Holy Fire

From 6th April: "In the Palestinian mind, Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre are "inseparable twins". Those who have attacked one will attack the other, and have indeed already made clear their intention to do so. They are part of the coalition that has brought Benjamin Netanyahu back to office. I remain under sentence of death from the last time, and that is the context in which Google regularly locates me in the ward of the former Leader of Durham County Council, where I am not aware that I have ever set foot."

Lo and behold, Israeli soldiers in Occupied East Jerusalem have attacked worshippers at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre on this, Holy Saturday in the Byzantine Rite that is observed by the majority of Palestinian Christians. This is unlikely to attract the Western attention that attacking Christians last weekend might have drawn, although even then probably not in the American media or, if anyone cared, in their London mini-me operations. Especially with Russia otherwise engaged, the Israelis know what they are doing.

In 2014, for purely ideological reasons, a couple were able to move what were then their five very young children, British citizens all, to a place where they were bound, in due season, to be conscripted into their perpetration of this atrocity. From the English village with the seventh highest house prices outside London, they were able to move those British children to a warzone, where two of them have now been killed, one while still only 15 years old. So much for Social Services. So much for the safeguarding-industrial complex. So much for Prevent.

There may be a religious obligation to live between the Mediterranean and the Jordan, but to move to a West Bank settlement is strictly a political choice. I am not going to do the obvious line about the different coverage of most killings of 15 to 20-year-olds on the West Bank. It is telling in itself that they are unlikely to be British citizens, although it would be interesting to hear of any who were. Rather, while Radlett is not quite in Greater London, it is inside the M25. So let us see the 15 to 20-year-olds who died violent, barely reported deaths on the inner side of the London Orbital Motorway. Their faces alone would draw all sorts of pertinent contrasts. And there are far more Orthodox in the United Kingdom than most people realise. For a start, nearly a quarter of all Greek Cypriots in the world live here. Did none of them make the trip for the Holy Fire this year? Well worth looking into.