Every since I was a court reporter I’ve been fascinated with the idea of repentance or as it is called in Hebrew – Teshuvah. Reading stuff like Jimmy Boyle’s ‘A Sense of Freedom’ also piqued my interest in whether serious criminals can be reformed and if so how to go about it? I started to wonder just how many of those who go through our courts and into our prisons repent of the prior behaviour, properly atone for their wrongs and become decent human beings again.
Obviously there were some who I saw go through the courts, such as the members of the now defunct Paedophile Information Exchange, who I thought at the time would never repent and history has proven me correct on this. I don’t recall any of PIE types who publicly renounced their prior criminality. However there were others, the murderers, the rapists, the armed robbers, the thieves, street fighters, fraudsters, gangsters, extremists and terrorists, who might well have later repented of their crimes and reformed themselves. There must have been some. It may not have been a huge number, I’m realistic enough to know that some people who are wrong’uns decide to stay wrong’uns, but there must have been some who repented and turned their lives around and if so I wonder what lit the spark of reform in their minds?
The Christian Testament in Luke 15:7 states that there is more joy in heaven over one repented sinner than ninety nine righteous persons and although I’m not a Christian I can relate to that. Repentance/Teshuvah is also a Jewish thing and it is recognised that it is a difficult thing for some people to do and the Christian idea of the disproportionate joy in heaven over the repenting sinner recognises the difficulty of the path of Repentance/Teshuvah.
One of the things that seems to be difficult for some people to repent about is Jew hatred. It’s a sickness that takes people over like one of those parasites that manipulate cockroaches to do the parasite’s will by burrowing into the cockroach’s brain. It’s such a deep penetrating disease that it is unlikely that the likes of former BNP leader Nick Griffin or any of the many Islamic Jew haters that currently afflict the world will ever change.
Jew hatred is a disease that is easy to catch and can have religious or social or ideological vectors of transmission. The problem is it’s often difficult to cure and sometimes the cure is the destruction of nations. Jew hatred starts off by ‘just asking questions’ Candace Owen style and then goes on to lead the individual into a parallel false world of paranoia where there’s a malevolent Jew under every bed. It’s a disease that is not confined to one culture or nation or race or class or even time period. Jew hatred was the disease that was there when the Amalekites attacked the Israelites thousands of years ago in the desert, it was there when religious hostility to Jews ensured their expulsion from England in the 13th century and it was there in Strasbourg in the 14th century when Jews were burned after being blamed for the Black Death. That same deranged Jew hatred that saw Jews wrongly blamed for the Black Death was behind the murders by Mohammed, the man Islam claims as its prophet, of Jewish tribes in Arabia, the pogroms in Russia, the Shoah and the Fahud.
But as well as harming Jews, Jew hatred more often than not harms those who espouse it. Will anyone take seriously in future the likes of Candace Owens or Tucker Carlson who have allegedly decided to engage in Jew hatred for pecuniary reasons? They’ll get the short term cash but how will they be remembered in the long term? Both Owens and Carlson could have continued as popular conservative voices and been possibly remembered fondly as such, but they chose a different path. Spain after the Reconquista did not gain from expelling its Jews in fact it probably lost out by not having access to the trading networks that medieval Jews had set up nor from the Jewish academic achievements that the Jews who were expelled from Spain took with them. The Soviet Union took a similar ‘othering’ attitude to Jews as could have been found in the medieval world which is not surprising bearing in mind that Karl Marx was a rabid Jew hater. Thousands of Soviet Jews, some whose skills could have done great good for the Soviet Union, languished in Gulags or died from gunshots in an NKVD basement. Soviet Jews were not truly free until the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. Germany in the mid 20th century was destroyed in large part by the German people going along with Adolf Hitler’s Jew hatred. His war of conquest and extermination, driven very strongly by Hitler’s Jew hatred, ended up destroying not only six million Jews and millions more non-Jews, but the war that Hitler started also destroyed Germany itself. Germany sank into barbarism and paid the price in explosions and fire. Jew hatred destroyed Germany, utterly.
So you see, lots of people and cultures sink into Jew hatred and by doing so harm themselves as well as their Jews.
However there are some people who go down the path of Jew hatred and repent of their view. They take a hard look at what they once believed and start to see holes in their beliefs and the more they look the bigger the holes get. As the holes get bigger the individual starts to see their ideology of Jew hatred melt before their eyes. In a way the process of a Jew hater becoming a former Jew hater must be very similar to many of the accounts I’ve seen of those choosing to leave Islam. They start by finding the inconsistencies in their belief system, small ones at first but these lead to the finding of more and bigger inconsistencies until there is nothing left for the honest person to do but set aside their guiding ideology.
One person who has walked the path from being a Jew hater to campaigning against Jew hatred is Joshua Bonehill-Paine. Now for those who don’t remember Mr Bonehill-Paine was an inveterate Jew hater. His publication The Daily Bale was classic neo-Nazism. He was the sort I marched against back in the early 80’s. He was also someone I vehemently criticised and when he was gaoled called him ‘an embarrassing twat of a man’ and the sort of person who ‘if he was operating in the 1940’s he would probably be interned under Section 18b as someone who has sympathy for the enemy’ (please note that the linked article is NSFW) He ended up getting imprisoned for various serious offences involving Jew hatred. Having seen Mr Bonehill-Paine’s behaviour that got him gaoled, my initial belief was that he would never turn himself around, but he really did. I feel wrong now that I didn’t at the time believe that he could one day repent.
Back in February of this year the publisher of the popular political satire site the Crewkerne Gazette decided to go public with his real identity and would you know it it is none other than Mr Joshua Bonehill-Paine. He had a prison epiphany about his beliefs and not only dropped his Jew hatred but also became a Christian and now he campaigns against Jew hatred in Britain.
His piece that he’s published about his journey from the madness of Jew hatred to becoming a foe of Jew hatred can be found on the Crewekerne Man website and it is a magnificent piece of writing.
Here’s some excerpts from Mr Bonehill-Paine’s fabulous article:
"Even prison did not immediately cure me. For at least the first year and a half of my sentence, I remained a committed antisemite. I refused to acknowledge that I had done anything wrong. I still believed I was the one telling the truth and merely being punished for it.
The collapse began at HMP Wayland in Norfolk in 2016, when I was 23 turning 24. I remember an Orthodox Jewish prisoner arriving on the wing. I believe he was serving time for fraud or something similar. What mattered was not his offence but my reaction. I could not fathom how a Jewish man had ended up in prison at all, because I had been led to believe that Jews escaped justice. If I am honest, when he first stepped onto the wing I was terrified. In the back of my mind I kept thinking: a Jew, a Jew. I went back to my cell, fell to my knees, and thought: they’ve got me.
That sounds deranged because it was deranged. But it captures the essence of antisemitism perfectly. It is not merely hatred. It is paranoia. It is delusion. It is a diseased interpretation of reality."
It’s good to see that he recognises that Jew hatred is a disease of the mind because it is. Mr Bonehill-Paine’s hatred of Jews dissolved when forced into contact with a Jew and he started to understand that there is a difference between truth and propaganda.
Whilst in prison he was put into segregation because of letters that he’d sent to supporters outside ended up being leaked to the Press, leading not just to a hostile story about him but also for HM Prisons to put him in segregation. Alone with just a Bible for company Mr Bonehill-Paine started to reflect on his beliefs and how they led him to where he was now, in a Victorian cell with nothing.
"And that changed everything.
In that segregation cell, for the first time in my life, I actually read scripture seriously. I was not reading snippets, not repeating slogans, not borrowing religious language to decorate hatred. I was reading properly. And in reading it, I began to understand the history of the Jewish people in a way I never had before. I encountered Abraham, Isaac and Jacob not as props in some ideological argument, but as part of the story of God’s covenant. I read the Hebrew scriptures and saw, perhaps for the first time, that the Jewish people were not some demonic force in history but a people bound up with the entire drama of salvation. I saw that Christ himself was a Jew, that the apostles were Jews, that the roots of Christianity are Jewish, and that you cannot claim to love Christ while hating the people through whom God chose to reveal so much of His redemptive purpose.
I came to believe, in a deep and personal sense, that the Jewish people are God’s chosen people — not as a slogan, but as part of the biblical story of covenant, exile, survival and promise. And with that came a radically different understanding of Israel. Israel ceased in my mind to be some satanic outpost or conspiratorial invention. Instead, I began to see the Jewish return to their ancestral homeland through the lens of scripture, history and survival. I had previously treated Israel as a symbol onto which I could project all my hatred. In that cell, reading the Bible, I began to understand why so many Christians see the restoration of Israel as bound up with the faithfulness of God to His promises and with the long, battered continuity of the Jewish people through history.
That was my great epiphany. More than that, it was the moment I would describe as being saved. It was the point at which my hatred finally began to lose its hold. I became closer to Christ in a real way, not as a badge, not as a tribal marker, but as Lord. And once that happened, the old ideological edifice could no longer stand."
I will not excerpt any more of Mr Bonehill-Paine’s piece as I want you to go and read all of it for yourself and these excerpts are to whet your appetite to do that. But the upshot of Mr Bonehill-Paine’s story is that he reached out to counter extremism programmes whilst in prison and when he was eventually released decided to marry, have a family and most notably at least for me, become a campaigner against Jew hatred.
I’m astonished at what he has achieved and he’s done it because he recognised that there is a path of Redemption/Teshuvah. However it’s clear from reading Mr Bonehill-Paine’s account of his road to redemption is that it has not been an easy path. He’s had to do much to get where he is and it is impressive. I wish to do my own bit of Teshuvah here with regards to Mr Bonehill-Paine, I thought he would never ever be redeemed, I thought he was going to be a modern day mini-Amalek, a constant enemy of Bnei Yisrael, the people Israel, but instead he repented and now spiritually fights on the side of The L-rd.
Baruch Hashem, bless the Holy Name of the Eternal One for this turnaround in this man’s spirit and his soul. If nothing else Mr Bonehill-Paine’s change of path is surely without doubt one of the biggest turnarounds I’ve seen a man take since I encountered many years ago, a former Hitler Youth member who later converted to Judaism.
This story shows that sometimes the L-rd can move in some extremely mysterious ways. After reading this piece by Mr Bonehill-Paine I’d like to say that this is a man who would now be welcome at my Passover Seder table.
It’s serendipitously correct that I publish this piece from February about Mr Bonehill-Paine’s redemption at Passover time. His journey from spiritual decrepitude to redemption is reminiscent of the flight of the Jews from Egypt and from slavery into freedom. ‘Dayenu!’ it would have been enough for him to just quietly accept his release from the slavery of his former beliefs and go on to live a quiet normal life, but he went further than that, he became Righteous and publicly so. I wish Mr Bonehill-Paine and his family all the very best. Shalom.
Link
Original Joshua Bonehill-Paine article
https://www.fahrenheit211.net/2016/12/08/joshua-bonehead-bonehill-an-embarrassing-tt-of-a-man-post-nsfw-due-to-swearing/
Mr Bonehill-Paine’s own story from the Crewkerne Gazette
https://crewkernegazette.co.uk/article/exclusive-the-crewkerne-man-reveals-his-identity-to-help-fight-against-antisemitism-in-the-uk-1