“Europe needs more inward migration, even
though we don’t think we do – we’re an ageing, and shrinking, population.
Somehow, peace will return to Syria, and it will be a just peace. Isis will, in
the end, collapse. Europe will learn to welcome its refugees, and the land will
be tilled again, and crops will grow, and the hungry will be fed and the poor
will be lifted up.” So blogged
London-based Canon Giles Goddard (http://stjohnswaterloo.org/blog/6974) an
Anglican vicar critical of the conservative Evangelical wing of the Church of
England.
And again (http://stjohnswaterloo.org/blog/1541)
‘Yesterday I was in France, and came back through the Eurotunnel terminal from
Calais… I was shocked … by how different the terminal is from when I was last
there a year ago. High fences topped with barbed wire are now all round the
site, and it feels as if you are entering a fortress when you drive through to
board the train… I remind you that we are
making a collection for those in Calais this Sunday: Tricia says "we are asking specifically
for men’s things: jeans, jumpers, training shoes, Bibles, games (scrabble,
chess), toiletries etc., but I am sure a few women’s and children’s things
wouldn’t go amiss" so do bring anything you have to church.’
This is the same well-meaning but naïve
clergyman who earlier in the year that’s just ended caused uproar in the Church
of England by contravening canon law with a full Muslim prayer service (an
idiosyncratic, unrepresentative one at that:
http://anglicanmainstream.org/inclusive-mosque-meets-to-pray-in-waterloo-church/
) in his church and during proceedings asked his congregation to praise “the
God that we love, Allah”. His
pronouncements regarding the “refugees” ignore what is effectively an Islamic
invasion of the European continent and a menace to Judeo-Christian values, and
he appears to disregard the fact that according to the 1951 Convention relating
to the Status of Refugees an “asylum seeker” should apply for sanctuary in the
first “safe country” he/she arrives in; manifestly, the hordes of mainly young
males milling around Calais attempting to smuggle themselves into Britain have
not complied with that expectation. The
fact that they are young and male, with all that implies for the demographic
future of Europe should ring alarm bells.
As for those Bibles so earnestly solicited, I’d hazard a guess that
there are unlikely to be many grateful takers.
In his admirably lucid and much-recommended
book The Third Choice: Islam, Dhimmitude
and Freedom, the Australian scholar of Islam Dr Mark Durie, himself an
Anglican clergyman, notes that “Classical Islamic law did not allow non-Muslims
who lived in an Islamic state to gain a deep understanding of Islam … Today
there can be considerable pressure upon non-Muslims not to investigate the
primary sources of Islam for themselves, but to refer all their questions about
Islam to a Muslim expert. Interfaith
dialogue is an increasingly important forum for exploring Islam in Western countries,
and these forums tend to follow principles of mutual respect, listening
attentively to the other party and accepting their interpretations of their own
faith. While this is a common-sense
approach to sustaining productive and mutually satisfying relationships between
people, it does however tend to have the same impact as traditional Sharia restrictions, inhibiting
non-Muslims from studying about [sic] Islam for themselves … One very good
reason why Christians should study Islam for themselves is that Islam defines
its spiritual identity, not merely in terms of Muslims’ standing before Allah,
but in opposition and contrast to Jews and Christians. This self-definition includes a deep
rejection of Christianity and Judaism.
It is a sad fact that incitement against non-Muslims, and specifically
followers of Biblical faiths, is an integral part of Islam, being hard-wired
into the Quran and Sunna.”
Such knowledge would empower non-Muslim
congregations when listening to addresses like this at Canon Goddard’s church
(http://stjohnswaterloo.org/blog/1516) and this ill-conceived fiasco
(http://jewsdownunder.com/2014/06/21/melbourne-jewish-temples-interfaith-deception/)
at Australia’s largest Progressive Jewish synagogue, for example.
Back to the “refugee” issue. It might be natural for Jews, mindful of
their own tragic history, to side with people fleeing persecution. As a perusal of the Jewish Chronicle shows, among the British Jews vocally championing
the argument that Britain should strive strenuously to accommodate those
displaced by the current upheaval in the Middle East are Chief Rabbi Ephraim
Mirvis and Sir Mick Davis, who heads the (unelected) Jewish Leadership
Council. But for every genuine refugee
family there are single males, mainly young ones, trying to take advantage of
porous borders for their own ends.
An
article every bit as naïve as Canon Goddard’s, and disturbingly tendentious,
appeared a few months ago in Britain’s odious Israel-baiting Guardian newspaper (http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/aug/13/jewish-people-calais-migrants-kindertransport-children-nazis). Its author, Rabbi Laura Janner Klausner,
daughter of a Labour life peer, did not speak for all Jews, though she gave the
impression she did: ‘For the Jewish people, for thousands of years a dispersed
nation without guaranteed safety, the sight of the Calais “jungle” camp on our
doorstep is especially painful. We remember with gratitude the great deeds of
the Kindertransport, and with hurt the rejection we have also known. What is
the Jewish response to hearing that thousands are living in squalor just a few
miles away? When we look across the English Channel, we see ourselves.’
No, Laura, not so; rather, some of us know
a ruse and a threat when we see one. The
present situation at Calais, where young economic migrants determined to get to
Britain cluster and try to hide aboard cross-Channel transport, is not
analogous to the plight of Jews desperate to escape the Reich. Nor will there be any supportable analogy
between them and those refugees if and when they manage to penetrate Britain’s
coasts. We align ourselves with the
welfare of the British Isles.
As Daniel Greenfield observes (http://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/261127/lefts-muslim-replacement-theology-jews-daniel-greenfield)
there’s grave danger in too nice a naïveté:
"Muslims are the new Jews. You can
find this offensive claim repeated everywhere in the media. The Jews, a small
ethnic minority of millions that was stateless for thousands of years, are a
terrible analogy for a global Muslim population of 1.6 billion and around 50
countries that do not comprise a single ethnicity or race… The only thing the
Muslims and the Jews have ever had in common is that the former conquered,
persecuted and enslaved the latter. Any religious similarities are the product
of Muslim cultural appropriation of Jewish beliefs and any cultural
similarities are the result of Muslim colonization... In this twisted
historical revisionism, the Jews, a beleaguered minority hanging on to a
country slightly bigger than Fiji, who have spent the last 40 years cutting
pieces off their small slice of the world to hand over to the region’s massive
Muslim majority in the hopes of being left alone, are the new Nazis... The
constant claims that Muslims are the new Jews carry with them a whiff of
progressive replacement theology. The old Jews have been found wanting. Setting
up a country and defending it against Muslim terrorism made them bad victims.
The Muslims are superior replacement victims. They have the right to Israel and
to Jewish history...."
Naïve well-meaning Jews, and Christians,
would do well to heed his words.
