Top cleric sorry for Holocaust comparison
THE Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby has apologised for suggesting that the impact of climate change would be worse than Nazi genocide.
Welby, the most senior cleric in the Church of England and leader of Anglicans worldwide, made the comments in an interview with the BBC at the COP26 summit in Glasgow.
He said that national leaders will be “cursed” if they do not achieve the goal of the United Nations summit to urgently find concrete ways to stabilise global heating.
Politicians who fail at this task will be spoken of by future generations “in far stronger terms than we speak today of the politicians of the ’30s, of the politicians who ignored what was happening in Nazi Germany,” said Welby.
He added that this was because climate change “will kill people all around the world for generations” and “allow a genocide on an infinitely greater scale” that will “come back to us or to our children and grandchildren”.
Welby, who discovered when he became Archbishop that his father was actually Jewish, later apologised for offending Jewish people with the Holocaust analogy.
“I unequivocally apologise for the words I used when trying to emphasise the gravity of the situation facing us at COP26,” he tweeted.
“It’s never right to make comparisons with the atrocities brought by the Nazis, and I’m sorry for the offence caused to Jews by these words,” he added.
A spokesman for British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said of the comments, “It is up to individuals how they choose to frame the problem.”
Stephen Pollard, editor of The Jewish Chronicle newspaper, reacted furiously to Welby’s comments, tweeting that they were “so sickening that I simply cannot comprehend how Welby can remain as a priest, let alone Archbishop”.
He later relented, saying the Archbishop made “a proper apology, not mealy-mouthed”.
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