An Appeal to Rev Slammer

For reasons known only to himself, Bloomsbury Central Baptist Minister Simon Perry’s e-mail address is 'revslammer@googlemail.com'. In view of the fact that I have had no acknowledgement of my e-mails to him and his ministerial colleagues about their decision to allow the Palestine Solidarity Campaign to hold a Carol Service in the church, I wrote to Rev Slammer again and copied the letter to his fellow ministers.

Dear Simon,

I wrote to you and your colleagues on Tuesday about the PSC Carol service at Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church.

I wonder if you have seen the You Tube film and comments on the protest outside the church (http://www.hurryupharry.org/2009/12/02/carols-with-caryl-and-more/#comment-419787).

One of my colleagues was present and, as I feared, the event attracted anti-Semites such as John Sullivan who, in an interview outside the church said, amongst other things:

“Everybody in Britain can see what a nasty unpleasant type of people the Jewish people are in England…”

“English people are basically Christian… and you should be abiding to the type of life we live in England…”

When the interviewer tried to correct his seriously skewed opinion, Sullivan interrupted him: “I’m doing the talking, not you. You cannot discuss with Jewish people… that is your philosophy… You’re not part of my country, and I’m British…. You’re Jewish and you’re prey to the Israeli Zionists…”

“Do you know anything about the Christian religion? It’s ‘love thy neighbour’. Have you got anything similar? It’s ‘an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth’ … it tells you you’re a cruel and unpleasant people in this respect…”

“If you look through history, Jewish people are vindicative [sic] and probably evil and probably very unpleasant…Israeli zealots and Zionists …”

Most English people would tell you to f*** off back to Israel … if you’re in England you should be more English than I am…”

“I hope I’m a little bit more educated than you are… To everyone in England, if you’re Jewish please adhere to the English way of life”

When the interviewer wished Mr Sullivan a happy Christmas he angrily rejected the good wish and went into the Carol service, presumably to sing about peace and goodwill to all men. If Mr Sullivan’s comments had been addressed to a Muslim or a homosexual, he would have been arrested on the spot.

But worse than John Sullivan in another respect was your Church Secretary, John Beynon. Mr Beynon is an educated man and a former principal of King’s College. His ignorance of the situation in the Middle East was astonishing. His limp, “when you put it like that [that Hamas is a terrorist organization that kills Jews and Christians] it is unreasonable” was inexcusable.

It is not a case of “putting it like that”. The Hamas Charter states unequivocally: “The Day of Judgement will not come about until Muslims fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Muslims, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him. Only the Gharkad tree, would not do that because it is one of the trees of the Jews."

One of the protesters outside the church pointed out that “there are no Baptist churches in Gaza”. The demonstrators recognised Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church as a “House of God”, which was why they considered it shameful that a hatefest such as Tuesday’s Carol Service should take place within the hallowed walls of BCBC.

At the top of your personal page on the BCBC web site, you quote Romans 12:2: “Don't let this era squeeze you into its own mould, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind”. Simon, I urge you to consider whether you and your colleagues have been squeezed into this world’s mould and by so doing have brought the Christian faith into disrepute.

Yours in the service of Messiah Jesus,