The outspoken chief rabbi of South Africa, Dr. Warren Goldstein, has once again given voice to crucial truths that others have shamefully ignored.
He accused both Pope Francis and the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, of being indifferent to the murder of black Christians in Africa and the terrorism threat in Europe while being “outright hostile” to Israel’s attempts to battle jihadi forces led by Iran.
“The world is locked in a civilisational battle of values, threatened by terrorism and violent jihad,” said Goldstein. “At a time when Europe’s very future hangs in the balance, its two most senior Christian leaders have abandoned their most sacred duty to protect and defend the values of the Bible. Their cowardice and lack of moral clarity threaten the free world.”
Goldstein’s blistering accusations were on the mark.
Christians in Africa have been subjected to barbaric slaughter and persecution by Islamists for decades. Two years ago, Open Doors, an organisation that supports persecuted Christians, observed: “In truth, there are very few Muslim countries—or countries with large Muslim populations —where Christians can avoid intimidation, harassment or violence.”
In January 2024, a report for Genocide Watch confirmed that, since 2000, 62,000 Christians in Nigeria have been murdered by Islamist groups in an ongoing attempt to exterminate Christianity. In addition, more than 32,000 moderate black Nigerian Muslims and non-faith individuals have been massacred.
According to a report in 2020 by the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom, Christians in Myanmar, China, Eritrea, India, Iran, Nigeria, North Korea, Pakistan, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Syria and Vietnam are being persecuted.
These facts were reported in June by Peter Baum for The Daily Blitz. Yet the mainstream media all but ignore these atrocities. There are no marches in western cities to accuse these countries of facilitating crimes against humanity. There are no NGO-inspired petitions to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) to declare these countries and groups guilty of genocide.
Instead, the media and western elites demonise Israel as the pariah of the world for defending itself against these genocidal Islamists. This unique and egregious double standard is the hallmark of classic antisemitism.
The attitude of the church leaders is even more astonishing. The hundreds of thousands of victims of this persecution are their flock. The goal of this onslaught is the wholesale destruction of the faith they lead.
Yet from Welby and the Pope have emerged little more than occasional expressions of measured concern. And even then, they usually refuse to call out what’s happening by its proper name — the Islamist war to eradicate Christianity and destroy the West.
The 10-month war against Israel by Iran and its proxies following the October 7 pogrom is a crucial front in that onslaught against Western civilisation. Yet as Goldstein said, the Pope and Welby have stood passively by while African Christians are “butchered by jihadi groups with direct ties to Israel’s enemies in Gaza and the West Bank”.
The jihadi ideology, he said, was also a clear and present danger to Europe. As a result of open-border policies, immigrants had poured into the United Kingdom and across Europe, many of them “brandishing a violent jihadi ideology deeply hostile to Christianity, liberal democracy and western values”.
The result has been surging antisemitism leaving diaspora Jews living in fear. Yet on the ideology fuelling this civilisational onslaught, Welby and the Pope have been silent. Instead, they have recycled the Islamists’ propaganda that demonises and delegitimises Israel with lies.
Last December, the Pope described Israel’s Gaza war of self-defence against genocide as “terrorism”.
Last month, Welby endorsed the advisory opinion of the ICJ that Israel’s occupation of the “Palestinian territories” was illegal. The court’s opinion, which owed everything to politics and virtually nothing to law, was based entirely on lies and distortions.
Yet Welby commented, with a passion that’s wholly lacking when he talks about the slaughter of Christians in Africa, that Israel was guilty of “systematic discrimination”; that it was “denying the Palestinian people dignity, freedom and hope”; and that “ending the occupation is a legal and moral necessity”.
Every part of that was a falsehood. Israel is not in illegal occupation of the disputed “West Bank” areas of Judea and Samaria. On the contrary, the Jews are the only people with a legal right many times over — from the terms of the 1922 Palestine Mandate and then through international laws of self-defence and those permitting the retention of territory that is still used for belligerent purposes — to what is now Israel, the “West Bank” and Gaza.
So why are the Pope and the archbishop given to such unholy perversity? The reason is partly psychological, partly political but mostly theological.
First, there’s the fear of antagonising the Muslim world and, as a result, bringing about yet more persecution of Christians.
Second, there’s internalised self-flagellation corresponding to western liberals scourging themselves for “white privilege”. Back in 2020, Welby said he was ashamed of the Anglican attitude towards black people and declared that the church was “deeply, institutionally racist”. The Pope, an acolyte of left-wing “liberation theology,” has a similarly anti-west mindset.
The deeper reason, however, is theological. That was illuminated by the sharpest challenge of all that Goldstein hurled at the Archbishop of Canterbury.
Read it all at Melanie Phillips
