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PROPHECY AND POLITICS: MILITANT EVANGELISTS ON THE ROAD TO NUCLEAR WAR 

Tuesday July 3 9:59 PM ET - Robertson Backs Israeli Attacks

U.S. Christians paid for summer airlift of Ethiopian Jews

Praise God and Pass the Ammunition / The Changing Nature of Israel's US Backers

GALILEE FLOWERS   By Israel Shamir

Enraged mob attacks Jews for Jesus meeting

The Zionist/Orthodox Attacks on Christianity

Rev. Farwell Jerry needs an answer on his comments
1) The Comments of Rev. Farwell
2) The answers from Palestine and Israel

The War Prayer  by Mark Twain

The Unannounced Reason Behind American Fundamentalism's Support for the State of Israel

Book Review

       Prophecy and Politics

• PROPHECY AND POLITICS: 

• MILITANT EVANGELISTS ON THE ROAD TO NUCLEAR WAR 

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• by Grace Halsell. 

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• Lawrence Hill & Company, 1986, 210 pages, $14.95, Hb., ISBN 0-88208-210-8.

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In the coming maelstrom that lies ahead, in the coming judgment that's going to burst in cyclonic fury over this world, and this planet, America's only hope -- listen to me, White House, listen to me, State Department, listen to me, Pentagon, listen to me, Mr. President -- America's only hope is not GNP, it's not scientific achievement, it's not an education at Harvard or Yale, but it's America holding on to that little, tiny state of Israel and saying, "We will stand with you," because God said, "They that bless Israel I will bless, and they that curse Israel, I will curse."

- Rev. Jimmy Lee Swaggart
March, 1985 TV homily.

Elite intellectual opinion in the West continues to regard the electronic sermons of Rev. Swaggart and other fleecers of the telecitizenry (Falwell, Bakker, Robertson, etc.) as morally outrageous and politically idiotic. Interestingly, the intelligentsia have continued to connect the phenomenon of TV evangelism and its Scofield Dispensationalist dogma with the extreme right and anti-Semitism. The unspoken assumption is that anything as stupid as a Jimmy Lee Swaggart sermon must be anti-Jewish.

The intelligentsia traffic in stereotypes which reinforce the liberal-Marxist view that history is essentially progressive and Zionism synonymous with progress; thus opposition to these hallowed forces arises from the camp of ignorant reaction, always atavistic and anti-Jewish.

Grace Halsell, whose liberal credentials as a former "Black like me" Southern civil rights worker (she once dyed her skin to experience the tribulations of minorities) are unassailable, has written a troubling book which neatly undercuts this stereotype. Contrary to the coverup, the most powerful movement of jingoists and "nuke 'em 'till they glow" fanatics is in Israel's camp.

The source of their zealotry lies in the Scofield Reference Bible, a heavily annotated King James Bible whose marginalia, penned by the 19th-century hermeneuticist C.I. Scofield, is often given the weight of Scripture itself by enthusiasts. His disciples' view of the modern era (or dispensation) is apocalyptic: Armageddon is inevitable, Jews are God's Herrenvolk, Mesech (Moscow) and Gomer (Europe) are the enemy, and righteous Christians will be "raptured" off the planet before the final, radioactive curtain.

True believers in Scofield Dispensationalism regard the nuclear annihilation of the world as imminent. Thus all attempts at making peace with one's foes, or even balancing Reagan's leviathan-sized national budget, are futile.

As a result of their pious vision of Zionists as God's chosen realtors in the Middle East, the TV preachers have received a kind of de facto license to remain on the airwaves and promote a traditional, conservative, Christian social agenda. Hence the rift among Zionism's powers that be: such Jewish leaders as Norman Lear feel that influential Jews should quickly pull the plug on Swaggart and Company because of their anti-abortionist, homophobic, anti-feminist, media-bashing platforms.

Other powerful Jews, for instance the neo-conservative Norman Podhoretz, feel that the preachers' social prescriptions must be tolerated for the sake of preserving their high profile philo-Zionism. New York intellectual Irving Kristol has tallied up this balance sheet with considerable acuity. Halsell writes:

If one had informed American Jews 15 years ago that there was to be a powerful revival of Protestant fundamentalism as a political as well as a religious force, they would surely have been alarmed, since they would have assumed that any such revival might tend to be anti-Semitic and anti-Israel. But the Moral Majority is neither ... Kristol urges Jews to ask themselves the question: How significant would it be for American Jews if the Moral Majority were anti-Israel? "The answer is easy and inescapable: it would be of major significance. Indeed, it would generally be regarded by Jews as a very alarming matter."

True, Kristol writes, the Moral Majority is committed to a set of social issues -- school prayer, anti-abortion, the relation of church and state in general -- that tend to evoke a hostile reaction among most (though not all) American Jews. To balance the pros and cons of the matter, Kristol says that "the social issues of the Moral Majority are meeting with practically no success, whereas anti-Israel sentiment has been distinctly on the rise, and the support of the Moral Majority could, in the near future, turn out to be decisive for the very existence of the Jewish state. This is the way that the Israeli government has struck its own balance vis-à-vis the Moral Majority, and it is hard to see why American Iews should come up with a different bottom line." (pp.155-156)

In other words, for the government of Israel and its dual-loyalist followers in the United States, the "bottom line" is that no matter how many pro-Zionist TV preachers have visions of a 900-foot Lassie instructing them to build a multi-million dollar crystal dog house, or engage in any of the other buck-hustling buffoonery Twain, Mencken and. Bierce satirized with their devastating barbs, the fundamentalists will remain on the airwaves. That all-encompassing ecclesiastical fiat, "If it's good for Israel, it's good," applies as effectively to Christian fundamentalists as it does to grossly inflated American military budgets, senatorial candidates or any other facet of contemporary realpolitik.

Halsell's book moves quickly and reads easily because it combines scholarship with the author's anecdotes about her experiences as a member of a Jerry Falwell-sponsored tour of Israel. On her tour bus she conversed with mostly successful American businessmen and entrepreneurs like Marvin, who told her, "Every war the Jewish soldiers fight is a battle directed by God himself."

Marvin liked the biblical texts that quoted a God opting for extreme violence as divine policy. He once quoted to me Psalm 110 that speaks of Yahweh crushing the heads and filling the earth with the corpses of non-believers, and Psalm 137 that expresses the wish for vengeance by taking little Babylonian children and dashing them against the rocks. (p. 168)

Another Falwellite was Brad, a financial manager who resembled the "quintessential southern male." Brad told Halsell, "I just wish I had been born a Jew!," explaining that "when God made the universe, He gave His special blessing to the Jews." As a result, "Jews were 'different and better' than non-Jews."

Jews are in fact so far superior to their Christian admirers that the temples, battle sites, and ceremonies of Judaism and state Zionism are apparently the only attractions of interest to the folks on the Falwell tour. Halsell was astounded to discover thal. no one on her bus evinced the least interest in visiting Nazareth, the home of what's His name, but went wild in anticipation of a meeting with an Israeli general. Ironically, the Falwell tour did make a stop in Jesus's home town after all, when their bus driver decided it would be a convenient place for the Christian Zionists to use the restroom facilities.

Halsell hints that the Christian Zionists have a believer in the White House and that the President is not pursuing peace because:

"There'll be no peace until Jesus comes. Any preaching of peace prior to this return is heresy; it's against the word of God; it's Anti-Christ," says TV evangelist Jim Robison, who was invited by President Reagan to deliver the opening prayer at the 1984 Republican National Convention. (p. 16)

Politician and president-maker Jerry Falwell, a close confidant of Reagan, is the only non-Jew ever to have received the coveted Jabotinsky medal for services rendered to the state of Israel. The prize, named in honor of the arch-terrorist Vladimir Jabotinsky, was personally bestowed upon Rev. Falwell by Jabotinsky's most ardent disciple, Menachem Begin, at a gala 1980 dinner in New York.

According to Halsell, the view of the fundamentalists surrounding Reagan, as well as 1980 Presidential candidates Bush and Kemp, is that,

... one need not work to eliminate pollution in our cities, or starvation ... One need not concern oneself with nuclear proliferation. One need not attempt to prevent an Arab-Israeli war. Rather -- pray for it to explode and engulf the world, since this is part of the divine scheme. (p. 39)

At a 1971 dinner, Reagan told California legislator James Mills that "everything is in place for the battle of Armageddon and the Second Coming of Christ." The President has permitted Jerry Falwell to attend National Security Council briefings and author and Armageddon-advocate Hal Lindsey to give a talk on nuclear war with Russia to top Pentagon strategists.

If Mills, Halsell and other observers of the presidency are correct, Reagan's personal belief in the Dispensationalist scenario explains the mystery of the seeming fatalism of so many of his military, domestic and monetary policies. According to Mills, Reagan's attitude can be summed up as, "There's no reason to get wrought up about the national debt, if God is soon going to foreclose on the whole world."

Leading an electronic propaganda drive with some 60 million estimated adherents, an enthusiast in the White House, upcoming Republican presidential candidates influenced by, and in debt to, fundamentalism (and one candidate, Marion G. "Pat" Robertson, who sees himself as "an anointed prophet of God" and confirmed advocate of Israel and Armageddon), one would think some sort of alarm would be sweeping America.

One would expect that the "no nukes" ecology movement and the anti-racism groups, as well as anyone who gives a fig for the future of his children would, by now, have launched a sustained campaign to oppose the fundamentalists on the specific grounds of their seeking after nuclear war in the Middle East. Yet no such movement has come forth. Mesmerized by Holocaust propaganda centered on World War II, millions of Americans are oblivious to the hoped-for atomic holocaust openly advocated by Christian Zionists who claim to have God on their side and who utilize the vast persuasion-power of television.

This recipe for World War III, the cowing of the collective conscience of Americans who know better, the resultant mass apathy, the vacant stares and smirking grins of clergymen who lead constituencies which regard their leaders as infallible mystics, has a final, perverse twist to its core-belief.

In the theology of the cult of Scofield Dispensationalism, these horrors these "Christians" actually pray for at 24-hour vigil sites in the nation's capital, attended by government officials and lawmakers, will not be shared by them or their children. Instead, a form of Star Trek-like "dematerialization" will occur. This event, called the "rapture," will waft Christian airline pilots out of their cockpits (leaving a planeload of the unsaved to tailspin to fiery destruction), Christian surgeons out of their operating rooms (while patients bleed to death), and tens of thousands of others directly to heaven, where they will observe from a cozy celestial cloud the flaming cinder of planet Earth.

This bizarre belief in a deus-ex-machina rescue from an atomic holocaust to be provoked by their blind support of state Zionism is most dramatically evoked by Jimmy Lee Swaggart, a spellbinding orator who has used television to showcase his speaking ability to maximum effect:

I'm not lookin' for a hole in the ground. I'm lookin' for a hole in the sky. I'm not lookin' for the undertaker, I'm lookin' for the Up Taker. I'm not lookin' for some missile. I'm lookin' for the coming king -- Jesus Christ -- to gather us and take us away! Rapture! Rapture! Rapture!... After the Rapture, the world will be plunged into tribulation. It will be a time so horrible and hideous that words cannot describe it. Jesus called it "Great Tribulation" such as the world has never seen before... a time of such agony, a time of such horrifying hell that will burst in cataclysmic destruction... And for the first time, in the Day of Grace, He (God) pulls off the gloves. He is going to pour out destruction onto this planet, upon evil and upon sin and upon wickedness and upon evil-doers such as minds cannot imagine, contemplate or comprehend...it will affect the whole world... (From a transcript of a Swaggart sermon of March 3,1985.)

Rev. Swaggart's words would be no more than a colorful bit of gothic, Southern Americana were he delivering them in a dimly lit tent on a steamy August night in some backwater hamlet. But Swaggart's "tent" was a midwestern auditorium holding 20,000 people in a major metropolian area. Moreover, he was nationally televised to an audience in the millions.

When Swaggart poured forth his searing nihilistic hatred for all life on earth he was not laughed out of town, booed, or tarred and feathered. He was cheered wildly, with the frenzied abandon and up-lifted arms not seen since the fabled days of Hitlerian Germany.

Odd, is it not, that amid the oceans of newsprint and months of broadcast time devoted to hammering home, with an unprecedented monotony, the perils of a fanatical demagogue and an irrational following which arose in National Socialist Germany, Swaggart, Robertson, Bakker and the rest proceed apace with little notice or protest?

What protest there is scrupulously skirts the taboo issue of the relationship between the likelihood of nuclear war and the preacher's idolatry of war-Zionism, delicately limiting the protests to concern over the fundamentalist's promotion of anti-abortion laws and censorship of pornography. These are interesting topics but their urgency pales in comparison to the atomic hell-fire the fundamentalists are promoting by every means available.

Perhaps these "men of God" are correct. Maybe America does have some weird death wish, having grown world-weary and full of resentment for life in the process Nietzsche accused Judeo-Christians of fomenting. If a thanatos cult as virulent as Scofield Dispensationalism can find allegiance among so many millions of our fellow citizens, while other millions idle away their hours in apathy, maybe the self fulfilling prophecies are coming true.

Surely some culpability descends upon all of us for helping to create the throw-away fundamentalist world Halsell documents. Ultimately, the evangelists have given any who choose to follow them a license to escalate the industrial pollution and nuclear arms buildup threatening all life on earth.

In this current manifestation of a long-festering disease we have an eschatology of the extreme taken to its farthest and most unnatural conclusion. This is nowhere revealed, in all its bitterest consequences, more aptly than in the contrast between the traditional question asked by native peoples in the past -- "How will any of our actions affect the next seven generations?" - and the mindset of Rev. Jerry Falwell, who, when confronted with the horrors his philosophy may produce, commentated, "You know why I'm not worried? I ain't gonna be here."

Reproduced from 

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U.S. Christians paid for summer airlift of Ethiopian Jews

Television evangelists helped inspire American Christians to give over $20 million for Jewish immigration to Israel, part of which paid for the recent airlift of Jews from Ethiopia. The Kuwara aliyah of this summer was financed by a $2 million donation from the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews (IFCJ), a Chicago-based organization that raises funds among the 68 million-strong evangelist Christian community in the United States.

The IFCJ began its campaign among Christian Americans five years ago with an 'infomercial' calling on Christians to sponsor immigration to Israel from the former Soviet Union. The promotion starred evangelist singer/actor Pat Boone and was broadcast on cable television. "We wanted to give Christians a vehicle through which to demonstrate their support for Israel and the Jewish people," said IFCJ founder and president, Rabbi Yechiel Eckstein. "They feel remorse for the Holocaust and want to oppose anti-Semitism."

The IFCJ has produced three infomercials so far, featuring leading Christian figures like Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, Chuck Coleson and Jack Hayford and a 1-800 number to which donors can make a pledge. Inspired by the words of American Christian leaders like Falwell, who told viewers: "I think of the words of Jesus when I think of Rabbi Eckstein. Blessed are the peacemakers," and Pat Roberston who said: "I will urge everyone who is watching this program to participate in the fulfillment of the words of scripture," the IFCJ has raised about $20 million since 1994, and has about 150,000 donors.

According to Eckstein, while the average infomercial in the United States elicits $30 to $35 from each donor, the average donation from the IFCJ clip is $132. "These are not wealthy people making large donations, but lower and middle class people giving sacrificially."

American donor Fay Dupont claims that she donated after watching the clip. "God spoke to my heart. He said: 'let my people go.'" Fellow donor Jerry Reynolds said that he contributed because he believes in God, the prophets and the scriptures and that helping the Jews get out of Russia was "one of the greatest things he ever saw."

In addition to assisting Jews from the former Soviet Union, the Christian community in the United States paid for the 1,500 Jews of Kuwara to emigrate from Ethiopia to Israel. The IFCJ raised some $2 million in just five months. Eckstein says: "I read about the Jews of Kuwara and wondered why the state was not bringing them to Israel. I spoke to officials at the United Jewish Appeal and the Jewish Agency and they told me that there wasn't enough money to bring them. I said: 'Tell me what it takes.'"

In addition to raising money for Russian immigration, this year, the IFCJ will focus on raising $5-10 million among Christians in America to help with the Ethiopian absorption in Israel, in matters ranging from education and job placement to housing and crisis services. "Israel has to start dealing with the Ethiopian community," said Eckstein. "It's a time bomb waiting to explode."

The Kuwara Jews are apparently unaware that the Christian community in American financed their immigration. Amara Eyov, head of the Kuwara community in Israel, who made aliyah in August and now lives in Kiryat Yam, knows only that the money came from one man, Rabbi Eckstein. "I thank him," he said. "And I am waiting for Israel to bring the other 100 families."

Asfaw Getane is one of 3,500 Ethiopians who immigrated in 1994, leaving his family behind in Ethiopia. He has spent many sleepless nights waiting for his relatives to emigrate since then. "The man who brought us here is like God," he said. "It was very difficult to wait. We were alone here for seven years. We tried to bring our families but we didn't manage. This man helped us. Finally, I can sleep.

Praise God and Pass the Ammunition
The Changing Nature of Israel's US Backers

Analysis of the US relationship with Israel has long been characterized by debates over who calls the shots. Which is the dog, which is the tail; is the pro-Israeli lobby more powerful or are Washington's strategic thinkers determinative. In fact neither version is a particularly useful model. It is, rather, the intersection between the two main arenas of US-Israeli relations, the political and the strategic, that provides the main locus of US decision-making.

During the decade of consolidation of strategically-unchallenged, post-Soviet US hegemony in the Middle East, and especially during the two years of Netanyahu's premiership, there has been both consistency and change in both arenas.

US-Israeli relations began in tandem with the emergence of the Cold War. From the beginning, the key element in the relationship was the expectation that Israel - initially quite dependent and in general deemed a more reliable US ally than the Arab governments -- would serve important US interests in and around the region. The domestic political concerns, especially Jewish community interest in providing for Holocaust survivors unwelcome in the US and Europe, were also present from the beginning. But the breadth of political support for Israel, and its bipartisan nature, was always rooted in the fact that the goals of the lobbying networks supported, rather than challenged, the national interest as defined by the Pentagon and the State Department. Israel would continue to play a key role as a strategic US surrogate and junior partner in fighting the Cold War, in the region and for many years, far afield in Africa, Asia and Latin America.

The collapse of the Soviet Union and the US military victory in the Gulf War rewrote the political map of the Middle East. Key US regional interests -- protecting access to oil, maintaining strategic reach remained. And insuring market-friendly stability for creation of a Middle East version of NAFTA took on new primacy. But how to protect those strategic interests during that transition period, however, was less certain.

Israel's role came under new question. With the end of Cold War-driven proxy wars in Africa, Asia and elsewhere, the primacy once placed on military force shifted in favour of economic and market realignments. During Operation Desert Storm, US press-ganging of the Arab coalition against Iraq, a key component of Washington's post-Cold War 'new Middle East,' meant Israel had to be kept out of the fighting. Patriot anti-missile systems and other expensive military hardware were shipped to Tel Aviv, and protection of Israel became a key task for the US-controlled 'coalition' forces.

It is likely that longterm reassessments of the strategic requirements for defending US interests are currently underway in Pentagon and State Department circles, but it is unlikely that any such reassessment is likely to result in major shifts in the US-Israeli relationship anytime soon. Political realities, long congruent with strategic interests, tend to take on a life of their own. Those realities include politicians' habits of relying on Israel supporters for money and votes.

But the growing unease and division among American Jews towards Israel has led to a shift in the venue of Israeli support, out of the mostly Democratic and often liberal Jewish community to be centered more in the mostly Republican, theologically Zionist Christian right.

Fundamentalist Christians and Right Wing Israelis: The Unholy Alliance

Netanyahu was rallying all possible support he could muster within Washington DC to dissuade the Clinton administration from using 'pressure' (defined as a public statement of US goals for Middle East peace) to force Netanyahu back to the stalled peace talks.

After his meeting with the Israeli leader Falwell said, 'there are about 200,000 evangelical pastors in America, and we are asking them all through e-mail, faxes, letters, telephone, to go into their pulpits and use their influence in support of the State of Israel and the prime minister'.

This meeting was only one recent episode in a two-decades-old unholy alliance between the Netanyahu's right wing Likud party and the American right wing fundamentalist Christians. What is changing now is that the highly organized Christian Zionist movement is emerging as a newly dominant force within the once largely Jewish Israel support movement.

It was Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin who first recognized the evolving weight of fundamentalist Christians. He decorated Falwell with the Jabotinsky medal in the early 1980s, a few years after the latter imposed himself on the political scene with the establishment of his influential Moral Majority organization .

Begin, who came to power in 1977 after a long social-democratic period in Israel, sought natural allies in right wing American circles. An aide was instructed to meet with American fundamentalist Christians and 'explore the depth of their pro-Israel sentiment'. The outcome was astounding. In 1977 full-page advertisements started to appear in major US papers, all declaring the support of Christian organizations for Israel and its major policies such as the immigration of Soviet Jews. In 1981, after Israel bombed the Iraqi nuclear reactor, Begin telephoned Falwell and asked him to do some publicity for Israel, which was softly criticized by the US administration . Falwell, in his many TV appearances 'spoke in favor of the raid on Baghdad'. Begin paid him back with the medal.

This alliance has been cemented in a very long process shaped by ideological, international, and US domestic considerations. Ideologically, the fundamentalist Protestants have always entertained biblical aspirations for the second coming of Christ in Palestine, an event pre-conditioned by the 'return' of the Jews to this land and the existence of a Jewish entity ready for the Messiah. Internationally, the significance of the strategic base for the strong US-Israel relations has come under question, as did the importance of Israel as a bridge-head in the oil-rich Middle East after the fall of the Soviet Union. Domestically, it is clear that the influence of organized right wing Christian groups is skyrocketing within US politics. The 1994 Republican sweep in the House of Representatives brought to power a number of right wing Christians, and helped to make Congress into the most significant institution to back Israel's 'most favoured friend' position in US foreign policy.

Christ will come back

Lobbying congress from this religious biblical ground dates back to this era. William Blackstone, a Chicago Methodist and a prominent figure in the early pro-Zionist Christian movement was able in 1891 to gather the signatures of 43 leading congressmen, governors, mayors and industrialists, on a petition submitted to then-President Benjamin Harrison asking him to lead an international effort in support of a Jewish state in Palestine.

It is difficult to accurately weigh the influence of Falwell and the dozen other major right wing Christian organizations in the US which now blindly support all policies of the Likud government. Some estimates put the figure of followers, listeners to Christian radio stations, and part or full time activists and members of these organization as high as 61 million Americans in the 1980s.

This uncritical support to Israel comes at virtually no political cost to the fundamentalist leaders. 'Whatever Israel does, the Christian believers will see the hand of God in it - whether it is simply a new office building, a highway, or the bombing of an Arab nuclear facility'.

The formation of the Unholy Alliance

AIPAC correctly understood that the American far right's commitment to Israel is largely different from the conventional support lent by the various US administrations to the Zionist state, support historically based within the US global anti-Soviet strategy. Moreover, the far right paid little attention to Israel's dismal human rights record. An AIPAC insider said :

[W]e are becoming more 'neo-conservative'. We want to broaden Israel's support to the right - with the people who do not care about what is happening on the West Bank but care a lot about the Soviet Union

According to Robert Kuttner of The New Republic magazine, the benefit was mutual. AIPAC and its controversial links to scores of local pro-Israel PACs started 'delivering Jewish financial backing to candidates far to the right of positions that most Jews hold on most issues. Incumbent conservative republicans have discovered a cynical formula. They have only to demonstrate sufficient loyalty to Israel and they can all but lock out their democratic challengers from a substantial fraction of Jewish support'.

Seeing that Christian right wing groups have successfully targeted one pro-Israel liberal candidate after another for defeat 'because of their positive votes on abortion, civil rights and social spending and war and peace - the pro Israel money has moved well to the right of most Jewish voters'.

Evangelicals are welcome but not to evangelize!

Many liberal American Jews have always been disturbed by this alliance between American and Israeli rightists. Liberal Jews, who favour abortion rights, oppose prayers in public schools, and defend the separation of church and state, were alarmed by right wing governments in Israel, and by Tel Aviv's Washington lobbyists, AIPAC, holding hands with extreme conservative fundamentalists on these issues.

The fundamentalist agenda, says Robert Zimmerman, president of the American Jewish Congress, threatens 'the freedoms that make Jews safe in America'. But the AJC's view is not supported by other major Jewish American organizations. The rift goes even within organizations such as the Anti-Defamation League. Nathan Perlmutter, Director of the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith, dismissed concerns of liberal Jews about fundamentalist support for Israel saying 'Praise God and pass the ammunition'. But Abraham Foxman, ADL executive director and one of the most influential voices in pro-Israel American Jewry, was dismayed after Netanyahu's meeting with Falwell, a meting that he saw as 'crude' and 'insensitive behaviour'.

The dangerous cynicism underlying such an unholy alliance is perhaps best captured by Lenny Davis, former chief of research for AIPAC and currently the second in command of the Israeli embassy in Washington (known now as Lenny Ben David), who says, 'until I see Jesus coming over the hill , I am in favour of all the friends Israel can get. Let the defence organizations [AJC and ADL] worry about the domestic issues [school prayer, abortion, and anti-semitism] among this group'.

Phyllis Bennis is an editor of MER and a Fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies. Khaled Mansour is the correspondent of the Middle East News Agency (MENA) in Washington DC.

From: http://www.worldcom.nl/tni/archives/bennis/nature.htm

When in 1543, the typhoon-blown Portuguese schooners approached the shores of Japan, the astonished sailors could not believe their eyes: on a warm spring day, the tropical island ahoy was buried under snow. They were witness to one of the real Seven Wonders of the World, the flowers of sakura, the wild cherry of Japan. As soon as the benevolent heaven bestows this seasonal gift to earth, the Japanese forget their wives and kids, their duties, employers and bills; they just sit under the trees, drink sake wine and write poems, short and sharp as swords.

That is why, these days, leaving behind our man-made troubles, I sit under the white cloud of a tree and watch the beautiful white and pink blossoms of almond trees covering the hills of Galilee.  These lovely blossoms are our version of the Japanese sakura, and a chance to indulge in the custom of flower viewing. A honey aroma wafts through the air; the skies are crystal blue.  Yellow daisies dance on the lush green grass at the base of these almond wonders, interspersed by violet cyclamen and red anemones. The glorious backdrop is provided by the huge snow mass of Jebel al Sheikh (Mt Hermon). Palestine is a sister to Japan. These two hilly lands are home to stubborn mountain folk, devoted to their customs and ways.

For all the similarities in the landscape, there are differences.  The hill we sit on, all white like Jaffa sea surf, is the ruin of a village. If we were in Japan, it would be alive and humming. The village of Birim has been dead for fifty years. It is beautiful even in death, like Ophelia floating down the stream in the pre-Raphaelite painting of Millais. It was not ruined by war. Its Christian inhabitants were expelled from their houses well after the 1948 war. They were told to leave for a week or two, for ‘security’ reasons. They had no option but to believe the Israeli officers and move out. Their village was dynamited, their church surrounded by barbed wire. They went to Israeli court, they went to the government, commissions were appointed and petitions signed. Nothing helped. Ever since, for 50 years, they have lived in the nearby villages and on Sundays they continue to visit their church. Their lands were seized by their Jewish neighbors, but they still bring their dead to be buried in the church graveyard, under the sign of the cross.

Until the arrival of the Israeli army, this ruined village with its orphaned church was the home of the rural Christians of Birim who, for centuries of Moslem rule, lived in peace with their Moslem neighbors of Nebi Yosha and with the old Sephardi Jewish community of nearby Safed.  This little Guernica in the Galillee can single-handedly undermine the myth of a ‘Judeo-Christian’ civilization opposing a ‘monstrous’ Islam. This myth lays at the foundation of the Christian Zionist movement; among its fervent supporters, one can find a friend of Mark Rich and a newly minted New York citizen, W. J. Clinton.

The problems of the Middle East are ugly enough without the current Moslem-bashing. The pro-Israeli pundits of the New York Times quote the blood-curling verses on Jihad, retell the old traditions of religious wars and persecutions, to ‘prove’ Islam’s cruelty and intolerance. They are repeated by a pleasant upper-class Jewish lady from London, Barbra Amiel. In a sotto voce, she writes about ‘exclusivist’ Islam and Jewish ‘moderation’. In order to incite hatred, Israel’s lobby works all the ropes. Before the rise of Israel, Arab sheiks were depicted as romantic heroes in movies acted by Rudolf Valentino. Nowadays, the pro-Israel producers of Hollywood turn out propaganda films on ill-shaven Moslem terrorists with the subtlety of Edward D. Wood, Jr. This new prejudice is amplified a hundredfold by the Christian Zionist Congress, claiming ‘protection for Christians of Palestine from the Moslem (?!) persecution’. These people obviously have not walked among the ruins of Birim.

Another email comes into my laptop, this time from Gaza. An American girl, Alison Weir from San Francisco evades Israeli bullets, comforts the scared Palestinian kids, and writes: “The problem is when you know the truth, it is far too cruel, far too diametrically opposite what we used to think and what everyone still thinks to express. The lie is too big, the repression too complete, the Palestinians' lives too horrible to write about reasonably”.

Well, Alison is right. We face a huge lie, an anti-Moslem blood libel, and it is time to stop it. I do not think that the problems of Middle East have anything to do with religion. But if the supporters of Israel want to wake up the sleeping ghost of religious intolerance, to incite Christians against Moslems, let us audit their balance.

If these Christian Zionists care for Christ, not only for Zion, let them learn what Jews and Moslems feel towards Christ. Rami Rozen expressed the Jewish tradition in a long feature in a major Israeli newspaper Haaretz[i]: “Jews feel towards Jesus today what they felt in 4 c or in the Middle Ages… It is not fear, it is hatred and despise”. “For centuries, Jews concealed from Christians their hate to Jesus, and this tradition continues even now”.  “He is revolting and repulsive”, said an important modern religious Jewish thinker.  Rozen writes that this “repulsion passed from the observant Jews to the general Israeli public”.

On Christmas Eve, according to a report in the Jerusalem local paper, Kol Ha-Ir[ii], Hassids customarily do not read holy books, as it could save Jesus from eternal punishment (the Talmud teaches that Jesus boils in hell[iii]). This custom was dying out, but Hassids of Habad, the fervent nationalists, brought it back to life. I still remember old Jews spitting while passing by a church, and cursing the dead, while passing by a Christian cemetery. Last year in Jerusalem, a Jew decided to refresh the tradition. He spat at Holy Cross, carried in the procession along the city. Police saved him from further trouble, but the court fined him $50, despite his claim that he just fulfilled his religious duty.

Last year, the biggest Israeli tabloid Yedioth Aharonoth reprinted in its library the Jewish anti-Gospel, Toledoth Eshu, compiled in the Middle Ages. It is the third recent reprint, including one in a newspaper. If the Gospel is the book of love, Toledoth is the book of hate for Christ. The hero of the book is Judas. He captures Jesus by polluting his purity. According to Toledoth, the conception of Christ was in sin, the miracles of Jesus were witchcraft, his resurrection but a trick.

Joseph Dan, a Professor of Jewish mysticism in Hebrew University in Jerusalem, writing on the death of Jesus stated: “The modern Jewish apologists, hesitantly adopted by the church, preferred to put the blame on Romans. But the medieval Jew did not wish to pass the buck. He tried to prove that Jesus had to be killed, and he was proud of killing Him. The Jews hated and despised Christ and Christians”. Actually, adds Prof. Dan, there is little place to doubt that the Jewish enemies of Jesus caused his execution.

Even today, Jews in Israel refer to Jesus by the demeaning word Yeshu (instead of Yeshua), meaning ‘Perish his name’. There is an ongoing argument, whether His name was turned into a swear word, or other way around. In a similar pun, the Gospel is called ‘Avon Gilaion’, the booklet of Sin. These are the endearing feeling of the friends of Christian Zionists towards Christ.

What about Moslems? The Moslems venerate Christ. He is called ‘The Word of God”, “Logos”, Messiah, the Prophet and is considered “a Messenger of God”,  along with Abraham, Moses and Muhammad. Many chapters of the Kor’an tell the story of Christ, his virgin birth and his persecution by Jews. His saintly mother is admired, and the Immaculate Conception is one of the tenets of Islam. The name of Christ glorifies the golden edifice of Haram a-Sharif. According to the Moslem faith, it was there that the founder of Islam met Jesus, and they prayed together.  The Hadith, the Moslem tradition, says in the name of the prophet, ‘We do not forbid you to believe in Christ, we order you to”. Moslems identify their prophet with Paracletes, the Helper (Jn 14:16) whose coming was predicted by Jesus. They venerate places associated with the life of Jesus: the place of Ascension, the Tomb of Lazarus, the Holy Sepulchre are adjacent to a mosque and perfectly accessible by Christians.

While Moslems do not consider Jesus – God, they proclaim him as the Messiah, the Anointed one, the Paradise Dweller. This religious idea, familiar to Nestorians and other early churches, but rejected by mainstream Christianity, opened the gates for those Jews, who could not part with the notion of strict monotheism. That is why many Palestinian Jews and Christians of the 7th century accepted Islam and became Palestinian Moslems. They remained in their villages, they did not depart for Poland or England, they did not learn Yiddish, they did not study the Talmud, but they continued to shepherd their flocks and plant almond trees, they remained faithful to their land and to the great idea of the fraternity of men.

In the south of Hebron, in the ruins of Susiah, one can see how in the course of two centuries a synagogue slowly evolved into a mosque, as the population of nearby caves abandoned the exclusionary faith of Babylonian wizards and adopted Islam. These shepherds still live there, in the same caves.  In the last year, the Israeli army has twice tried to expel them to provide more room for new settlers from Brooklyn.

Why, in this season of blossoming almond trees, do I brood on the sensitive subject of Jewish and Moslem attitudes towards Christ? Because one has to stop the mills of hatred operated by Israel’s supporters. Because the “Judeo-Christian” code language is being used to justify the barbed wire around Birim’s Church and the tanks around Bethlehem. Because there is a duty to remove an obstacle from the path of the blind.

The majority of the Christian Zionists are simple misled souls, people of good intentions but little knowledge. They think they ‘support Jews’, but they promote the Christ-hating spirit among the Jews. It was not in vain that a hero of the Zionist Bible, Exodus by Leon Uris, kept a poster in his room saying ‘We crucified Christ’.  It  was not in vain that an Israeli soldier on the roadblock of Bethlehem told me yesterday, ‘We starve the beasts’, referring to the native Christians of the city of Nativity.  It was not in vain that the Gospel was burned on a stake in Israel, while anti-Gospel literature is widely spread; that new immigrant Jews embracing Christianity are persecuted and deported; that every preacher of the Christian faith in Israel can be sent to jail according to new anti-Christian laws; that Israeli archaeologists erase the Christian holy sites and memories off the face of  the Holy Land.

To the leaders of the Christian Zionists, who surely know these facts, but lead their innocent flock on the path of the Anti-Christ, I say, “Whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in Christ to sin, it would be better for him to have a large millstone tied round his neck and be drowned in the deep sea” (Mt 18:6).

To my Jewish brothers I say: the opinions of medieval Jews do not bind us. Every Jew can decide for himself, whether to pray for the destruction of the Gentiles or to share the blessing of the Holy Land with the villagers of Birim and Bethlehem. Within the Jewish people, there were always spiritual descendants of the prophets who wished to bring peace and blessing to all the children of Adam. As true as this almond blossom, in you the prophecy will be fulfilled: ‘All the nations of the earth will bless you’ (Deut. 7).

Israel Shamir is one of the best-known and respected Russian Israeli writers and journalists. He wrote for Haaretz, BBC, Pravda and translated Agnon, Joyce and Chandler into Russian. His articles The Rape of Dulcinea, Kid Sister and The Test Failed could be found on many Internet sites, http://www.thestruggle.org/ , http://www.antiwar/ , http://www.nilemedia/  etc. He can be reached at shamiri_@netvision.net.il , or write P.O.B. 23714 Tel Aviv 61236

Reproduced From:  http://www.al-bushra.org/ecu-inter/zionist.htm 

Enraged mob attacks Jews for Jesus meeting

A mob of several hundred ultra-Orthodox Jews besieged an old Arab structure in Be'er Sheva yesterday after a rumor spread in the city's synagogues that missionaries were baptizing Jewish children.

The Haredim stopped their prayers to go to the house, where they found about 40 people, including women and children, who are members of the messianic movement Jews for Jesus. The movement has met in the same building for 17 years.

Police Chief Superintendent Kobi Cohen, who headed the police force that arrived at the scene, said police rescued the trapped worshipers and escorted them past the singing and dancing demonstrators.

A messianic Jew who was in the area described the experience as terrifying. "A mob of men in black surrounded us and were shouting and throwing stones and they tried to jump over the fence. We were especially scared for the children. We're not missionaries. We are Jews just like those who want to kick us out. We all believe in the same god, but we also believe in love and tolerance," he said.

A few days ago in Kiryat Malachi, several dozen youths from a Chabad high school attacked an American couple whom they suspected were missionaries. The boys hurled stones at the house of the new immigrants, who moved to the city three months ago. The couple denied engaging in any missionary activity and said they belonged to a humanitarian organization based in Switzerland and came to Kiryat Malachi to work with Ethiopian immigrants.

Two weeks ago, a mob of ultra-Orthodox men attacked and ransacked an apartment rented by three Swiss Christian women they accused of conducting missionary activity in Jerusalem's ultra-Orthodox neighborhood of Mea She'arim. The women denied the accusations.

(c) copyright 1998 Ha'aretz. All Rights Reserved

The Zionist/Orthodox Attacks on Christianity

Facts worked By Liam Hulin

 The Israel old and new war against Christians

The Zionist/Orthodox Attacks on Christianity

The Christian Right in America presents the support of Israel as necessary to the very survival of America and by extension the West:

Jerry Falwell- "Right at the very top of our priorities must be an unswerving commitment and devotion to the State of Israel."

Pat Robertson- "The future of this Nation (U.S.) may be at stake, because God will bless those that bless Israel."

Jimmy Swaggart- "God will bless those that bless Israel, and God will curse those that curse Israel."

Mike Evans produced a television special- "Israel: America's Key to Survival."

This devotion is certaintly not mutual as the evidence below reveals:

In the Beginning there Was Terrorism

St. George's Cathedral in Jerusalem. On 3 Feb. 1944 three Jews were suprised as they tried to set a bomb at the gate of St. George's Cathedral through which the British High Commissioner would pass on his way to Sunday service.

French Catholic Ratisbonne School. On 20 Nov, 1947 Jews smashed the statue of the Virgin Mary in the enclosure.

German Catholic Church of Jerusalem. On 16 Feb. 1948 Jews threw handgrenades into the yard of the the church.

Dormito Abbey, Mt. Zion. Also on 16 Feb. 1948 a bomb was thrown by the Haganah into the garden barely missing two fathers.

The War Against the Chrisatian Palestinians 1948-49

The Zionist attack on Christianity in Jerusalem:

• In 1947 Christian Population of Palestine was 350,000. In 1948 the Israelis grabbed 80% of Palestine and expelled 800,000 Muslim and Christian Arabs. In 1969 the Christian population of Israel was less than 45,000.

Convent of St. George of the Greek Orthodox- occupied 14 May 1948; struck on 18 May by a mortar shell

Hospice "Notre Dame de France" of the Assumptionist Fathers- occupied 15 May 1948; used as a main base to attack Jerusalem. Large part of it was destroyed by the occupation.

Convent of Reparatrice Sisters- occupied 15 May 1948; used in the attack on Jerusalem. Set on fire and mostly destroyed.

French Hospital- occupied 15 May 1948 in defiance of the International Red Cross and French flags flying over it.

Italian Hospital- occupied 15 May 1948 despite its being under the protection of the Red Cross; used to shell Jerusalem.

Seminary of Ste. Anne was bombed on 17 & 19 May 1948 suffering heavy damage and many of the refugees within were wounded.

Church of St. Constantin and Helena- struck by a bomb on 17 May 1948 the fragments of which damaged the Church of the Holy Sepulcher next-door.

The Armenian Orthodox Patriarchate was hit with about one hundred mortar bombs launched by the Zionists from the monastery of the Benedictine Fathers on Mount Sion. These bombs also damaged St. Jacob's Convent, the Archangels Convent and their churches, their two Elementary and Seminary schools along with their libraries. 8 killed and 120 wounded.

The Apostolic Delegation (protected by the Holy See)- occupied 18 May 1948.

Monastery of the German Benedictine Fathers (Dormition)- occupied 18 May 1948; used as one of the main bases for the attack on Jerusalem.

The English School at Mount Sion- occupied 18 May 1948

Convent of St. John (Greek Orthodox)- occupied 18 May 1948; struck by a mortar shell on 23 May 1948

St. Abraham convent struck by mortar fire on 23 May 1948

St. Spiridon convent struck by mortar fire on 23 May 1948

Convent of the Archangel (belonging to the Coptic Patriarchate) forming part of the Holy Sepulcher struck by a mortar shell on 23 May 1948

The Greek Orthodox Patriarchate hit by mortar shells on 23 & 24 May 1948 wounding many refugees

Franciscan Convent (St. Saviour) near the Holy Sepulcher hit by mortar shells on 19, 23, 24, & 28 May 1948- orphanage damaged; general secretariat damaged; many nearby houses destroyed; many sheltering children killed and wounded

Latin Patriarche hit by mortar shelling on 23, 26, 27 & 28 May 1948 damaging the Patriarchal Palace, especially the Cathedral

Greek Catholic Patriarchate struck by mortar shells on 16 & 29 May 1948 damaging the building and wounding several people

Church of St. Mark (Syrian Orthodox)- struck by mortar shell killing the monk Peter Saymy, secretary to the bishop, and wounding two others.

Zionists fired on Jerusalem from the Hebrew University, Hadassah Hospital and from two synagogues located in the Old City.

Desecration in Peace: 1949-1967

• On Mt. Zion in Jerusalem Israeli forces first seized then looted various churches and convents. Gold and silver religious objects were taken and the churches and convents turned into military posts. The soldiers desecrated and vandalized the Armenian and Greek Orthodox cemeteries. Fourteen tombs of Christian patriarchs were smashed open and their contents desecrated. In the Greek Orthodox cemetery practically every tomb was smashed. Many graves were dynamited or ripped open. Fragments of marble crosses, angles' wings and inscriptions lie inextricably mixed with human skeletons and skulls, blackened tree stumps, and the remains of rockets and shells.

"The Jews actually dragged the corpses out of the tombs and scattered the coffins and remains of the dead all around the cemetery." The Very Reverend Father Andres, Procurator-General in the Holy Land writing in 1968 of the attack on the Catholic cemetery.

• Churches were destroyed in Damound & Somata.

• Christmas Day 1952 the Israeli army blew up the village of Ikret, whose population was 100% Catholic. Its beautiful church was destroyed and the population were scattered to other parts of Galilee.

• October 1953 the Israeli army destroyed the Christian village of Kafr Bur'om in Galilee. Its churches and schools were demolished and the population scattered to various parts of Galilee.

• 16 April 1954 Zionist attack the cemetery of the Greek Catholic Community in Haifa. Desecration was the point- they danced on the graves; they dug up the remains destroying many tombs, 73 crosses and 50 statues of angles were smashed.

• July 1954 Israeli fundamentalists attack a Christian religious procession of the Carmelite Fathers and the Christian community of Haifa on Mt. Carmel near Haifa. The procession was dispersed, many crosses were destroyed and many Christians were injured.

• 12 July 1954, a Protestant Minister in Tiberias went to a house where some families of Christian and Jews had gathered. a rabbi provoked Jews to riot by spreading the rumor that many Jews were to be baptized in that house. Hundreds of Jews gathered and attacked the house. The police were rushed to disperse the mob, and it was only the presence of the police which saved the Protestant Minister from being lynched.

• July 1961 a Christian Fundamentalist missionary group in Jerusalem was forced to cancel it services when attacked by stone-throwing Jewish religious fanatics. They chanted "Eichmann! Eichmann!" and began tossing rocks.

• 10 January 1963 the Finnish Christian Mission School in Jerusalem is attacked by seventy Jews, mostly Yeshiva students. They smashed windows and beat Mr. Risto Santala, the school pastor. Further along the street the plate glass windows of the Zion Mission shop run by Reverend William Hall were smashed. All of this was the result of an editorial in the Jewish newspaper Yediot Aharonot of 23 Dec. 1962 which accused the Christian Mission of converting Jews to Christianity, and calling on Jews to demonstrate outside the Finnish School.

Attacks on Christianity-- 1967 & After

The War:

• Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem shelled by Israeli forces

• Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem-

Israeli soldiers and youths throw stink bombs into the church

Israelis inappropriately dressed entered the church;

they smoked cigarettes;

they littered the church;

they brought dogs with them

• Church of the Nativity suffered some of the same desecretions as the Holy Sepulchre

• Israeli forces shot up the Episcopal Cathedral just as they had done in 1948

• They smashed the Episcopal school for boys with their tanks

• Israeli army wrecked and looted the YMCA

• Israeli army wrecked the Lutheran Hospital, even though it was being used by the UN

• The Lutheran center for cripples was also heavily damaged by the Israelis

• In Ramallah (a Christian city near Jerusalem) the Episcopal school for girls was fired upon by Israeli forces and some of the girls were killed

• The Reverend S.J. Mattar, warden of the Garden Tomb in Jerusalem, was murdered in his home by Israeli soldiers- without cause according to witnesses who were also fired upon.

• The villages of Yalu, Beit Nuba and Emmaus were totally destroyed-

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The Jewish writer Amos Kenan who was a soldier in the Israeli army gave this account to the Jewish magazine Haolem Hazeh:

The unit commander told us that it had been decided to blow up three villages in our sector; they were Beit-Nuba, Emmaus and Yalu. This was explained by strategic, tactical and security considerations. At noon the first bulldozer arrived and pulled down the first house at the edge of the village. Within ten minutes the house was turned into rubble. The olive trees and cypresses were all uprooted. After the destruction of the three houses the first refugee column arrived from the direction of Ramallah. We told them to go to Beit Sura. They told us that they were driven out everywhere, forbidden to enter any village, that they were wandering like this for four days, without food, without water, some dying on the road. They asked to return to the village, and said we'd better kill them. Some had a goat, a lamb, a donkey or a camel. A father ground wheat by hand to feed his four children. On the horizon we could see the next group arriving. The children cried. Some of our soldiers started to crying too. We went to fetch them water. We stopped a car with a major, two captains and a woman. We took a jerrican of water and distributed it to the refugees. We also handed out cigarettes and candy. More soldiers burst out crying. We asked the officers why are these refugees sent from one place to another and driven out everywhere. They told us this was good for them. Let them go. Moreover, said the officers, why do you care about the Arabs anyway. We drove them out. they go on wandering in the south like lost cattle. The weak die. In the evening we found out we had been deceived, for in Beit-Sura too, bulldozers commenced destruction and they were forbidden to enter. We found out that not only in our sector was the border straightened out for security reasons but in all sectors. Our unit was outraged. At night we were ordered to guard the bulldozers, but the unit was so enraged that no soldier was willing to carry out such duties. None of us understood how Jews could behave like this. the chickens and doves were buried in the rubble. the fields were turned into wasteland in front of our eyes. The children who went on crying on the road will be Fedayeen in 19 years, in the next round. Thus have we lost on that day the victory.

After the War: 1967--

1972 Arson destroys the bookstore of the Baptist Church in Jerusalem. The church suffers several attacks per year- usually window breaking. The bookstore also is a favorite target for vandalism. The chapel had recently been vandalized by a member of the ultra-right Kach movement.

1974 Two American Jewish girls attempt to set fire to the Baptist Church bookstore.

1975 A grenade damages the Baptist Church. Slogans were painted on the Church's property- a common practice in these attacks.

1978 Law against missionaries.

8 Oct. 1982 "Unknown persons" set fire to the Baptist Church in Jerusalem destroying it. The adjacent church library suffered damage also.

23 Dec. 1982 "Unknown persons" drew swastikas on the entrances of two churches in Jerusalem. They also tried to set the two churches on fire. In addition to the swastikas the word "OUT" was painted on the entrance of the Notre Dame Church- the second such desecration.

Dec. 1982 Meir Kahane's Kach group burned to the ground a Baptist church in Jerusalem.

23 May 1983 "Unknown persons" attacked a convent run by German nuns in Jerusalem. Al-Fajr, a Jerusalem weekly, reported that this was just the latest incident in a series of many anti-Christian incidents in Jerusalem.

June 1983 The Mother Superior and another nun of the Russian Orthodox Church were stabbed to death by an American Jew. In mid-month men entered the church and threatened the nuns. At another Russian Orthodox church, directly across the street from Jerusalem's main police center, swastikas were painted on the main entrance.

Nov. 1983 Father Fawzi Khoury of the Fassouta Roman Catholic Church was held for weeks without charge.

25 Dec. 1983 A fire was started in the Hotel Nitzan in Tiberias on Christmas Day. Jews claimed that the hotel is a center for missionary activity and that various Christian sects are offering clothes, jewelry and sneakers to Jews who would attend missionary lectures. The Jerusalem Post noted the incident as one of many such actions harassing the group; meetings interrupted and photos of the participants taken and sometimes published later in anti-missionary tracts; windows smashed; stones tossed into meetings; homes of members broken into; and converts are often harassed. The owners closed the hotel and asked the group to leave. The anti-missionary group Yad Le' Achim and a local yeshiva, Kolel Yad Rambam, seemed to the instigators of the attacks.

Dec 1983 Explosives placed outside several Christian and Muslim religious institutions in Jerusalem injured a number of people.

5 Jan. 1984 "Unknown persons" set fire to the Messianic Assemblies Church in Jerusalem-- the latest of a number of arsons and bombings against Christian and Muslim targets. The church's address had been placed on copies of Biblical literature later distributed in Orthodox Jewish circles. The church had nothing to do with the literature to which its name had been affixed.

15 Jan. 1984 At the Russian Orthodox convent Ain Karem an Israeli army issue hand grenade exploded as a nun opened her door. The door was blown to pieces but the nun eluded death by ducking around a corner just before the grenade exploded. Israeli police point to the terror group Terror Against Terror group held responsible for at least 14 such bomb attacks throughout the West Bank.

Jan. 1984 Plans to build a Christian hotel near Bethlehem were scrapped by the Jewish municipality which refused to issue a building permit.

After the fire meetings are held in tent like structures.

Their rebuilding plan is approved by Mayor Teddy Kollek but in the fall the district planning commission decided to allow only the building of a structure similar to the congregation's original 60 seat chapel built in 1929.

The Church filed suit in Israel's High Court.

Yad Le' Achim organized protests against the rebuilding plans. an unnamed ultraconservative Orthodox Jewish leader told the Jerusalem Post that his political party would withdraw from the municipal coalition if approval were granted.

The High Court in mid 1985 asked the Baptist congregation to leave the area before it builds a new sanctuary. the court said it would not rule on the church's suit for two months. The delay is designed to give the congregation and the Baptist Convention of Israel time to consider trading the church property for another site in Jerusalem. Lawyers for the church have recommended that the Baptists move on condition the church's building will be approved as submitted.

23 Jan. 1985 Ultra-Orthodox Jews protest opposite the Baptist Church against plans to rebuild the burnt-out church. The signs read: "Get Out," "We don't want a missionary center here." One demonstrator said: The Church disrupts the Shabbat peace and lowers the quality of life in our quiet residential area."

13 Apr. 1985 Members of the Assyrian community (the oldest Christian community in Jerusalem), led by their archbishop, were walking to their quarter of the Old City on the occasion of Holy Fire when they were bombarded with hot water and rocks by a Jewish family from their home. This was the fifth time an Assyrian procession had been attacked during Christian holidays. several Assyrian youths ran into the building to search for the family's apartment. They were met by Jewish residents aiming cocked submachine guns at them. Israeli police with the procession fired into the air to prevent the youths from being gunned down. The Jerusalem Post reported that the attackers were newly converted Orthodox Jews from America. Israeli police were more interested in ascertaining the identities of the Assyrian youths who rushed into the building than in those who attacked the procession. The Jewish neighborhood in the vicinity of the Assyrian convent is all Assyrian property confiscated after 1967 to build the Jewish quarter.

Aug. 1986 Grenade thrown at an Arab family's house.

Oct. 1986 An Arab school was broken into and racist slogans painted on the walls.

12 Apr. 1987 "Unknown persons" set fire to St. Savior's Episcopal Church in Akka. The arsonists also painted racists slogans in Hebrew on the church walls: "Kahane the Great," "Get Out Christians and Muslims, " and Death to the Pope." The statement of the church:

"No doubt this event . . . took place in the absence of any deterring force to stop such racial and undesirable acts. this aggression is an aggression against spiritual values, against freedom of worship, and against democracy."

1988 In Gaza, 18-year old Kader Tarazi, on his way to but groceries was caught in a crowd fleeing Israeli soldiers. He ducked into the house of a friend but the soldiers dragged him out. While beating him they demanded to know his religion. when he replied "Christian" the soldiers spread him cruciform on the hood of a jeep and beat him on the head. Then they drove him around the streets of Gaza for hours as an example. He died from the beatings.

Statement of the Heads of the Christian Community in Jerusalem

We, the heads of the Christian communities in the Holy City, have met together in view of the grave situation prevailing in Jerusalem and the whole of our country.

It is our Christian conviction that as spiritual leaders we have an urgent duty to follow up the developments in this situation and to make known to the world the conditions of life of our people here in the Holy Land.

In Jerusalem, on the West Bank and in Gaza, our people experience in their daily lives constant deprivation of their fundamental rights because on arbitrary actions deliberately taken by the authorities. Our people are often subject to unprovoked harassment and hardship.

We are particularly concerned by the tragic and unnecessary loss of Palestinian lives, especially among minors. Unarmed and innocent people are being killed by the unwarranted use of firearms and hundreds are wounded by the excessive use of force.

We protest against the frequent shooting incidents in the vicinity of Holy Places.

We also condemn the practice of mass administrative arrests and of continuing detention of adults and minors without trial.

We further condemn the use of all forms of collective punishment, including the demolition of homes and depriving whole communities of basic services such as water and electricity.

We appeal to the world community to support our demand for the reopening of schools and universities, closed for the past sixteen months, so that thousands of our children can enjoy again their basic right to education.

We demand that the authorities respect the rights of believers to enjoy free access to all places of worship on the Holy Days of all religions.

We affirm our human solidarity and sympathy with al who are suffering and oppressed; we pray for the return of peace based on justice to Jerusalem and the Holy Land; and we request the international community and the United Nations Organization to give urgent attention to the plight of the Palestinian people and to work for a speedy and just resolution of the Palestinian problem.

Signed 27 April 1989 by: H.B. Diodoros (Greek Orthodox Patriarch); H.B. Michel Sabbah (Latin Patriarch); Bishop Samir Kafity (Episcopal Church); Archbishop Lufti Laham (Greek Catholic Patriarchate); H.B. Yeghishe Derderian (Armenian Orthodox Patriarchate); Bishop Naim Nassar (Evangelical Luthern Church in Jordan); H.B. Basilios (Coptic Orthodox Patriarche); Archbishop Dionysios Behnam Jijjawi (Syrian Orthodox Patriarchal Vicar); Most Rev. Father Cechitelli (O.F.M.) (Cusios of the Holy Land). --------

22 May 1995 An Israeli soldier sprayed the inside of St. Anthony's church in Jaffa with automatic weapon fire. Seven people were injured outside the church in clashes between police and Arab residents. The gunman fired hundreds of bullets with an M-16 assault weapon and threw several concussion grenades. When he began firing those inside fled and no one was injured. However, paintings, statues, pews and walls were heavily damaged or destroyed.

Christian Symbols Under Attack:

"Dishonoring Christian religious symbols is an old religious duty in Judaism. Spitting on the cross, and especially on the Crucifix, and spitting when a Jew passes a church, have been obligatory from around AD 200 for pious Jews. In the past, when the danger of anti-Semitic hostility was a real one, the pious Jews were commanded by their rabbis either to spit so that the reason for doing so would be unknown, or to spit onto their chests, not actually on the cross or openly before the church. The increasing strength of the Jewish state has caused these customs to become more open again but there should be no mistake: The spitting on the cross for converts from Christianity to Judaism, organized in Kibbutz Sa'ad and financed by the Israeli government is an act of traditional Jewish piety. It does not cease to be barbaric, horrifying and wicked because of this! On the contrary, it is worse because it is so traditional, and much more dangerous as well, just as the renewed anti-Semitism of the Nazis was dangerous, because in part, it played on the traditional anti-Semitic past.

This barbarous attitude of contempt and hate for Christian symbols has grown in Israel. In the 1950s Israel issued a series of stamps representing pictures of Israeli cities. In the picture of Nazareth, there was a church and on its top a cross-- almost invisible, perhaps the size of a millimeter. Nevertheless, the religious parties, supported by many on the Zionist "left" made a scandal and the stamps were quickly withdrawn and replaced by an almost identical series from which the microscopic cross was withdrawn.

Then there was the long-drawn-out battle about Christian influence in elementary arithmetic. Pious Jews object to the international plus sign for it is a cross, and it may in their opinion, influence little children to convert to Christianity, Another "explanation" holds: it would then be difficult to "educate" them to spit on the cross, if they become used to it in their arithmetic exercises. Until the early 1970s two different sets of arithmetic books were used in Israel. One for the secular schools, employing the inverted "T" sign. In the early 70s the religious fanatics "converted" the Labour Party to the great danger of the cross in arithmetic, and from that time, in all Hebrew elementary schools (and now many high schools as well) the international plus sign has been forbidden.

Similar development is visible in other areas of education> Teaching the New Testament was always forbidden, but in the old times conscientious teachers of history used to circumvent the prohibition, by organizing seminars or sending the students to libraries (not the school libraries, of course). About 10 years ago there was a wave of denouncing such teachers. One in Jerusalem was almost sacked, for advising her history pupils, who were studying the history of Jews in Palestine around 30-40 AD, that it would be a god thing if they would read a few chapters of the New Testament as a historical aid. She retained her post only after humbly promising not to do this again.

However, in recent years, anti-Christian feelings are literally exploding in Israel (and among the Israel-worshipping Jews in Diaspora too) together with the increase of the Jewish fanaticism in all other areas.

The worse enemies of the truth here, as in many other aspects of the Israel reality, are the socialist, "liberals," "radicals," etc. in the USA. Imagine the reaction of the US Liberals, and of such papers as The Nation and New York Review of Books, not to mention The New York Times if in any state whatsoever, the government financed spitting on the Star of David? But when here in Israel, the government finances the spitting on a cross, they are and will continue to be, quite silent. More than this, they help to finance it. United States taxpayers, who are of course mostly Christians, are financing at least half the Israeli budget, one way or another, and therefore the spitting on the cross too."

Statement by Israel Shahak,

Tourism:

1967- The Tourism Ministry begins its policy of granting guide licenses only to Jewish Israelis.

1978- Israeli Government now requires all tour groups to be accompanied by a licensed guide.

Result- The movement and experiences of Christian pilgrims are now closely controlled by Jewish Israeli guides. These guides use this control to propagandize subordinating Christian history to Jewish history. Tour groups stay in West Jerusalem and are advised to stay clear of the Christian Palestinians of East Jerusalem because they are "terrorists." Denying Christian Palestinians tour guide licenses also aids in the destabilization of the Palestinian economy. Guiding pilgrims has been a traditional occupation among the native Christians in the Holy Land for centuries.

This compilation was made possible by the monumental work of Issa Nakhleh and published in his two volume work Encyclopedia of the Palestine Problem.

Reproduced From:  http://www.al-bushra.org/ecu-inter/orthodox.htm 

Rev. Farwell Jerry needs an answer on his comments
1) The Comments of Rev. Farwell
2) The answers from Palestine and Israel

1) DATE: JANUARY 11, 2001
FROM: JERRY FALWELL

Arafat's Terrorism Threatens Christians and Christian Sites ... Not Just Israel: Beit Jalla is a small Christian Arab village on the southern outskirts of Jerusalem. It sits across a handsome valley from the Jewish suburb of Gilo. The Christian residents of Beit
Jalla and their Jewish neighbors in Gilo have been a model for Arab-Israeli cooperation ever since all of the Biblical land of Israel
was reunited under Israeli control in the Six Day War of 1967. For the first time in the ancient history of this small village, Beit
Jalla was booming. Commerce between the hard working Christians and their new partners in Israel brought a measure of wealth, opportunity and freedom these people had never had before. By the middle of the 1990's, Beit Jalla was one of the wealthiest Arab towns and the envy of Palestinians everywhere. It isn't anymore.
Today, Beit Jalla is in shambles. Most of its fancy homes have been destroyed. Its best people have been forced to flee, and its long cultivated commercial and cultural relations with Israel have been completely devastated.
What happened? Well, in a word, Yasir Arafat. Even if most of the world long ago decided to turn a deaf ear to it, everyone knows about the PLO terrorist leader's war against the Jews and Israel. But very few people know about his war against Christians and Christianity. In one of the most cynical ploys in Arafat's long and nefarious career, he has transformed Beit Jalla from a once peaceful and prosperous village into a nest of terrorist gangs whose sole purpose is to provoke a massacre of that town's Christians residents.

After he concluded that Bill Clinton's so called "peace process" had given him all the unilateral Israeli concessions he could extract, Yasir Arafat decided to throw off the ill fitting cloak of respectability and return to the open terrorism at which he so excels. Using last September's visit of Israeli opposition leader Ariel Sharon's visit to Jerusalem's Temple Mount, the holiest site
in Judaism, as his pretext, Arafat launched his long planned war against Israel and the western values it represents.
That the Christian residents of Beit Jalla are among this war's foremost victims is anything but an accident. Rather it is an
integral part of Arafat's campaign to get the United Nations to send an international force to impose a solution to the conflict that Arafat was unable to win at the negotiating table. Because, as he likes to put it, "Palestinian blood is cheap," Arafat, as he has demonstrated time and again over his 40 year terrorist career, will gladly sacrifice even his people's own children if it can score him a point in the battle for world opinion.

Arafat knows that in order to persuade the international community to deploy a military force to fight the Israelis, he has to win the world's sympathy. To this end, he has shown himself all too willing to provoke the killing of hundreds of his own people, the younger the better. To encourage the death of still more children, the Palestinian Authority that Arafat controls and Bill Clinton has funded with American tax dollars, has been offering $2,000 to each family whose child becomes a "martyr for Jerusalem". Since virtually none of mostly pro-Palestinian journalists who have converged to cover Arafat's war understand the constant Arabic language appeals for "martyrs" on PLO radio and TV, almost no one knows that Yasir Arafat uses American money, and lots of it, to encourage parents to allow their children to be killed.

There has never been any military purpose of getting Palestinian children to attack Israeli positions located on the far outskirts of
Palestinian towns with rocks, guns, and firebombs. Their only purpose has been to provoke besieged Israeli soldiers to shoot the Palestinian children who are assaulting for the benefit of television viewers.

Ever since he created the PLO in 1964, three years before there were any "occupied territories", Yasir Arafat's greatest tactical
strength has been his ability to turn Israel's democratic institutions into Palestinian assets. His latest war is no exception. In its early days, the televised pictures of dead Palestinian children whipped the Islamic world into a frenzy against Israel and the west. While Arafat was also able to win great sympathy in Western Europe and from the liberal elite that controls the mainstream American press, he wasn't able to get United Nations to dispatch a force to fight Israel. Naturally, such a force would have to include at least some American troops.

Arafat thought that if he could find a way to market Israel as a "killer of Christians" as effectively as he sold the lie that
Israelis were "killing children," Israel would find itself completely isolated. In such a climate, Israel would have no choice,
Arafat thought, but to agree to the establishment of a PLO state along the indefensible border of June 4, 1967. Arafat surmised that they would have no choice but to re-divide their capital city of Jerusalem, agree to let Arafat himself become custodian of all of Jerusalem's Christian Holy sites and even offer up their holy Temple Mount to Moslem control.

From this position, Arafat could use his 40,000 man terrorist army to escalate his 37 year war to destroy what would surely be a
devastated and demoralized State of Israel. While it hasn't quite worked yet, it isn't for Arafat's lack of trying. His devilish
scheme has no shortage of victims. The most conspicuous being the innocent Christians of Beit Jalla. Almost every afternoon for the past three months, members of Yasir Arafat's heavily armed Muslim militia (illegal according to the Oslo Accords) storm into the town from territory they control and commandeer the homes closest to living rooms and kitchens of the Jewish neighborhood of Gilo. Most of the time, the terrorists refuse to let anyone already inside leave, preferring instead to take them hostage.

Soon thereafter, the gunmen start shooting their heavy machine guns into the exposed houses on Gilo's southern edge. Naturally, once the shooting starts, Israeli army sharpshooters calibrate their tracing equipment to hone in on the source of fire as exactly as they can to avoid civilian causalities and start to shoot back. The battle rages inconclusively until the militiamen run out of ammunition and go home.

To date at least, the PLO terrorists haven't been able to get any of their Christian hostages killed by Israeli return fire. But almost
every Israeli I know, and I know a lot, think that as long as the government allows itself to be manipulated by Arafat, the greater
the likelihood that sooner or later, Arafat is going to get his"massacre." One day, one sharpshooter is going to miss. It is bound
to happen. Since almost everyone in Israel agrees that the Israeli army could permanently end the firing on Gilo and liberate the
Christians of Beit Jalla by simply retaking the town, many want to know why Prime Minister Ehud Barak continues to allow himself to be used as Arafat's pawn. That question, according to almost all the Israelis I met on my recent tour to Israel, can be answered in two words: Bill Clinton.

Barak, a decorated soldier, and by all accounts a very decent and honorable man, is a political novice and no match for the wily
Clinton. Plus, he all but owes his job to Clinton, who, in an unprecedented interference in the domestic affairs of Israel, pulled
out all the stops, including sending James Carville and his cohorts to Israel, to get him elected in 1999. Clinton, these Israelis
believe, put the screws to Barak to refrain from doing anything that would upset Arafat and hurt Clinton's chances of cinching a peace deal and winning the Nobel Prize before he left office. Arafat knows that his terrorism is working. Never before in the glorious history of the state of Israel has the Jewish state ever appeared desperate in the eyes of its enemies. Today, sadly, many think that it does.
If the events of the past several months prove anything, it is that Yasir Arafat remains what he has always been; an insatiably
dangerous terrorist.

One can only hope and pray that the new American administration of President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney will see Arafat for what he truly is and act to stand by Israel and to stand up for the besieged Christians .

2) The Answers:

a) JERRY FALWELL and his Support Circle
Do not represent the churches and the Christians in the Holy Land

Dear Friends, Brothers and Sisters,

I was very shocked to receive the news from the so-called famous preacher Jerry Falwell and his “Falwell Confidential”, a weekly briefing for America's pastors and Christian leaders who may use this publication without attribution. This publication is made available, without charge, to the evangelical pastors who are part of the "Friends of Jerry Falwell Support Circle." What shocked me most were his thoughts about the Christians in the Holy Land, particularly those living in Bethlehem, Beit Jala and Beit Sahour. He pretended that the Palestinian Authority and President Arafat are persecuting them and forcing them to leave the Holy Land.

First of all, this man and his group don’t represent us in the Holy Land at all. They are not authorised to speak in our name or on our behalf, since we can write ourselves and make our voices heard in the whole world if necessary. We have our ways and means to inform the world about our lives and we expect you to receive information from the true sources in Jerusalem, and not from a pastor in the States who is a pure Zionist more than he is a Christian. This man and his group had always supported Israel and the Zionists. His Church is called Christian-Zionist. What do you truly expect?

This man and his group do not represent the Arab Christians, in other words all those Catholics, Orthodox, Anglicans, Lutherans… well over one and a half billion people across the world.

This man says what Israel wishes him to say, and with his friends at the Christian International Embassy in Jerusalem, they represent the Zionists and not the local Christians of the region.

I repeat here what I have always written: we don’t accept that these people speak on our names! How can a few Zionist and uninvited American Christians come here in order to preach Christianity in the "Cradle of Christianity", and allege in the process that the Palestinian Authority persecutes Christians? They are like "those selling water in the quarter of the water carriers" or, as the Jerusalem proverb would have it, "like those selling celery to the people of Silwan". This underlines their dubious political aims, for they are American Christian Zionists, hiding behind the Bible and trading in American dollars in order to sow discord in the community, doubt in the faith, disintegration of the church and the dispersion of the Christians. Thus we warn people against those visitors because they are not from among us, "for whoever does not gather together, divides", as Christ said.

This man and his group represent only one part of the evangelical wing of the Church, and have as many problems with the traditional Churches in the USA as they do with our own local churches here. Their theology, doctrines and political orientations are still steeped in the Old Testament, and they find little similarity with the larger numbers of Christian churches and grass roots that are supporting peace with justice here by seeking to assist the Palestinians in their struggle for independence and statehood.

We would like to highlight, once more, that the Arab Christian Community in the Palestinian Territories is an integral part of the Palestinian people. It suffers with it, rejoices with it, and shares with it the same hopes and aspirations. Therefore, the recent Israeli rumours about getting the town of Beit Jala involved in the recent clashes is not a coincidence, but aims to “divide and rule” among the one Palestinian people. I have repeatedly written about this principle of our existence in the Holy Land, and lately in my article “Arab Christians do not need Anyone’s Protection” in which I insisted and insist again today! These Christians are Palestinians, and their identity has been handed on from father to son. They are an indivisible part of this homeland, "citizens and believers" as is repeatedly upheld by the Patriarch Michel Sabbah. This means that they have the same rights and the same obligations, based on the principle: "Religion is unto God, and the homeland is unto all".

Indeed, they have proven their true worth and sense of belonging to this land and this society time and again over the past decades! They have participated in the revolution, in the uprising of 1987 and in the peace process. They participate today in the cultural and political life side by side with their Muslim brothers. From among them, there are those who led different Palestinian factions like George Habbash and Nayef Hawatmeh; there are those who were martyrs like Na’im Khadr and Hanna Mukbil; there are those who are diplomats like Afif Safieh; and there are those who are ministers and members of the Legislative Council like Mitri Abu Aita, Hanan Ashrawi and others. I believe that whoever plays on this sensitive religious chord in order to sow discord between the children of the one homeland is frankly deluded.

I finish by saying to all our friends, brothers and sisters all over the world, that we are here by the will of God himself for a very special mission which is to witness to Jesus Christ in His Homeland and we will remain here for ever until the end of the world.

As such, and since Merry Falwell has the readiness to advise us Christians on our own lives and destinies, I take the opportunity to advise him back with some simple truths! As a man of God, he should accept the truth when he hears it! We clearly and openly tell him:

To remain silent if he does not want to say the Truth

To remain silent if he does not want to support Justice.

Fr. Raed Abusahlia
Chancellor
Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem
--------------------------------------------------------
Fr. Raed Awad Abusahlia

P.O.Box 14152 Jerusalem 91141
Tel. 00 972 2 6282323/6272280
Fax 00 972 2 6271652
E-mail: nonviolence@writeme.com 
E-mail: Latinpat@actcom.co.il 
Website: http://www.Lpj.org 
Website: http://members.nbci.com/nonviolence 
==================================
b) From: freodeh@hotmail.com  (FR.ELIAS ODEH)
To: LabibKobti@aol.com 
CC: SMOdeh@aol.com 

Dear Fr. Labib:
this is a copy from my letter sent to:
Undisclosed-Recipient@Lmail.actcom.co.il 
tsaffold@provide.net
webmaster@libertyalliance.org

I hope that you will send it to many other friends and associations...

Fr. Elias

Dear Friends, Brothers and Sisters

With a very shocking matter I read Mr. Falwell preaching, I couldn't finish
the article my heart was aching of the miss information that Mr. Falwell
pass to his congregation, I did not expect who calls himself Christian to
come up with those lies with no shame.
I am a catholic priest in the Holy land for 30 years, we don't feel or live
those moments where we have such difficulties. Yes, we recognize there are
some extremist in every religion, Jews Christians and Moslems.
We ask God's forgiveness to Mr. Falwell. With my community we pray to all the
congregation where Mr. Falwell preach to open there mind and heart to know
were the truth stands.
Mr. Falwell try to portrait that Moslems are treating Christians badly, we
wonder how much Mr. Falwell have received to tell such a big lie to poison
his people mind hiding the true that our suffering Christian as Moslem alike
is from the Israeli occupation. How dare Mr. Falwell use our name and belief
to come up with such a tragic teaching, who authorize him to defend us? I
am ashamed of him and his teaching, and he calls himself Christian? He is
way far away from Christ and Christianity.
So please Mr. Falwell spare yourself embarrassment of what you call
preaching.
You are addressing Yaser Arafat as terrorist. I wonder how your conscience
allow you to say so? We know that the U.S.A. government received him and
recognized him as a man of peace, and he received the Nobel price !!!!! You
say: "Yaser Arafat wasn't able to get the united Nations to dispatch a force
to fight Israel."
Israel oppose to that with the blessing of the U.S.A. veto. Why was the
Israeli afraid or try to hide the terror act against the Palestinians?
I would like to know if Mr. Sharon visited the Holy Site to pay homage, why
would he accompany thousands of soldiers with him???
The protest will go on and on ...
We urge the congregation to try to search and find the truth...
Here is a personal experience that happened with us last week. exactly on
Tuesday the ninth: Bishop Marcuzzo, Bishop of Nazareth and Israel, his
assistant Fr. Elie Kurzum, myself Fr. Elias Odeh my sister Angela, we were
going to visit one of our parishes in the West Bank with a car that carries
the Vatican flag and diplomatic license plate as we approached a military
camp three soldiers jumped pointing their guns at our car shouting: Stop. We
stopped: GO BACK and they shot the first bullet and a second and a third
without asking any question. They terrorized us we were almost killed. What
do you call this Mr. Falwell ???????????
May God open your mind and heart to the truth and enough courage to tell
about it....

Fr. Elias M. ODEH

Reproduced From: http://www.al-bushra.org/ecu-inter/orthodox.htm 

The War Prayer Mark Twain

It was a time of great and exalting excitement. The country was up in arms, the war was on, in every breast burned the holy fire of patriotism; the drums were beating, the bands playing, the toy pistols popping, the bunched firecrackers hissing and spluttering; on every hand and far down the receding and fading spread of roofs and balconies a fluttering wilderness of flags flashed in the sun; daily the young volunteers marched down the wide avenue gay and fine in their new uniforms, the proud fathers and mothers and sisters and sweethearts cheering them with voices choked with happy emotion as they swung by; nightly the packed mass meetings listened, panting, to patriot oratory which stirred the deepest deeps of their hearts, and which they interrupted at briefest intervals with cyclones of applause, the tears running down their cheeks the while; in the churches the pastors preached devotion to flag and country, and invoked the God of Battles beseeching His aid in our good cause in outpourings of fervid eloquence which moved every listener. It was indeed a glad and gracious time, and the half dozen rash spirits that ventured to disapprove of the war and cast a doubt upon its righteousness straightway got such a stern and angry warning that for their personal safety's sake they quickly shrank out of sight and offended no more in that way.

Sunday morning came--next day the battalions would leave for the front; the church was filled; the volunteers were there, their young faces alight with martial dreams--visions of the stern advance, the gathering momentum, the rushing charge, the flashing sabers, the flight of the foe, the tumult, the enveloping smoke, the fierce pursuit, the surrender! Then home from the war, bronzed heroes, welcomed, adored, submerged in golden seas of glory! With the volunteers sat their dear ones, proud, happy, and envied by the neighbors and fiends who had no sons and brothers to send forth to the field of honor, there to win for the flag, or , failing, die the noblest of noble deaths. The service proceeded; a war chapter from the Old Testament was read; the first prayer was said; it was followed by an organ burst that shook the building, and with one impulse the house rose, with glowing eyes and beating hearts, and poured out that tremendous invocation

*God the all-terrible! Thou who ordainest! Thunder they clarion and lightning thy sword!*

Then came the "long" prayer. None could remember the like of it for passionate pleading and moving and beautiful language. The burden of its supplication was, that an ever-merciful and benignant Father of us all would watch over our noble young soldiers, and aid, comfort, and encourage them in their patriotic work; bless them, shield them in the day of battle and the hour of peril, bear them in His mighty hand, make them strong and confident, invincible in the bloody onset; help them to crush the foe, grant to them and to their flag and country imperishable honor and glory--

An aged stranger entered and moved with slow and noiseless step up the main aisle, his eyes fixed upon the minister, his long body clothed in a robe that reached to his feet, his head bare, his white hair descending in a frothy cataract to his shoulders, his seamy face unnaturally pale, pale even to ghastliness. With all eyes following him and wondering, he made his silent way; without pausing, he ascended to the preacher's side and stood there waiting. With shut lids the preacher, unconscious of his presence, continued with his moving prayer, and at last finished it with the words, uttered in fervent appeal, "Bless our arms, grant us the victory, O Lord our God, Father and Protector of our land and flag!"

The stranger touched his arm, motioned him to step aside--which the startled minister did--and took his place. During some moments he surveyed the spellbound audience with solemn eyes, in which burned an uncanny light; then in a deep voice he said:

"I come from the Throne--bearing a message from Almighty God!" The words smote the house with a shock; if the stranger perceived it he gave no attention. "He has heard the prayer of His servant your shepherd, and will grant it if such shall be your desire after I, His messenger, shall have explained to you its import--that is to say, its full import. For it is like unto many of the prayers of men, in that it asks for more than he who utters it is aware of--except he pause and think.

"God's servant and yours has prayed his prayer. Has he paused and taken thought? Is it one prayer? No, it is two--one uttered, the other not. Both have reached the ear of Him Who heareth all supplications, the spoken and the unspoken. Ponder this--keep it in mind. If you would beseech a blessing upon yourself, beware! lest without intent you invoke a curse upon a neighbor at the same time. If you pray for the blessing of rain upon your crop which needs it, by that act you are possibly praying for a curse upon some neighbor's crop which may not need rain and can be injured by it.

"You have heard your servant's prayer--the uttered part of it. I am commissioned of God to put into words the other part of it--that part which the pastor--and also you in your hearts- -fervently prayed silently. And ignorantly and unthinkingly? God grant that it was so! You heard these words: 'Grant us the victory, O Lord our God!' That is sufficient. the *whole* of the uttered prayer is compact into those pregnant words. Elaborations were not necessary. When you have prayed for victory you have prayed for many unmentioned results which follow victory--*must* follow it, cannot help but follow it. Upon the listening spirit of God fell also the unspoken part of the prayer. He commandeth me to put it into words. Listen!

"O Lord our Father, our young patriots, idols of our hearts, go forth to battle--be Thou near them! With them--in spirit--we also go forth from the sweet peace of our beloved firesides to smite the foe. O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with little children to wander unfriended the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst, sports of the sun flames of summer and the icy winds of winter, broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring Thee for the refuge of the grave and denied it--for our sakes who adore Thee, Lord, blast their hopes, blight their lives, protract their bitter pilgrimage, make heavy their steps, water their way with their tears, stain the white snow with the blood of their wounded feet! We ask it, in the spirit of love, of Him Who is the Source of Love, and Who is the ever-faithful refuge and friend of all that are sore beset and seek His aid with humble and contrite hearts. Amen.

(*After a pause.*) "Ye have prayed it; if ye still desire it, speak! The messenger of the Most High waits!"

It was believed afterward that the man was a lunatic, because there was no sense in what he said.

The Unannounced Reason Behind American Fundamentalism's Support for the State of Israel

by Gary North

With the President meeting this week with Prime Minister Barak of Israel and Yassir Arafat, it may be time to review a topic that is baffling for Jews, annoying to Arabs, and unavoidable for American Congressmen: the unswerving political support for the State of Israel by American fundamentalists.

Vocal support of a pro-Israel American foreign policy is basic for the leaders of American Protestant fundamentalism. This has been true ever since 1948. Pat Robertson and Rev. Jerry Falwell have been pro-Israel throughout their careers, beginning two decades before the arrival of the New Christian Right in the late 1970's. These men are not aberrations. The Trinity Broadcasting Network is equally supportive. So are the best-selling authors who speak for, and influence heavily, Protestant fundamentalism, most notably Hal Lindsey, author of The Late Great Planet Earth (1970), and Tim LaHaye, the husband of Beverly LaHaye of Concerned Women for America, which says on its Web site that it is "the nation’s largest public policy women’s organization." Rev. LaHaye and his co-author have each earned some $10 million in royalties for their multi-volume futuristic novel, Left Behind. They have a very large audience.

People may ask themselves, "Why this support?" Fundamentalists earlier in this century were sometimes associated with anti-Semitism. James M. Gray of the Moody Bible Institute in 1927 wrote an editorial favorable to Henry Ford’s Dearborn Independent series on Jews. Gray’s editorial appeared in the Moody Bible Institute Monthly. Arno C. Gabelein, a prominent fundamentalist leader, believed that the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion was a legitimate document. Gabelein’s 1933 book, The Conflict of the Ages, would today be regarded as anti-Semitic.

Other fundamentalist leaders of the pre-War era, while not anti-Semitic, attempted to maintain neutrality on the issue of Hitler’s persecution of Jews. In his 1977 book, Armageddon Now!, Christian historian Dwight Wilson cites numerous examples of fundamentalist theologians in the late 1930’s who regarded Hitler’s discriminatory policies against Jews as part of God’s judgment on the Jews. He writes: "Pleas from Europe for assistance for Jewish refugees fell on deaf ears, and ‘Hands Off’ meant no helping hand. So in spite of being theologically more pro-Jewish than any other Christian group, the premillennarians also were apathetic. . . ." [pp. 96-97].

What was it that persuaded almost the entire fundamentalist movement to move from either hostility or neutrality to vocal support of Israel? No single answer will fit every case, but there is a common motivation, one not taken seriously by most people in history: getting out of life alive.

The Not-Quite Last Things

The Christian doctrine of eschatology deals with the last things. Sometimes eschatology deals with the personal: the death of the individual. Usually, however, it has to do with God’s final judgment of mankind.

There have been three main views of eschatology in the history of the church, which theologians classify as premillennialism, postmillennialism, and amillennialism. The pre- and post- designations refer to the expected timing of the bodily return of Jesus in the company of angels: before (pre-) the establishment of an earthly kingdom of God, or after (post-) this kingdom has extended its rule across the earth.

The amillennial view is that the kingdom of God is mainly spiritual. This became the dominant view of Christianity for over a millennium after Augustine’s City of God, with its distinction between the city of God, the church (spiritual and permanent) and the political cities of man (rising and falling). Luther held this eschatological view. Most of the Continental Protestant Reformers of the sixteenth century held it. But seventeenth-century Scottish Presbyterians were more likely to hold the postmillennial view, and they carried it with them when they emigrated to America. Their postmillennialism rested in part on their belief that God will convert the Jews to Christianity as a prelude to the kingdom’s period of greatest expansion, an idea derived from Paul’s Epistle to the church at Rome, chapter 11. Presbyterians are officially commanded to pray for the conversion of the Jews. [Westminster Larger Catechism (1647), Answer 191.] The first generation of Puritan Congregationalists in New England also held similar postmillennial opinions.

The premillennial view was commonly held in the pre-Augustinian church, although the other views did have defenders. After 1660, premillennialism became increasingly common within American Puritanism. Cotton Mather was a premillennialist. But Jonathan Edwards was postmillennial. In nineteenth-century America, both views were common prior to the Civil War. After the War, premillennialism steadily replaced postmillennialism among fundamentalists. A secularized postmillennialism was adopted by the Social Gospel movement. Non-fundamentalist Protestants from Continental Europe, like the Catholics, remained amillennial. Postmillennialism faded after World War I until the late 1970's, when it experienced a limited revival.

Basic to the view of both premillennialism and amillennialism is pessimism regarding the efforts of Christians to build a culture-wide kingdom of God on earth. Both positions hold that only by Jesus’ bodily presence among the saints can Christians create an cultural alternative to the competing kingdoms of man. The premillennialist believes that this international kingdom construction task will begin in earnest a thousand years before the final judgment, with Jesus ruling from a literal throne, probably located in Jerusalem. The amillennialist views this universal extension of the kingdom of God into culture as possible only after the resurrection of all humanity at the final judgment, i.e., in a sin-free, death-free, Christians-only world.

Tribulation and Rapture

Just prior to Jesus’ return to set up an earthly kingdom, argue most amillennialists and all premillennialists, there will be a time of persecution, called the Great Tribulation. It is here that the great debate over the Jews begins. Amillennialists believe that Christians will be persecuted by their enemies. A handful of premillennialists, referred to as "historic premillennialists," also identify Christians as the targets. This version of premillennialism has been insignificant institutionally since the 1870’s. The dominant premillennial view says that Jews will suffer the Great Tribulation. Born-again Christians will have flown the coop – literally. This is the doctrine of the pre-tribulation Rapture.

According to pre-tribulation premillennialists, who are known as dispensationalists, Jesus will come secretly in the clouds and raise deceased Christians – and only Christians – from the dead. Immediately thereafter, every true Christian will be transported bodily into the sky, and from there to heaven: the Rapture event. The passage cited to defend this view is found in Paul’s first letter to the church at Thessolonica: "For the Lord himself shall descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trump of God: and the dead in Christ shall rise first: Then we which are alive and remain shall be caught up [harpazo] together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air: and so shall we ever be with the Lord" (I Thes. 4:16-17). Throughout most of church history, this passage was associated with the final judgment, but beginning sometime around 1830 in England, it was linked to the premillennial, pretribulational Rapture – a word that is not found in the Greek text or in any English translation of the New Testament. Its Latin root word is in Jerome’s Vulgate, a translation of the Greek "harpazo" – seize, catch, or pluck.

This outlook on the earthly future became increasingly popular among fundamentalists, beginning in the 1870's. It was formalized in the footnotes of the Scofield Reference Bible (1909; revised, 1917). In 1930, it became the first Oxford University Press book to reach sales of one million. It has now sold over five million copies. C. I. Scofield’s system has defined fundamentalism for nine decades.

The Rapture-based escape from history is now universally believed by fundamentalists to be imminent. Generations of fundamentalists have believed that they will escape bodily death. They will be transported into the sky, like Elijah, though without benefit of chariots.

But when? That has been the great question. The answer: "Soon." But why soon? Why not a millennium from now? The psychological answer: Because men do not live that long in this millennium. The main selling point for fundamentalism’s Bible prophecies is to get insight into what is coming soon. In this case, the issue of mortality is central. As the slogan says, "Everybody wants to go to heaven, but nobody wants to die." The doctrine of the imminent Rapture allows Christians to believe seriously that they can go to heaven without dying. Millions of Americans believe this today.

But how can they be so sure? Because of the events of 1948. In that year, the crucial missing piece of the prophetic puzzle – the restoration of the nation of Israel – seemed to come true. Critics of the dispensational system could no longer say, "But where is Israel in all this?" The answer, at long last: "In Palestine, just in time for the Great Tribulation."

The Grim Fate of Israel

The source of the idea of the Great Tribulation is found in Jesus’ last words regarding Israel, which are recorded in Matthew 24 and Luke 21.

And when ye shall see Jerusalem compassed with armies, then know that the desolation thereof is nigh. Then let them which are in Judaea flee to the mountains; and let them which are in the midst of it depart out; and let not them that are in the countries enter thereinto. For these be the days of vengeance, that all things which are written may be fulfilled. But woe unto them that are with child, and to them that give suck, in those days! for there shall be great distress in the land, and wrath upon this people. And they shall fall by the edge of the sword, and shall be led away captive into all nations: and Jerusalem shall be trodden down of the Gentiles, until the times of the Gentiles be fulfilled (Luke 21:20-24).

Throughout most of church history, this prophecy was interpreted as having been fulfilled by the Roman siege of Jerusalem and the destruction of the temple in 70 A.D. With the rise of dispensationalism, however, the fulfillment of this passage was moved into the future.

Dispensationalism’s critics had long asked: "Where is the nation of Israel? Where are the Jews?" Not in Palestine, surely. So, dispensationalists tended to apply this prophecy of near-destruction to Jews in general – only symbolically residing in Israel – until 1948. This was one reason for their silence on Hitler’s persecution. Hitler was just another rung in the ladder of persecution leading to the inevitable Great Tribulation.

The prophesied agency of the great persecution has shifted over the years. As Wilson shows in Armageddon Now!, from 1917 until 1977, Russia was a prime candidate. But, after 1991, this has become difficult to defend, for obvious reasons. The collapse of the Soviet Union has created a major problem for dispensationalism’s theologians and its popular authors. But there have been no comparable doubts about the intensity of the coming persecution. Here is the opinion of John F. Walvoord, one of dispensationalism’s leading theologians, who served for three decades as the president of Dallas Theological Seminary (founded, 1924), the movement’s main seminary.

Nothing can or will be done by Christians to save Israel’s Jews from this disaster, for all of the Christians will have been removed from this world three and a half years prior to the beginning of this 42-month period of tribulation. (The total period of seven years is interpreted as the fulfillment of the seventieth week of Daniel [Dan. 9:27].)

In order for most of today’s Christians to escape physical death, two-thirds of the Jews in Israel must perish, soon. This is the grim prophetic trade-off that fundamentalists rarely discuss publicly, but which is the central motivation in the movement’s support for Israel. It should be clear why they believe that Israel must be defended at all costs by the West. If Israel were militarily removed from history prior to the Rapture, then the strongest case for Christians’ imminent escape from death would have to be abandoned. This would mean the indefinite delay of the Rapture. The fundamentalist movement thrives on the doctrine of the imminent Rapture, not the indefinitely postponed Rapture.

Every time you hear the phrase, "Jesus is coming back soon," you should mentally add, "and two-thirds of the Jews of Israel will be dead in ‘soon plus 84 months.’" Fundamentalists really do believe that they probably will not die physically, but to secure this faith prophetically, they must defend the doctrine of an inevitable holocaust.

This specific motivation for the support of Israel is never preached from any fundamentalist pulpit. The faithful hear sermons – many, many sermons – on the pretribulation Rapture. On other occasions, they hear sermons on the Great Tribulation. But they do not hear the two themes put together: "We can avoid death, but only because two-thirds of the Jews of Israel will inevitably die in a future holocaust. America must therefore support the nation of Israel in order to keep the Israelis alive until after the Rapture." Fundamentalist ministers expect their congregations to put two and two together on their own. It would be politically incorrect to add up these figures in public.

The fundamentalists I have known generally say they appreciate Jews. They think Israel is far superior to Arab nations. They believe in a pro-Israel foreign policy as supportive of democracy and America’s interests. They do not dwell upon the prophetic fate of Israel’s Jews except insofar as they want to transfer the threat of the Great Tribulation away from themselves and their families. Nevertheless, this is the bottom line: the prophetic scapegoating of Israel. This scapegoat, not Christians, must be sent into the post-Rapture wilderness.

Evangelism in Israel

Their eschatology has produced a kind of Catch-22 for fundamentalists. What if, as a result of evangelism, the Jews of Israel were converted en masse to Christianity? They would then be Raptured, along with their Gentile brethren, leaving only Arabs behind. This scenario would make the immediate fulfillment of prophecy impossible: no post-Rapture Israelis to persecute. So, fundamentalists have concluded that the vast majority of the Jews of Israel cannot, will not, and must not be converted to Christianity.

This raises an obvious question: Why spend money on evangelizing Israelis? It would be a waste of resources. This is why there are so few active fundamentalist ministries in Israel that target Jews. They target Arabs instead. Eschatologically speaking, the body of an Israeli must be preserved, for he may live long enough to go through the Great Tribulation. But his soul is expendable. This is why fundamentalists vocally support the nation of Israel, but then do very little to preach to Israelis the traditional Protestant doctrine of salvation by faith in Jesus Christ. Fundamentalists have a prophetic agenda for Israelis that does not involve at least two-thirds of the Israelis’ souls. Israelis are members of the only group on earth that has an unofficial yet operational King’s X against evangelism by fundamentalists, specifically so that God may preserve Israelis for the sake of the destruction of modern Israel in the Great Tribulation. The presence of Israel validates the hope of fundamentalists that Christians, and Christians alone, will get out of life alive.

July 19, 2000

Gary North is the author of Conspiracy: A Biblical View, which discusses the 20th century's Anglo-American alliance. Download a free copy at www.freebooks.com.

Reproduced From: LewRockwell.com

R

For an excellent and extensive selection of articles critical of Hal Lindsey and Christian Zionism in general please go to: http://www.virginiawater.co.uk/christchurch/articles/ 

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