There was a certain dissonance about the way I picked up on the news today. We were setting up for our Carols by Candlelight service and there was much joking and laughing as we worked out where fairy lights and candles were going to go. I stepped out of the room to see a news report of a terror attack on Bondi beach with 11 dead. It was a Jewish gathering that had been targeted. A gathering celebrating Hanukah.
In case you don’t know, Hanukah is a festival marked by the lighting of Menorah candles to represent light’s triumph over darkness. In this case it commemorates specifically the Maccabean uprising and liberation that followed Antioches Epiphanies’ atrocities. It was those atrocities that were prophesied by Daniel and coined the term drawn on by Jesus and the Gospel writers “the abomination that causes desolation.”
I believe that today’s atrocity was such an abomination of desolation as was the October 7th attacks by Hamas and the Manchester Synagogue attack on Yom Kippur. These attacks were designed not just to kill, not just to cause fear but to bring shock and offence at their outrageous nature. They are designed to dehumanise a people to shame and despise them just as the Holocaust was. That’s why they are antisemitic.
Already reactions are coming through.
This response from Owen Jones is typical of the kinds of response we often give in the face of such evil. It sounds right and good. However it’s a meaningless and nonsensical platitude. It reflects our need like Peter at the transfiguration to say something. It also expressed our need to distance things as irrational violence, the acts of madmen.
But the truth is that there was a cause that drove this, a cause it advanced. That cause may have co-opted other causes along the way but it is specifically the cause of antisemitism, Jew hatred, the desire to wipe a whole people from the earth. Not all causes are good causes.
Nor can we distance ourselves from it as over there and nothing to do with us. It happened in a culturally western nation. It is within that western culture that this evil has been allowed to cultivate. You see, whenever we have allowed Hamas propaganda to be reported as fact, whenever we have turned a blind eye to hate marches through our cities, whenever we have justified the banning of Jews from football games in our cities on the basis of misinformation and whenever we allow those antisemitic tropes about powerful elites, George Soros, cultural Marxism and the Frankfurt School to go unchallenged, we have created space for violent talk that leads to the violence we have seen today and saw recently in Manchester.
Faithroots 