"Don't Let The Zionist Divide Us!": A strange call from Christians

Thanks to the kindness of a reader in London I'm now in possession of the Church of England newspaper editorial of 17 January, some of which so evidently irritated the anti-Zionist head of the Christian NGO Embrace the Middle East (see my post here).

Headed "Anti-Semitism on the rise in Europe", it's a robust editorial which, since it's now archival, and such a contrast to the toxin spewed out by some Christians regarding Israel, I feel compelled to reproduce in toto.

The editorial was, of course, written over a week prior to the disgraceful, despicable scenes witnessed in Paris on Sunday (see here) but is relevant to those scenes nonetheless:

'Fans flock to French comic Dieudonné on social media’ we are told by the BBC’s Georg Lentze of the BBC Social Media Monitoring Unit. Dieudonné has several convictions for anti-Semitic hate speech in France, and his very popular shows have recently been banned for this reason. All forms of social media are showing real spikes of interest and favour, YouTube, Facebook ‘likes’, tweets, a TV channel, all register enormous popularity. He unites the poor immigrant Muslim youth and the anti-immigrant National Front bloc. He taps into the growing anti-politics feeling rising in Europe. Dieudonné operates with a subtle ambiguity, as the New Yorker’s Alexander Stille reported: of a distinguished French Jewish journalist Dieudonné said: “When I hear him speak, Patrick Cohen, I say to myself, you see, the gas chambers … too bad.”

 The meaning is clear, the grammar broken up to gain deniability. He has developed a cynical inversion of the Nazi salute that has gained such traction as to have been used at a Premiership football match to bait Jewish fans. The French authorities are concerned and trying to suppress the activities of this ‘comedian’ and activist, but that suppression stokes a victim image and social media popularity.

Reuters photo of the French demo

 Hatred of Jews is now popular in France again, and barely 60 years after 1945. Dieudonné plans to use his Human Rights to free expression to overturn government bans on his very lucrative shows. The bitter irony is that the mass murder of the Holocaust was the driver for the UN Declaration of Human Rights. Dieudonné himself is a ‘holocaust denier’. In the UK there is a growing movement to boycott the state of Israel by academics who think that Israel is guilty of repressing Palestinians. The University and College Union of lecturers had invited Bongani Masuka, someone found guilty by the South African Human Rights Commission of anti-Semitic hate crimes, to speak at their conference, and the UCU Annual Congress voted against dissociating itself from his views. UCU refused to accept the definition of anti-Semitism drawn up by the EU Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia. A Jewish academic, Ronnie Fraser, felt harassed by the UCU’s action and complained of anti-Semitism to a Tribunal, which denied his complaint.

The Tribunal likened Fraser to a rugby player who was asking to be bashed and bruised in such a game, and so was entitled to a low degree of legal protection – an astonishing argument. The Church of England is also perilously close to adding respectability to his movement, as the Sunday Programme debate between Lucy Winkett and Alan Johnson showed: fashionable St James’ Piccadilly protested at the protective wall around Bethlehem, Johnson argued this protest ignored the realities of the context. Christians should beware of singling out Israel for protest, the Israel – Palestine spat, like Northern Ireland, is just one of many contested areas in the world, and the rising tide of hatred of the Jews is a toxic movement to make fashionable – again.'

Just how toxic a movement can be seen in a number of avowedly Christian sites, including pages on Facebook.

Regular readers of this blog may recall my post here drawing attention to the truly heinous rantings and ravings of a heavy-duty antisemitic Facebook page calling itself "Christians United for Peace", which wallows in medieval-like lies concerning Jewish beliefs and practices.

Earlier this week, as a result of sustained pressure brought to bear on Facebook by concerned individuals and groups, the egregiously misnamed "Christians United for Peace" page was removed from Facebook.

Today, however, the page was back up, with its previous nonsense intact, and spewing out its customary venom against Jews, Judaism and its texts, Israel and Zionism in such new posts as these  (which like most if not all of the posts attract breathtakingly antisemitic comments from the site's avowedly Christian followers):

 

But this odious Facebook page  is not the only avowedly Christian one that specialises in invective that crosses the line into antisemitism.

Similar group pages, including that belonging to Christian Friends of Palestine, are  riddled with antisemitic posts from avowed Christians, posts such as these gems from an American with a Spanish-sounding name.

First:

Of all the people on planet Earth, the ones I love and respect most are the Palestinians!!!

Under any period of Human History on Earth there had been such brave and heroic people such as the Palestinians.

The entire Satanic Zionist world turned against them and there they are, without army, without weapons, without electricity, water etc... but they are steadily standing against the mightiest zionist countries of the world.

They don't need any super powers to support them!!! They already have the mightiest one on their side. They have God on their side!!!

Second, regarding the photo of a huge mass demonstration he’d posted:

This is not Egypt,

It is not Syria,

It is not Greece...

This is Spain and you won't see this in your News Channels because the Spanish Government is helping the Zionist Jooish Banks on behalf of the spanish population.

The Zionist Jooish Media keeps silent on this as long as the Government acts accordingly and in favor to Zionist rules!!!

Third, regarding Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper and former Australian prime minister John Howard:

If you still believe we live in a democratic western world, you are then just as fucked up as these poor bastard leaders reading a peach [i.e. speech] ordered by their masters the Zionist Jooz Of PissraHell.

Fourth, regarding Hitler:

He was a filthy Zionist Joo himself. Don't take me wrong.

I need you to drop the way of thinking all of us been programmed to think to be able to understand what I'm going to say.

What Hitler did to the Joos is called Collateral Dammage.

First of all Germans never killed 6million Joos and all of us by today and hopefully know it was our history's biggest lie.

He maybe did kill some of them to show the real Jooish haters of Germany that he was one of them.

The Jooish Rothchild family sponsored him since he was a kid and placed him in the Nazi Youth Camps so he could blend….

And then, from others, there are posts denying the Holocaust, impugning the Jewishness of Ashkenazim, smearing the Rothschilds, likening Israeli statesmen to the anti-Christ, and so on and so forth.

One recurrent theme that runs through many of these sites is this one, the profile picture of Christian Friends of Palestine:

 Christians United for Peace puts it like this:

Strange, isn't it, how, despite the ruthless persecution of their co-religionists by Islamists in the Middle East, avowed Christians – and as we are only too aware, they include many (like the church authorities who enlisted the aid of Interpal in sponsoring the Piccadilly replica "Wall") who are unconnected with these dodgy Facebook groups – seek to make common cause with Islam by scapegoating Jews Zionists?