Yesterday, the Guardian published a letter from Canon Paul Oestreicher, former chairman of Amnesty International. For those who still don't grasp the full extent of the moral deformity of the world of human rights NGOs, along with a predominant strain within the Church of England, here it is:

'Yesterday's front page describing the crimes of the US military in Iraq and the Israeli military in Palestine denote for me, late in the day, a crossing of the Rubicon. I have until now, perhaps foolishly, been prepared to admit that in both situations one could agree to differ with the apologists. But no longer. These are not "military actions", but crimes against humanity. The occupations in both cases have no basis in law. They amount to the brutal repression of civilian populations. As a British citizen I am ashamed to be party to all that. Those old enough to remember will recollect that the French Resistance were held to be heroes when they killed the German occupiers. I did not rejoice at German deaths then, any more than I rejoice at Israeli, American and, yes, British deaths now. But there is no difference.'

This letter illustrates how the toxic combination of vicious prejudice and astonishing ignorance combine to produce an astounding inversion of moral values. These occupations are not illegal. There is no brutal repression of civilian populations, but a defence against terror and mass murder in an attempt to restore order and respect for human life. As for his convoluted last thought, he appeared to be equating the deaths of Nazis during the occupation of France with the deaths of Israelis, Americans and British now, and proposing that Islamist mass murderers are the moral equivalent of the French Resistance.

On his own website, Oliver Kamm provides a helpful gloss on just where Oestreicher is coming from:

'In the 1960s he was a leading figure in a curious exercise dubbed the Christian-Marxist dialogue. The dialogue nominally owed its inspiration to the intellectual ferment in Christendom associated with radical political ideas. These included Liberation Theology, a series of papal encyclicals condemning global capitalism, and the romanticised Marxism then popular among those certain that western liberal democracy was repressive but unable to identify quite why... interesting that in Britain the Christian-Marxist dialogue of the 1960s was scarcely touched by the newer currents of thought. Instead the Marxism that left-wing Christians were ‘in dialogue’ with was of the standard - and shameless – variety espoused by the Communist Party of Great Britain. The principal figure on that side was James Klugmann, editor of Marxism Today, one of the Cambridge Communists of the 1930s, and a man prepared to tailor his convictions to whatever the current line happened to be from Moscow. When in 1948 the Cominform issued instructions that Tito was to be denounced, Klugmann wrote the CPGB’s version of that directive – under the title From Trotsky to Tito – despite being a personal friend of Tito’s. He was also, incidentally, a Soviet spy: he recruited John Cairncross, the ‘Fourth Man’, at Cambridge, and as a member of the wartime SOE passed classified information to the Yugoslav Communists. This was the man with whom Oestreicher edited a volume of proceedings of Christian-Communist dialogue. They formed a complementary duo: Klugmann, an ideologue of high intellect and low morals; Oestreicher, a political naïf of the first order...

'A man as ideologically obtuse as Oestreicher proved irresistible during the Cold War to the East German secret police, the Stasi. In his recent analysis of Stasi propaganda operations against Britain, The Stasi Files, Anthony Glees records Oestreicher’s ambivalent record. Genuinely believing he was advancing the cause of human rights behind the Iron Curtain and disarmament, Oestreicher both maintained contacts with dissidents and … not only took great pains to stay in with the East German regime but gave its officers useful information and some real propaganda help. Glees quotes Oestreicher insisting, even in 2001, that "at its root Communism is a good idea, fundamentally right", but that it had been "corrupted, rather as the Church had been".

How many others in the Church of England were similarly influenced by this Christian-Marxist dialogue? Might this help explain why the Church has for the past several decades gone so comprehensively off the moral rails and sided with the enemies of this country's moral and social values? Did the long march through the institutions place a bomb underneath the English altar?

Posted by melanie at May 25, 2004