Israël : C’est le sens de la vie

עם ישראל חי

There was a terrorist attack last week in the London suburb of Streatham by a young Muslim Englishman who set out to murder English infidels and become a religious martyr. The attack was described – universally throughout Britain, by the Church, the media and the Government – as a “senseless attack”.

In fact the suicide attack was not was not senseless at all. The protagonist surely used, as Muslim martyrs are called to do, the full human sensibilities, awareness and logic in aligning himself to the cause – the Holy Struggle or Jihad – in order to qualify as a blessed and eternally-rewarded martyr or shuhada. 

The attack was inspired by Islamist philosophical theology. It had clear purpose and direction, as we know from what the young man had expressed on social media, spouting the standard Al-Qaeda propaganda. (We can properly deduce that the attack was a martyrdom attack, because the attacker had strapped a dummy bomb to himself, therefore inviting the police to shoot-to-kill without warning as he set about killing the Infidel.)

We will return to the word senseless, and how the attack was reported by British authorities and media, later in this piece.

The attacker – according to what he told the world before the police shot him – has gone straight to paradise. Age shall not weary him in waiting for the ‘Palestine’/’Al-Quds’-centred paradise that comes on Earth with the Islamic apocalypse, according to the mainstream contemporary Islamic theology (Islamism) that had poisoned this man’s mind.

Although the headline-grabbing Streatham attack (mercifully not fatal) was doubtless horrific for the victims and their close ones, in the larger scheme of things it is but one of many tragic knife attacks in London (most of which do not carry the classification of “terrorism”). And the Islamist philosophy that leads to attacks in the UK such as 7/7, Lee Rigby, Manchester Arena, London Bridge and Streatham amount to about a mere thousandth of such attacks on the people of the tiny nation Israel, if we compare the annual tally of Islamist attacks on the UK against Islamist attacks on Israel. Israel is the primary target for Al-Qaeda and the other Islamist movements.  Of course, British Intelligence has, thankfully, reduced the attacks by many multiples, but so has, thankfully, Israeli Intelligence in Israel.

Islamist attacks in England, despite the media sensation they arouse, are statistically insignificant, although the threat does seem to be worsening. They are a worry of course, and financially costly (not least through keeping in prison the Muslims who have made terror threats, and then attempting to de-radicalise them, and then monitoring them after release). But there are more severe problems of violence in the UK, such as drug-crime violence, and domestic violence (which according to the Office of National Statistics affected over a 1.3 million women in 2018, and averaged 2 murders of women per week).

Islamist attacks in Israel, on the other hand, are a daily occurrence that, in the worst-affected areas, are causing, apart from death and injury, deep psychological trauma, and post-traumatic stress disorder, to Israelis and their children. And Islamist attacks, including martyrdom attacks, are also a constant menace throughout the whole of the Middle East, for Christians, Sufis, Yazidis and other minority groups.

***

In this piece, as in most of my pieces dealing with antisemitism and the world’s obsessive anti-Israelism, I dig into the philosophy of the problem. It is a problem that my own (or, practically now, former) faith community – the Church of England – refuses to deal with. As I’ve written elsewhere on this blog, there are many complex reasons for the Church of England’s own antisemitism/anti-Israelism, which variously cause it to ignore, or approve, of Islamic antisemitism/anti-Israelism, and to ignore Islamist persecution of Christians (murder, kidnapping, rape and imprisonment) throughout the Middle East and the continent of Africa, and Pakistan and elsewhere. One of the reasons is, frankly, that the Church of England clergy has become lethally stupid from the top down. I’ve been involved with the Church of England for nearly 30 years, and I was for a time one of a handful of moderators for a global online forum for the Anglican Communion. I have come to realise that, like many failing institutions, the CofE rewards loyalty to the leadership rather than meritocracy. Hence the senior clergy has no thinkers left that are able or willing to challenge the conventional wisdom, or are able to think differently from the weak leadership. Show me today, for instance, a bishop who can write philosophical theology like Bishop William Temple (d. 1944), both his great abstractions of the whole and his vision for Christian society relevant to his times.

Much of the Church of England’s antisemitism is fed by Arab Anglican senior and junior clergy in the Holy Land through a movement called “Palestinian liberation theology” led by Rev Dr Naim Ateek, who is a popular guest to Protestant churches (not just Anglican) throughout the UK and Europe.  Ateek was the main Christian voice supporting the Jihadist Second Intifada.  Ateek’s philosophy is the traditional Christian one: “blame the Jews”.  And back home, the English senior Anglican clergy are duped, unable to even accept there is such a thing as contemporary Jihadism and Islamic martyrdom, as we can see in this extract from the Church’s official teaching on the Arab-Israeli conflict, titled Israel/Palestine, An Unholy War.  The document, written in 2002, is still on the Church of England’s website (although now out-of-date, because in the ensuing years, all Jews have moved from, or have been removed from, Gaza):
“It is difficult in such a report to convey the deep despair that leads young Palestinians to seek ‘martyrdom’, or the anguish felt by Israeli families mourning the loss of loved ones that legitimates military retaliation. What motives three 14-year old Palestinian classmates to mount a suicide attack on a Jewish settlement in Gaza, or a 20-year old Palestinian woman to blow herself up by a bus stop in central Jerusalem? Without an understanding of this despair, merely condemning suicide bomb attacks as immoral glosses over the deep-rooted social, economic and political disenfranchisement experienced by Palestinians. Such attacks are evil and must be condemned unequivocally. However, if peace is to be achieved the cycle of suicide bombings has to be broken. This requires the circumstances that give rise to them to be understood and resolved. Similarly, it is difficult to imagine the grief felt by Israeli families when a Jewish girl’s bar [sic] mitzvah party in Hadera turns into a bloody massacre leaving six dead and thirty wounded or when a night out in Tel Aviv at a discotheque or snooker club ends in horrendous circumstances…”

Israel/Palestine, An Unholy War, the Church of England’s official ‘understanding’
Note that the Church of England has written martyrdom in inverted commas, implying that the contemporary Islamic theology of martyrdom, and genocidal antisemitism, do not exist, and are rather natural human reactions to frustrating situations. And yet in the regions administered by Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Palestinian Authority (i.e. PLO/Fatah) religious martyrdom against Jews is taught to children, including by their parents[i]. And beyond the boundaries of Israel, children in Lebanon (where Hezbollah now controls the government) and Jordan are also encouraged to become martyrs to anti-Israelist Jihad. There are even popular summer training camps in Lebanon and Gaza where children are given pretend machine guns and suicide vests with bombs, and are taught the Islamist philosophies which demand the taking of Jerusalem (Al-Quds) by Islam.

Suicide bombing, we are told by the Church of England, is a result of the “despair” and “economic and political disenfranchisement”. No it isn’t. It’s martyrdom. And it is no different, and no less excusable, in Israel than the Islamist martydom attack in Streatham, London, last week.  It is sourced in the same Jihadist political theology.  The Church of England is guilty, we might say, of the bigotry of low expectations. If Irish, Scottish or Welsh irredentists were to make themselves into human bombs and come into English towns, or English churches, the Church of England really would condemn it unequivocally as evil, but the Church of England has lower expectations of Arabs, and much lower concern for Jews.

Consider one of the most atrocious Arab-Islamist suicide bombings in Israel: the attack on Machane Yehuda Market in Jerusalem in 1997, perpetrated by two science students from Birzeit University in Ramallah, which injured 178 people (including teenage tourists) and killed 16. In 1997, Ramallah, a Palestinian Authority region, had a far higher standard of living for Arabs than the average for the Arab world (Middle East and North Africa). Yes, the people have been “politically disenfranchised” but this is because Palestinian Authority/Fatah has not allowed an election since it was elected in the 1990s.

Last year (2019), one of the worst – or at least most widely reported – Islamist suicide bombings was on Easter Sunday in Sri Lanka. It had been planned by a group of young, intelligent and affluent Muslim men who, on the most holy day of the Christian calendar, walked into crowded churches and hotels, blowing themselves up, killing over 250 people, and injuring hundreds more. The martyrs were highly educated (including, it seems, at Kingston University in the UK); two of them were brothers who were sons of the one of the richest businessmen in Sri Lanka. And yet the Church of England senior clergy thinks that condemning such attacks as “immoral” is to “merely gloss over” the causes.

The Church of England’s anti-Israelism and uncritical support of Arab Jihadist irredentism of the Holy Land has caused the Church to ignore the real problems in the region: the “near genocide” of Christians throughout the Middle East since the turn of the millennium. As the Bishop of Truro admitted in his report demanded by the British Government last year on the “vast scale” of Christian persecution, “many churchmen in the West turn a blind eye” to this genocide of Christians. The Bishop of Truro has himself turned a blind eye to the Anglican antisemitism that I have reported to him.

And so here we have a CofE bishop telling us that many churchmen in the West turn a blind eye to the plight of Christians in the Middle East, at the hands of Muslim Arabs. It is neglect. But these clergymen do not neglect to support the same Muslim Arabs (or at least Muslim Arabs of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad motivated by the same Islamist/Muslim Brotherhood philosophy) who want to eradicate the Jewish State of Israel and murder all her Jews.

The Church of England is, today, the Church of Stupid. And stupidity is not the Christian Way.  Anglican bishops – who should be protecting Christians, not Islamist terrorists – have become the #UsefulInfidel overseeing the genocide of Christians.

Contemporary Islam is the Problem, and Christianity must take much responsibility for where Islam has ended up

The British newspapers tell us that the Streatham attacker was radicalised whilst in jail. Perhaps he was, but his ideas – that he published on the Internet – are standard contemporary Islamic philosophy that has come from the world’s most revered Muslim thinkers (revered by the world’s Muslims, that is).

Islam, unlike the Church, does not have a Pope and a Magisterium, or its spin offs, such as the Anglican Church. (The Church of England is essentially inertia: a sidecar, attached by its “episcopalian” bolts, to the Roman Catholic motorbike.)  The closest figure to a Muslim pope today is Sheikh Dr. Yusuf al-Qaradawi, in Qatar, who heads the International Union of Muslim Scholars. At age 93, he seems to be the most revered and decorated thinker of contemporary Islam. Like a medieval Pope, he  makes infallible proclamations on everything, from sex to dancing.  And the Muslim faithful, including scholars, lap it up as canonical. The fact that much of what he says violates any sensible standard of human rights seems to afford him more authority: Islam sets itself above human rights: there is not a single Muslim-majority nation that has universal human rights, or shows any intention of introducing them, precisely because of thinkers such as Qaradawi. Qaradawi says he is not antisemitic, but encourages Muslims, including Muslim children, to martyr themselves in order to help wipe the Jewish state of Israel off the map.

In January 2009, Yusuf al-Qaradawi, who has issued fatwas on Jews (and Europeans, according to some sources that I would like to investigate further) issued one of his infallible sermons (translated by MEMRI from Al-Jazeera TV):
“O Allah, take your enemies, the enemies of Islam. O Allah, take the Jews, the treacherous aggressors. O Allah, take this profligate, cunning, arrogant band of people. O Allah, they have spread much tyranny and corruption in the land. Pour Your wrath upon them, O our God. Lie in wait for them. O Allah, You annihilated the people of Thamoud (An early pagan Arab tribe) with an overpowering blast, and You annihilated the people of ‘Aad with a fierce, icy gale, and You destroyed the pharaoh [of Exodus] and his soldiers – O Allah, take this oppressive, tyrannical band of people. O Allah, take this oppressive, Jewish Zionist band of people. O Allah, do not spare a single one of them. O Allah, count their numbers, and kill them, down to the very last one.”

Yusuf al-Qaradawi, Al-Jazeera TV, 2009
Two weeks later, also translated by MEMRI, Qaradawi offered the Arab world his theory of the Holocaust:
“Throughout history, Allah has imposed upon the Jews people who would punish them for their corruption … The last punishment was carried out by Hitler. By means of all the things he did to them – even though they exaggerated this issue – he managed to put them in their place. This was divine punishment for them … Allah Willing, the next time will be at the hand of the believers.”

Yusuf al-Qaradawi, Al-Jazeera TV, 2009
And so I think it is fair to say that the incumbent ‘pope’ of Islam is an antisemitic anti-Israelist. And his ideas are not considered extreme in contemporary Islam. In recent decades, mainstream Islam has inexorably been taken over by Islamism. As I have noted in other pieces, the incumbent Prime Minister of Malaysia, the elder statesman of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) of the Muslim-majority nations, preaches exactly the same evil as Sheikh Dr. Yusuf al-Qaradawi.

Of course, none of these Islamist ideas from contemporary Islamic ‘scholarship’ are original. They came from Christendom. And, if you add a little sugar-coating, Yusuf al-Qaradawi’s teaching on Israel is more or less the same as that of the Church of England and of senior Israel-bashing British politicians in all parties, such as Jeremy Corbyn (Labour), Baroness Jenny Tonge (Liberal Democrat) and Sir Nicholas Soames (Conservative).

British and Christian Israel bashers do not wear suicide belts or carry machetes or launch rockets, but they give their nodding approval – or at least partly justify terrorism – to the Islamists surrounding Israel who do the killing for them.  They relay the propaganda for the Islamists (much of which is received into the Church of England via the World Council of Churches), and the propagation of absurd ‘News’ and narratives and spurious histories provided by Arab, Turkish and Iranian media agences.  I think, in England, most Christian Israel bashers do not even realise they are antisemites. Look at this screenshot for instance, published on LinkedIn in July 2019 and which, the last time I looked recently, is still there.  Fr. Bernard Joy (a Franciscan Anglican) was responding to an essay I wrote accusing the Church of England of institutional antisemitism. In other words, this is his defence that the Church is not antisemitic!

I’ve reported this kind of thing (there are many other examples) to Church of England bishops (including the Bishop of Truro), who have acknowledge receipt.  The bishops are not interested, and close ranks, despite the College of Bishops’ having ostensibly accepted compliance to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism, a year before Fr Bernard Joy wrote this in a public domain.

[ If the reader has any ideas of how I can make the Church of England live up to its compliance to IHRA – which is apparently not legally binding – please do let me know. Message me as a response on this blog; I will keep the message private unless you want to see it published as a response. ]

The World Council of Churches’ antisemitism and anti-Israelism – and implicit support for Jihadism in Israel – is obsessive. This should not surprise us. The high-profile Protestants who opposed Hitler, such as Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Karl Barth, and Martin Niemöller – whose “Confessing Church” gave birth to the World Council of Churches – were nevertheless old-school German antisemites. As Bonhoeffer wrote:
“The Church of Christ has never lost sight of the thought that the “chosen people,” who nailed the Redeemer of the world to the cross, must bear the curse for its action through a long history of suffering… . But the history of the suffering of this people, loved and punished by God, stands under the sign of the final homecoming of the people of Israel to its God. And this home-coming happens in the conversion of Israel to Christ….This conversion, that is to be the end of the people’s period of suffering. The gospel lesson for the day throws light upon the dark and sinister history of this people that can neither live nor die because it is under a curse which forbids it to do either. Until the end of its days, the Jewish people must go its way under the burden which Jesus’ decree has laid upon it.”

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Church and the Jewish Question, 1933
As for historical punishment by God, if there is such a thing, no nation was punished more than Bonhoeffer’s Germany. Even though Germany has now recovered economically, every German today either has to deny the Holocaust or live with the shame that, within living memory, his nation became one of the most systematically evil nations on Earth, in which almost every citizen was complicit. Germany is condemned to eternal shame, which is why perhaps why there will always be a threat of German neo-Nazism from younger generations who want to recover the nation’s loss of honour by justifying what the Nazis did, or by denying what they did.
“What is the reason for obvious punishment, which has lasted for thousands of years? Dear brethren, the reason is easily given: the Jews brought the Christ of God to the cross!”
From a sermon by Martin Niemöller in 1935
Surely future historians of the 20th century will arrive at the conclusion that it was overwhelming Germany and Italy (the cradles of Fascism) and Russia (the cradle of Communism) who were the curse of civilisation. Or perhaps Japan, and its emperor worship, will take the ultimate dishonour; it was Japan after all that introduced to the world the philosophy of “divine” human bombs. The State of Israel, on the other hand, will be seen as the great blessing to mankind that she is, despite almost all nations united in their attempts to undermine her.

Apocalypse Now

As noted, the terrorist in Streatham opted to go straight to Paradise before the Islamists win the world for Allah and bring Sharia ‘Paradise’ to Earth on Judgement Day, spanning out from Jerusalem.

The Church’s mainstream teaching on the goal of history (be it Catholic, Protestant or Orthodox) is no better than mainstream Islamic teaching. According to the Christian vision of history – which has been modified in parts of Western Europe since the Holocaust – the Jew is condemned (or at best surplus to requirements) as God Almighty rules the world through the Church. The Church is to “sit” on everything, as implied in the churchy words supersession and cathedra.

The Christians and churches of Germany and Austria have of course been made to realise that they are not in fact to become the ruling centre of the Judenrein thousand-year Third Holy Roman Empire (or Reich), but contemporary Islam has not given up on the belief that it is to become a Jerusalem-centred Judenrein global caliphate.

To use a (Christian) Biblical metaphor, we handed over the leaven in the lump, which although it has been added to a quite a difference recipe, results in bread that is a recursion of the exact same inexorable rot.  In other pieces on this blog (such as the Arab-Israel Conflict Made Simple, that I wrote in August 2019), I have explained the transfer of Nazism from European Christians to Muslim Arabs, not least via the philosophy of Muslim Brotherhood leader Sayid Qutb (d.1966) who Islamised Nazism, and on whose philosophy al-Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood is based.

To fear contemporary Islam is not “Islamophobia”, it is common sense, just as to fear the direction of Christianity a century ago in nations such as Russia, Germany, Austria, France, Italy… would have been the correct view.  Jews were the first victims of course, but the nations themselves quickly imploded to a state of pre-Christian barbarism following the resurgence of antisemitism.  Mussolini even modelled himself on Caesar, and Hilter modelled himself on Mussolini.

You would think the World Council of Churches has enough to do in the world – not least addressing the genocide of Christians in the Middle East, who have rapidly dropped from 20% to 5% of the population – but no, the WCC is obsessed with providing support for Arab irredentism to overthrow the Jewish “Israeli occupation” of the Holy Land. Church of England vicars don’t wield machetes, and don’t launch rockets, and don’t wear suicide vests, but they are nevertheless the mincing and mawkish cheerleaders for anti-Israelist Islamism.

Sense is Meaning

Sense/Sens

As noted, last week’s attack in London was described – universally through Britain – as a “senseless attack”. To understand why the attack should not be seen as senseless requires us to look through the lens of philosophical theology, and that which gives life its deepest meaning to many of us (perhaps more than half the population of the world) who have faith in God of Israel.

It is worth looking at the very word “sense” at its French roots.  Sens, in French, primarily means direction of travel. Hence the French road signs saying sens interdit mean that you are not permitted to travel in this direction (“no entry” we say in the UK).  And deux sens de circulation means that the traffic travels in both directions.

In the Anglophone world, when we talking about the meaning of life, we are talking about life’s significance. In the Francophone world, when we are talking about the meaning of life, we are explicitly talking about life’s direction.

Hence the French phrase for “meaning of life” is rarely la signifiance de la vie, and almost always le sens de la vie. And this is why I have echoed my title for this piece in the French:  Israël : C’est le sens de la vie.

I think that the French expression to describe the meaning of life is more useful than the English expression. Almost everyone in the West (and “Westernised” parts of the world), and in the Muslim-majority nations, have in their mind a linear direction (sens). If we have no personal goal, and no corporate goal that we feel we are part of, life is senseless, directionless, meaningless.

Of course, we all embark on many meaningful journeys (literally and metaphorical) in life, and some have more meaning than others. Starting a family for instance does, for most people, have supreme meaning, despite knowing all the effort, difficulties and challenges that will accompany the achievements and joy.  This is at least the case in civilised nations: there are parts of the world where, as we have noted, children are bred to create child martyrs, and there are, tragically, still many parts of the world where children are bred to be slaves, in the many nations where debt bondage remains prevalent and is passed down the generations. (Many children are born into slavery, and debt bondage is another terrible global problem that our churches have, scandalously, neglected in pursuit of irredentism of the Holy Land.)

Our life finds its meaning in our direction, our journey

For “Abrahamic” monotheists amongst us – that is Jews, Christians and Muslims who accept that the Creator is God of Israel who definitively revealed Himself into the history of mankind through the People Israel – life’s most meaningful journeys can literally be journeys.

For Muslims for instance, a once-in-a-lifetime pilgrimage, or Hajj, to Mecca has inestimable value to the believer.

Metaphorically, the Church is all about journey. The fact that the naves of our great cathedrals resemble upside-down ships is no accident of design. As the very word “nave” (related to navy) implies, these are the spiritual ships of heaven, carrying our souls safely through the storms of History to the end of Time. The New-Testament word parousia is usually mistranslated as “second coming”, but more literally means to arrive, a word itself (as in the French arriver) that comes from Old French, meaning to arrive at land, “to come to shore”.  It is a metaphor for man’s arriving to a state of holy knowledge (at which time, according to Christian Apocalypse, we see things differently, and “there was no more sea”).  The word Apocalypse means unveiling.  It relates back to the Jerusalem High Priest unveiling the whole, when he entered the Holy of Holies on the Day of Atonement and became fully at one with God.

And the three great monotheistic faiths have direction – sens – not only towards a corporate end goal, but in day-to-day worship.

• The world’s Jews face Jerusalem in prayer.
• The world’s Muslims face Mecca in prayer.
• We Christians face East to the Sun: almost all church naves point east to the Sun because Emperor Constantine’s favourite god was Sol Invictus – to be worshipped not on the Sabbath (i.e. Saturday or sabbato in Latin) but on dies Solis: Sun-day.

And so in every way, literally and metaphorically, the Abrahamic faiths have sens, or direction of travel.  They can be good sens or bad sens, of course. And perhaps in most religion, the majority of followers always follow each other down a bad route, not the good route. Consider Germany and Austria in the 1930s for instance, at the very heart of Christendom and the very peak of civilisation. According to the Nazis’ own census in 1939, 94% of the people were Christian. (Hitler himself opposed secularism, seeing it as a Communism project.)

Alas, this would not, I imagine, have surprised Jesus the Christ, who warned that people would follow each other through the wide gate, rather than take the narrow and demanding path that we are each, as individuals, called to ascend in order to become as fully human as we can (as Jesus was fully human), and grow “in wisdom and stature” in the eyes of God and man.

The Abrahamic religions have Geo-graphy, and have Time: they are all “apocalyptic” (much as this word has come to have overwhelmingly negative connotations where it should be overwhelmingly positive).

The Abrahamic faiths are progressive: The world, despite appearances, is always progressing towards the unknowable ultimate good on Earth, despite appearances, and despite the obvious fact that God Almighty, God Omnipotent and Lord of History, allows evil to unfurl under His Providence. God uses all things, good and evil, to bring about the ultimate Good.  As for the obvious lack of justice we see in the world, many of us have faith that, in the context of Eternity, there is justice (and mercy), which is why we forgive rather than seek revenge.  There is only one authentic Judge of what is ultimately justice.

“Thy Kingdom Come” [Time] Jesus said in his prayer following the Sermon on the Mount, and in almost the same breath as he said, preaching from his Jewish scripture, “Swear not by Jerusalem [Geo-Graphy], for it is the City of the Great King”.

And so, all adherents of all three Abrahamic religions have sense/sens.

Muslim Terrorists are NOT senseless

Justice Secretary Robert Buckland, who informed the House of Commons of the Streatham attack last week, described it as “senseless and horrific”.

The terrorist was, until he went to prison, a college student of science and maths. His mother told the media: “I spoke to him on the phone on Sunday. He said: ‘Mum, I want some biryani… your mutton biryani…’ He was fine when I went to see him. He became more religious inside prison… Before he went to prison he was not that religious. After he came out he was really religious… He was a polite, kind, lovely boy. He was always smiling. I’m so upset, he was only 20 years old.”

One of the victims of the knife attack, a Roman Catholic lady, is now, thankfully, safely recovering, at least from the physical wounds. The Roman Catholic Archbishop of Southwark John Wilson is reported in the Catholic journal The Tablet as saying:
“Our thoughts and prayers are with those who have been injured and with their families, and with all affected by this senseless assault. We thank our emergency services for their support and response.”
All the media outlets I have seen used the word “senseless”.  Reading the media reports we find that this young man’s life was not senseless at all. The Mail Online and the BBC website reported that the attacker had a “Goals In Life” on the inside cover of his notebook. He had his eyes fixed on goal and direction of travel. Indeed, the judge who imprisoned him in 2018 spoke of “life goal”, which was “to die a shuhada (martyr) and be admitted to jannah (paradise)”. As noted, he strapped a false bomb to himself because he wanted to the police to kill him whilst he was doing his divinely-assigned task of killing the Infidel.

As Muslims who are trying to encourage reform of contemporary Islam point out, Islamism – such as that of the Muslim Council of Britain – is not necessarily violent, and in fact isn’t usually violent, but its very philosophy – the belief in the Islamisation of the world – is nevertheless extreme. And the potential for violence as the means for achieving the goals of Islamism is ever present.  As the historian Dr Richard Landes, an expert on the history of apocalyptic movements through the past thousand years points out, apocalyptic expectations quickly lead to frustation, impatience and then extreme irrationality, evil, killing, and suicide (Heaven on Earth: The Varieties of the Millennial Experience, Richard Landes, OUP).

Islamism is an apocalyptic movement.  Its three goals are –  according to the “Prevent” counter-terrorism expert and practicing Sufi Muslim Haris Rafiq at a speech he gave at Oxford University in July 2019:

1. “Enforce Islamism’s verion of Fiqh [jurisprudence] which comes from Sharia”.
2. “Impose Islam, and Fiqh, in every part of Earth”.
3. “Wipe Israel off the map”.

The greatest obstacles to these goals are seen as the USA and, obviously, Israel.

Israel is the Goal

The world’s obsession with Israel should surprise no-one. More than half of the population the world has some attachment to one of the Abrahamic religions. It was through the People Israel, on whose ideas our civilisation is built, that the One Creator, “God of Israel” (in Scripture) revealed His Israel-centred plan.  Our ideas of geography and time – such as 7 days in a week – come from Jewish scripture (which has even survived the atheism of the French Revolution, and the 10-days a week of the Republican Calendar).

God even “housed” His Name in Jerusalem. And all those of us who are baptised Christian are “named... in the Name of God”. Christian Scripture points, always to “Israel”, “Zion”, “Jerusalem”, “Mount Zion”… in both ‘Old’ Testament and ‘New’ (not least Apocalypse).

I am a science writer by profession. I write inter-disciplinary science to help scientists communicate (such as explaining the physics of mass spectrometry to life scientists who need to use such instruments for medical research and analysis). In my spare time I choose to write about Israel, and antisemitism. I have many Jewish friends, some of whom appreciate my efforts and ideas. One Jewish friend recently asked me if writing about Israel is a “hobby”. No, it’s something far more meaningful. Ever since Jeremy Corbyn MP became leader of the Labour Party and introduced antisemitism/anti-Israelism into mainstream British politics, I’ve become so aware and concerned about bad philosophy in the world, and how it is increasingly gravitating to antisemitism and anti-Israelism, that I have had to drop my hobbies, feeling that I must make whatever small contribution I can to challenge the anti-Israel philosophies (religious and secular) that seem to be overwhelming the world.  I’m ashamed that I have not engaged before 2016, or wasn’t properly aware of the problem before 2016, especially as an adherent in the institutionally-antisemitic Church of England.  But I have realised that what filters through the British media, including the BBC, does not help our understanding of the truth.

The lawmaker said that Israel is to be “the head nation, not a tail nation”.  I think in many ways she already is the head nation, always excelling and doing the best she can, despite so little encouragement from the world and despite being surrounded by the Levantine Leviathan, whose regimes’ philosophy is the same as that which inspired the Muslim martyr’s knife attack in Streatham last week.

Israel, the ensign for God of Israel, is already the best nation in the world, despite the fact that the United Nations has condemned Israel, the sole Jewish nation, more times than every other nation in the world put together!

According to the United Nations, Israel is by far the worst nation in the world.
Very strange. Very bad sense.

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[i] A few days ago I came across this on Twitter (click on the February 6 link below): A 6-year-old girl articulates the need to kill Jews, before her proud and beaming mentor (mother? or teacher?). This is common Arab entertainment today.  There is a big demand for it.  It is translated from the Arabic by media-watching groups such as MEMRI and CAMERA.  Look them up.

And over the border in Jordan, things are no better: