Londonistan

by Melanie Phillips

  This fusion of ancient theological prejudice and modern politics has found echoes in Britain, as illustrated by the revised version of Whose Promised Land? by the highly influential Anglican thinker Colin Chapman. Though Chapman carefully condemns antisemitism and says the Christians have not superseded the Jews, his book is a poisonous travesty that uses theology to delegitimize Israel. Although the Jews are still in a special relationship with God, he says, their only salvation is through Christ when they will be “grafted back” onto their own olive tree. Christians have come to share the Jews’ privileges; through Christ, the division between Jews and Christians has broken down and they have become as one new man. These “new men” don’t believe it is important to have a Jewish state. In his conclusion, Chapman explicitly delegitimizes Israel on theological grounds:When seen in the context of the whole Bible, however, both Old and New Testaments, the promise of the land to Abraham and his descendants does not give anyone a divine right to possess or to live in the land for all time because the coming of the kingdom of God through Jesus the messiah has transformed and reinterpreted all the promises and prophecies in the Old Testament. . . . Jesus the messiah who lived, died and was raised from death in the land has opened the kingdom of God to people of all races, making all who follow him into one new humanity.36

  This is replacement theology masquerading as a dispassionate analysis of the tragedy of Israel and the Palestinians. Indeed, the very premise of the book is suspect. It investigates the claim to the land based on Biblical exegesis. But the Jews’ claim to Israel was not based on the Bible. Certainly, the dream of Zion is integral to Jewish attachment and religious focus, and a minority of Jews believe in the literal truth of prophecy. But that wasn’t why Israel was founded. Zionism was never a religious movement. Israel was established because after the Holocaust, the world finally decided to enact the undertaking made thirty years previously to re-establish the Jews in their ancient homeland.

  Chapman’s version of replacement theology is based on the premise that the existence of Israel has to be justified. It does not. To single out Israel’s existence in this way is without precedent in the world and is itself evidence of prejudice. Moreover, replacement theology is not just a form of anti-Zionism; it directly attacks Jewish religion, history and identity.

  At the same time, Chapman’s history grossly downplays the extent of Arab violence against Jews in the decades of Jewish immigration to Palestine before the State of Israel was created. His conclusion that Zionism was an innate deception and that violence was always implicit is a baseless slur, as is the confusion of Jewish self-determination with racism. Not surprisingly, this elides seamlessly into the anti-Jewish trope of Jewish power over America, repeating the absurd claim that no U.S. president could win without Jewish votes. Since American Jews are overwhelmingly Democrats, the victory of Republican presidents must remain, on this theory, a complete mystery.

  According to Canon Andrew White, replacement theology is dominant in the Church of England and present in almost every church, fueling the venom against Israel. Lord Carey agrees that replacement theology is the most important driver behind the Church’s hatred of Israel.37

  David Ison, the canon of Exeter Cathedral, took a party of pilgrims to the Holy Land in 2000 at the start of the intifada. They had a Palestinian guide, visited only Christian sites in Arab East Jerusalem and the West Bank, and talked to virtually no Jews. “The Old Testament is a horrifying picture of genocide committed in God’s name,” he said. “And genocide is now being waged in a long, slow way by Zionists against the Palestinians.” Asked what he made of Yasser Arafat’s rejection of the offers presented by Israel at Camp David and Tabah, Ison said he knew nothing about it. Indeed, he said, he knew nothing about Israel beyond what he had read in a book by an advocate of replacement theology, with which he agreed, and what he had been told by the Palestinians on the pilgrimage.38

  The bishop of Guildford, Dr. John Gladwyn, who said he particularly admired Bishop Riah and Naim Ateek, shared the view that the Jews have no particular claim to the promised land. Christianity and Islam, he said, could lay equal claim. And although he said Israel’s existence was a reality that must be accepted, his ideal was very different. A separate Palestinian state would be merely a “first step.” “Ultimately, one shared land is the vision one would want to pursue, although it’s unlikely this will come about.”39

  Stephen Sizer, the vicar of Christ Church, Virginia Water, is a leading crusader against Christian Zionism. He believes that God’s promises to the Jews have been inherited by Christianity, including the land of Israel. He has acknowledged that Israel has the right to exist, since it was established by a United Nations resolution. But he has also said it is “fundamentally an apartheid state because it is based on race” and “even worse than South Africa” (this despite the fact that Israeli Arabs have the vote, they are members of the Knesset and one is even a Supreme Court judge).

  Asked whether Israel’s existence could be justified, Sizer replied that South African apartheid had been “brought to an end internally by the rising up of the people.” So, despite saying he supported Israel’s existence, he appeared to be suggesting that the Jewish state should be singled out for a fate imposed on no other democracy properly constituted under international law. But perhaps this was not surprising, given his attitude towards Jews. “The covenant between Jews and God,” he stated, “was conditional on their respect for human rights. The reason they were expelled from the land was that they were more interested in money and power and treated the poor and aliens with contempt.” Today’s Jews, it appeared, were no better. “In the United States, politicians dare not criticize Israel because half the funding for both the Democrats and the Republicans comes from Jewish sources.”40

  In a lecture in 2001, Canon Andrew White observed that Palestinian politics and Christian theology had become inextricably intertwined. The Palestinians were viewed as oppressed and the Church had to fight their oppressor. “Who is their oppressor? The State of Israel. Who is Israel? The Jews. It is they therefore who must be put under pressure so that the oppressed may one day be set free to enter their ‘Promised Land’ which is being denied to them.”41

  The essential problem, he observed, was the lack of will in the Church to face the difference between Judaism and Islam. “They don’t want to recognize that their faith comes from Judaism,” he said. “They talk instead of the ‘children of Abraham’ as if we are all in it together. The reality is, however, that although Islam and Judaism have a lot in common in terms of customs, they are as far apart as Christianity is from heathenism.”42

  The revival of replacement theology, the ancient theological prejudice against the Jews, has achieved two results. The first is that the Church has lent its weight to the delegitimization of Israel. The second is that this conflation of revisionist Christian theology with an Arab agenda has delivered a victory to the Islamists. A view which holds that the enemies of civilization are not the Islamists but the Jews transfers righteous opposition from those who threaten the free world to their victims. This feeds into and is in turn fed by the Church’s perverse desire at home to surrender to those who wish to obliterate Christianity from the British public sphere. As Lord Carey observed:The net victors in all this are the Muslims. Through all that has happened they have positioned themselves very well through violence to gain a greater niche in British society. Their voice has been heard. People are reading the Koran and taking an interest, so they stand to gain a great deal. Muslim leaders have done a very successful job in separating the tenets of Islam from the extremists. So there’s been a reversal: instead of people saying, “I abhor an ideology which does such terrible things,” they say, “of course these people were not doing it in the name of Islam, which is a tolerant and benign faith.”43

  The net losers in this process are the Church, steadfastly immolating itself at the shrine of interfaith vacuities, and the nation it has defined but whose spiritual light is
now all but extinguished.

  · CHAPTER NINE ·

  THE APPEASEMENT OF CLERICAL FASCISM

  After the London bombings in July 2005, Tony Blair appeared to have understood just what Britain was facing. He spoke of the need to confront a strain of Islam that was an “evil ideology.” “It cannot be beaten except by confronting it, symptoms and causes, head-on, without compromise and without delusion,” he declared.1 Crucially, he recognized that the ideological component of the struggle with radical Islamism was as important as the military and operational aspects—if not even more so. He said he would close mosques that fomented hatred, vet foreign imams and outlaw extremist groups such as Hizb ut-Tahrir and al-Muhajiroun that are known to be ideological organizations rather than ones with a direct connection to terrorism.

  By setting the ideology of radical Islamism firmly in his sights, the prime minister appeared to have got the point. But it was not always so. In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, he had declared after meeting a group of Muslim community leaders: “What happened in America was not the work of Islamic terrorists, it was not the work of Muslim terrorists. It was the work of terrorists, pure and simple.”2

  Following the American atrocities, the British government had bent over backwards to avoid saying that they had anything to do with Islam at all. It was all to do instead with grievances, discrimination and “Islamophobia.” A former Foreign Office minister, Denis MacShane, has said that he tried to push for a more hard-line approach but was rebuffed because of concerns that Muslims would be offended. “My generation of Labour MPs don’t want to indulge in anything that smacks of Muslim typecasting or hostility,” he said; “. . . it’s fair to say we failed to work out an adequate political response to Islamist politics in the UK.”3

  Despite the apparent change in Tony Blair’s attitude, however, neither the rest of his government nor the wider British establishment seems yet to have worked out an adequate political response to Islamism even after the London bombings; all are still paralyzed by the terror of Muslim hostility. According to a Guardian poll carried out a month after the London attacks, almost three-quarters of the public believed that it was right to give up civil liberties to improve security.4 Nevertheless, opinion in political, judicial and intellectual circles was very different. Indeed, Mr. Blair found that in his attempt to beef up the country’s security he was all but outnumbered.

  After the bombings, he issued a blunt warning to the country’s judges. “The independence of the judiciary is a principle of our democracy and we have to uphold it but . . . it is important that we do protect ourselves,” he said. “Let no one be in any doubt, the rules of the game are changing.”5 With that one statement, he set the British government on a collision course with the country’s judiciary. He was reflecting a widespread feeling that one of the main reasons why Britain had laid itself wide open to terrorism was that the courts had made it impossible for it to defend itself.

  A harsh spotlight was suddenly being shone on the culture of human rights and the role played by the judiciary in enforcing it, apparently privileging the rights of extremists over the right to life and limb of everyone else. For the first time, the prime minister floated the possibility of amending Britain’s Human Rights Act—the measure that his own government had introduced with enormous fanfare. It was Mr. Blair who, by this measure, had given the judges a far more powerful role in British public life. Now he was trying to rein them in, threatening “a lot of battles” with the courts if they used human rights grounds to block his new resolve to deport extremists.

  But the judges made it clear that they were not going to cooperate. Lord Ackner, a retired law lord, said: “The judiciary will oppose attempts to undermine its independence. These suggestions that we [politicians and judges] are all a team and should pull together is such rubbish that the judiciary will ignore it.”6

  The judges were part of a widespread establishment mood that did not think the case had been made for encroaching upon Britain’s jealously protected liberties. There was deep hostility to the American “war on terror,” particularly over detention without trial in Guantanamo Bay, and fury that the prime minister had yoked Britain to President Bush’s coattails; skepticism that the terrorist threat to Britain was as great as Blair said it was, simply because it was Blair who was saying it; disbelief that the threat from al-Qaeda was any different from previous terrorist threats from the IRA; suspicion of police incompetence, especially after the debacle at Stockwell Tube station in south London shortly after the bombings, when an innocent Brazilian electrician was shot dead by the police who thought he was a suicide bomber; and a deep fear of upsetting British Muslims and provoking a backlash against them.

  The result was that Blair’s antiterrorism measures became mired in a welter of confusion and recrimination. One proposal, to make it an offense to “glorify terrorism,” provoked a struggle between both houses of Parliament as the government tried to fight off attempts to remove it by an alliance of liberals and the Conservative party.7 Another proposal, to shut down extremist mosques, was withdrawn after objections by the police that this would damage relations with the Muslim community. Yet another, to require imams to be tested on their knowledge of Britishness, was shelved (to the irritation, in fact, of the Muslim Council of Britain).8

  The most controversy, however, was aroused over a proposal to detain terrorist suspects for ninety days without charge to allow the police time to build up a case against them. In an unusually powerful document, the Anti-Terrorist Branch of the Metropolitan Police spelled out why this was necessary. The new terrorist threat to inflict mass civilian casualties, it said, posed an unprecedented dilemma. The police could no longer afford to build up the evidence necessary to support legal charges because the risk to the public was simply too great. They therefore had to arrest suspects before they had enough evidence that would stand up in court. Since al-Qaeda was a global network requiring police inquiries in many jurisdictions and with possibly dozens of computers and hundreds of hard drives to analyze, the two-week detention deadline under existing antiterror laws was clearly hopelessly inadequate. They needed ninety days instead.9

  But Parliament wasn’t having any of it. Instead, it was prepared to increase the detention period by only two weeks. In November 2005, the government was defeated and the ninety days maximum was reduced to four weeks.

  The fight over these proposals, however—in which the government was pitched against Parliament, the Conservative opposition, the media, the human rights industry and the rest of the intelligentsia—served to obscure a more fundamental and dangerous problem. The government had understood from the police and security service that existing laws were inadequate to deal with the terrorism the country was now facing. But the fact that they grasped that there was an entirely new kind of terrorist threat did not mean they understood what lay behind it.

  They knew well enough that it involved suicide bombing and the deliberate mass targeting of civilians and that it was intended to involve weapons of mass destruction. But with the exception of the prime minister and a handful of others, they continued to go to great lengths to deny its most obvious characteristic: that it was rooted in a religious ideology. They believed instead that it was merely the violent expression of various grievances by a small handful of unrepresentative extremists. They thought therefore that they could buy it off. They imagined that by doing so they would damp down Muslim rage. And, within the Labour party, they thought it would buy them Muslim votes.

  Labour was traditionally the party that appealed most to new immigrants, and Britain’s Muslims were no exception. Many Labour MPs, including the foreign secretary, Jack Straw, found themselves representing constituencies with significant Muslim populations. This had a number of consequences, one of which was that some Labour politicians allowed Pakistani politics to influence British politics. On the day of the 2005 British general election, Faisal Bodi wrote in the Guardian:Labour politicians have cultivated the “community
leader”, the modern-day equivalent of the village chief, whose unique selling point is that he can bring in the vote of the particular ethnic sub-category he belongs to, be it by fair means or rigged postal votes. Jack Straw’s Blackburn constituency typifies this type of Indian subcontinent politics. Here Adam Patel was raised to the peerage in 2000, with an unwritten brief to deliver the Indian Muslim vote. He has used his influence to insulate mosques against anti-Labour sentiments and protect his master’s 9,000 majority.10

  According to the bishop of Rochester, Dr. Michael Nazir-Ali, himself of Pakistani origin, a number of Labour MPs with large numbers of Muslim voters need the support of various Islamic leaders in Pakistan who tell their followers in Britain how to vote. He claimed that one such leader who was close to al-Qaeda, Maulana Fazlur Rahman, had been welcomed to Britain by the Foreign Office because of his great influence over certain sections of British Muslims. “I asked the government why they had allowed him in,” said Dr. Nazir-Ali, who was outraged that someone with such an extremist record should have been given red carpet treatment. “They said he had a very strong following in Britain.”11

  It might be no coincidence, therefore, that the foreign secretary was given to denouncing the West and extolling the Muslim world. In 2002, Straw blamed many of the world’s problems on the legacy of British imperialism.12 In September 2005, he told the United Nations General Assembly that Muslims had given the world mathematics and the digital age, and that only “terrorists and the preachers of hate” wanted people to believe “that Islam and the West are fundamentally different.”13

  Such Labour efforts to suck up to the Muslim community, however, were badly undermined after 9/11 when Britain supported first the war in Afghanistan and then the war in Iraq. This enraged Britain’s Muslims, who appeared inclined to support the antiwar Liberal Democrats instead. An opinion poll in 2004 showed that Labour support in the Muslim community had halved from 75 percent at the 2001 general election to 38 percent.14 In the event, the Muslim Labour vote held up pretty well at the 2005 general election, with only a few Labour scalps going to the Liberal Democrats. But what was more notable was the arrival of sectarian politics in Britain, with the emergence of Muslims voting en bloc for candidates on the basis of whether or not they were delivering a Muslim agenda.