Will King Charles Repudiate His Church’s ‘Libel Against Jews’?

What sayeth King Charles III, the Defender of the Faith and Supreme Governor of the Church of England? That is the question that is emerging in the wake of the church adopting a stunningly anti-Israel document that libels the Jewish state and the Jews of the king’s realm. The report, known as Kairos II, is being denounced by Britain’s Chief Rabbi, Ephraim Mirvis, as a “shocking” dispatch that contains “so much falsehood.”For half a millennium, ever since King Henry VIII broke from the Church of Rome, the wearers of the English and British crowns have also served as the supreme religious authority of the Sceptered Isle. Henry was named a “Defender of the Faith” by Pope Leo X. The honorific was, in 1544, confirmed by an act of Parliament for all subsequent kings and queens of England’s breakaway faith, not the Church of Rome. Kairos II declares that “the genocidal war on Gaza is the continuation of the Zionist project to seize all of Palestine, emptied of its Palestinian people.” It calls Israel a “colonial, settler, and exclusionary entity” and asserts that Jerusalem’s “claim of ‘self-defense’ cannot stand. How can a coloniser defend itself against those it has colonised and expelled?” It demands “repentance” for the situation “affecting the Palestinian people.”Below the king in the hierarchy sits the Archbishop of Canterbury. The erstwhile holder of that office, Baron Carey, reckons that the “King could, through no fault of his own, find that the Church he represents is now committed to promoting a document” animated by animus toward the Jewish state. The current archbishop, Sarah Mullally, reckons that it contains the “heartfelt expressions of the lived experience of Palestinian Christians.”Monday’s vote by the Anglican Synod mandates that Kairos II encourages the “Church of England at all levels to engage with” the report, which also goes by the title “Moment of Truth: Faith in a Time of Genocide.” Archbishop Mullally acknowledges the “abhorrent rise in antisemitism” in Britain, but does not connect the dots between the libels of Kairos II and the bigotry faced by Britain’s Jews, record numbers of whom are decamping for Israel.As our A.R. Hoffman reports, British Jews are sounding the alarm. The community’s Board of Deputies reckons that Kairos II propagates a “toxic narrative about Jews” at a time when “antisemitic rhetoric, incitement and violence have surged in Britain following the horrors of 7 October.” Its defamation of Zionism as a “settler-colonial” movement amounts to “a libel against Jews everywhere.”As the Board of Deputies notes, “When Britain stopped Jewish immigration to Palestine in 1939, this closed off the last place of refuge for Jews from the Holocaust. Statelessness was the key condition that enabled the annihilation of two thirds of European Jews.” Twenty years before London issued the notorious White Paper, His Majesty’s Government announced its support for a “national home for the Jewish people.”King Charles’s relationship to Zion is a personal one. His grandmother, Princess Alice of Battenberg, is buried at a crypt on the Mount of Olives. He was anointed — with oil sanctified at Jerusalem — to the chords of Handel’s Coronation Anthem, which tells the story of Zadok the Priest and Nathan the Prophet. The monarch has time and again proven himself a friend of British Jews. It is time for Charles Rex to defend the best of his faith.

Will King Charles Repudiate His Church’s ‘Libel Against Jews’?

Will King Charles Repudiate His Church’s ‘Libel Against Jews’?

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