Jew Hatred Will Backfire on Its Haters (David Virtue on the Church of England)

In one country after another, Jews are being excoriated over Israel’s conduct of the war in the Middle East. Israel stands accused of genocide, of baby-killing, of deliberately starving the citizens of Gaza. October 7, 2023 — the slaughter of some 1,200 Israelis and the dragging of roughly 250 hostages into the tunnels of Gaza — is now brazenly repositioned as payback for Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians. Never mind that two million Arab citizens live inside Israel in peace and prosperity, with seats in the Knesset, judges on its Supreme Court, and doctors in every Israeli hospital. Israel alone is blamed for the devastation of Gaza, with barely a mention of Hamas, which started the war and has hidden behind Gaza’s civilians ever since.

Little is said of Hezbollah, or the Houthis, or of the evil empire of Iran, whose declared purpose is the annihilation of the Jewish state. A democratic nation no bigger than New Jersey is held responsible for all the ills of the Middle East.

Meanwhile, the pressure ratchets up on Israel to accept a two-state solution that would inevitably see more rockets raining down on the small democratic state.

Now the Church of England has joined the pile-on, condemning Israel in terms unthinkable a decade ago.

On July 13, at its General Synod in York, the Church’s governing body voted overwhelmingly to encourage Anglicans at every level to engage with Kairos Palestine II — a document formally titled A Moment of Truth: Faith in a Time of Genocide, produced last November by Palestinian Christian activists. The document brands Israel a colonial, settler and exclusionary entity; describes the Jewish state as an apartheid system built on Jewish supremacy; dismisses Israel’s right of self-defense by asking how a colonizer can defend itself against the colonized; condemns the Abraham Accords; damns Christian Zionism as a theology of racism; and calls for boycotts, divestment and sanctions against the world’s only Jewish state.

The Chief Rabbi of the United Kingdom, Sir Ephraim Mirvis, pleaded with the Synod to reject it, warning that the document was shocking, riddled with falsehood, and little more than “political activism dressed up as theology.” Lord Carey, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, warned that the King himself — Supreme Governor of the Church and patron of the Council of Christians and Jews — could find the Church he represents set against Britain’s Jewish community. The Board of Deputies of British Jews condemned the document’s toxic narrative about Jews and urged the Church to reject it outright.

The Synod did not listen. The House of Bishops voted 25 to 0 in favor, with five abstentions. The clergy voted 115 to 20; the laity, 113 to 27. A fig-leaf amendment changed the word “receive” to “hear” — a distinction the Bishop of Blackburn, Philip North, rightly observed makes no difference whatsoever on the ground. The new Archbishop of Canterbury, Sarah Mullally, defended the document as reflecting Palestinian pain and trauma.

The most piercing word came from the theologian Ian Paul, who asked why the Synod has never once debated the persecution of Kurds, Yazidis, Uyghurs, or Nigerian Christians, nor the ethnic cleansing of some 850,000 Jews from Arab lands — yet found time to platform a manifesto delegitimizing the Jewish state. “I wonder what we will say when the last Jew leaves Britain,” he told the Synod — because British Jews now know the Church will not speak up for them.

This is a Church accelerating its descent into moral and spiritual darkness, and its pronouncements would have Winston Churchill rolling in his grave. The Church that once steeled a nation against tyranny cannot now summon the courage to stand with the Jewish people while synagogues are firebombed and Jewish schoolchildren hide their blazers on London buses. Her pews empty, her parishes close, her clergy chase every secular fashion — and the Synod’s answer is to lecture the Middle East’s only democracy on morality. Physician, heal thyself.

Let it also be said plainly where much of the fault lies. Successive British governments have allowed an imported Islamist antisemitism to fester in their cities while policing the speech of anyone who dared to name it. Weekly marches glorify intifada; Jewish students are hounded from campuses; and a political and ecclesiastical establishment too frightened to defend its own Jewish citizens is likewise too frightened to defend its own Christian inheritance. The failure is not one of race but of nerve.

There is now open talk that Britain’s Jews may be driven out altogether if the brutal antisemitic attacks continue.

If they go, there is a silver lining — for Israel. They will take their genius, their capital, and their children with them, and Israel will be the richer for it: more Jews, more money, and decidedly more brains. Jews arriving in Israel bring highly developed skills, languages, entrepreneurial capital, and a technological brilliance unsurpassed anywhere in the region. Israel absorbed the 850,000 Jews expelled from Arab lands after 1948 and turned them into the engine of a start-up nation; she will absorb Britain’s Jews just as readily. Britain’s loss will be measured for generations.

For here is the lesson the haters never learn: Jew hatred always backfires on the hater.

Spain expelled its Jews in 1492 and began its long slide from golden age to backwater, while the Ottoman Sultan who welcomed them marveled that Ferdinand had impoverished his own kingdom to enrich a rival’s. Germany drove out its Jewish scientists in the 1930s, and the atomic age was born in America instead. Wherever Jews have been expelled, the expelling nation grew poorer, duller and darker. Wherever they were received, blessing followed.

God’s word to Abraham has not been repealed: “I will bless those who bless you, and him who dishonors you I will curse” (Genesis 12:3). Nations, like men, reap what they sow.

Britain — and its established Church — should tremble at what they are sowing.

David W. Virtue, DD, is the founder and editor of VirtueOnline (www.virtueonline.org)

2 posted on 07/15/2026 4:00:06 PM PDT by chajin ("There is no other name under heaven given among people by which we must be saved." Acts 4:12)

Thirty seconds before God ends this world HE will say:
All wars are gone forever...all of them.

NOTHING will happen before that...to any country.

History has repeated itself...too many times for it to be a coinkidink.

Ah, yes, the “genocide” of the poor-poor-Palestinians. I’ve never before seen a genocide where the victim population increases rather than decreasing.

“Spain expelled its Jews in 1492 and began its long slide from golden age to backwater,”

Actually Spain’s golden age began in 1492.

AI
The Spanish Golden Age (Siglo de Oro) was a period of intense artistic, literary, and political flourishing in Spain that broadly coincided with the rise of the Habsburg dynasty. It is conventionally dated from 1492, marked by the completion of the Reconquista, Christopher Columbus’s voyages, and the expulsion of Jews, to 1659 (Treaty of the Pyrenees) or 1681 (death of playwright Pedro Calderón de la Barca).

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