Lord Toby Young’s powerful speech in London in support of British Jews sets an example for the Church of England. The leaders of the established Church need to be much more vocal in speaking out against the rising tide of hatred against Britain’s 270,000 Jews.
The Free Speech Union founder was speaking at the Campaign Against Antisemitism protest opposite Downing Street on April 30. This was the day after the stabbings of two Jewish men in Golders Green, north London.
He said: “I want you to imagine what Britain would look like without British Jews. What kind of country would we be if Jews had not been tolerated in Britain since the mid-17th Century and fully emancipated since the mid-19th Century? ... Well, for one thing, there probably wouldn’t be a Labour Party.
“Jewish trade union organisers in London, Leeds and Manchester played a pivotal role in the creation of the party – the Jewish Encyclopedia of 1906 lists 39 Jewish unions set up between 1882 and 1902 – and left-wing Jewish intellectuals like Harold Laski and Ralph Milliband provided the party with its conscience.”
He continued: “Without Benjamin Disraeli, that great radical Prime Minister who passed the 1867 Reform Act, we might not have a Conservative Party either.”
He then addressed Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer directly: “Prime Minister, has there ever been a religious or racial minority in the history of these islands who’ve contributed so much to our national life, who’ve been so public spirited, so eager to contribute, so happy to serve?”
Young concluded his speech by telling Starmer: “We only have to imagine how much poorer our country would have been without the contributions of British Jews over the last 200 years to realise just how much poorer we will be without them in the future.
“Prime Minister, we need to protect this precious, vital, patriotic minority. For over 200 years they have shown us in so many ways how much they love our country. If we want them to stay, it’s time for us to show how much we love them.”
Indeed. And one of the ways to support British Jews is to combat the lie that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. That lie incites hatred against all Jews.
As Jewish Chronicle and Times columnist Melanie Phillips told Sky’s Sunday Morning with Trevor Phillips, accusing Israel of committing genocide “is inciting hatred because if people are committing genocide you have to destroy them”.
Last November, in an interview with the Church Times, the Archbishop of York, Stephen Cottrell, accused the Israeli government of committing "genocidal acts" in Gaza.
This was a dangerous misrepresentation as Lord Nigel Biggar, Regius Professor Emeritus of Moral Theology at the University of Oxford, has pointed out:
“In waging war against the genocidally racist empire of the Nazis, the Allies killed about 70,000 French civilians and a further 60-80,000 non-combatant Italians. They didn’t want to cause those deaths, but the urgent necessity of overcoming the Nazi enemy and the available military means of doing so meant that civilian casualties on a large scale were, tragically, unavoidable.
"The same could well be true of the Israeli Defence Force’s prosecution of the war against Hamas, which, judging by its constitutional determination to destroy Israel and the sadistically atrocious character of the massacre of October 7, 2023, really is ‘genocidal’.
“Indeed, the fact that Israel has permitted aid to civilians at all, and that the IDF customarily warns them of impending military action, is surely clear evidence that total, ‘genocidal’ extermination is not its aim.”
Biggar, who is also an Anglican priest, concluded: “I currently consider Israel’s recent military operations to have been ‘disproportionate’. Nevertheless, it was not appropriate for the archbishop to describe them as ‘genocidal’. It was also very unwise. The excessive charge of Israeli ‘genocide’ has been used to justify the no-holds-barred, atrocious, sadistic horrors of October 7.
"And the enthusiastic recourse to it of too many stinks of antisemitic prejudice. Add to that the history of antisemitism in the Christian church itself, and the Archbishop of York should have been much, much more cautious.”
Will the leadership of the Church of England now do its best to ensure that British Jews are not being swept up in a tide of hatred resulting from a false accusation of genocide against Israel?
Julian Mann, a former Church of England vicar, is an evangelical journalist based in Lancashire.
