Londonistan
Page 19
So now it’s open season. In the House of Lords, a meeting was told that the Jews control the British media. One peer told another: “Well, we’ve finished off Saddam. Now your lot are next.”52 A fashionable poet, Tom Paulin, called for the Israeli settlers to be shot. For this incitement to mass murder, he continued to be lionized by the BBC. The Independent published a cartoon depicting a monstrous Ariel Sharon biting the head off a Palestinian baby . For this, the cartoonist received first prize in a prestigious national cartoonists’ competition. At one point, the Sun newspaper became so alarmed at the firestorm of anti-Israel and anti-Jewish hatred blazing through British society that it felt the need to publish a full-page leading article telling its readers: “The Jewish faith is not an evil religion.”53
While those who seek to defend Israel are pilloried, those who seek to prevent Israel from defending itself against mass murder are turned into heroes. Thus fashionable London purred over the production in 2005 of the Cantata for Rachel Corrie, an opera celebrating the International Solidarity Movement activist who was killed by an Israeli military bulldozer as she tried to prevent the Israel Defense Forces from demolishing houses in Rafah where Palestinians were suspected of smuggling weapons into Gaza.
In Britain, the notion of Jewish victimhood has now been all but expunged. In its place has come “Islamophobia.” While the Jews are defamed as Nazis, the Palestinians are considered to be the “new Jews.” Thus have the Islamists captured the citadels of thought at the heart of the Western alliance.
· CHAPTER EIGHT·
ON THEIR KNEES BEFORE TERROR
On the Sunday after the London bombings, the parish priest of the church that stands a few yards away from where the number 30 bus was blown up in Russell Square delivered a sermon in which, having urged his congregation to rejoice in the capital’s rich diversity of cultures, traditions, ethnic groups and faiths, he added: “There is one small practical thing that we can all do. We can name the people who did these things as criminals or terrorists. We must not name them as Muslims.”1
When a memorial service for the victims of the London bombings was being planned for St. Paul’s Cathedral, church leaders wanted to invite the families of the bombers. Two senior bishops believed that this would “acknowledge their own loss and send a powerful message of reconciliation to the Muslim community.” Jack Nicholls, bishop of Sheffield, said: “We have to look forward, not back, forward to a society in which Muslims and Christians live together amicably in an integrated community.”2
After relatives of the murdered victims expressed their outrage at this suggestion, the government declined to accept it. The reaction of these churchmen was typical. The first instinct of many British clerics was to empathize and agonize not with the victims of the atrocity but with the community of the faith in whose name it had been committed—and to deny that religion had had anything to do with it at all.
Those who might have thought the Church of England would hold the line as the last redoubt against both the attack upon the West from Islamism and the attack upon its values from within—which has so weakened its defenses against the onslaught from without—are in for a shock. Far from defending the nation at the heart of whose identity and values its own doctrines lie, the Church of England—Britain’s established church—has internalized the hatred of the West that defines the shared universe of radical Islamism and the revolutionary left. At a clergy gathering on 9/11, as clerics watched the horror unfold on a large TV screen, one turned to another and said: “I hope Bush doesn’t retaliate. The West has brought this judgment on itself.”3 The Church of England is on its knees before terror.
In America, the churches have been in the forefront of the defense of Western values. Some of the strongest support for Israel comes from evangelical Christians. In Britain, by contrast, the Church of England has been in the forefront of the retreat from the Judeo-Christian heritage. At every stage it has sought to appease the forces of secularism, accommodating itself to family breakdown, seeking to be nonjudgmental and embracing multiculturalism.
Presented with a society that has lost its moral compass and descended into the nihilism of moral relativism, the Church has feebly followed suit. The prevailing view, as one bishop observed, is that “there is no one truth, and we all have to respect each other’s truths.”4 A church that can no longer distinguish the truth from a lie no longer believes that its own message is true.
Peter Mullen, rector of St. Michael’s Cornhill in London, has written in despair of his church’s “mania for self-destruction.” The majestic Book of Common Prayer and the Authorised Version of the Bible, he wrote, had been replaced by evasive, sentimentalized and vacuous texts that sounded as if they had been “written by a committee made up of Tony Blair, Karl Marx and Noddy.”5
How has this happened at the heart of the Anglican Communion? As the former archbishop of Canterbury, Lord Carey, puts it: “Britain’s unthinking secularism is the context for the Church’s attitudes, shapeless form and its lack of any underpinning values.”6 During the 1960s, the view expressed by radical theologians that traditional belief was no longer possible in a secular age was absorbed by the Church of England as a fact that could not be challenged. This was because, unlike the American churches where evangelical Christians are in the majority, the Church of England is dominated by liberals who control its bureaucracy and its thinking process. In addition, because it is the established church of the nation it is governed by the belief that it has to be—literally—a broad church embracing everyone. Such a drive to be consensual means that it tends to go with the flow, even when that flow is in the direction of religious, moral and social collapse.
The outcome for the Church has been that faith in God and belief in the fundamental doctrines of Christianity have been replaced by worship of social liberalism. The Church stopped trying to save people’s souls and started trying instead to change society. It signed up to the prevailing doctrine of the progressive class that the world’s troubles were caused by poverty, oppression and discrimination. Miracles were replaced by Marx. Accordingly, it soaked up the radical message coming out of the World Council of Churches, under the influence of liberation theology, that the problems of the poor peoples of the south were social and economic, and emanated from the capitalist West and America in particular. At home, absorbing the prevailing utilitarianism which preached the creed of lifestyle choice, the Church came to believe that it too was in the business of delivering the greatest happiness to the greatest number. So it went with the flow of permissiveness, supporting the liberalization of abortion, homosexuality and divorce. And as post-moral Britain demanded that ever more constraints be knocked away, the Church was forced further and further into hollowing out its own identity.
As it renounced its own culture, it embraced others, while never ceasing to grovel for its onetime sin of believing in itself. As secular society denounced the crimes of British cultural and political imperialism, so the Church of England abased itself for its own crime of religious imperialism. The archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Rowan Williams, apologized for bringing Christianity to the world. Addressing the Anglican conference in Cairo in 2005, he said that the Church had taken “cultural captives” by exporting hymns and liturgies to remote parts of the world.7 The fact that Christianity had brought civilization to these remote parts of the world, for the very good reason that it was superior to traditional practices in those parts, was not acknowledged. For the implicit assumption was that Christian values are trumped by the belief that everyone’s culture is of equal value and so no one has the right to overlay any other. That of course leads directly to the view (not stated by the Church) that polygamy, female circumcision or the stoning of adulterers must be regarded as of equal merit to the concept of human dignity at the heart of Christianity. It took a black Ugandan cleric, Dr. John Sentamu, when he was enthroned as archbishop of York in 2005, to scorn publicly this white postcolonial and post-missionary guilt by denouncing multiculturalism, defending the B
ritish Empire and praising the English culture it spread around the world.8
One of the most striking features of the Church’s instinct for self-immolation is that it abases itself particularly towards those ideologies that are out to destroy it, notably secularism and radical Islamism. As it progressively lost its way, it developed an obsessive enthusiasm for interfaith dialogue. While few would decry the importance of forging links between faiths to create better understanding, the interfaith industry acts as a positive bar to understanding by dangerously sanitizing differences that can explode into aggression and violence. This is because interfaith work has become an end in itself, skating over the really difficult areas of hostility or hatred between faiths just to keep everyone on board and ensure that the dialogue continues.9 As a result, the message coming out of these interfaith groups is that the Church has no real problem with either Islam or Judaism, and that there is no real difference between the Church’s relationship with Judaism and its relationship with Islam. After all, the argument goes, all three faiths are the children of Abraham.
This has managed to obscure two absolutely fundamental problems for the Church. The first is that the dominant contemporary political force within Islam is an ideology that seeks to destroy Christianity and its values. The second is that, because the Church has failed to resolve its deeply ambiguous and conflict-laden attitude towards the Jews, it cannot recognize the threat posed by Islamism to the Jews and beyond them to the free world. Instead, it has allowed itself to absorb much of the Islamist and Arab narrative of hostility to Israel and the Jews, thus positioning itself as an unwitting ally of those who would destroy Christianity itself.
The result is an astounding silence by the Church about the persecution by Muslims of millions of Christians around the world. Churches are being burned down and Christians terrorized and killed by Muslims in Sudan, Congo, Egypt, Indonesia, Pakistan, Nigeria, Lebanon, Somalia, the Philippines and elsewhere. Yet in the face of this global persecution of its followers, the church that represents them is almost totally silent. It has abandoned its own flock and sucked up to their persecutors instead. When it does tiptoe into the subject—as Dr. Williams did in an article in December 2005 about the burning of churches and Bibles in the Punjab10—it is done in such a limp and oblique way as to make a bad situation even worse.
One churchman who has spoken out about the way Islam treats Christians is the former archbishop of Canterbury, Lord Carey. He says the Church is overly apologetic to Islam for a number of reasons, including fear that any protest might make the situation of Christians in such countries even worse. In 2004, Lord Carey made a speech in Rome that caused a stir. He said that although the vast majority of Muslims were “honourable and good people who hate violence,” Islam stood in opposition to “practically every other world religion—to Judaism in the Middle East; to Christianity in the West, in Nigeria, and in the Middle East; to Hinduism in India; to Buddhism, especially since the destruction of the Temples in Afghanistan.”11
What was particularly striking was this passage: “Sadly, apart from a few courageous examples, very few Muslim leaders condemn, clearly and unconditionally, the evil of suicide bombers who kill innocent people. We need to hear outright condemnation of theologies that state that suicide bombers are ‘martyrs’ and enter a martyrs’ reward. We need to hear Muslims expressing their outrage and condemning such evil.”12
This was notable because no other church leader in Britain had dared criticize this most glaring omission. As a result, Lord Carey found himself criticized—from within his own church. “The following week I went to Leicester and the canon of Leicester Cathedral told me that I had done a great deal of damage because I had rattled the cage,” he said.13
The essential problem that Lord Carey had laid his finger on was that Muslims had failed to acknowledge that the problem lay in their religion. Unlike other church leaders, he saw very clearly that it was not enough for them to say how much they deplored violence if at the same time they were denying its nature as an expression of religious fanaticism rooted in Islamic theology. “What appalled me about the reaction was the way they distanced themselves from the essential problem,” he said. “They said the problem was that this was coming from ‘extremists.’ They didn’t seem to see there was a link between themselves and these people: they were ‘not real Muslims’ at all. So they pushed the problem away to safeguard the heart of Islam, without realizing that the theological issue is what drives fanatics. In the long history of Christian or Jewish martyrdom, there wasn’t one person who killed another to be a martyr. But here was a theology of Muslim martyrdom where you kill innocent people and go to heaven and God will bless a terrible act like that. I have said to Muslims, ‘You’ve got to condemn it’ and they say ‘I have condemned it.’ But they don’t condemn the theology behind it.”14
It is perhaps no surprise that Lord Carey, an evangelical with a very strong belief in the truth of Scripture, takes such a clear moral view. In stark contrast, the current archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Williams, has responded to Islamist terrorism with repeated examples of moral equivalence and appeasement. In Writing in the Dust, a meditation he wrote after 9/11 when he was still archbishop of Wales, he wrote of the West: “. . . we have something of the freedom to consider whether or not we turn to violence and so, in virtue of that very fact, are rather different from those who experience their world as leaving them no other option.”15
So according to this, Islamists were driven to mass murder because they had “no other option.” He also observed of the Palestinian/Israeli deadlock that “both sides know what it is to be faced with regular terror” and that “the Muslim world is now experiencing—as it has for some time, but now with so much more intensity—that ‘conscription’ into someone else’s story that once characterized the Church’s attitude to Jews.”16
Dr. Williams’s prose style is famously opaque. But the man who was shortly to become the leader of the Anglican Communion appeared to be saying that Israeli self-defense against terror was morally equivalent to that terror, that attitudes to Muslims in the wake of 9/11 were morally equivalent to the Church’s persecution of the Jews, and that 9/11 had happened because its perpetrators couldn’t help themselves.
His remarks after he became the archbishop of Canterbury continued in the same vein. At the memorial service for fallen British soldiers after the defeat of Saddam Hussein, he used his sermon to attack the prime minister for the war, with the implication that all killing was wrong regardless of factors such as aggression, motivation or responsibility.17 In a subsequent lecture to the Royal Institute for International Affairs, he effectively said that a state had no right to seek to defend itself by military means if other countries were opposed to such a course of action.18 And he chose one of the major seats of Islamic learning, Al-Azhar University in Cairo, to mark the anniversary of 9/11 in 2004 by saying that people should not take the action that might be necessary to prevent themselves and others from being murdered:We may rightly want to defend ourselves and one another—our people, our families, the weak and vulnerable among us. But we are not forced to act in revengeful ways, holding up a mirror to the terrible acts done to us. If we do act in the same way as our enemies, we imprison ourselves in their anger, their evil. And we fail to show our belief in the living God who always requires of us justice and goodness. So whenever a Muslim, a Christian or a Jew refuses to act in violent revenge, creating terror and threatening or killing the innocent, that person bears witness to the true God. They have stepped outside the way the faithless world thinks. A person without faith, hope and love may say, If I do not use indiscriminate violence and terror, there is no safety for me. The believer says, My safety is with God, whose justice can never be defeated. If I defend myself, I seek to do so only in a way that honours God and God’s image in others, and that does not offend against God’s justice. To seek to find reconciliation, to refuse revenge and the killing of the innocent, this is a form of adoration towards
the One Living and Almighty God.19
This was a quite remarkable doctrine. Ostensibly evenhanded, it actually represented a startling moral inversion and a rubric against all military self-defense. Christians and Jews do not use “indiscriminate violence and terror” against Muslims; it is Muslims who are indiscriminately murdering Christians and Jews. Attacks on Muslims by Jews, Christians or others who have themselves been attacked are conducted solely in self-defense and in an attempt to prevent further acts of mass murder. To equate such acts of self-defense with truly indiscriminate acts of barbarism is moral illiteracy. Condemning self-defense or the defense of others against murder as “revenge” or “indiscriminate violence and terror” condemns the innocent to death in the guise of godliness. If followed, such guidance would turn Christianity into the handmaiden of evil. It implies that if the Nazi Holocaust were to happen again, the Church would once again stand aside. In the current war being waged against the West, the head of the Anglican Church is telling it to turn the other cheek.
Such a near-pacifist attitude—despite many pious allusions to “just war” theory—is reflected in the Church’s visceral hostility to the war in Iraq. This opposition also draws upon a deep well of anti-Americanism among the clerics—not least because of their distaste, droll as this may seem, for the “Christian fundamentalists” supporting President Bush and their loathing of the “Christian right.” For the English clerics believe that the Christian left is a benchmark of virtue that brooks no alternative, and that belief in Biblical truth is a psychological flaw.
In the Church’s General Synod, only two people spoke in favor of the war in Iraq.20 This reflected not merely an opposition to the war itself, but a view that the best way of dealing with Islamism was to appease it. A report by the Church’s House of Bishops argued that it was important to win Muslim hearts and minds, and that to do so required “an understanding of what is being thought and felt in the Islamic world, together with active steps to address legitimate concerns, such as the ongoing Middle East conflict.” Although it hastily denied that such an approach amounted to appeasement, it went on: “A political settlement that meets some of the terrorist concerns, while rejecting others, can help in undercutting the terrorists by reducing the pool of political support.”21