'There are several reasons why the Labour Party has become vulnerable to accusations of anti-Semitism (News, 12 July). The first is that, having swung so far to the left, it has forgotten the distinguished Jewish politicians who have contributed to its history. Second, sympathy for the Palestinians has led to a worrying tolerance of anti-Jewish conspiracy theories from the Nazi era, which are widespread in some pro-Palestine groups.
But there is also a hidden, perhaps more disturbing, factor behind the party’s problem with anti-Semitism, and that is the illusion that a programme of universal progress confers automatic moral superiority on those who promote it....
Anti-Semitism has Christian roots. It was vigorously promoted by the second-century heretic Marcion, who rejected the God of the Old Testament as the enemy of the kindly God and Father of Jesus. Marcion reduced scripture to an edited version of St Luke’s Gospel and a few of St Paul’s letters. Christians of a Marcionite tendency continue to contrast law and gospel, to the detriment of the former. Luther was unashamedly anti-Semitic....
....When I hear Christians contrast the simple gospel of Jesus with the “angry God of the Old Testament”, I shudder. Anti-Semitism begins in an uncritical belief in our own innocence.'Angela Tilby's article provoked a response by a chap called Christopher John Ryecart, who I notice has taken issue with Canon Tilby before.
Our old mate the Reverend Dr Stephen Sizer, former vicar of Virginia Water, now head of the so-called Peacemakers outfit, which seems to spend a lot of its time bashing one country above all others (no prizes for guessing which), in the tradition of the vicar himself, has treated his Facebook faithful to a copy of Ryecart's response, as follows:
Now, I have no idea who Ryecart is. But how unsavoury is his response, with its gratuitous references to the "race" of the Jews, and to what I've previously referred to as "the Khazar crap".
How strange is his seeming ignorance of the fact that the term "Anti-Semitismus" was invented in the late nineteenth century by German Jew-hater Wilhelm Marr to refer specifically to Jews, and that is why the term antisemitism (which, following the example of the Vidal Sassoon Center for the Study of Antisemitism, most Jews today prefer to spell without the hyphen, since there is no ideology of "semitism" and therefore no corresponding counter-ideology, only the old Judenhass under a different name) is used to refer to Jews and not to other peoples considered descendants of the Biblical Shem.
How even more unsavoury for a man of the cloth such as Sizer to echo Ryecart's dwelling on the racial origins of a persecuted people, and how implausible that he should be unaware of the origins of the reason term "antisemitism" refers to Jews, and to Jews alone.
You don't really need a history lesson on all this ... do you, Vicar?
