he didn’t do that. He said instead that he would defend the Muslim community from attack, and he spoke only of “right-wing” thuggery. And his government is now under pressure to crack down on “Islamophobia” — thus potentially criminalising articles like this one.
This precisely embodies the double standards which have so badly upset so many people but which are obdurately denied by both government and police.
As several commentators have pointed out, many demonstrators in these recent riots were neither thugs nor the “far right”. They were just ordinary people who wanted to register a peaceful protest against mass uncontrolled immigration and what they perceived to be a double standard in policing and the excusing or denial of Muslim misdeeds.
Examples of this double standard include the response to Islamist terrorist attacks which denies they have anything to do with Islam and which, after such attacks, prioritises defence of the Muslim community against “Islamophobia;” the classification of any criticism of Islam or the Muslim community as “Islamophobia;” the two decades of official denial of Muslim rape and pimping “grooming gangs” — offences which still continue; the apparent official indifference towards outrages such as the death threats against the Batley grammar school teacher who showed his class on free speech the images of Mohammed that precipitated jihadi murder around the world and who remains in hiding for his life as a result; the Manchester Airport incident in which a police officer caused justifiable outrage by kicking a prone Muslim in the head but where video footage emerged after almost 24 hours of the unprovoked and vicious attacks on the police by him and his family that preceded this; or the fact that the Home Secretary, Yvette Cooper, struck a far more conciliatory tone over the riots by Romanies and other minorities in Harehills, Leeds after the removal of children for their own safety from a Roma family than the vindictive outrage she expressed over the “far right” white riots.
Moreover, as Britain’s Jewish defence organisation the Community Security Trust notes in a new report, there has been a 41 per cent increase in assaults on Jews between January and June this year. The ethnicity of offenders was recorded in under a third of cases, of whom 44 per cent were white, 30 per cent Arab or North African, 14 per cent South Asian and 12 per cent black. These percentages far outweigh the proportion of Arab, Asian or black people in Britain at 0.5 per cent, nine per cent and 3.7 per cent respectively.
The government’s one-eyed, ruthlessly anti-white response to the riots, ignoring or excusing Muslim or other ethnic minority aggression as well as promoting falsehood-driven, exterminatory hostility to Israel, suggests that tragically Britain is now sealing its fate as a state whose moral bankruptcy signals its eventual disintegration.
