The former head of the Anglican Church in Jerusalem, who wanted to divest Israel of her assests is now himself being accused of alleged fraud by his own diocese

In the meantime, the former Anglican Bishop of Jerusalem, Riah, who caused no end of trouble for Jewish-Christian relations worldwide, and sucessfully encouraged the Feburary 2006 Anglican Synod to vote in favour of divesting from Israel:

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2-2028504,00.html

has now been making trouble for his successor, Bishop Suheil:

http://www.religiousintelligence.com/news/?NewsID=1521

I met the current Anglican Bishop of Jerusalem, Suheil, last summer at St. George's Anglican Cathedral, Jerusalem. He chatted with me for an hour and was graciousness itself.

http://irenelancaster.typepad.com/my_weblog/2007/05/i_am_invited_to.html

I gave a couple of Biblical Hebrew lessons to members of his staff and later learned how excited they were that Bishop Suheil had also organised lessons in Modern Hebrew for them:

I've also visited Nazareth and heard what Anglican clergy there had to say about Bishop Riah. I was also shown the eye-sore which is the school named after the former Anglican Bishop and which seems to be the centre of the scandal he's got himself into.

Bishop Riah hates the Hebrew Bible and thinks that Jews are irrelevant to the Church of England, to Jesus, and to the State of Israel. In fact, he seems to think that we're basically the devil incarnate:

http://www.usislam.org/debate/bishopriah.htm

Bishop Suheil is quiet, thoughtful and gracious, and obviously thinks that Hebrew of both the Biblical and modern variety have their place. He has also prayed for the peace of all the citizens of Israel and the surrounding areas:

http://www.episcopalchurch.org/81808_84974_ENG_HTM.htm

Most important, he backed Lambeth Palace and the two Chief Rabbis of Israel in their establishing of the Commission of Anglican and Jewish leaders, and recently attended one of their meetings in Jerusalem:

http://www.churchtimes.co.uk/content.asp?id=43222

Many in Israel think that Bishop Suheil is best thing to have happened to the local Church of England in a very very long time and represents a much needed breath of fresh air.

On a karmic level, it's somewhat ironic to see that the same Bishop Riah who advocated, and I quote: 'morally responsible investment' (i.e. denuding Jewish Israel of its assests), is now himself the subject of 'litigation brought by the diocese ... for fraud'.

Quite quite delicious!!

Can't wait to see what Ruth Gledhill of The Times makes of this one!

http://timescolumns.typepad.com/gledhill/2006/02/caterpillar_cri.html

And sure enough, Ruth has now blogged on the story here:

http://timescolumns.typepad.com/gledhill/2008/01/call-for-bishop.html

Comments

[Denis MacEoin]

Irene, thank you for providing a link to the interview with Riah (you don't happen to know with whom, do you?). On the basis of those statements, I cannot understand why this monstrous individual can call himself a Christian, let alone a bishop. His obvious siding with terrorism alone strikes me as sufficient reason to defrock him. Or don't morals cpount any more within the Anglican church. When paedophile priests are brought to book for their acvts, why can a man who turns a blind eye to terrorism be allowed to walk around proclaiming he is the true Israel. As for his astonishingly naive, 'tickle me, then kill me' attitude to Islam, I am speechless. Can't Williams act the man and get rid of him?

[Paolo]

Denis MacEoin, you are mistaking the Anglican Communion with the Roman Catholic Communion (the one headed by the guy in Rome, Italy), and both with a modern business company. You cannot sack a bishop: bishops are the heads of their respective local churches and are, collectively, the successors of the Apostles. In the Anglican Church, there is no mechanism for removing even the guiltiest of criminal bishops. In the Catholic Church, only the Pope, as successor of Peter, head of the Apostles, has the power to do so, and even so, he only does so in absolutely desperate circumstances. The Pope has his own Jerusalem nightmare, the crazed Latin Patriarch Michel Sabbah, a regrettable adjunct of the Palestinian Authority who has not said a word about the destruction of Palestinian Christianity while he ranted and raved against Israel. I think that by now Rome has become convinced that the experiment with making a local man Patriarch has comprehensively failed, and that the next Patriarch is likely to be an Italian or at any rate not an Arab.