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| The Archbishop of Canterbury addressing a recent synod |
European antisemitism has rarely been made clearer than it
has now by the Church of Engla As noted by Melanie
Phillips, at a recent synod, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dame Sarah
Mulally, read from a document entitled A Moment of Truth: Faith in a
Time of Genocide. It can best be described as one of the most antisemitic
pieces of propaganda ever uttered by a prominent public figure since Joseph
Goebbels served as Hitler’s propaganda minister in Nazi Germany.
On the other hand, Is it possible that she has a point? Some
of my more liberal friends would say that the truth is the truth. Even when it
isn’t flattering and spoken by your worst enemy. There is some validity to
that. I have always argued that there is nothing wrong with asking
challenging—even difficult—questions. But there is a profound difference
between asking honest questions and parroting the talking points of Israel’s
enemies, many of which are demonstrably false, taken completely out of context,
or wildly exaggerated.
Still, using that logic, let’s see just how true the
observations of the respected head of the Anglican Church are about Israel.
Maybe she’s right. Maybe we should consider what she says and change our ways
accordingly.
The following are excerpts from Melanie Phillips’s article:
The document brands Israel a “colonial, settler, and exclusionary entity” (note the term “entity”—the language of genocidal Islamists—rather than “state,” “nation,” or “country”).
It describes the Palestinian Arabs falsely as the “indigenous people of this land” (it is the Jews who are the actual indigenous people of the land).
It claims that “the genocidal war on Gaza is the continuation of the Zionist project to seize all of Palestine, emptied of its Palestinian people” (a demonstrable lie that demonizes Zionism—and therefore Judaism, whose connection with the land of Israel is existential). It also demands a boycott of dialogue with “Zionists,” which in practice means treating the overwhelming majority of Jews as pariahs.
It asserts that the Hamas atrocities of October 7, 2023, were “born out of decades of injustice, oppression and displacement since the Nakba of 1948”—that is, the Arab war of extermination launched to destroy Israel at its rebirth in the Jewish people’s ancestral homeland, now falsely recast as a Jewish war of colonial aggression.
Referring to Israel’s war of self-defense in Gaza, the document continues:
The claim of “self-defence” cannot stand. How can a coloniser defend itself against those it has colonised and expelled from their land?
It then explicitly justifies Palestinian Arab violence against Jews:
At a time when Palestinian resistance and global solidarity movements are criminalised, we reaffirm the right of all colonised peoples to resist their colonisers.
The document portrays Zionists—not only Jews but also Christian Zionists—as inherently evil, driven by violence and bloodlust. It echoes the medieval blood libels that incited the mass slaughter of Jews throughout Europe for centuries. Yet it presents accusations of antisemitism primarily as a cynical tool of political manipulation...
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