For Evangelicals, Supporting Israel Is ‘God’s Foreign Policy’
Offline The irony here is that evangelicals only want to protect the jews for selfish reasons. Fundamentally, an evangelical thinks jews will not be saved during the rapture, and fundamentally an evangelical doesn't care, so long as she is saved. So in essence here, the evangelical movement in support for israel is indeed selfish in nature, and any self respecting jew, would not assoiciate herself with evangelical xtians. Of course...I find it funny how Dobson compares the israeli struggle with David and Goliath, comparing "little Israel" to the Goliath of the muslim nations. Ironically, Israel is the only nuclear power (outside pakistan and india and maybe now Iran) in that region. The palestinians have what...rocks? Also, ironically, the comparison here lacks one little fact, which is that Israel is supported by the goliath called the US.
The evangelicals will not tell you about the segregation of palestinians and the brutality of the israeli soldiers on palestinian children. The evangelicals do not care about innocent lives and homes destroyed, so long as it is the precursor to saving their own ass, in what they deem as their apocalyptic wet dream.
This, my friends is why church and state shoud be separate and why religion should be abolished. How can you plan for the future, when you have 1/4 of the electorate thinking jeebus will be cummin' for them in the next 50 years. This is why we need to fight hard to destroy theism. This the very core of theistic ideology and the fule of atheist activism.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/14/washington/14israel.html?pagewanted=1&th&emc=th
For Evangelicals, Supporting Israel Is ‘God’s Foreign Policy’
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK
Published: November 14, 2006
WASHINGTON, Nov. 13 — As Israeli bombs fell on Lebanon for a second week last July, the Rev. John Hagee of San Antonio arrived in Washington with 3,500 evangelicals for the first annual conference of his newly founded organization, Christians United For Israel.
At a dinner addressed by the Israeli ambassador, a handful of Republican senators and the chairman of the Republican Party, Mr. Hagee read greetings from President Bush and Prime Minister Ehud Olmert of Israel and dispatched the crowd with a message for their representatives in Congress. Tell them “to let Israel do their job” of destroying the Lebanese militia, Hezbollah, Mr. Hagee said.
He called the conflict “a battle between good and evil” and said support for Israel was “God’s foreign policy.”
The next day he took the same message to the White House.
Many conservative Christians say they believe that the president’s support for Israel fulfills a biblical injunction to protect the Jewish state, which some of them think will play a pivotal role in the second coming. Many on the left, in turn, fear that such theology may influence decisions the administration makes toward Israel and the Middle East.
Administration officials say that the meeting with Mr. Hagee was a courtesy for a political ally and that evangelical theology has no effect on policy making. But the alliance of Israel, its evangelical Christian supporters and President Bush has never been closer or more potent. In the wake of the summer war in southern Lebanon, reports that Hezbollah’s sponsor, Iran, may be pushing for nuclear weapons have galvanized conservative Christian support for Israel into a political force that will be hard to ignore.
For one thing, white evangelicals make up about a quarter of the electorate. Whatever strains may be creeping into the Israeli-American alliance over Iraq, the Palestinians and Iran, a large part of the Republican Party’s base remains committed to a fiercely pro-Israel agenda that seems likely to have an effect on policy choices.
Mr. Hagee says his message for the White House was, “Every time there has been a fight like this over the last 50 years, the State Department would send someone over in a jet to call for a cease-fire. The terrorists would rest, rearm and retaliate.” He added, “Appeasement has never helped the Jewish people.”
This time Elliott Abrams, the White House deputy national security adviser who met with him, essentially agreed, Mr. Hagee said.
Leaving the White House offices, “we felt we were on the right track,” he said.
Now, in tandem with the Israeli government, many evangelical Christians have focused on a new villain, Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Evangelical broadcasters and commentators have seized on Mr. Ahmadinejad’s comments questioning the Holocaust and calling for the abolition of the Israeli state. And many evangelicals now talk of the Iranian leader as a “mortal threat” to Israel.
Some evangelical leaders say they are wary of reports that a panel including former Secretary of State James A. Baker III might recommend negotiating with Iran about the future of Iraq. “It certainly bothers me,” said Dr. James C. Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family and one of the most influential conservative Christians. “That has the same kind of feel to it as the British negotiating with Germany, Italy and Japan in the run up to World War II.”
At rallies this fall for Christian conservative voters, Dr. Dobson sometimes singled out Mr. Ahmadinejad as a reason to go to the polls, arguing that Democrats could not be trusted to face down such dangers. “Hitler told everybody what he was going to do, and Ahmadinejad is saying exactly what he is going to do,” Dr. Dobson explained. “He is talking genocide.”
The same name, with many pronunciations, comes up repeatedly on Christian talk radio shows, said Gary Bauer, a Christian conservative political organizer. “I am not sure there is a foreign leader who has made a bigger splash in American culture since Khrushchev, certainly among committed Christians,” he said.
Mr. Hagee, for his part, said Mr. Ahmadinejad’s comments about Israel and the Holocaust were part of what motivated him to found Christians United For Israel late last year. Since the fight with Hezbollah, Mr. Hagee said, he is doing all he can to keep the pressure on United States officials to take a hard line with Iran.
When 5,000 evangelicals gathered last month for a “Night to Honor Israel” at his San Antonio megachurch, for example, Mr. Ahmadinejad was much discussed.
Mr. Hagee compared the Iranian leader with the biblical pharaoh of Egypt. “Pharaoh threatened Israel and he ended up fish food,” Mr. Hagee said, to great applause.
Evangelical Christians who know President Bush, including Marvin Olasky, editor of the magazine World and a former Bush adviser, said Mr. Bush, unlike President Reagan, has never shown any interest in prophecies of the second coming.
Such theological details, however, have not kept the Israeli government and Jewish pro-Israel lobbying groups from capitalizing on the powerful support of American evangelicals. Fearing a backlash over Lebanon last July, Israeli officials and their American allies sought public statements of support from American evangelicals. Some groups declined because of risks to missionaries in the Arab world.
Dr. Dobson read a statement on his popular radio program expressing “heartache” at the civilian casualties but comparing Israel’s fight to “the Biblical skirmish between little David and mighty Goliath.” He explained, “There sits little Israel with its five million beleaguered Jews, surrounded by five hundred million Muslims whose leaders are determined to drive it into the sea.”
Rabbi Yechiel Eckstein, the founder of the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews and the Israeli government’s official goodwill ambassador to evangelicals, said the statements turned out to be superfluous because there was a groundswell of grass roots evangelical support.
Mr. Eckstein said he had discovered the depth of that support when he ran television commercials on the Fox News Channel seeking donations. The response, mainly from evangelicals, “burned out the call centers,” Mr. Eckstein said. During the five-week war, his group added 30,000 new donors. Thanks to the influx of money, he said his organization has exceeded its income from the first 10 months of last year by 60 percent, putting it on track to pull in $80 million this year. “The war really generated a momentum,” Mr. Eckstein said.
Evangelicals’ support for Israel, of course, is far from uniform. Mr. Hagee is an author of several books about the interpretation of biblical prophecies. He says he believes the Bible assigns Israel a pivotal role as a harbinger of the second coming. Citing passages from Revelation and Ezekiel, he argues that conflict between Israel and Iran may be a sign that that time is approaching.
Others say they believe more generally that God maintains his Old Testament covenant with the Jewish people and thus commands Christian believers to help protect their “older brothers.”
“My theology indicates that Israel is covenant land,” Dr. Dobson said in an interview.
Many conservative Christians and their Jewish allies acknowledge a certain tension between the evangelical belief in a Biblical commission to convert non-Christians and their simultaneous desire to help the Jews of Israel.
“Despite all the spiritual shortcomings of the Jewish people,” Dr. Dobson said, “according to scripture — and those criticisms come not from Christians but from the Old Testament. Just look in Deuteronomy, where Jews are referred to as a stiff-necked and stubborn people — despite all of that, God has chosen to bless them as his people. God chose to bless Abraham and his seed not because they were a perfect people any more than the rest of the human family.”
Dr. Dobson, along with some other evangelicals, has expressed disappointment with what he saw as the Bush administration’s pressure on Israel to sign the cease-fire that ended the fight.
“They began by saying they had to take a hard line, by saying they would support Israel and they ended up urging them to compromise and go home,” Dr. Dobson said. “All that is going to do is allow everybody to reload. That didn’t solve anything.” (Mr. Hagee said that he believed the administration gave Israel “ample time” but that Israel erred by not “unleashing the full might of its ground troops” until it was too late.)
The Israeli government and its American allies have been building their alliance with evangelicals for decades. Israeli officials began working closely with Mr. Hagee and his church, for example, a quarter century ago, when he met several times with then-Prime Minister Menachem Begin.
The Jerusalem Post, an English-language newspaper, recently started an edition for American Christians.
The Israeli government temporarily cut off ties with the Christian broadcaster Pat Robertson after he suggested that Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s stroke might have been God’s punishment for withdrawing from territory that belonged to the Biblical Israel. But then Mr. Robertson flew to Israel during the fight with Hezbollah. In a gesture of reconciliation, the Israeli government recently worked with him to film a television commercial to attract Christian tourists.
“Israel — to walk where Jesus walked, to pray where Jesus prayed, to stand where he stood — there is no other place like it on earth,” Mr. Robertson says in the commercial, according to the Jerusalem Post.
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Hagee is insane. He's one of these people who wants to bring about Armageddon.
I am often annoyed that questioning the acts of the state of Isreal is painted as anti-semitism. It's another clear example of the dangers of mixing religion and government.
Wasn't Peter Jennings accused of anti-semitism for reporting the Palestinian perspective of the conflict?
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The antisemitism charges are part of the jewish lobby agenda. They have successfully managed to hijack our government. The jewish lobby is the LARGEST lobby in the united states of america.
Check this out.
World News
Israel Lobby says Pentagon "Infiltrated": Hostility to Zionism seen as "Major Threat"
By Michael Collins Piper
Nov 15, 2006, 12:01
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Aleading voice of the pro-Israel lobby is pushing for an old-style “witchhunt”—under the guise of “homeland security”—to identify (and expel) individuals in the U.S. government and our military who are suspected of being hostile to Israel.
The call for a witch-hunt is based on the outlandish thesis that “Islamo-fascists” and Muslim “jihadist” operatives and, perhaps more particularly, their “sympathizers”—however loosely defined—have infested America’s defense, national security and federal law enforcement community.
The witch-hunt was proposed in the fall 2006 issue of the small-circulation—but highly influential—Journal of International Security Affairs published by the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA). JINSA has been one of the frontline forces in the fanatically pro-Israel “neo-conservative” circles directing foreign policy under George W. Bush.
Not only Vice President Dick Cheney, but also UN Ambassador John Bolton, former Deputy Under Secretary of Defense Douglas Feith and Richard Perle, former chairman of the Defense Policy Board—to name just a few big Bush administration names—have all been associates of JINSA.
University of Pennsylvania Prof. Edward Herman has described JINSA as “organized and [run] by individuals closely tied to the Israeli lobby and can be regarded as a virtual agency of the Israeli government.”
What first appears as commentary in JINSA’s Journal often leads to very real policies carried out by the Bush administration alone and sometimes in concert with Capitol Hill which some critics have been known to cynically call “Israeli occupied territory.”
The JINSA call for a witch-hunt came in the context of a series of commentaries on “21st Century Allies . . . and Adversaries” for the United States and Israel, which two nations, of course, are seen in the JINSA world view as virtual extensions of one another.
Zionist publications regularly assert that “anti-Israel” sentiments must automatically be seen as “anti-American” and even as “anti-Christian” in nature, a theme first loudly propagated by the American Jewish Committee’s Commentary magazine.
The commentaries, not surprisingly, named such countries as Iran, Syria, Russia and Venezuela, as possible “adversaries” for the U.S.-Israel Axis. However, it was an article by Walid Phares—who is associated with a Zionist lobby front known as the Foundation for the Defense of the Democracies—which made the suggestion that there are very real “adversaries” on American soil, at high levels in the American military and intelligence establishment. In his article “Future Terrorism—Mutant Jihads,” Phares asked:
“How deeply have jihadist elements infiltrated the U.S. government and federal agencies, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Defense, and various military commands, either through sympathizers or via actual operatives?”
Although posed as a loaded question, Phares’s implication was clear: he believes such a “threat” exists. The JINSA writer then proclaimed the need for a “national consensus” that requires “confronting these forces” based on “knowledge of their ideologies, objectives and determination.”
Since there are few Muslim Americans or even Arab Americans in any substantial numbers in the FBI, Homeland Security, the Department of Defense, etc, the suggestion that “jihadist” elements have “infiltrated” our government might seem silly to the average American.
But in the fevered minds of JINSA and hard-line Zionist elements, the real concern is that there are growing numbers of people high up in the FBI and the CIA and in the military who are getting “fed up” with Zionist power in America. Top military leaders openly dismissed the need for war against Iraq and Iran, both wars of which have been long-time policy plans of the Zionist lobby. And all of this, in the view of the JINSA sphere, constitutes effective collaboration with and sympathy for the dreaded “jihadists.”
For example, on May 11, 2005, the New York-based Forward, a leading Jewish community newspaper, reported that Barry Jacobs of the Washington office of the American Jewish Committee said he believed there are high-ranking officials inside the U.S. intelligence community who are hostile to Israel and are waging war against pro-Israel lobbyists and their neo-conservative allies in the inner circles of the Bush administration.
Citing the ongoing FBI investigation of espionage by officials of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the leading pro-Israel lobby group, Forward reported that Jacobs believes, in Forward’s summary, that “the notion that American Jews and Pentagon neo-conservatives conspired to push the United States into war against Iraq, and possibly also against Iran, is pervasive in Washington’s intelligence community.”
Obviously, with such thoughts running rampant in pro-Israel circles, it is inevitable a leading pro-Israel policy group such as JINSA would raise the specter of “infiltration” by those who are seen as “sympathizers” and suggest that they be purged from their positions in government agencies.
So the threat of a witch-hunt happening is real. Despite differences between the Bush administration and its Democratic foes, both come together in one realm: satisfying the Israeli lobby which funds both Democrats and Republicans alike through a network of political action committees and exercising its clout on Capitol Hill through pressure groups such as the APIAC, the American Jewish Committee, the American Jewish Congress and the Anti-Defamation League.
It is ironic that JINSA should be the source of a demand for an investigation of foreign agents and sympathizers inside the American government. The founder of JINSA, Stephen Bryen, a former Senate aide on Capitol Hill, faced certain indictment on charges of espionage for Israel until pressure on the Justice Department forced Justice to back off.
Not only Bryen, but several others in the JINSA sphere were under FBI investigation on similar charges relating to their possible misuse of American defense and intelligence information on Israel’s behalf. They include:
• Richard Perle, investigated in the 1970s when he was a top aide to then-Sen. Henry Jackson;
• Douglas Feith, who—although later promoted to a high post in the Bush administration in 2001—was fired from the National Security Council of President Ronald Reagan; and
• Paul Wolfowitz, now head of the World Bank and former deputy secretary of defense in the Bush administration, investigated in the 1970s by the FBI on suspicion of passing classified information to Israel.
http://www.americanfreepress.net/html/pentagon__infiltrated_.html
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