JUST OVER a week ago worshippers fled a synagogue in Melbourne after it was set on fire in what the Australian Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese, condemned as a violent act of anti-semitism. About 60 firefighters and 17 trucks were called to the massive blaze at Adass Israel synagogue. No-one in the Jewish community was surprised. ‘We’ve known this has been coming,’ said Daniel Aghion, president of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry.
A few days later further such attacks took place, this time in the affluent borough of Woollahra, a Sydney eastern suburb known for its Jewish community. Vile antisemitic graffiti was sprayed on a wall, and a car was torched.
Albanese, though clear in his condemnation of these attacks, was accused of creating the conditions for them. That his government’s toleration of repeated Hamas-inspired anti-Israel demonstrations across Australia, with their genocide call of ‘from the river to the sea’, (like ours) emboldened these direct anti-semitic attacks, is a question that has to be asked.
Kanishka de Silva Raffel, the British-born Australian Anglican Archbishop of Sydney, immediately issued an uncompromising condemnation of the attacks:
‘The latest attack on the Jewish community in Sydney is egregious, cowardly and despicable. All people of good will, faith or none, will condemn this outrage. It follows the terrorist attack on the Adass Israel synagogue in Melbourne, and more than a year of increasing hostility and intimidation of the Australian Jewish community in multiple, grotesque ways. This is totally unacceptable.
‘The Jewish community in Sydney is resilient and peace-loving, contributing to the welfare and harmony of our city in myriad ways. Jewish people arrived in Sydney with the First Fleet (from Britain in 1788). Sydney is the home we all share. I urge all political, community and religious leaders to unite, and I offer the support of Sydney Anglicans as together we stand against hate.’
His statement stands in sharp contrast to the tepid response from Church of England leaders to rising antisemitism in the UK since the Hamas terrorist atrocities in Israel on October 7, 2023.
On October 18 2023 the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, issued a joint statement with Muslim and Jewish leaders at Lambeth Palace ‘to condemn the sharp rise in antisemitic incidents over the past 10 days, and to call for unity between British faith communities against the backdrop of war between Israel and Hamas’.
He avoided speaking out specifically for the safety of British Jews. When the Metropolitan Police decided to dabble in theology after a demonstrator at a rally organised by Hizb ut-Tahrir Britain on October 21 (which took place alongside there march larger protest organised by the Palestine Solidarity Campaign) last year was heard chanting ‘jihad‘ the Archbishop chose to remain silent.
In a statement seemingly designed to obfuscate, the Met had stated: ‘In addition to officers deployed with the protest, we have counter-terrorism officers with specialist language skills and subject expertise working alongside public-order officers in our main operations room, assessing any videos and photos that emerge.
‘Officers have reviewed a video from the Hizb ut-Tahrir protest in which a man can be seen to chant “jihad, jihad”. . .
‘The word has a number of meanings but we know the public will most commonly associate it with terrorism. Specialist officers have assessed the video and have not identified any offences arising from the specific clip.
‘We have also sought advice from specialist Crown Prosecution Service lawyers who have reached the same conclusion.
‘However, recognising the way language like this will be interpreted by the public and the divisive impact it will have, officers identified the man involved and spoke to him to discourage any repeat of similar chanting.’
He was not arrested. (Three months later, the then Home Secretary, James Cleverley, laid a draft order before Parliament to proscribe Hizb ut-Tahrir, a group that had openly praised the October 7th attacks, under the Terrorism Act 2000.)
It was surely an opportunity for Archbishop Welby to express his support for Jews, clearly targeted by this incitement to violence against them, and also to denounce the absurdity of the Met’s excuse for taking no action.
The Archbishop must after all have been well aware of the indefensible grounds on which Met officers in Uxbridge arrested a Christian street preacher, Pastor John Sherwood, then age 71, in April 2021 for peacefully proclaiming the Bible’s teaching that marriage is exclusively heterosexual Did not this example two-tier justice bother him?
Pastor Sherwood was acquitted a year later but his arrest, interrogation and prosecution were a gruesome ordeal. Silence from leaders of the Anglican Church in the UK over the police treatment of Christian street preachers has been as deafening as their silence over the treatment of incitement to violence against British Jews.
Meanwhile Church of England leaders have been happy to lay into Israel since the October 7 atrocity. Last September four bishops wrote to The Observer accusing the Israelis of the ‘forceful dispossession of the Kisiya family from their ancestral land in the al-Makhrour valley outside Bethlehem’. The signatories were Rachel Treweek, Bishop of Gloucester; Dr Guli Francis-Dehqani, Bishop of Chelmsford; Graham Usher, Bishop of Norwich; and Christopher Chessun, Bishop of Southwark.
Archbishop Welby went on social media in support: ‘This is an urgent and important intervention by my fellow bishops and I support them in it. The oppression, violence and discrimination against Palestinians in the West Bank, including Christians, must cease. The Israeli government is not above the law and must stop acting otherwise.
‘Steadfast Christian families such as the Kisiya family, whose ancestral land has been forcibly stolen from them, remain especially in my prayers. We continue to stand in prayerful solidarity with our Palestinian Christian sisters and brothers as they resist the injustice of occupation.’
A little research would have shown how unwise it can be to leap to conclusions. The Times and Jewish Chronicle columnist Melanie Phillips showed that the bishops had not done their homework over the case of the Kisiya family and a story that had long been taken up by anti-Israel activists.
Writing on her Substack she pointed out that in May 2023 an Israeli court ruled that Mr Kisiya did not legally own the property he claimed to have inherited in Bethlehem – a ruling that forbade him from even entering the plot. One year later, illegal construction was again found and taken down on July 30 last.
Phillips asked: ‘Did Welby and his four clerics make the slightest attempt to discover the truth of this story? Did they consult the Israeli court records? Did they even ask the Israelis for their side of the story? Of course not. As usual, they believed the claims of those who routinely defame Israel in order to destroy it.’
This is the context that makes the Christian humanity in Archbishop Raffel’s courageous statement against antisemitism stand out so strongly.
