MAHMOUD ABBAS, the Palestinian Authority President, met with representatives of UK Churches led by Archbishop Patrick Kelly of Liverpool, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and the Moderator of the Church of Scotland, the Rt Rev David Arnott, on 17 January.
The meeting, which took place at Lambeth Palace, discussed the plight of Christians in the Holy Land and the ongoing peace process. President Abbas said that the Arab Spring offered a rare opportunity that needed to be grasped now or missed completely.
“The people’s desperate yearning for peace needs to be fulfilled and this meeting today with President Abbas reinforced our determination,” said Archbishop Kelly, who represented the international affairs department of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference.
Archbishop Rowan Williams expressed gratitude to President Abbas for taking time to share his concerns and aspirations with church leaders and said that churches were praying for courage on all sides to break the deadlock in the peace talks.
A Jewish convert to Christianity and to Anglicanism has written as strong attack on the Bishop of Guildford for failing to take speedy action to stop the Rev Stephen Sizer from having a link on his Facebook page to an anti-Semitic site that features images of blood-sucking Jewish vampires and Nazi-style caricatures of Jewish men.
Nick Howard claims in an article appearing in the Jewish Chronicle online on 16 January that it took the Rt Rev Christopher Hill six weeks to take action and that he only acted when he knew the Jewish Chronicle was investigating the matter. Howard argues that Stephen Sizer has a long record of arguably anti-Semitic behaviour so that the Church should not have been encouraged to give him the benefit of the doubt.
“The Macpherson report into Stephen Lawrence’s death defined institutional racism as ‘the collective failure of an organisation’ regarding ‘colour, culture, or ethnic origin’. The Diocese of Guildford has fallen foul of that,” charges Howard.