The Church of England is accelerating its descent into a terrible moral and spiritual darkness.

Yesterday, the Synod decided to “hear,” or engage with, a spittle-flecked document that demonises the State of Israel with vicious falsehoods and distortions, tries to to rob Jewish people of their historic identity and seeks to destroy Judaism itself as the religion rooted in the land of Israel.

Its very title, A Moment of Truth: Faith in a Time of Genocide, perpetrates the wicked lie that Israel is the perpetrator of genocide rather than the target and victim of genocidal attacks perpetrated by the people that this document, and the Church of England, go out of their way to sanitise, excuse and justify.

The document brands Israel a “colonial, settler, and exclusionary entity” (note the term “entity” — the language of genocidal Islamists — rather than “state”, “nation” or country”).

It describes the Palestinian Arabs falsely as the “indigenous people of this land” (it’s the Jews who are the actual indigenous people of the land).

It claims that “the genocidal war on Gaza is the continuation of the Zionist project to seize all of Palestine, emptied of its Palestinian people” (a demonstrable lie that demonises Zionism — and therefore Judaism, whose connection with the land of Israel is existential). And it demands a boycott of dialogue with “Zionists” — which in practice means boycotting as pariahs the majority of Jews.

Every lie that’s been thrown at Israel over its war of self-defence in Gaza — starvation, ethnic cleansing, war crimes — is thrown at it here. While it includes the weaselly caveat that it doesn’t justify civilian killings, it portrays opposition to Israel’s existence and “resistance” — aka the killing of Jews — as an act of religious faith.

It asserts that the Hamas atrocities in Israel on October 7 2023 were “born out of decades of injustice, oppression and displacement since the Nakba of 1948” (the war of extermination waged by the Arabs to destroy Israel at its rebirth in the Jews’ ancestral homeland, but which today’s would-be exterminators falsely describe as a Jewish war of colonial aggression).

Read it all at Melanie Phillips on Substack