Author: Ashley Church

Ashley Church. Most of those reading this will probably have seen the 1993 movie Schindler’s List, starring Liam Neeson and based on the actions of Oskar Schindler, the German industrialist who saved more than a thousand Polish Jews from the Nazi death camps during the Second World War. The real-life Schindler was a complex and flawed character whose initial motivations were probably more economic than moral. But as the war raged on and he witnessed, first-hand, the atrocities being committed against the Jews of Poland, there’s no doubt that his focus changed and became increasingly about saving as many Jewish…

Ashley Church Benjamin Netanyahu has made two remarkable statements in recent months which, taken together, point to a profound change in Israel’s thinking about its future.The first concerns American military aid. In January, Netanyahu said that he wanted Israel to progressively reduce its dependence on United States military assistance over the next ten years, eventually bringing the financial component of that support down to zero. He repeated the point more explicitly during an interview with CBS in May.“I want to draw down to zero the American financial support, the financial component of the military cooperation that we have,” he said.This…

Ashley Church. Mention the words ‘Bible Prophecy’ and most people will roll their eyes. In fact, it’s an indictment on the Christian faith that a society of people that will consult a medium, believe a horoscope, or swear by the writings of Nostradamus now regard Bible prophecy as ‘quaint’ and outdated. Even amongst Christians the mention of Bible prophecy will often elicit obvious indifference, or outright cynicism. Very few Christians now see Bible prophecy as something that should fundamentally shape the way that they understand God, history or even their own faith. But it wasn’t always like that. Fifty years…

Ashley Church. I’ve spent most of my life debating ideas. Not in the sense of being difficult, but in the sense of taking a position, testing it, and defending it to see whether it survives contact with an opposing view. It’s a skill I learnt early. At school, I was in debating teams, where I learned that it wasn’t enough to feel strongly about something. You had to make a case. You had to listen to the other side. You had to understand the opposing case and recognise when someone has made a point that genuinely lands. Even today, I…

Ashley Church Most of us grew up hearing the story of The Boy Who Cried Wolf about a young shepherd repeatedly raising false alarms and delighting in the panic he causes. But when a wolf really did appear, nobody believed him. The lesson was simple: if you lie often enough, people eventually stop listening. But over the past couple of years we’ve witnessed almost the reverse of that story. Instead of learning to distrust those who repeatedly cry wolf, much of the international media has continued to treat every fresh accusation against Israel as though it were established fact. Time after time,…

Ashley Church Reclaiming the aspiration for a Jewish homeland Most of us are familiar with the word Zionist. We see it constantly thrown around on social media, used as an insult, a slur and an accusation.Depending on who’s using it, a Zionist is apparently a racist, a colonialist, an extremist, a supremacist, an apartheid supporter, an oppressor, or someone involved in some dark international conspiracy. In fact, the word is used so often, and with such hostility, that many people now just assume that it has negative connotations. They don’t stop to question it – they just hear “Zionist” and…

Opinion Ashley Church. Over the past few days there’s been a lot noise about the agreement reached between the United States and Iran, with most commentators assessing it to be a failure despite desperate attempts by the White House to spin it as some sort of strategic win. For me – the facts speak for themselves. What began as a matter of strong principle – removing the threat posed by the Iranian regime and ensuring that Iran could never become a nuclear power – has collapsed into an undignified US surrender which leaves the Iranian regime in place with its…

By Ashley Church Every Saturday morning, for at least the past twelve months, Hawkes Bay Pastor Nigel Woodley and a group of supporters from his Hastings church have gathered at the Marine Parade roundabout in Napier. They don’t make speeches or block traffic. They simply stand quietly, holding Israeli flags in solidarity with Israel and the Jewish people. This simple and powerful witness takes place week after week, in good weather and bad. And that scene isn’t unique to Napier. Since the weeks following the October 7 attacks, similar expressions of Christian support have appeared across New Zealand and throughout…

By Ashley Church. Today, June 7, marks the 59th anniversary of one of the three or four most significant events in human history – and you’re probably not even aware of it. Why would you be? It’s not the subject of a public holiday. It’s not a big part of what we learn at school, and it’s not surrounded by festive preparations or national commemoration in the way that other, lesser, events are. So for most people, today will come and go as an ordinary day. But on June 7, 1967, Israeli paratroopers entered the Old City of Jerusalem and,…

OPINION: Ashley Church. At the end of the First World War, the League of Nations gave Britain sovereign control over some of the Middle Eastern territory that had formed part of the defeated Ottoman Empire in the expectation that the Brits would resolve longstanding territorial and political issues between the various peoples who lived in this region. This coincided with the British ‘Balfour Declaration’ which had already committed the Brits to providing a national homeland for the Jewish people and the original plan was to divide the land into an Arab nation, to the east, and a Jewish nation, to…

Laundering the latest lie against Israel OPINION: Ashley Church. Just when it seems that the moral inversion around Israel cannot get any worse, someone finds another shovel and starts digging. In recent weeks, a major report documenting the sexual violence committed by Hamas on, and after, October 7, was released. The findings are grotesque, hideous and almost impossible to read without feeling physically sick. They describe sexual violence as terror, humiliation as strategy, and the destruction of bodies and families as part of the point. The report, Silenced No More, draws on more than 430 testimonies and interviews, more than 10,000…

OPINION: Ashley Church. Spend more than five minutes on social media and you will almost certainly run into the claim that the Jews control the world. It is one of the oldest and ugliest tropes in human history, and like most conspiracy theories, it offers its believers the comfort of an explanation without the inconvenience of facts. It’s a claim that allows its supporters to blame the Jews for both capitalism and communism, wealth and poverty, war and peace, banks and universities, Hollywood and the media, immigration and nationalism, atheism and religion, globalism and nationalism. If the world is complicated, the…

Opinion: Ashley Church New Zealand is in the early stages of a major debate about children, social media, digital identity and the future of online access. Following the earlier introduction of a private member’s bill which would have required social media platforms to stop under-16s from creating accounts (now on hold), the Government is now moving toward the introduction of a much more comprehensive suite of digital ID measures to ‘address online harm’ and ‘introduce social media regulation’ – two phrases that should never appear in the policy platform of any centre right government, ever. This program is also running…

By Ashley Church. One of the more tiresome claims made against Israel is that the Jews are somehow strangers in their own ancestral homeland. You’ve heard the line: that Israel is a ‘colonial’ project, that the Jews arrived late, that the land was really “Palestinian” until modern politics got involved. It’s uninformed nonsense, of course – there has never been a sovereign ‘Palestinian’ state in that land – ever. Yes, Judea was renamed Syria Palaestina following the 132 to 135 Jewish Bar Kokhba revolt – but that was a Roman administrative district named by the Roman Emperor Hadrian in an…

OPINION: Ashley Church. Why are voters really abandoning traditional political parties? Election results, last week, confirmed a trend that seems to be moving across the western world: the rise of the far right. Reform UK surged through councils across England, gaining 1,349 council seats, taking control of 14 councils, and winning mayoralties – establishing itself as a major political force and claiming territory once dominated by Labour and the Conservatives. In Australia, we saw Pauline Hanson’s historic win with her One Nation party securing its first lower-house seat in a byelection. These results follow similar moves to the right in…

OPINION: Ashley Church. Yesterday I pulled into a major-brand service station to fill the tank in my car. (and yes, before anyone asks, I had remembered to arrange a mortgage first). So there I was, standing beside the pump, doing what most of us now do in those awkward few minutes while liquid gold trickles into the tank, when a female voice suddenly boomed across the forecourt. “Pump 10, please hang up your pump.” It wasn’t quite Moses receiving instruction from the mountain, but it was loud enough to make half of the forecourt look up. I hung up the…

OPINION: Ashley Church. A few weeks ago I wrote an article pushing back on the claim that Israel is committing “genocide” in Gaza. I received immediate attacks – most of which you wouldn’t have seen because they were expressed in the same vile, violent way that I’ve come to expect and, therefore, didn’t make it past my content filters. But stripped of the profanity, the threats, the abuse, and the sickening glee at the events of 7 October – there was a consistency of argument amongst the handful of detractors who could actually spell. Essentially their message (expressed colourfully) was…

OPINION: Ashley Church I am a man of many contradictions. One of them is that while I don’t believe there is intelligent life on other planets, I absolutely love science fiction and have watched it since I was a boy – particularly Star Wars, Star Trek, Battlestar Galactica and my all-time favourite – Stargate. Stargate, which ran from 1997 to 2007, starred Richard Dean Anderson as Colonel Jack O’Neill and had that rare mix of adventure, humour, mythology, and good old-fashioned storytelling. It was clever without becoming pretentious, funny without becoming corny, and based its story around an ancient device…

By Ashley Church Over the past few weeks, readers will have noticed a more assertive tone emerging from the Vatican. Pope Leo has stepped more deliberately into the geopolitical arena, offering commentary on events in the Middle East and positioning himself as a moral voice on international affairs. In many quarters this has been welcomed. Surely the emergence of a respected spiritual leader into one of the world’s most complex conflicts should be a good thing? Surely a voice grounded in faith might bring clarity, balance, and even wisdom to a fractured and volatile region? But that instinct rests on…

OPINION: Ashley Church Have you ever watched a magic trick which has left you scratching your head – only for the penny to drop once you saw how it was done? What initially looked impossible became relatively straightforward once the mechanism behind it was revealed. The past few years have been a bit like that, for me. Over that time it has been my privilege to write and speak about Israel and the Jewish people. Not just in the context of the events of 7 October 2023 – but going back much further than that. In fact, I’ve been writing…

OPINION: Ashley Church There is something about Israel that feels bigger than politics and bigger than the events of the moment. You might support Israel or oppose it. You might understand it well or badly. You might see the current conflict through the lens of security, terrorism, diplomacy, ideology or humanitarian concern. But whatever view you take, Israel doesn’t feel like just another country caught in just another war. Because it isn’t. One of the great mistakes of our age is to imagine that Israel’s story began on 7 October 2023, or in 1967, or in 1948. It didn’t. Israel’s…

OPINION: Ashley Church. For a long time, after October 7, I tried to respond to the claims that Israel was committing “genocide” in Gaza in good faith. I assumed that most people were using that word out of ignorance. That they’d picked it up from headlines, activists, or social media feeds, without really understanding what genocide actually means in law, history, or reality. I thought that, if I just explained the term, people would stop using it. I was wrong. It became obvious that the word “genocide” wasn’t being used because people were confused or misinformed. It was being used…

Image featured was created by AI. OPINION: Ashley Church If the recent Newstalk ZB claim that “there is no bias in our newsroom” – attributed to TVNZ CEO Jodi O’Donnell – was intended as a joke, then it revealed an extraordinary sense of humour and a missed career in comedy. If it wasn’t, then it leaves only two other possibilities: either a level of naivety that is concerning in someone holding such an important role, or a belief that the public are too stupid to recognise what is going on front of them. Because the ‘fact’ of bias at TVNZ…

OPINION: Ashley Church. Right now, much of the world’s attention is focused on the events unfolding in Iran. We follow every development, debate the details, and argue it all through the lens of our own worldviews. As a result, today, in every sense, Iran is shaping the international narrative. But go back six months, or a year, or five years, and the focus would have been on something completely different. That’s the rhythm of modern history. One crisis replaces another. One global drama gives way to the next. And like obedient marionettes, we shift our attention to whatever event currently…

Opinion: Ashley Church. As decent people everywhere mark the elimination of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei – Iran’s supreme leader since 1989 – serious questions need to be asked of the Western left. For nearly 5 decades, the Islamic Republic suppressed speech, denied women equal legal standing, executed dissenters, and exported militancy abroad – all while influential voices in the so-called “progressive” left in the West framed Iran as a victim of U.S. influence and as the heroic face of “resistance” against Israel. The contrast with reality could not be more stark. In 1979, just before the Revolution, Iranian society was making…

OPINION: Ashley Church January 27, 2026 The Holocaust did not begin with the gas chambers of Auschwitz or Treblinka. It began much earlier, with ideas, laws, exclusions, and the slow normalisation of cruelty. The part that history often forgets. When Hitler became Chancellor of Germany in 1933, there was no plan to exterminate the Jews. What did exist was a heavily racist worldview: that Jews were alien, that they were a corrosive presence within society – and that the economic hardship, moral decay, and national humiliation that the Germans were facing was their fault. So the early years were not…