It's great to be back to find England in the sun, but sad to see what is happening to the country.
Because there's been more hype on the Archbishop of Canterbury and his pro-sharia speech. In order to defend that lecture and malign everyone who's had to audacity to question it, BBC's Sunday Programme invited the husband of their boss, i.e. Paul Vallely of The Independent, to air his views. He's the guy who recently stated on the same programme that he didn't see any problem with Hamas, and has written the type of negative articles about Israel that one would expect from someone associated with The Independent.
Then making up the cuddly twosome, there was also Giles Fraser, one of Radio Four's regulars on Thought for the Day, vicar in Putney, former lecturer in philosophy at Oxford University, professed lover of that arch-antisemite, Martin Heidegger, loved by loads on the 'left'
http://www.friesian.com/rockmore.htm
and total bruiser. He's the one who promised me to my face that he'd never vote for divestment from Israel and then promptly did, plus justified doing so in the Church Times.
And he admitted in writing that when he gave a particularly crude, and potentially defamatory, account of the Pharisees on Thought for the Day that what he said hadn't been strictly accurate and had been done for effect!
It's all here on the programme:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/religion/programmes/sunday/prog_details.shtml
He featured once again on BBC I's 1.00 o'clock news today by the way, slagging off everyone who had been concerned about the Archbishop's speech as 'marginal elements'. I do wonder who he means. But then, he writes for The Guardian, so what do you expect?
But The Times got it right. In a thunderingly intelligent Leader, passed over to me by a fellow passenger (who remembered that I used to work with the churches in Manchester) on last night's flight from Israel to Manchester (and who is, incidentally, becoming so concerned about the state of affairs in Britain that he's asked me to fill him in about the job situation in Israel), The Times
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/leading_article/article3337882.ece
states that:
the Archbishop has started a needless storm,
that during his service as Archbishop, the Church of England is suffering a deeper crisis of confidence than before
and that This is precisely the wrong time for Dr Williams to be offering views at the very fringe of his role as a public figure and commentator, and which have an incendiary quality....
And this afternoon, my former neighbour in Salford, who hadn't originally realised I was back, saw me and said:
You'll never believe it, but I've cut out an article in today's Times which is an analysis of The Archbishop of Canterbury's sharia speech affair. And it features the explanation that Lambeth Palace originally gave you for why the speech is being made.
And here is the entire TIMES article, entitled:
The Intellectual Arrogance that Pervades the heart of Lambeth Palace Wisdom
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/faith/article3346339.ece
My own view, (having carefully read all Lambeth Palace pronouncements in the last five years, AS THEY APPEAR ON THEIR OWN WEBSITE, as well as the Anglican statements prepared for the summer 2007 Anglican-Jewish commission, on which I reported),
http://www.churchtimes.co.uk/content.asp?id=43222
is that the present leadership of the Church of England give the impression that their Church is merely one of many religious groups in the country. It is therefore difficult not to conclude that the present Church of England leadership does not regard itself as the governing church of the country, but as a small sect, which constantly needs defending. It appears to regard its role as that of having to battle against the secular forces of evil, against a modern-day Roman Empire, if you like, and that this explains their constant desire to appease the present-day world bully, i.e., militant Islam.
Why else, do you think, did Lambeth Palace ask me to write something nice about how Christians are treated in Syria? This despite the fact that they know that my apartment in Haifa faces Lebanon and Syria, and would be in the forefront of any missile attack from that region.
And so they use the fact of the Holocaust actually in the cause of Islam, who they seem to think is the 'new Jew', and not in the only cause which is relevant. And that cause is the future survival of the Jewish people, surrounded in their own homeland by those who try daily to destroy her, and in the diaspora by physical, intellectual and spiritual assaults on their right to live in peace as a loyal and law-abiding minority, who unlike the present C of E leadership, do not regard the State as an enemy but as the protector.
And this is why Freud knew that when the Catholic Church turned against Austrian Jews in the end, then and only then was the time to leave. His sisters perished in concentration camps.
But as far as members of the present-day Jewish community are concerned, the Archbishop's speech and its repercussions constitute yet one more nail in their coffin, and some of them realise that this speech may well cause a backlash which might curtail their hard-won freedoms to practise Jewish law in this country, if it is identified with sharia law, as the Archbishop's speech implied. For even the Dalai Lama has spoken highly of the Jews' secret of survival in diaspora:
http://www.itvs.org/jewinthelotus/exile.html
And part of that secret must surely be the practice of Jewish law in as humane a way as possible and certainly in such a way so as not to impinge on others.
Here's Ruth Gledhill of The Times on tonight's Synod support of the Archbishop:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/faith/article3351854.ece?Submitted=true
and here's Melanie Phillips' blog:
http://www.spectator.co.uk/melaniephillips/498796/the-betrayal-of-the-anglican-communion.thtml
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