Why is a CofE Church Displaying the Names of ‘Martyred’ Islamic Terrorists for Jewish New Year?

A vast tapestry has just gone on display in England, celebrating the nation’s military, cultural and religious conquest by brutal armed colonial warlords who mercilessly stormed onto our undefended beaches from abroad in large boats. And, by remarkable coincidence, the Bayeux Tapestry is also available for the general public to see at the British Museum at the moment, too.

The other triumphalist tapestry I am talking about has nothing to do with the 11th-century French, but modern-day Middle Easterners of an even more medieval mindset. Leeds Minster is a major Anglican church and, coinciding with the Jewish New Year High Holy Days of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur this September, its vicars, in a spirit of “commitment to peace and interfaith solidarity”, decided to erect a tapestry there commemorating the names of those who have died in the conflict in Gaza since Hamas’s attacks of October 7th 2023. But only the Muslim ones. Several of whom are known terrorists who were slain whilst fighting for Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ).

Stitched up like a Kippur

A Christian church shouldn’t be celebrating Jewish holidays anyway. Its priests are getting the building confused with a synagogue. But to ‘celebrate’ such occasions by commemorating the memory of proud Jew-killers seems about as sensitive as the Minster holding a Mass for the souls of Richard the Lionheart and General Allenby to ‘celebrate’ Ramadan. Just to ensure maximum crassness, the specific dates the display was open to the public for were between September 11th (a well-known Muslim High Holy Day itself, I believe, as well as the first day of Rosh Hashanah this year), and September 20th (the day of Yom Kippur 2026).

For some context, here’s what the 2021 census data said about religion in Leeds:

The religious profile of the city is changing. … The numbers of people identifying as Christian fell by 76,479 but at 419,790 still make up the largest identifying group. The numbers of people identifying as Muslim rose by 22,282 to 63,054 and Muslims remain the second largest self-identifying religious group in the city. All other religions measured in the census increased in number except for the Jewish community where a small decrease of 580 was recorded.

Wonder why that might have been?

The tapestry, called “Stitch Their Names Together”, is just a series of big white square dishtowels containing the needleworked names of over 50,000 Gazans who have died in post-October 7th Israeli actions in the region; by the end, someone with RSI must have been very well-practised in stitching variants of the word ‘Mohammed’. Conceived by Irish feminist Mary Evers, a “committed anti-war activist and humanitarian, with a lifelong focus on the empowerment of women and the rights of the Palestinian people”, Mary says she made the giant cloth death-list together with close input from several pro-Palestinian groups. Including Palestinian Islamic Jihad?

Disturbed members of the Jewish Representative Council (JRC) of Leeds contacted the Minster to let them know that, following analysis, they had found at least 12 of the names being celebrated belonged to PIJ militants; names like G. Haddist and Haïd al-D’Bomms should really have been a dead giveaway. Identifiable PIJ members stitched onto the tapestry included Field Platoon Commander Karam Tayseer Mahmoud al-Jourani and Artillery Operative Muhammad Noman Fadl Hajji.

Al-Jourani, says the Israeli military, was responsible for having “planned and promoted attacks against Israeli civilians and IDF soldiers using anti-tank launchers”. The only man matching Artillery Operative Hajji’s name and age I could find online, meanwhile, was ‘martyred’ back in October 2023, during the immediate aftermath of Hamas’s original attacks a few days earlier, presumably whilst attempting to fire shells at the Israelis. Are these really the kinds of people the Church of England wants commemorating inside its churches now? Where’s the big stained-glass window of Yahya Sinwar to go alongside them? Maybe it’s down in the basement, together with all the hostages.

Embroidering the truth

As for ‘feminist’ Mary Evers, she sounds even worse than the trendy interfaith vicars are. In reality, rather then celebrating female empowerment, the region’s jihadists would gladly stitch Ms Evers’s mouth shut forever (although, to be fair, so would I). As it is, she has merely settled for stitching closed her own eyelids. How can acts of mere embroidery possibly be expected to change the world and bring about peace in the Middle East? Evers’s website explains:

Stitched art, often marginalised in militaristic, patriarchal societies, is reclaimed here as a powerful tool of expression and resistance. This international sewing circle transforms the craft into a means of shaping collective identity and stands as a protest against the states enabling this genocide and a world that, by watching in silence, is equally culpable.

The “militaristic, patriarchal” society of William the Conqueror and his Normans didn’t “marginalise” female sewing-circles, though, and surely neither would that of Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Otherwise, who was going to stitch together all the shrouds for their victims?

Who is this naïve, needle-happy individual, Mary Evers, who has proudly put her name to this project? Born in Ireland in 1959, she moved to the Middle East as a child when her policeman father was deployed to the Holy Land as part of an early UN peacekeeping mission there. Whilst in Jerusalem, she realised that the region’s people were quite simply better, more peaceful and more tolerant than the backwards, bigoted, potato-eating white Papists and Proddies back home.

“In Jerusalem, religion was just part of who you were, not a tool for division,” she told the Middle East Monitor website last year. If that’s really the case, then why had her own father just been sent there as part of an armed UN peacekeeping force to stop all the Jews, Christians and Muslims from killing each other? In her own words, Mary “is a risk-taker, a lifelong learner, and a woman who sees possibility where others see obstacles”. Where there really are obstacles, it is generally a good idea to actually see them, however. She’d never win a hurdles race with an attitude like that. Or navigate through an Israeli minefield.

Living in the shadow of constant religio-ethnic strife which she somehow contrived not to see, Mary naturally developed “an inclusive perspective” upon the Holy Land’s various religions and races, which is why only dead Palestinians are included on her latest tapestries. “I feel Palestinian in my heart,” she says, with members of her family having intermarried with the locals; she has a Palestinian brother-in-law who says “You are one of us now”, which sounds not at all sinister.

Tapestry of lies

Being Palestinian “in my heart”, the white Irishwoman naturally teamed up with groups of actual Palestinians living in genuine modern-day Occupied Territories like Wales, such as the traditional Islamic sewing experts of Swansea Creatives For Palestine, whose social media pages feature posters calling Israel “The infanticide state” (admittedly, King Herod was Jewish, but that was a long time ago now).

That Jews kill babies certainly seems to be the intended message of the colour-coded tapestries hanging limply like Hamas-executed homosexuals in Leeds Minster, too:

To reflect the Palestinian flag, Mary chose specific colour codes for the embroidery. Black threads represent Gaza men, red for women and green for children. The creamy white Egyptian cotton represents the white of the flag. Each panel, even without reading the names, visually conveys the demographic impact of the deaths. Some panels, overwhelmingly green, are a haunting reminder of the countless Gaza children killed.

Other images on the Swansea Creatives For Palestine social media page promote Tai Chi as an improbable means of anti-Zionist resistance, and hyperbolically condemn the Swansea Air Show, as “Not everyone hears aircraft the same way”; some Palestinian immigrants might “hear” them as being piloted by evil Jews come to drop white phosphorous on their heads. Instead of military aircraft, “We choose bubbles”, says the bubble-blowing Arab child on the poster. The bubble of their own perpetual geopolitical victimhood?    

Ty Dai colours

The central organisation involved here is Ty Filasteen, a sort of glorified arts-and-crafts store combined with Muslim meeting-house, less William Morris, more William Moorish. The shop’s name comes from the Welsh word for ‘house/home’ and the Arabic word for ‘Palestine’; a literal translation might therefore be ‘Wales is our homeland now’, an odd attitude for an apparently anti-colonialist outfit to take. But, as ever, only white or Jewish-settler colonialism is to be condemned; systematic Muslim colonisation of white people’s own homelands is to be celebrated.

Supposedly, Wales and Palestine are natural twins, because both have historically been oppressed by the forces of malign foreign imperialism, English or otherwise:

The connections [demonstrated at the Ty Filasteen HQ] between Wales and Palestine have surprised many visitors [especially ones who know there aren’t any]. Wales has its own history of protecting its language, culture and identity. While the histories of our two nations are different, both understand the importance of preserving heritage through stories, music, craft and community. These shared values have created meaningful conversations and a genuine curiosity about Palestine.

So, the argument is that Welsh people historically guarded their traditional culture very closely. So do the Palestinians. In solidarity, therefore, the Welsh should now allow boatloads of Palestinians into their country, to systematically displace the traditional native Celtic culture in favour of their own alien Arab obsessions in a spirit of cross-cultural brotherhood.

The organisation’s social media features the below piece of graffiti, in which the traditional emblem of the red dragon from the Welsh flag has been re-coloured with the hues of the Palestinian flag. The words next to it, “Or afon i’r mor” are Welsh for “From the river to the sea”, and it doesn’t mean the Severn and the Bristol Channel. How is this not a prime example of cultural imperialism in open action? I don’t know if it was an actual Palestinian or a brainwashed native Celt who spray-painted the thing, but if the latter, then his or her mind has been successfully colonised by the incomers, has it not? 

Cloth ears

Does the Church of England really not know what kinds of people and causes it is getting involved with here by allowing the display of such tapestries in what is supposed to be a Christian building, not a gigantic converted stone monument to the shuhada of jihad? It should do, because it didn’t take me long to look all this stuff up on extremely easily publicly accessible websites.

After being told some of the people they were memorialising were outright terrorists, Leeds Minster staff did later remove the relevant panels from display, and you could well argue they were not to realise who every single one of the 50,000 or so names included were, there being far too many for clerics to check out individually. But, as the Jewish Representative Council of Leeds correctly wrote in communications with the Minster managers:

Over 800 Israeli civilians were murdered on October 7th. … It cannot be right that innocent lives have comparative degrees of sanctity: the decision to display this tapestry [commemorating only Muslim, and not Jewish victims of the war] suggests that the church publicly takes a different stance.

Whatever your view on Israeli actions in the region, it should surely have been incredibly, embarrassingly obvious to CofE employees that holding a display of this kind, at this particular period of the Jewish calendar, would widely be seen as perpetrating a deliberate open insult against Jews. Yet they didn’t. Why? Because their collective minds, like those of Celtic collaborators who paint formerly red dragons black, white and green, have clearly been colonised by the artificially imported ‘anti-colonialist’ Palestinian mind-virus as well. Mary Evers isn’t the only one out there who has deliberately stitched her own eyes closed tight together, then.     

Outside of Leeds and Wales, the opening of the current Bayeux Tapestry exhibition earlier this month down in London was, predictably, disrupted by pro-Palestine mobs, just like everything else over here is these days. How long before the British Museum, like Leeds Minster, folds too and begins displaying the Beyt Hanoun Tapestry instead?

Steven Tucker is a journalist and the author of over 10 books.