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'I Feel Ashamed to be an Anglican'

Melanie Phillips has a long post on the recent Anglican decision to "disinvest" from Israel that I recently mentioned here.

Apparently, though he was voting for disinvestment, Rowan Williams did not "realize" he was voting for disinvestment. A position that sounds Kerry-esque in its carefully manufactored disingenuousness.

In his carefully crafted letter Dr Rowan Williams, who voted in favour of the motion, denies that it represented a decision to disinvest. At the same time, he admits that it was a response to a call from the Anglican church in Jerusalem to disinvest...

Dr Williams defends the synod as merely urging the Church of England 'to engage with companies about whom we had concerns and to encourage a fact-finding visit to the Holy Land.'

In his letter to Sir Jonathan Sacks, the Archbishop of Canterbury says: 'The Synod has not resolved to disinvest.'

Dr Williams says: 'It is unfortunate that this has arisen at a time when anti-Semitism is a growing menace and when the State of Israel faces challenges not only in respect of the new administration in the territories administered by the Palestinian Authority but also elsewhere in the region.'

So the timing of this vote is unfortunate, yet the Archbishop of Canterbury, with his considerable influence, did nothing to effect the timing. Except vote for disinvestment. Which he denies is disinvestment.

Nor has he yet commented on the Hamas victory in the Palestinian election.

Ah the vacuity responsibility of ecclesiastical leadership.

Fortunately, there are still a few decent Anglican leaders left.

The former Archbishop of Canterbury reacted to the Synod vote by saying that he was 'ashamed to be an Anglican.'

The former archbishop of Canterbury, George Carey, told The Jerusalem Post on Tuesday he was "ashamed to be an Anglican" following Monday's vote by the Church of England to disinvest from companies whose products are used by the Israeli government in the territories.

The February 6 divestment vote, which was backed by current Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, was "a most regrettable and one-sided statement," Lord Carey said, and one that "ignores the trauma of ordinary Jewish people" in Israel subjected to terrorist attacks.

Simon McIllwaine, the head of Anglicans for Israel has a interview on the BBC here against the Synod's vote with a rebuttal by the Bishop of Chelmsford, John Gladwin, who supported the vote.

McIllwaine does us the favor as well by letting us know that many of the people who voted to disinvest are Liberation theologists and that some of the others, presumably Bishop of Jerusalem, the Right Rev Riah Hanna Abu El-Assal, practiced a form of Moslem influenced Anglicanism - syncretism at work.

Good to know that 50 years after Stalin, the communist creed is still perverting the thinking of influential people in the West. The self-willed naivete of these bishops who have no idea the extent to which the entire Palestinian cause was first shaped in the USSR as another front in the cold war is astounding. And their knee jerk, programmatic response to continue the fight to liberate the people 'oppressed' by the capitalists here represented by the Zionist entity and the company - Caterpillar - which does business with it.

But the cold-war syllogism lives on today in a new guise. Too many haters of capitalism and the United States still cram everything into the frame of untruth and self-deception that says my enemy's enemy is still my friend because, even if he blows up my family on the tube, murders my colleagues on the bus or threatens to behead me for publishing a drawing, he is still at war with Bush, Blair and Berlusconi. It is 50 years this month since that simplistic view of the world lost whatever moral purchase it may once have had. It is time such thinking was, to choose a sadly appropriate word, purged. Too long, my brothers and my sisters, too long.

By the way, methods of indoctrination dreamt up by the Soviets in collusion with Arafat continues, in many of its manifestations, until today. But not a word from the Anglican leadership on any of this.

Here is the response of Anglicans in Israel.

The Israel Trust of the Anglican Church is in no way connected with the Church of England in sponsoring this initiative. The Church of England would be better served to find practical ways to facilitate dialogue instead of passing one-sided resolutions. This naïve action will do nothing to promote genuine reconciliation between Jews and Arabs in the Middle East."

Earlier posts on the the Anglican situation here.

posted by Alcibiades @ 9:22 AM