A Christmas crusade: scapegoating the Jews
by Melanie Phillips:
Archbishop Welby is now twisting in a foul and bitter wind.
Christian churches, seemingly deaf to baleful historical and theological echoes, have decided to mark Christmas 2021 by scapegoating the Jews.
In the last week, a preposterous campaign has been mounted by church leaders to blame Israeli Jews for driving Christians out of Israel and the disputed territories of Judea and Samaria.
An article in last weekend’s Sunday Times, written jointly by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, and the Archbishop of Jerusalem, Hosam Naoum, warned about a crisis of Christian survival “in the Holy Land”.
This, they wrote, was being brought about through the desecration of churches and attacks, both physical and verbal, on priests, monks and worshippers.
The previous day, the Franciscan friar Francesco Patton, guardian of the Christian holy sites in the region, made a similar claim in the Telegraph where he wrote that, in recent years, the lives of many Christians had been made unbearable “by radical local groups with extremist ideologies”.
The previous week, Naoum claimed on Britain’s GB news channel that Christianity was on the point of extinction in the Holy Land as a result of pressure from “extremists and radicals,” especially in Jerusalem.
Anyone with any connection to reality would have been perplexed by all this. According to Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics, the country’s Christian population actually increased last year by 1.4 per cent. Indeed, Israel is the only place in the Middle East where Christians are flourishing.
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