The bigotry and lies of St. James Church in Piccadilly

St. James Church in Piccadilly has spent a huge amount of time, money and effort for a naked anti-Israel stunt in central London:

St James’s Church, Piccadilly, in London’s West End has installed a life size 8 metre tall/30 metre long replica of Israel’s security wall in its courtyard as part of its Bethlehem Unwrapped festival. The replica wall is so vast that it obscures the Church itself.

The replica wall will be lit up at night and for the next twelve days of Christmas (until 5th January) a montage of images and slogans will be continuously projected onto it. Scenes include parts of London with a wall passing through it.

What you won’t see projected onto the replica wall are scenes of bombed out Israeli buses, hotels, pizza restaurants, bars and nightclubs that were ubiquitous in Israel before the wall.

Bethlehem Unwrapped has evening events with anti-Israel polemicists including comedians Jeremy Hardy and Ivor Dembina, musician Nigel Kennedy, columnists Yasmin Alibhai-Brown and Mark Steel, Jeff Halper of Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions and War On Want’s in-house poet Rafeef Ziadah.

The video that the church released reveals that the stunt took 8 months of planning and a "huge team of builders, designers, architects and scaffolders." And, of course, the narrator says that the wall is "surrounding" Bethlehem.



Here is a map of the separation barrier at bethlehem created by B'Tselem showing that the barrier (solid red line) does not come close to surrounding Bethlehem:

One of the supreme ironies of the St. James' description of the barrier is this:

The wall in our courtyard is a replica segment of the wall that surrounds Bethlehem. It is 8 metres tall because the real wall is 8 metres. It obscures the view of this historic church because that is what has happened to Bethlehem’s holy sites and historic places.

Indeed, there is a wall that obscures and virtually separates a holy place in Bethlehem - the Jewish holy place of Rachel's Tomb, which has been the scene of numerous terror attacks against Jewish pilgrims and worshipers.

Here is the detail of B'Tselem's map showing how Israel had to surround Judaism's third holiest shrine with what indeed is an ugly tall wall - because that was the only possible way to protect Jewish visitors:

Here is what Rachel's Tomb used to look like before 1995:

And here is what its entrance looks like today:

Not only have there been numerous attacks at Jews visiting Rachel's Tomb in the past - but hundreds of  attacks continue today!

St. James Church doesn't give a damn.

Rachel's Tomb is an undisputed Jewish holy site. But in the 1990s, Muslims made up a fairy tale that it is actually a Muslim shrine, a lie purely meant to erase Jewish claims to the site.

St. James Church doesn't give a damn.

Now, let's look at some other Jewish communities that are forced to be far more surrounded by the barrier in order to protect human lives, more lives that St. James' Church doesn't give a damn about:

Elkana and surrounding areas:

Tal Menashe and surrounding communities:

Not to mention the Jewish communities who are not protected by the security barrier and that must build their own fences to protect themselves from murderous Arab terrorists.

How come no Arab communities feel it is necessary build fences to protect themselves from Israeli attacks?

Yes, there is a besieged people in the Middle East. A people who must build often ugly fences and walls to protect themselves. Those people are not the Arabs of Bethlehem.

And the charitable people at St. James Church don't say a word when those people are attacked, bombed, shot at and killed.

The hypocrisy is nauseating..