The moral cowardice of European Christian leaders
The Pope and the Archbishop of Canterbury are accused of abandoning the defense of the Bible.
By Melanie Phillips
JNS
Aug 29, 2024
The outspoken Chief Rabbi of South Africa, Dr. Warren Goldstein, has once again given voice to crucial truths that others have shamefully ignored.
He accused both Pope Francis and the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, of being indifferent to the murder of black Christians in Africa and the terrorism threat in Europe while being “outright hostile” to Israel’s attempts to battle jihadi forces led by Iran.
“The world is locked in a civilizational battle of values, threatened by terrorism and violent jihad,” said Goldstein. “At a time when Europe’s very future hangs in the balance, its two most senior Christian leaders have abandoned their most sacred duty to protect and defend the values of the Bible. Their cowardice and lack of moral clarity threaten the free world.”
Goldstein’s blistering accusations were on the mark.
Christians in Africa have been subjected to barbaric slaughter and persecution by Islamists for decades. Two years ago, Open Doors, an organization that supports persecuted Christians, observed: “In truth, there are very few Muslim countries—or countries with large Muslim populations—where Christians can avoid intimidation, harassment or violence.”
In Jan. 2024, a report for Genocide Watch confirmed that, since 2000, 62,000 Christians in Nigeria have been murdered by Islamist groups in an ongoing attempt to exterminate Christianity. In addition, more than 32,000 moderate black Nigerian Muslims and non-faith individuals have been massacred.
According to a report in 2020 by the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom, Christians in Myanmar, China, Eritrea, India, Iran, Nigeria, North Korea, Pakistan, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Syria and Vietnam are being persecuted.
These facts were reported in June by Peter Baum for The Daily Blitz. Yet the mainstream media all but ignore these atrocities. There are no marches in Western cities to accuse these countries of facilitating crimes against humanity. There are no NGO-inspired petitions to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) to declare these countries and groups guilty of genocide.
Instead, the media and Western elites demonize Israel as the pariah of the world for defending itself against these genocidal Islamists. This unique and egregious double standard is the hallmark of classic antisemitism.
The attitude of the church leaders is even more astonishing. The hundreds of thousands of victims of this persecution are their flock. The goal of this onslaught is the wholesale destruction of the faith they lead.
Yet from Welby and the Pope have emerged little more than occasional expressions of measured concern. And even then, they usually refuse to call out what’s happening by its proper name—the Islamist war to eradicate Christianity and destroy the West.
The 10-month war against Israel by Iran and its proxies following the Oct. 7 pogrom is a crucial front in that onslaught against Western civilization. Yet as Goldstein said, the Pope and Welby have stood passively by while African Christians are “butchered by jihadi groups with direct ties to Israel’s enemies in Gaza and the West Bank.”
The jihadi ideology, he said, was also a clear and present danger to Europe. As a result of open-border policies, immigrants poured into the U.K. and across Europe, many of them “brandishing a violent jihadi ideology deeply hostile to Christianity, liberal democracy and western values.”
The result has been surging antisemitism leaving Diaspora Jews living in fear. Yet on the ideology fueling this civilizational onslaught, Welby and the Pope have been silent. Instead, they have recycled the Islamists’ propaganda that demonizes and delegitimizes Israel with lies.
Last December, the Pope described Israel’s Gaza war of self-defense against genocide as “terrorism.”
Last month, Welby endorsed the advisory opinion of the ICJ that Israel’s occupation of the “Palestinian territories” was illegal. The court’s opinion, which owed everything to politics and virtually nothing to law, was based entirely on lies and distortions.
Yet Welby commented, with a passion that’s wholly lacking when he talks about the slaughter of Christians in Africa, that Israel was guilty of “systematic discrimination”; that it was “denying the Palestinian people dignity, freedom and hope”; and that “ending the occupation is a legal and moral necessity”.
Every part of that was a falsehood. Israel is not in illegal occupation of the disputed “West Bank” areas of Judea and Samaria. On the contrary, the Jews are the only people with a legal right many times over—from the terms of the 1922 Palestine Mandate and then through international laws of self-defense and those permitting the retention of territory that is still used for belligerent purposes—to what is now Israel, the “West Bank” and Gaza.
So, why are the Pope and the archbishop given to such unholy perversity? The reason is partly psychological, partly political but mostly theological.
First, there’s the fear of antagonizing the Muslim world and, as a result, bringing about yet more persecution of Christians.
Second, there’s internalized self-flagellation corresponding to Western liberals scourging themselves for “white privilege.” Back in 2020, Welby said he was ashamed of the Anglican attitude towards black people and declared that the church was “deeply, institutionally racist.” The Pope, an acolyte of left-wing “liberation theology,” has a similarly anti-West mindset.
The deeper reason, however, is theological. That was illuminated by the sharpest challenge of all that Goldstein hurled at the Archbishop of Canterbury.
By supporting the ICJ ruling that the “West Bank” and eastern Jerusalem are “occupied territory” to which the Jewish state has no rightful claim, said Goldstein, Welby was effectively rejecting the Bible—which, in addition to theology, was a book of historical fact.
This was because, said Goldstein, the boundaries of Israel, which are delineated repeatedly throughout the Torah as the word of God, include the ancient lands of Judea and Samaria that, along with Jerusalem, also figure in other books of the Bible as the historic kingdom of Israel.
Goldstein’s main challenge, however, was not political or legal but religious. In the Bible, God’s promise to the Jews of the entire Land of Israel is an “eternal oath,” an “unconditional covenant.” For a religious believer, this must supersede everything else without limit of time.
Yet Welby’s endorsement of the ICJ ruling that Israel was in illegal occupation suggested he did not regard the word of God as eternally binding. Was Welby therefore truly a religious believer, the rabbi was asking, or did he regard God’s promise as merely a myth?
That slices straight to the heart of Welby’s unholy attitude—the profound and enduring problem that certain Christians have with Judaism itself.
Christians who are faithful to the Hebrew Scriptures love the Jews and support Israel, appreciating that Christianity derives from Judaism. Other Christians, who don’t have such respect for Hebrew Scripture, have no such love for the Jews.
To such Christians, the Jews’ implacable refusal to accept the divinity of Jesus represents an eternal reproach to the church for repudiating its spiritual parent. It sets up internal tensions over whether Christianity can actually be justified.
The core of Christian anti-Zionism is therefore the perception by some Christians that the Jews represent a permanent challenge to the Christian faith itself.
These Christians can’t acknowledge that the Muslim world presents a threat because that would mean acknowledging the Muslim victimization of the Jews. Such Christians can’t accept that the Jews are victims of religious war because the people who victimized the Jews far worse than the Muslims were the Christians, whose attempt to wipe out the Jewish challenge to Christianity resulted in centuries of mass slaughter of Jews across Europe.
And so, while today’s Islamists are murdering Christians and Jews, trying to conquer the West and posing a terrifying threat to civilization itself, European Christian leaders have decided to dump their Jewish parent and embrace their Islamist assassin.
They have abandoned the Jewish people because they have abandoned the Hebrew Bible and with it the defense of Christianity and the West.
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