Open Letter to a Holocaust Denier - The Reverend Lord Biggar, Oxford’s Regius Professor Emeritus of Moral and Pastoral Theology

Those Who Deny the Holocaust in Gaza are No Different to those Who Deny the Nazi Holocaust

The truth about the British Empire and slavery: Mehdi Hasan and Nigel Biggar | Head to Head

I first came across Tory Peer and author of In Defence of War, the Revd. Lord Biggar, when a friend, Adam Waterhouse, sent me a link to an article he had written. Adam’s article was in response to an article Biggar had written, Israel’s acts are not ‘genocidal.’ Biggar had been replying to an article by the Archbishop of York, Stephen Cottrell which spoke of Israel’s actions in Gaza as ‘genocidal acts’.

The Archbishop had visited the West Bank and he was quoted as saying that after his visit the previous week “It gives me no joy whatsoever to use these words,” but that he had been left wondering, “What other words do you use” to describe the situation in the West Bank?

What’s happening in the West Bank is not what happened in South Africa, but you’re left thinking: what other language do I use to describe such a two-tier system, where one group of people is so persistently and systematically denied their human rights and having to live a parallel life? What is happening is deliberate and systematic, persistent, and intentional, and its impact is devastating.

You may wonder why Nigel Biggar even felt the need to respond to the Archbishop’s mild words. We have the horrors of Gaza: the starvation of children, the bombing of hospitals and schools, the Flour Massacre and the shooting of people collecting food, the mass murder of innocent civilians and the genocidal statements of Israeli leaders, to say nothing of the open apartheid in the West Bank, yet the only thing that aroused the ire of our Professor of Morality was the description of what is happening in Gaza 'Genocide'. 

Israeli officials' rhetoric fuelling Gaza genocide through dehumanisation and incitement: B’Tselem

One can only assume that Biggar was doing his best to prevent any expression of solidarity by the Church of England with the Palestinians of Gaza. Not that there had been much anyway. Until he resigned for his role in covering up child abuse in the Church of England, Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby had not only refused to condemn the genocide but had all but supported it.

Biggar is not a historian but an academic engaged in historical revisionism and moral relativism. He is no different from those who downplay the magnitude of the Nazi holocaust.

Although Biggar dresses up his arguments in the clothes of moral theology his mission is political, the rehabilitation of the reputation of the British Empire and its offspring, Israel.

That is why he defends the actions of Israel and minimises the genocide in Gaza. In this he is given enthusiastic support by the same Tory press which turned a blind eye to Hitler's anti-Semitism in the 30s.

Zionism was the product of the late colonial era. He could hardly exculpate British colonialism whilst condemning its bastard child, Israel. That is the impulse which drives Biggar and he is not averse to resorting to every verbal and rhetorical trick in pursuit of that goal even if he plays fast and loose with facts.

The reason why I have penned an Open Letter to Biggar is two fold. Firstly Adam Waterhouse was too polite by half when tackling as devious and dishonest a character as Biggar. Politeness is not one of my faults!

Secondly there are many questions that Adam did not ask concerning Biggar’s motive in writing his turgid essay.

To:  nigel.biggar@theology.ox.ac.uk, biggarn@parliament.uk, @NigelBiggar  

Open Letter to the Rev. Lord Biggar

Dear Lord Biggar,

You are the Regius Professor Emeritus of Moral and Pastoral Theology. It is a grand title for such an immoral, (or is it amoral?) man. You are the King’s Professor no less.

I puzzle over what kind of morality and theology leads a person to deny that a genocide is taking place when the evidence to the contrary is so overwhelming?

You state, in the Church Times of 28 November 2025, that Israel’s acts are not ‘genocidal’ in response to the Archbishop of York’s declaration that Israel is committing ‘genocidal acts’. 

Israel bombs school in Gaza killing children and parents under the pretext that they were Hamas

What was it that went through your mind when you read Archbishop Cottrell’s article that impelled you to write in defence of Israel’s genocide? What emotion was it that led you to defend a state that has bombed refugee camps, tent encampments and burnt and buried children alive? A state which has destroyed hospitals and schools, murdered doctors and first responders?

By the most conservative estimate, when your article appeared, 70,100 people had been murdered by Israel in Gaza yet you reduce it to 44,000. Why?

According to a study published in The Lancet, some 83,000 had died by January 2025. If this is true then over 118,000 had died by the time your article appeared.

According to Stuart Casey Maslen, head of the Geneva Academy of International Humanitarian Law and Human Rights, Gaza’s population had declined by more than 10%, which would suggest roughly 200,000 people had died by February 2026.

In your article you do your best to minimise the number of dead. Morally you are no different from deniers of the Nazi holocaust who also did their best to minimise the number of those killed. You say that ‘the large number of civilian casualties alone — maybe around 44,000 — is not sufficient evidence’ of genocide. Is this what the morality of pastoral Christian theology amounts to?

The definition of genocide owes nothing to numbers. The death of 8,000 at Srbenica was held to be a genocide. ‘Genocide’ refers to the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group. The question is whether Israel had the necessary intent and did it commit any of the acts that constitute genocide, viz. 

Ø    Killing members of or Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group

Ø    Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction, in whole or in part

Ø    Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group

Ø    Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group

Apart from the last category it is clear that the acts of the Israeli state are clearly acts of genocide. It is also clear that you have no expertise in genocide, history or any relevant academic discipline.

Raz Segal, an Israeli and Associate Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies does have that expertise. Segal wrote:

Israelis are explicit and unashamed about their genocidal intent because they have imagined and prosecuted a war against people who they see as colonised “savages”.

A survey by Professor Tamir Sorek of Pennsylvania State University showed that 82% of Israeli Jews supported the expulsion of the Palestinians of Gaza and 47% agreed that

when conquering an enemy city, the Israel Defense Forces should act as the Israelites did in Jericho under Joshua's command – killing all its inhabitants.

56% supported the expulsion of Palestinian citizens of Israel. The statements of intent to commit genocide by Israel's leaders are too many to count.

You question why Archbishop Cottrell ‘thinks that his view should carry weight’ when he ‘is an expert neither in the ethics of war nor in Middle Eastern affairs’. But this applies even more so to you, the author of a book In Defence of War?

You also criticise the Genocide Convention because it ‘fails to distinguish the morally different ways in which a people can be “destroyed”.’ For most people there is nothing moral in destroying a people.

You compare the Allies killing of thousands of French and Italian civilians in the fight against the Nazis with Israel’s ‘war against Hamas’. But there is no  comparison. 

Hamas is a resistance organisation waging a guerrilla war against the world’s fourth most powerful army. The Nazis had an army consisting of armed soldiers complete with tanks and aircraft. So too does Israel. It is the IDF not Hamas which is comparable to the Nazis.

It is also noticeable that you avoid mentioning the word ‘Palestinians’. To you they are ‘Arabs’. This too is part of a genocidal mentality whereby indigenous people are invisible.

What is clear is that your morality is not politically neutral. You say that

THERE is no doubt that Hamas intended to kill indiscriminately on 7 October 2023, because we know that they deliberately hunted down the old, the young, and the infant.’

Hamas mass rape a ‘hoax’ and ‘fake news’, says University of Sydney professor

But there is doubt. Israel has waged a war of atrocity propaganda. The first lies were the 40 beheaded babies hoax. Then there was the mass rape hoax. Hamas’ principal aim was to capture Israeli hostages in order to exchange them for Palestinian hostages.

Whereas you attributed to Hamas the worst of motives, you went out of your way to excuse the actions of the Israeli army. You wrote that:

In contrast, the fact that the Israeli military have targeted buildings where they know civilians are present is no proof that they intend to kill them; for it may be that their intended targets are Hamas sites, to which, tragically, civilians are located dangerously close.

So when Israel bombs and attacks hospitals it is because they are Hamas sites? And ambulances? Universities? What about schools?  How about reservoirs and water treatment plants? Was Hamas hiding out in them too? How about the Trades Union Centre? Are bakeries and kindergartens also Hamas bases.

I know that you are an expert in moral theology, but that begs the question of whether moral theology is a genuine academic discipline or an invented and imagined subject. It is entirely subjective and without any means of independent verification.

Everything you have said could justify any and everything that the Nazis did. Your morality seems to depend on which side you take.  Are there any universal principles that can be distilled from your writings?

You say that ‘the Nazi death camps are the paradigm of genocide’. But are they? One of the main characteristics of Genocide is that there is no paradigm except perhaps the presence of colonialism/imperialism/nationalism.

The death of between 12 and 15 million Africans as a result of slavery might also be considered paradigmatic but your main concern when it comes to colonial slavery is to oppose reparations by indulging in whatabouttery in your book The Tyranny of Imagined Guilt.

As Professor Alan Lester writes:

‘Whataboutery seems to me a very fragile ethical edifice upon which to build an anti-reparative argument.

It seems that ethics have no place in your moral theology. Lester writes that you

accuse(s) reparations activists of “the reckless, dismissive brushing aside of concerns about the truth.” One wonders if he was looking in the mirror.

For you there seems to be only one genocide, the Jewish holocaust. Contrary to Zionist propaganda it was no more unique than any other genocide.

Was the Genocide in the Congo  where amputations and the skinning alive of the 10 million Africans were perpetrated, less cruel or paradigmatic? 

Was the Herero/Nama genocide in SW Africa to be disregarded when it was based on the same principles of racial supremacy and even involved some of the same actors who perpetrated the Nazi holocaust, such as Eugen Fischer?

The Nazi genocide of Jews has become an imperialist narrative, shorn of its political and social  roots, as the main rationale for everything that Israel does. It is no surprise that you do not deploy your ‘moral’ arguments against reparations for slavery against the reparations that were paid by the Germans to Israel.

I can only assume that the real reason for your anguish is that as a Christian Zionist you are prepared to justify any atrocity and any war crime that Israel commits because without the ‘return’ of the Jews to the Holy Land Christ will not be returning. In other words the ends justify the means.

When I saw you in the debate hosted by Mehdi Hassan you brought to mind Percy Shelley’s Masque of Anarchy, written in the wake of the massacre at Peterloo in 1819:

I met Murder on the way—

He had a mask like Castlereagh -

Very smooth he looked, yet grim;

Seven blood-hounds followed him.

You are also the author of Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning, which attempts to provide a defence of the British Empire. In your own words it is ‘Empire Without Apology’.

Although you conceded in the debate hosted by Mehdi Hassan that the Empire contained ‘‘elements of racism’ you see the Empire as not having been ‘essentially racist’. On balance it was a force for good.

It is no surprise that you were ennobled by Kemi Badenoch who like most Black people in the Tory Party goes out of her way to prove that she’s politically White. Badenoch is the Black Face of White Supremacism. It is no surprise that she has been called a coconut by Black anti-racists.

Kenan Malik, in his review of your book describes how, in 1919, the architect of British support for Zionism, Foreign Secretary, Arthur James Balfour,

dismissed the idea that the new League of Nations should adopt a statement about equality, insisting it unimaginable “that a man from central Africa could be regarded as the equal of a European or an American”

This is the racism that led to Britain’s support of Zionism.

Your real function as an academic was to provide the religious and ideological underpinnings for the new imperialism that we are seeing play out in the wars in the Middle East today. Your academic discipline, Moral Theology, is little more than a religious justification of imperialism and its work. It is political chicanery dressed up in academic jargon.

Virtually every human rights organisation in the world recognises that what has occurred in Gaza is genocide. Organisations as disparate as Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Israel’s B’tselem and the UN’s own Commission of Inquiry. The Association of Genocide Scholars voted by 86% to describe what was happening in Gaza as a genocide.

Perhaps you would like to inform people just what your own qualifications are that enables you to contradict not only every human rights organisation but the testimony of doctors like Dr Mark Perlmutter. In an interview Perlmutter described how, when volunteering at the European hospital of Khan Younis in southern Gaza he "saw two children that were shot twice". He added: "No child gets shot twice by mistake."

Virtually every doctor who has volunteered in Gaza has the same story. Israel is using children as target practice. Does this not tell you something about what has happened in Gaza or does your allegiance to the Tory Party and mammon preclude this?

It seems to me that a far better title for you to use would be the Professor of an Immoral Theology, not forgetting the Regius bit of course!

Tony Greenstein