| Beware the new axis of evangelicals and Islamists
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By Melanie Phillips, Spectator, March 4, 2009
http://www.spectator.co.uk/print/the-magazine/features/3409686/beware-the-new-axis-of-evangelicals-and-islamists.thtml
Melanie Phillips says there is a dangerous
new alliance between anti-Israel Christians and radical Muslim
groups, often plotting in secret against their common enemy.
Last weekend the Revd Stephen Sizer, vicar of
Christ Church, Virginia Water appeared at an anti-Israel meeting
with an Islamist called Ismail Patel. Patel has not only accused
Israel of 'genocide' and 'war crimes' but considers Disney to
be a Jewish plot and supports Hamas, Iran and Syria.
Sizer is a virulent opponent of Christian Zionism
and of Israel, which he has said he hopes will disappear just
as did the apartheid regime in South Africa. He has also applauded
Iranian President Ahmadinejad for having 'looked forward to the
day when Zionism ceased to exist'. Nevertheless, the appearance
of an Anglican churchman on a pro-Islamist platform in Britain
is a new and significant development. The Church of England recently
banned its clergy from joining the BNP; should it not equally
ban them from siding with the forces of Islamofascism?
Sizer's participation, however, must be seen in
the context of a disturbing realignment in the services of the
forces of darkness against the free world: the emergence of an
axis between a body of evangelicals, the hard left, the Islamists
- and the far right.
Last July, a discreet meeting was held by a group
of influential Anglican evangelicals to co-ordinate a new church
approach towards Islam. The meeting was convened by Bryan Knell,
head of the missionary organisation Global Connections, and others
from a group calling itself Christian Responses to Islam in Britain.
The 22 participants, who met at All Nations Christian College
in Ware, Hertfordshire, were sworn to secrecy. The aim of the
meeting was to develop the 'grace approach to Islam', which 'tries
to let Muslims interpret Islam rather than telling them what their
religion teaches'. The meeting had in its sights those 'aggressive'
Christians who were 'increasing the level of fear' in many others
by talking about the threat posed by radical Islam.
The aim was thus to discredit and stifle those
Christians who warn against the Islamisation of Britain and Islam's
threat to the church. Those who do so include the Bishop of Rochester,
Michael Nazir-Ali, the Africa specialist Baroness Cox, the Islam
expert Dr Patrick Sookhdeo and the Maranatha Ministry. A few weeks
ago, Dr Sookhdeo became a spectacular victim of precisely such
a discrediting process. Dr Sookhdeo, an Anglican canon, a Muslim
convert and one of this country's premier authorities on Islam,
runs the Barnabas Fund, an aid agency helping persecuted Christians.
He has written many books about Islam of which the latest is Global
Jihad: The Future in the Face of Militant Islam.
In January the website of Fulcrum, an evangelical
group, carried a review of Global Jihad by Ben White, a frequent
contributor to the Guardian. His review rubbished Sookhdeo's scholarship
on the grounds that he had identified a theological problem with
Islam when Islamic aggression was rooted instead in global grievances,
particularly the existence and behaviour of Israel. To cap a farrago
of ignorance and historical illiteracy, White tried to damn Sookhdeo
by association, citing 'hard-line conservatives and pro-Israel
right-wingers' who endorsed his work as proof that Sookhdeo was
beyond the pale.
White then drew his review to the attention of
a blogger, Islamist and Muslim convert called Indigo Jo. On his
website, Indigo Jo anathematised Sookhdeo as the 'Sookhdevil'.
This attack was reproduced on various other Islamist websites
and Sookhdeo has received a death threat as a result.
So why should Christians betray another Christian
to radical Islamists? Fulcrum have denied any connection to the
Indigo Jo site along with any intention to discredit Sookhdeo.
They say they merely wanted to 'provide a forum' to discuss the
issues raised by his book. But why use Ben White, who clearly
knows little about Islam, to review a book by an Islam scholar?
A recurring thread of White's writing is his hatred of Israel.
He justifies Palestinian terrorism against Israel as legitimate
self-defence to bring about the 'decolonisation and liberation
from occupation and Zionist apartheid'. He says he can 'understand'
why some people are unpleasant towards Jews because of Israel's
'ideology of racial supremacy and its subsequent crimes committed
against the Palestinians' and also 'the widespread bias and subservience
to the Israeli cause in the Western media'.
Enter at this point the non-evangelical, secular
Left in the shape of Andrew Brown, who joined White's onslaught
against Sookhdeo on the Guardian's Comment Is Free website. Brown
claimed of Sookhdeo's supporters that they constructed 'a closed
mirror-world of hatred to stand against the Islamist one'.
Brown's article, too, seemed to be driven by hostility
to anyone who supported Israel. His objection to Sookhdeo was
principally that 'in practice the Sookhdeo view of Islam is always
coupled with a stance in favour of the greater Israel' - which
enabled Brown to make a witty crack insinuating that the Jews
were 'people who are instructed by their religion to be violent,
treacherous and imperialist'.
There has long been a notable crossover between
the Left and the Islamists, who bury their considerable differences
because of their all-consuming hatred of Israel and the West -
and in which they find an echo in neo-Nazi and white supremacist
groups. But what's new in this explosive mix is the presence of
Christian evangelicals. What is extraordinary, moreover, is the
targeting by Christian missionaries such as Brian Knell of Sookhdeo,
a principal campaigner to end the death sentence for Muslim converts
to Christianity. So why are such evangelicals trying to destroy
people who are defending Christianity against Islamist aggression?
The answer lies in a profound split amongst evangelicals:
between Christian Zionists who love Israel and want to defend
the church against the predations of radical Islam, and those
who want Israel to be destroyed and radical Islam appeased. Brian
Knell, for example, blames Israel's 'institutionalised terrorism'
for the radicalisation of Muslims worldwide. He thus ignores Islamist
statements about the innate perfidy of the secular West, the cosmic
evil of the Jews throughout history and the need to impose doctrinal
purity upon other Muslims in the face of Western modernity.
The warped obsession with Israel is fundamental
to these evangelicals' desire to accommodate radical Islamism.
Another participant at the All Nations meeting was Colin Chapman,
the father of the UK movement against Christian Zionism - and
whose animosity is rooted in a theological prejudice against the
Jews. Chapman's hugely influential book, Whose Promised Land,
resurrects the ancient Christian canard of 'supercessionism' -
the belief that because the Jews denied the divinity of Christ,
God transferred His favours to the Christians while the Jews were
cast out as the party of the Devil. This doctrine lay behind centuries
of Christian anti-Jewish hatred until the Holocaust drove it underground.
In his book, Chapman writes that violence has
always been implicit in Zionism and that Jewish self-determination
is somehow racist. He also subscribes to the canard of sinister
Jewish power. He has written: 'Six million Jews in the USA have
an influence that is out of all proportion to their numbers in
the total population of 281 million... It is widely recognised,
for example, that no one could ever win the presidential race
without the votes and the financial support of substantial sections
of the Jewish community.'
It is a sobering fact that such a subscriber to
anti-Jewish prejudice should be so influential in the church.
And such thinking has many followers, including Stephen Sizer.
'The covenant between Jews and God,' he has written, 'was conditional
on their respect for human rights. The reason they were expelled
from the land was that they were more interested in money and
power and treated the poor and aliens with contempt'. And he has
denied validity to Judaism itself saying: 'to suggest ...that
the Jewish people continue to have a special relationship with
God, apart from faith in Jesus ...is, in the words of [the leading
Anglican evangelical] John Stott, "biblically anathema".'
And now look at other groups with which Sizer
is making common cause in his hatred of Israel and the Jews. He
has given interviews to, endorsed or forwarded material from American
white supremacists and Holocaust deniers. Last year, he sent an
article printed in the Palestine Chronicle about the alleged influence
of 'Israel in Washington' through 'powerful overtly Jewish Washington
organisations and, increasingly, through Christian Zionist organisations'
to an appreciative Martin Webster, the former leader of the neo-Nazi
National Front.
Many will be deeply shocked that the Church of
England harbours individuals with such attitudes. But the church
hierarchy is unlikely to act against them. Extreme hostility towards
Israel is the default position among bishops and archbishops;
while the establishment line is to reach out towards Islam in
an attempt to accommodate and appease it. With Christians around
the world suffering forced conversion, ethnic cleansing and murder
at Islamist hands, the church utters not a word of protest. Instead,
inter-faith dialogue is the order of the day, with Canon Graham
Kings - the theological secretary of Fulcrum, no less - a key
player in Anglican inter-faith work. And now Israel's war against
Hamas has had a pivotal effect. There is now a widespread sense
that Israel must finally be defeated once and for all - and then
the Islamists will calm down.
It is horrifying that so many in the church should
be preaching against the victims of Jew-hatred and Islamist violence
and seeking to accommodate those who stand for the persecution
of Christians, the destruction of western and Christian values
and the genocide of the Jews. It is horrifying that the church
is providing a platform for the dissemination of lies about Israel
and ancient theological bigotry against the Jews. And it is horrifying
that it contains people who are not just virulently hostile towards
Israel but also towards anyone who supports it.
Given the common but no less odious view that
British Jews who support Israel are guilty of 'dual loyalty',
it would seem that the church is truly supping with the devil
and setting the stage for a repeat of an ancient tragedy.
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