THE TENTH COW

Israeli Lawmaker: 'Netanyahu Decided To Spit Into Obama's Eye'

2010-03-24T16:25:00.000-05:00

Israeli Lawmaker: 'Netanyahu Decided To Spit Into Obama's Eye': "The Jerusalem municipality has approved 20 new apartments for Jews in an Arab neighborhood of east Jerusalem, the city said Wednesday, in a move that could stir a new diplomatic crisis with the United States just as Israel's leader is in Washington on a fence-mending visit."

A stark truth - Israel - Salon.com

2010-03-23T12:04:00.000-05:00

A stark truth - Israel - Salon.com: "Why should those same American taxpayers bear the enormous costs of Israel's military purchases�(as Israel enjoys booming economic growth)?� Especially if the issue is presented as cleanly and honestly as Scherer did here, and especially if Israel continues to extend its proverbial middle finger to even the most basic�U.S. requests that it cease activities that harm American interests, how much longer can this absurdity be sustained?�"

Robert Reich: How a Few Private Health Insurers Are on the Way to Controlling Health Care

2009-12-11T15:58:00.000-05:00

Robert Reich: How a Few Private Health Insurers Are on the Way to Controlling Health Care:

"From the start, opponents of the public option have wanted to portray it as big government preying upon the market, and private insurers as the embodiment of the market. But it's just the reverse. Private insurers are exempt from competition. As a result, they are becoming ever more powerful. And it's not just their economic power that's worrying. It's also their political power, as we've learned over the last ten months. Economic and political power is a potent combination. Without some mechanism forcing private insurers to compete, we're going to end up with a national health care system that's controlled by a handful of very large corporations accountable neither to American voters nor to the market."

Anti-Muslim Challenger Vies For Minnesota Congressional Seat

2009-12-11T14:59:00.000-05:00

Anti-Muslim Challenger Vies For Minnesota Congressional Seat:

"Torgerson, a Christian, also believes that, due to certain passages of the Quran, Islam 'is not entitled to full protection as a religion.'"

Pharma Deal Shuts Down Senate Health Care Debate

2009-12-11T14:57:00.000-05:00

Pharma Deal Shuts Down Senate Health Care Debate:

"The White House, aided by Sen. Tom Carper (D-Del.), is working hard to crush an amendment being pushed by Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-N.D.) to allow for the reimportation of pharmaceutical drugs from Canada, Senate sources tell the Huffington Post."

Omar Baddar: The Race Against Israeli Expansionism: Can the Two-State Solution be Saved?

2009-12-11T11:44:00.001-05:00

Omar Baddar: The Race Against Israeli Expansionism: Can the Two-State Solution be Saved?:

"Initially inspired by the promises of the new American administration to seriously pursue Israeli-Palestinian peace, and eager to regain credibility by achieving statehood for its people, the PA implemented a harsh crackdown on any violent resistance to Israel's occupation, attempting to leave Israel no excuse to circumvent its obligations. Now that the Obama Administration, overwhelmed with domestic matters, is capitulating in the face of Israeli defiance of its obligations with continued settlement expansion, the PA has effectively become nothing more than a security subcontractor for the Israeli occupation. The PA is on the verge of political collapse because its entire national strategy based on a negotiated peace is failing."

BBC NEWS | Middle East | Israeli settlement plan denounced

2009-11-18T09:45:00.000-05:00

BBC NEWS | Middle East | Israeli settlement plan denounced

Home / Headlines / No Partner for Peace: Our American Problem - Media Monitors Network (MMN)

2009-11-05T10:30:00.000-05:00

Home / Headlines / No Partner for Peace: Our American Problem - Media Monitors Network (MMN)

Jewish Settlers Force Way Into East Jerusalem Home, Evict Arab Family (PHOTOS)

2009-11-03T21:43:00.000-05:00

Jewish Settlers Force Way Into East Jerusalem Home, Evict Arab Family (PHOTOS)

MJ Rosenberg: Dems in House to Pass Resolution Defending Gaza War

2009-11-02T08:53:00.000-05:00

MJ Rosenberg: Dems in House to Pass Resolution Defending Gaza War

David Sirota: The Moment's "Why" Questions

2009-10-28T18:43:00.000-05:00

David Sirota: The Moment's "Why" Questions

Business & Technology | Costco plans to accept food stamps nationally | Seattle Times Newspaper

2009-10-28T18:36:00.000-05:00

Business & Technology | Costco plans to accept food stamps nationally | Seattle Times Newspaper

2009-10-28T16:44:00.001-05:00

General Jim Jones, President Obama's National Security Advisor, addresses J Street's first national conference from Isaac Luria on Vimeo.

Israeli Police Raid Temple Mount

2009-10-25T19:45:00.000-05:00

Israeli Police Raid Temple Mount

Confessions of an AIPAC Veteran

2009-10-16T11:54:00.000-05:00

Confessions of an AIPAC Veteran

American Jews Rethink Israel

2009-10-16T11:53:00.000-05:00

American Jews Rethink Israel

UN Endorses Goldstone Gaza Report Accusing Israel Of War Crimes

2009-10-16T09:24:00.000-05:00

UN Endorses Goldstone Gaza Report Accusing Israel Of War Crimes

Avigdor Lieberman: No Chance For Israeli-Palestinian Peace Deal

2009-10-08T10:39:00.000-05:00

Avigdor Lieberman: No Chance For Israeli-Palestinian Peace Deal

Is the U.S. Preparing to bomb Iran? - ABC News

2009-10-07T12:41:00.000-05:00

Is the U.S. Preparing to bomb Iran? - ABC News

Jamal Dajani: Israel vs. Iran: The Writing Is on the Wall

2009-10-02T15:40:00.000-05:00

Jamal Dajani: Israel vs. Iran: The Writing Is on the Wall

Majority Of American Jews Think U.S. Should Strike Iran: Poll

2009-10-01T21:15:00.000-05:00

Majority Of American Jews Think U.S. Should Strike Iran: Poll

Israel Threatens Palestinian Phone Service Over War Crimes Claims

2009-10-01T21:13:00.000-05:00

Israel Threatens Palestinian Phone Service Over War Crimes Claims

Al Jazeera English - Europe - UN investigator defends Gaza report

2009-09-29T18:34:00.000-05:00

Al Jazeera English - Europe - UN investigator defends Gaza report

In Mideast Peace Bid, Obama Pivots in His Demands - NYTimes.com

2009-09-23T08:20:00.000-05:00

In Mideast Peace Bid, Obama Pivots in His Demands - NYTimes.com

Intelligence Agencies Say No New Nukes in Iran | Newsweek International | Newsweek.com

2009-09-17T13:38:00.000-05:00

Intelligence Agencies Say No New Nukes in Iran | Newsweek International | Newsweek.com

MJ Rosenberg: Israeli Government: Iran Not A Threat

2009-09-17T13:37:00.000-05:00

MJ Rosenberg: Israeli Government: Iran Not A Threat

MARWAN AT MIAMI BOOK FAIR

2009-09-15T11:50:00.001-05:00

My novel Marwan will be at the Miami Book Fair November 8-15. Check it out at the AuthorHouse pavilion.

B'Tselem: Civilians Majority Of Gaza War Dead

2009-09-09T08:51:00.000-05:00

B'Tselem: Civilians Majority Of Gaza War Dead

Israel Pushes Ahead East Jerusalem Building Plans

2009-09-09T08:50:00.000-05:00

Israel Pushes Ahead East Jerusalem Building Plans

WHERE'D HE GET IT?

2009-09-08T06:14:00.005-05:00

I just finished reading Michael Chabon's "The Yiddish Policemen's Union." At first I found it a delightful conceit - that Israel had lost the 1948 war and that the Jews had been given a temporary refuge in Alaska. But then I read on. Chabon needed a denouement, and it's quite possible I have figured out where he got it.

The denouement begins on page 290, on which Chabon describes an armed camp surrounded by electrified fence, inside of which is a herd of cows. (See page 14, etc., of "The Tenth Cow", and page 130 etc.) On page 295 one of Chabon's cows is identified as the red heifer (TC page 20). On the same page the significance of the red heifer is explained (TC page 95). Contained within this explanation is the note that temple artifacts would have to be reconstructed for the Messiah to come (TC page 105). On page 312 a scheme begins to be outlined. On page 315 it is explained that for the scheme to be successful, the Dome of the Rock must be destroyed (TC page 118). A character, talking about the Dome, says "It isn't a mosque, Meyerle. It's a shrine." The line in TC at page 26 is "People will tell you it's a mosque, but it isn't; it's a shrine."

On page 322 Chabon begins to imply that there is a US government plot, using the red heifer, to destroy the Dome, rebuild the Temple and usher in the time of Messiah. That is central to TC, and it does not appear in any other source before TC. It suggests that the FAA has destroyed a file relating to this cow - as opposed to the Israeli agencies discussed by Teddy in TC. On 323, Chabon states that a group of messianic Jews have banded together to attack the Dome - another central element of TC. On page 324 Chabon invents the Moriah Institute as deeply involved in the plot. In TC it was the Bar Kochba Institute. Chabon states that American Jews are financing this plot - another central tenet of TC.

On page 330 Chabon describes recreated Temple implements displayed on pedestals (TC at page 103). On 331 he describes a scale model of the Temple (TC at 102 and 93). On page 336 Chabon states that the red heifer was born in Oregon and then flown into the Alaskan Jewish community (TC at 59, where the heifer is flown from Florida to Israel - and remember Alaska for Chabon is a stand-in for Israel). On page 339 Chabon states that the plot fulfills the divinely inspired mission of the president of America - again, a major point in TC. On page 342, Chabon posits that Christian fundamentalists are behind the plot (TC at page 190). On page 344 he explains that some Orthodox Jews are opposed to the plot on theological grounds (TC at page 101). On page 345 he explains that the red heifer was produced by in vitro fertilization - going not quite as far as TC did in implying that the heifer was not the result of a normal reproduction process. And, finally, Chabon implicates a former Jewish terrorist in the plot to blow up the Dome (see Shaya's father in TC) - although in Chabon's book the Dome is blown up, while in TC the plot is frustrated.

I should note that throughout Chabon's book there are offhand references to a talking chicken announcing the coming of the Messiah. In TC it was a talking carp - referencing a true story I drew from the New York Times.

And so on.

Now, it is possible that Chabon came up with this stuff through reading the same source material I did, and through the same reasoning process - although the similarities to TC are striking, particularly in how the material is fit together.

But at the end of his book Chabon lists a number of sources. Not one of them would be a source for information on the red heifer or any of the points I noted above that he made. He does say that he initially wrote a six-hundred page draft with the same characters, but a completely different story. Where did the new story come from?

Chabon's book was first published in 2007. The print version of TC came out in 2008. But the podcast version of TC - which was a reading of the book - was published in 2005 and 2006. And, if I remember right, the Tenth Cow website was put up in 2006.

So - just sayin'

TENTH COW IS IPHONE APP

2009-09-07T15:51:00.000-05:00

My novel "The Tenth Cow" is now an iPhone app. Get it in the iTunes app store. This is an updated version to take into account political changes since the first publication.

A NEW REVIEW AT ITUNES

2009-08-22T10:15:00.000-05:00

The Tenth Cow - A free audiobook by Aram Schefrin Aram Schefrin Category: Literature Free Rating: Entertaining, Educational, and Complex. There are many concepts, historical, and biblical references here that I'm not familiar with. Yet, I understood enough to follow the story and I enjoyed it immensely. Schefrin's writing and performance pull you right into each scene as if you're sitting there among the characters. Completely unique and enjoyable.

IPHONE APP

2009-08-22T09:08:00.002-05:00

The ebook of The Tenth Cow has been submitted to Apple as an iPhone app, and should be appearing on iTunes within two to four weeks. We'll let you know when it's available.

U.S. blasts Israeli restrictions on American travelers in West Bank - Haaretz - Israel News

2009-08-19T19:00:00.000-05:00

U.S. blasts Israeli restrictions on American travelers in West Bank - Haaretz - Israel News

Swedish Article Suggesting Israeli Troops Kill Palestinians, Harvest Organs Infuriates Israel

2009-08-19T08:51:00.000-05:00

Swedish Article Suggesting Israeli Troops Kill Palestinians, Harvest Organs Infuriates Israel

Good God, this article is outrageous. But is it out of line with the current climate in the US and Israel?

Israeli Settlements Quietly Halted: No New Housing Permits Granted

2009-08-19T08:46:00.000-05:00

Israeli Settlements Quietly Halted: No New Housing Permits Granted

Israeli Leader's Defiance of U.S. on Settlement Issue Wins Support at Home - washingtonpost.com

2009-08-19T08:45:00.000-05:00

Israeli Leader's Defiance of U.S. on Settlement Issue Wins Support at Home - washingtonpost.com

Huckabee In Israel: A Palestinian State Within Holy Land "Unrealistic"

2009-08-18T10:18:00.000-05:00

Huckabee In Israel: A Palestinian State Within Holy Land "Unrealistic"

Obama's America is not delivering the goods - Haaretz - Israel News

2009-08-17T11:10:00.000-05:00

Obama's America is not delivering the goods - Haaretz - Israel News

Israelis sour on Rahm Emanuel - Kenneth P. Vogel - POLITICO.com

2009-08-17T11:08:00.000-05:00

Israelis sour on Rahm Emanuel - Kenneth P. Vogel - POLITICO.com

Cantor Called Upon To Repudiate Rush By Jewish Dem Group

2009-08-07T15:46:00.000-05:00

Cantor Called Upon To Repudiate Rush By Jewish Dem Group

GOP Delegation In Israel Contradicts U.S. Policy

2009-08-06T14:38:00.000-05:00

GOP Delegation In Israel Contradicts U.S. Policy

Um - when Obama went to Europe during his campaign and talked to European leaders, didn't Republicans say that was unAmerican and undercutting official policy?

East Jerusalem Evictions Cause Outrage From US, UN

2009-08-03T10:43:00.000-05:00

East Jerusalem Evictions Cause Outrage From US, UN

Arabs Losing Hope in Obama's Ability to Broker Mideast Peace - ABC News

2009-08-02T19:34:00.000-05:00

Arabs Losing Hope in Obama's Ability to Broker Mideast Peace - ABC News

50 Palestinians Evicted From Their Jerusalem Homes

2009-08-02T19:33:00.000-05:00

50 Palestinians Evicted From Their Jerusalem Homes

Hamas Chief Outlines Terms for Talks on Arab-Israeli Peace - WSJ.com

2009-08-01T14:08:00.000-05:00

Hamas Chief Outlines Terms for Talks on Arab-Israeli Peace - WSJ.com

Yesh Din - Volunteers for Human Rights יש דין - ארגון מתנדבים לזכויות אדם

2009-07-27T08:57:00.000-05:00

Yesh Din - Volunteers for Human Rights יש דין - ארגון מתנדבים לזכויות אדם

Unsettled - In 2 West Bank Settlements, Sign of Hope for a Deal - Series - NYTimes.com

2009-07-27T08:56:00.000-05:00

Unsettled - In 2 West Bank Settlements, Sign of Hope for a Deal - Series - NYTimes.com

Western Wall Twitter Service Lets Jews Tweet A Prayer To God

2009-07-23T09:24:00.000-05:00

Western Wall Twitter Service Lets Jews Tweet A Prayer To God

East Jerusalem Settlements: Mike Huckabee Joins The Fray, Will Broadcast From Disputed Site

2009-07-21T16:00:00.000-05:00

East Jerusalem Settlements: Mike Huckabee Joins The Fray, Will Broadcast From Disputed Site

Anybody know why Huckabee is in on this?

Well, sure. He's the ambassador from Hageeland.

Israeli Settlers Set Fire To Palestinian Fields, Stone Cars During Rampage

2009-07-20T10:46:00.000-05:00

Israeli Settlers Set Fire To Palestinian Fields, Stone Cars During Rampage

Ultra-Orthodox Protest In Israel Over Arrest Of Woman Suspected Of Starving Son

2009-07-16T12:03:00.000-05:00

Ultra-Orthodox Protest In Israel Over Arrest Of Woman Suspected Of Starving Son

EXCLUSIVE: Israel declines to ask U.S. to OK Iran attack - Washington Times

2009-07-09T23:48:00.000-05:00

EXCLUSIVE: Israel declines to ask U.S. to OK Iran attack - Washington Times

Netanyahu's paranoia extends to 'self-hating Jews' Emanuel and Axelrod - Haaretz - Israel News

2009-07-09T13:13:00.000-05:00

Netanyahu's paranoia extends to 'self-hating Jews' Emanuel and Axelrod - Haaretz - Israel News

MJ Rosenberg: Obama To Congressional Dems: "I'm Taking On Netanyahu and I Need You"

2009-04-09T08:38:00.000-05:00

MJ Rosenberg: Obama To Congressional Dems: "I'm Taking On Netanyahu and I Need You"

Netanyahu, Lieberman 'struck secret deal for West Bank construction' - Haaretz - Israel News

2009-04-01T11:07:00.000-05:00

Netanyahu, Lieberman 'struck secret deal for West Bank construction' - Haaretz - Israel News

The Raw Story | Oliphant Israel-Gaza cartoon called 'hideously anti-Semitic'

2009-03-26T13:48:00.000-05:00

The Raw Story | Oliphant Israel-Gaza cartoon called 'hideously anti-Semitic'

Israeli soldiers say army rabbis framed Gaza as religious war | McClatchy

2009-03-21T10:44:00.000-05:00

Israeli soldiers say army rabbis framed Gaza as religious war | McClatchy

THE LATEST RED HEIFER

2009-03-18T17:16:00.001-05:00

See it here.

THE GOLDEN RULE

2009-03-14T16:06:00.001-05:00

Karen Armstrong talks about the Golden Rule -which is what The Tenth Cow is about - as the proper focus of all religions on Bill Moyers' Journal, available at iTunes as a podcast.

FRONTLINE'S "ISRAEL'S NEXT WAR" SAYS IT ALL

2009-02-15T17:59:00.005-05:00

Click here to see the Frontline series "Israel's Next War", which proves out the thesis behind The Tenth Cow - with none of the humanism that's the focus of the book. I'm grateful that Frontline had the courage to put together this series - because so far The Tenth Cow is not believed, and that's a serious error.

Tags:Frontline,tenth cow, red heifer, mishnah, book of numbers, chapter 19, evangelical, end of days, messiah, second coming, jesus, antichrist, kabbala, kabbalah, polo, aram, schefrin, novel, fiction, israel, jerusalem, bush, aipac, mount moriah, dome of the rock, tsfat, safed, second temple, golan heights, shekhina, jezreel valley, har megiddo, christian friends of israel, christian zionism, numbers 19:2, ANTICHRIST, revelation, rapture, tribulation, foundation stone, ein sof, sitra achra, neturei karta,iran, rod dreher, gershom gorenberg

FROM THE NEW YORK TIMES

2008-12-07T11:59:00.001-05:00

December 7, 2008
New Tensions in Jerusalem’s Arab Neighborhoods

By ISABEL KERSHNER
JERUSALEM — A series of recent Israeli actions in the mainly Arab neighborhoods of East Jerusalem have raised tensions there, with Palestinian and Israeli critics contending that they are part of a wider plan to “Judaize” historically charged areas around the Old City.

The actions, ostensibly unconnected, include the demolition of two Arab homes in Silwan, a neighborhood adjacent to the Old City above the ruins of an ancient Jewish site; the start of a controversial infrastructure project there; and the eviction of a Palestinian family from its home in Sheik Jarrah, another neighborhood coveted by Jewish nationalists near the Old City.

None of these actions in themselves are that unusual here. But the spate of high-profile, highly symbolic moves in the past few weeks has reignited concerns that an increasing Jewish presence in Arab areas will further complicate the chances of reaching an Israeli-Palestinian political agreement based on a two-state solution, which calls for a division of powers in a shared capital.

And they come as a new Jerusalem mayor who has vocally supported expansion of Jewish settlements in East Jerusalem takes office.

“East Jerusalem must be the capital of the Palestinian state,” said Hatem Abdel Qader, an adviser on Jerusalem affairs to the Palestinian Authority prime minister, Salam Fayyad. “Israel is trying to create facts on the ground and determine the results before we reach any solution.”

Some believe that the Israeli authorities and Jewish nationalists, who are increasingly gaining footholds in the Arab neighborhoods, are intentionally exploiting the period of political transition in the United States, as well as the political vacuum in Israel before the February elections.

“Several elements combine to make the situation in Jerusalem much more dangerous,” said Hagit Ofran of Peace Now, a left-wing Israeli group that opposes Jewish settlements in areas that are expected to be part a Palestinian state. The conditions are ideal, she said, “for settlers to seek to force their agenda without fear of challenge or repercussions.”

A spokesman for Jerusalem City Hall, Gidi Schmerling, rejected the accusations, saying that municipal enforcement is carried out equally and according to the law in the eastern part of the city and the predominantly Jewish western part. He added that the demolition of the houses, which were built on public land, was carried out after the residents lost their appeals in the district and supreme courts.

The home demolitions in this part of Silwan, where a volatile mix of about 7,000 Palestinians and a few hundred Jewish ultranationalists live in cramped quarters on steep hillsides above the ruins of the ancient City of David, set off a riot. They were the first of 88 homes to be razed in a compound built without proper permits where Israeli planners want to expand a national archaeological park.

The infrastructure improvements, in ordinary circumstances, would be welcome news in a poor and neglected neighborhood like Silwan. But in the charged atmosphere of East Jerusalem, which Israel seized from the Jordanians in the 1967 war and later annexed, some perceive even municipal road works and new traffic arrangements as part of a larger plan.

In late November, Jerusalem city authorities and East Jerusalem Development, an Israeli government company, began a project to lay new water and sewage pipes and to repave one of Silwan’s main roads. The road, known to Arabs as Wadi Hilweh and renamed by Israeli authorities as City of David Steps, runs roughly from the main entrance of the City of David site down toward the compound known as the Bustan, where the demolitions took place.

Many local residents oppose the traffic changes, which have already been instituted, as well as plans to turn empty spaces along the road into parking lots, saying they will benefit the tourists to the detriment of the local residents.

“We lack schools, playgrounds, everything,” said Jawwad Siyam, an activist in Silwan. “The Israeli government and Jerusalem city are now like tools in the settlers’ hands.”

With the help of the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, a human rights group, Mr. Siyam and several other residents have gone to court to try to halt the work. They told the court that they feared that the road works would turn up archaeological finds, requiring a salvage dig “that could paralyze life in the area for years.”

Eli Shmuelyan, the deputy director of East Jerusalem Development, dismissed the complaints. “We’re creating parking lots for the residents as well,” he said, “so the streets will be clear and the buses can move.”

Perhaps the opponents of the project “enjoy traffic jams,” he said.

But what the opponents see is a pattern, a direct line extending from the City of David and the Bustan — where the demolition orders were issued in 2005 but were delayed, largely because of international pressure — to the eviction of the Palestinian family in Sheik Jarrah.

The family, the Kurds, who had lived in its home there for more than 50 years, was evicted in early November. A Jewish association claims ownership of the land and has plans to build a large Jewish housing complex there.

For years, the Kurds had refused to pay rent as protected tenants in their own home, as they had been ordered to do, pending the outcome of a protracted legal battle against the Jewish claimants. Religious Jewish nationalists had already moved into an extension of the Kurds’ small, single-story stone house.

Just days after the Kurds’ eviction, the family patriarch, Muhammad al-Kurd, 61, who suffered from diabetes and heart problems, died. His family moved into protest tents on an empty lot near the house where they received mourners, but the tents, too, have been dismantled by the Israeli authorities several times.

The Kurds’ home is adjacent to a site held by Jews to be the ancient tomb of Shimon Hatzadik, or Simeon the Just, a Jewish high priest from the days of the Second Temple. A Jewish organization has reclaimed the land based on property deeds whose authenticity is disputed, and which date back to the 1870s, long before the Jewish state was established in 1948.

Another 27 Palestinian families are threatened with eviction on the same grounds.

“People in the neighborhood are very upset and fear they will be next,” said a resident, Mahmoud Abu Turk, who was visiting the mourning tent.

The Palestinian Authority, based in the West Bank, is responding by trying to assert its presence.

Mr. Abdel Qader and Rafiq Husseini, the director of the president’s office, took a group of foreign consular officials on a tour of Silwan, Sheik Jarrah and other problematic areas of East Jerusalem last week.

The tour was “symbolic,” Mr. Abdel Qader said, a “message to Israel” that the Palestinian leadership can also operate in Jerusalem.

Others note that the Jewish reclamation of pre-state property in East Jerusalem could open a political Pandora’s box of counterclaims. In a symbolic protest on Thursday, Muhammad al-Kurd’s widow, Fawziyah, 56, accompanied by Palestinian and Israeli activists and two Arab Israeli members of Parliament, briefly set up a tent in the affluent West Jerusalem neighborhood of Talbieh.

She said that her parents abandoned a home there when they became refugees in 1948.

TRUTH

2008-10-08T21:47:00.001-05:00

Just in case you're interested in the truth:

Former officials say Iran helped on al-Qaida
By BARRY SCHWEID –
WASHINGTON (AP) — In an effort to help the United States counter al-Qaida after the 9/11 attack, Iran rounded up hundreds of Arabs who had crossed the border from Afghanistan, expelled many of them and made copies of nearly 300 of their passports, a former Bush administration official said Tuesday.

The copies were sent to Kofi Annan, the U.N. secretary-general, who passed them on to the United States, while U.S. interrogators were given a chance by Iran to question some of the detainees, Hillary Mann Leverett said in an Associated Press interview.

Leverett, who said she negotiated with Iran for the Bush administration in the 2001-3 period, said Iran sought a broader relationship with the United States. "They thought they had been helpful on al-Qaida, and they were," she said.

For one thing, she said, suspected al-Qaida operatives were not given sanctuary in Iran.

Some administration officials took the view, however, that Iran had not acknowledged all likely al-Qaida members nor provided access to them, Leverett said.

Many of the expelled Arabs were deported to Saudi Arabia and to other Arab and Muslim countries, even though Iran had poor relations with the Saudi monarchy and some other countries in the region, Leverett said.

James F. Dobbins, the Bush administration's chief negotiator on Afghanistan in late 2001, said that Iran was "comprehensively helpful" in the aftermath of the 9/11 attack in working to overthrow the Taliban and collaborating with the United States in installing the Karzai government in Kabul.

Iranian diplomats made clear at the time they were looking for broader cooperation with the United States, but the Bush administration was not interested, the author of "After the Taliban: Nation-Building in Afghanistan," said in a separate interview.

The Bush administration has acknowledged contacts with Iran over the years even while denouncing Iran as part of an "axis of evil" and declining to consider a resumption of diplomatic relations.

"It isn't something that is talked about," Leverett said in describing Iran's role during a forum at the New America Foundation, a nonpartisan policy institute.

Leverett and her husband, Flynt Leverett, a former career CIA analyst and a former National Security Council official, jointly proposed the next U.S. president seek a "grand bargain" with Iran to settle all major outstanding differences.

"The next president needs to reorient U.S. policy toward Iran as fundamentally as President Nixon did with China in the 1970s," Flynt Leverett said.

Among the provisions: The United States would clarify that it is not seeking change in the nature of the Iranian regime but rather in its policies, while Iran would agree to "certain limits" on its nuclear program.

Iran considers most of its neighbors as enemies. Among its incentives for improving U.S. relations is that they feel that Pakistan and Saudi Arabia would be less provocative, the Leveretts said.

JEWISH MODESTY PATROLS SOW FEAR IN ISRAEL

2008-10-04T23:53:00.001-05:00

AMY TEIBEL | October 4, 2008 09:45 AM EST |

JERUSALEM — In Israel's ultra-Orthodox Jewish community, where the rule of law sometimes takes a back seat to the rule of God, zealots are on a campaign to stamp out behavior they consider unchaste. They hurl stones at women for such "sins" as wearing a red blouse, and attack stores selling devices that can access the Internet.

In recent weeks, self-styled "modesty patrols" have been accused of breaking into the apartment of a Jerusalem woman and beating her for allegedly consorting with men. They have torched a store that sells MP4 players, fearing devout Jews would use them to download pornography.

"These breaches of purity and modesty endanger our community," said 38-year-old Elchanan Blau, defending the bearded, black-robed zealots. "If it takes fire to get them to stop, then so be it."

Many ultra-Orthodox Jews are dismayed by the violence, but the enforcers often enjoy quiet approval from rabbis eager to protect their own reputations as guardians of the faith, community members say. And while some welcome anything that keeps secular culture out of their cloistered world, others feel terrorized, knowing that the mere perception of impropriety could ruin their lives.

"There are eyes and ears all over the place, very similar to what you hear about in countries like Iran," says Israeli-American novelist Naomi Ragen, an observant Jew who has chronicled the troubles that confront some women living in the ultra-Orthodox world.

The violence has already deepened the antagonism between the 600,000 haredim, or God-fearing, and the secular majority, which resents having religious rules dictated to them.

Religious vigilantes operate in a society that has granted their community influence well beyond its numbers _ partly out of a commitment to revive the great centers of Jewish scholarship destroyed in the Holocaust, but also because the Orthodox are perennial king-makers in Israeli coalition politics.

Thus public transport is grounded for the Jewish Sabbath each Saturday, and the rabbis control all Jewish marriage and divorce in Israel.

In recent years, however, the haredim have eased up on their long campaign to impose their rules on secular areas, and nowadays many restaurants and suburban shopping centers are open on the Sabbath.

These days, most vigilante attacks take place in the zealots' own neighborhoods.

Israel police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said the modesty police are not an organized phenomenon, just rogue enforcers carrying out isolated attacks. But Israel's Justice Ministry used the term "modesty patrols" in an indictment against a man accused of assaulting the Jerusalem woman.

The unidentified, 31-year-old woman had left the ultra-Orthodox fold after getting divorced, according to the indictment filed by the Jerusalem district attorney's office. The indictment said her assailant tried to get her to leave her apartment in a haredi neighborhood in Jerusalem by gagging, beating and threatening to kill her. He was paid $2,000 for the attack, it said.

A 17-year-old who moved to Israel from New York five years ago said she was hospitalized after being attacked with pepper spray by a crowd of men outraged that she was walking down a Jerusalem street with boys.

"They can burn in hell," said the girl, who would identify herself only as Rivka.

She lives in Beit Shemesh, a town outside Jerusalem where the vigilantism has been particularly violent. Zealots there have thrown rocks and spat at women, and set fire to trash bins to protest impiety. Walls of the neighborhood are plastered with signs exhorting women to dress modestly _ spelled out as closed-necked, long-sleeved blouses and long skirts.

The state, catering to religious sensitivities, subsidizes gender-segregated bus routes that service religious neighborhoods. Ragen and several other women challenged the practice in Israel's Supreme Court after an Orthodox Canadian woman in her 50s told police she was kicked, slapped, pushed to the floor and spat upon by men for refusing to move to the back of the bus.

Another Beit Shemesh girl, who asked to be identified only as Esther, said zealots threw rocks, cursed and spat at a friend for wearing a red blouse _ taboo because the color attracts attention.

Yitzhak Polack, a 50-year-old Jerusalem teacher, is one of those who deplore such behavior.

"They are stupid troublemakers who are bringing shame and disgrace on this holy community," he said.

But the rabbis are afraid to condemn them, says Yehuda Meshi-Zahav, another community member.

"They can't come out against zealots who champion modesty. Here and there they write against violence, but the militants ultimately set the tone," he said.

Stores are targeted too.

In August, a Jerusalem man was placed under house arrest on suspicion he set fire to a store in a haredi district of the city that sold MP4 players.

"It started about six months ago. They would come into the store, about 15 of them at a time, screaming, 'This store burns souls!' and they would throw merchandise on the floor and threaten customers," said 31-year-old Aaron Gold, a haredi worker at the Space electronic store.

One Friday night, just before the Sabbath was about to begin, "they smashed a window, doused the place with gasoline and lit a match," Gold said.

Now, a big sign behind the counter says, "All products sold in this store are under rabbinical supervision. By order of the rabbis, no MP4s are sold here."

Clothing stores that sell clothes regarded as provocative have been vandalized, and bleach thrown at merchandise.

Suspicion is all that's needed to spark an attack.

Girls have been expelled from school after being seen talking to boys, a punishment that ruins their marriage prospects.

"It could be very innocent; she could be talking to her brother," Ragen said. But once thrown out of school, "no one _ NO ONE _ will take you in," she added.

In one case, the violence reached the highest levels of haredi society.

Three years ago, a son of Israel's Sephardi chief rabbi, Shlomo Amar, was accused of kidnapping a 17-year-old boy, beating him at knifepoint and terrorizing him with snarling dogs because he had sought the attentions of the accused's unchaperoned sister.

The son was sentenced to two years and eight months in jail.

His sister married a different suitor the following year.

___

Associated Press Writer Ian Deitch contributed to this report.

JEWSVOTE.ORG

2008-08-29T09:59:00.000-05:00

Welcome to JewsVote.org! We have just returned from the Democratic National Convention. There we met with dozens of Jews who share your enthusiasm for Sen. Barack Obama and your anger at the smear campaign targeting our community. Unfortunately, things are about to get real ugly. The effort to discredit Sen. Obama will be in overdrive during the Republican convention. JewsVote was created to provide you with the tools you need to fight back against the misinformation circulating in our community.

DON'T LET THE LIES GO UNANSWERED!
LOG INTO JewsVote.org TODAY.

ON JOE KLEIN AND THE JEWISH NEOCONSERVATIVES

2008-07-31T19:13:00.003-05:00

By Daniel Levy on the Huffington Post:

You may have missed it, but renowned Time columnist Joe Klein and the Jewish neoconservative blogosphere are at war with one another. The reason this is more important than an argument on who sits where in shul is that Klein has refused to cower, and as a respected member of the mainstream media is pushing back against one of the uglier and more debate-restricting phenomena of recent years. Here is what Joe had to say on 'Swampland', his blog on the Time website:

There is a small group of Jewish neoconservatives who unsuccessfully tried to get Benjamin Netanyahu to attack Saddam Hussein in the 1990s, and then successfully helped provide the intellectual rationale for George Bush to do it in 2003... Happily, these people represent a very small sliver of the Jewish population in this country...I remain proud of my Jewish heritage, a strong supporter of Israel...But I am not willing to grant these ideologues the anonymity they seek...I believe there are a small group of Jewish neoconservatives who are pushing for war with Iran because they believe it is in America's long-term interests and because they believe Israel's existence is at stake. They are wrong and recent history tells us they are dangerous. They are also bullies and I'm not going to be intimidated by them.

It came in response to the latest outburst from Podhoretz Jr. at the Commentary blog: "As for his [Klein] use of classic anti-Semitic canards, I am happy to report that the Jewish people will long survive Joe Klein". Mazal Tov, Joe, you have became a thing that the Jewish people will survive, no less.

All of this came on the heels of an earlier and none-too-friendly exchange of letters between Klein and the Anti-Defamation League, when the latter saw fit to attack Klein over his characterization of the role of the Jewish neoconservatives in the run-up to the Iraq War. Joe stood his ground then, too, effectively dismissing the claim of anti-Semitism and explaining that "most Jews disagree with their [the Jewish neocons] politics and many Jews are disgusted with their behavior."

I would suggest that this is not just Klein's private kerfuffle: it matters to Jewish America, to America and Israel too, and to being able to have a more serious conversation about anti-Semitism in the future.

The Klein thesis shared by a great many commentators and analysts (this writer included) goes something like this: Bush administration policies in the Middle East have had disastrous consequences for the US; Israel too is in a less secure and worse place as a result of these policies; ultimate responsibility for all this lies with the president himself and his hawkish and close group of senior aides--principal among them Veep Cheney; the neoconservatives played an important role in providing an ideological framing for these policies; within that neoconservative world there operates a prominent and tight-knit group of Jewish neocons who are ideologically driven in part by an old school Likudist view of Israeli interests.

Were the Jewish neocons in control and did they make the fatal decisions? No. Are all Jews neoconservatives or are all neoconservatives Jews? Please! Are the Jews or Israel to blame for the Bush Middle East debacle? Get outta here.

Something did happen though -- there was a failure within the mainstream, Jewish and non-Jewish, to identify the existence of a particular Jewish neoconservative narrative and then to challenge that narrative as being fundamentally flawed in its reading of both American and Israeli interests. One of the causes of that vacuum was the abuse and cheapening of the term anti-Semitism as it was hurled at many who went after Podhoretz, Perle, Feith, and co. They tried, and sadly rather successfully, built a wall of untouchability. Klein is taking his shofar or trumpet to that wall, as many have done before, but Joe is particularly MSM, and therefore important.

Too many Jewish communal leaders and institutions made the mistake of not standing up and speaking out more against the right-wing excesses of a small minority of their co-religionists. Some even embraced and feted the neocons -- a mistake AIPAC particularly excelled in and something I get the impression that AIPAC is at least partially trying to walk itself back from. Israeli leaders, interestingly enough, appear to be less enthusiastic -- there is evidence that Prime Minister Sharon thought the Iraq War not to be a good idea and outgoing Prime Minister Olmert has begun proximity talks with the Syrians.

Similar mistakes are being made with the far-right Christian Evangelical Zionists, and John Hagee's group CUFI. Can there be a more vile poster-boy for Israel than Hagee?!

Polls consistently show that American Jewish opinion is in a very different place. Over a decade ago, J.J. Goldberg described how what he called the "new Jews", who were out of sync with the majority, assumed the mantle of leadership in the American Jewish community. In his book Jewish Power: Inside the American Jewish Establishment, Goldberg claimed that a set of facts had emerged by the mid-1970s that transformed organized Jewry, based around the 1967 Israeli military victory, the role of the Soviet Jewry campaign in Soviet-US relations, and the belated rise of popular Holocaust awareness with its attendant "never again" maxim. This created the counter-revolution of the "new Jews" -- a passionate minority of defensive nationalists, driven by a terrible vision, living amidst an overwhelming majority of still optimistic Jewish liberals. To quote J.J. Goldberg, "their defiance was so strident, and their anger so intense, that the rest of the Jewish community respectfully stood back and let the new Jews take the lead."

The "new Jews" of Goldberg's 1997 book are today's Jewish neoconservatives, and the reason this is so important right now is the issue raised by Joe Klein -- their aggressive advocacy of a military strike against Iran, a position that again places them out of step with the majority of American Jews. There have been a series of articles advocating such military action. It is true that such voices are also heard in Israel (and some even appear in the New York Times op-ed page, most notably the truly horrific and pathetically argued piece by Benny Morris).

I would argue that Israel has made a strategic mistake in making the gevalt approach so central in its response to suspected Iranian nuclear ambitions. Israel is stronger than that and it also has the capacity to deter Iran. It also has U.S. support. It is worth remembering that Israel, evidently, has not attacked Iran, so in practice, at least so far, the military is not the preferred option. In their declarations, Israeli leaders express a preference for a diplomatic solution to the Iranian nuclear question. And prominent ex- and even current officials have endorsed American engagement with Iran as the best option, including ex-Mossad chief Efraim Halevy and ex-Foreign Minister Shlomo Ben-Ami. In private, Israeli leaders are apparently more circumspect. This report appeared some time ago in Haaretz about Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni:

Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni said a few months ago in a series of closed discussions that in her opinion that Iranian nuclear weapons do not pose an existential threat to Israel...Livni also criticized the exaggerated use that Prime Minister Ehud Olmert is making of the issue of the Iranian bomb, claiming that he is attempting to rally the public around him by playing on its most basic fears.

I will not go too deeply into the Iran policy debate, but a more compelling case than that of Podhoretz and co. is that military action would be a disaster for Israel, for America, and for the American Jewish community, too.

The problem for the American Jewish community would not seem to be with exposing the objectionable positions of Jewish neoconservatives and then having a debate. The danger is in the opposite approach -- in creating the impression that the Jewish neoconservative voice is the Jewish voice, or that of the "pro-Israel" lobby, and in drowning out, or more accurately, suppressing the voice of the majority. That would be a way to not only increase the risk of an extremely dangerous policy being pursued and to make support for Israel the partisan domain of the far-right bomb-bomb-bomb Iran crowd, but it would also cede the ground to those who are emptying the charge of anti-Semitism of all meaning. And those are good enough reasons for Joe Klein's cause to be our cause too.

DOES "PRO-ISRAEL" MEAN ANYTHING?

2008-07-28T20:59:00.000-05:00

By M J Rosenberg in the Huffington Post:

Watching Barack Obama in Israel it became clear that he knows the Arab-Israeli issue well. Those who hoped he would make some gaffe that would hurt his candidacy were disappointed. He knows the ins and outs of the issue the way President Bill Clinton did. He feels no need to rely on sound bites about "our democratic ally" or Israel's obvious "right to defend itself." Maybe it's because he is so close to the Chicago Jewish community, which has backed him since the start of his career, but he can talk about Israel with fluency and comfort. He does not have to memorize talking points.

The Israelis -- not an easy group to impress -- were impressed. Why wouldn't they be? They have enough confidence in the rightness of their cause to assume that Obama's knowledge of their country and its problems can only redound to their country's benefit. They are not afraid that anyone who understands the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will automatically oppose them.

It is only here in the United States that pro-Israel advocates insist that politicians rely on canned talking points to show their devotion to Israel. It is as if they believe -- and perhaps they do -- that thinking about the Middle East can only lead to anti-Israel conclusions. They demand that politicians mouth pieties and, all too often, that demand is met.

There is a real irony here, one which most of us who deal with this issue in Washington confront daily. It is that the politicians who are most deft at spouting memorized "pro-Israel" talking points tend to care about Israel the least. The ones who speak from the heart and the head, who study the issue, and try to come up with ways to break out of the deadly status quo are the ones who care the most. This includes Jewish politicians, many of whom pretend that they care deeply but only discovered Israel when they decided that playing the Jewish card would help them politically.

Think about it. There is no political downside to simply going with the crowd on the Middle East. A politician knows that all they have to do is say that they are for Israel, and against the Palestinians, and they will be deemed a "staunch supporter" of Israel and the campaign money will flow their way.

In short, supporting the status quo is the path of least resistance. It is the default position for every politician, easy and risk-free. But it is also the one that only adds to Israel's security problems--and America's declining strategic position in the Middle East.

Unfortunately, many in the pro-Israel community seem not to understand this. They believe that the status quo--and specifically the last eight years--have been good for Israel when, in fact, they have been disastrous.

Eight years ago, as President Clinton was preparing to leave office, Israelis and Palestinians were closer to an agreement than ever before. Israel had experienced three years that were virtually terror-free, thanks to Israeli-Palestinian security cooperation. The Clinton-engineered peace treaty with Jordan had eliminated the threat from the east, especially given that Saddam Hussein's Iraq had been neutralized and defanged by sanctions. The Syrians then, as now, were considering just how much peace and normalization they were willing to offer Israel in exchange for the Golan Heights, but the border itself was quiet.

The eight years that followed were some of the bloodiest in Israel's history. A second intifada took over a thousand Israeli lives (and three times as many Palestinians). Following its conclusion, and the end of Arafat's reign, the U.S. demand for elections in the West Bank and Gaza brought Hamas to power. With the United States abandoning the role of Middle East "honest broker," Israeli-Palestinian negotiations were intermittent and fruitless. Today, in the summer of 2008, Israelis see a new frightening form of terrorism manifested by two attacks by bulldozer in the streets of Jerusalem. And then there is the utter destabilization produced by the Iraq War, which has moved Iraq into Iran's orbit, facilitating Iranian trouble-making and making it more of a threat to Israel than ever before.

This is not a status quo anyone should seek to preserve, let alone celebrate. Politicians who endorse it serve neither America's nor Israel's interests. Pro-Israel? No way.

The next president, whether Obama or McCain, needs to get back to where negotiations left off in 2000 and help wrap up the deal. It is not going to happen without U.S. leadership and it's up to the next president to provide it.

The problem he will face is that his political advisors are going to warn that it is way too risky to take on the Israeli-Palestinian issue. They will argue against doing it in the first year of a new administration ("You don't need that kind of fight in the first year"). They will warn against doing it in the second year ("What? In a Congressional election year?") and certainly not in the third or fourth years when a president runs for re-election.

The cynics will always find an excuse not to touch this issue and it all comes down to political expediency. That is because there is no solid argument against U.S. leadership; the argument against it all comes down to the perception that it is politically dangerous to take on the status quo lobby.

This is no different than the arguments against doing anything about any of the major problems that confront the country. Name an issue and I'll show you a special interest that wants to preserve the status quo. No matter if it's immigration, health care, energy, the deteriorating economy, or whatever, the forces of inertia usually prevail. The path of least resistance, no matter what the issue, is doing nothing.

We've had enough of that.

The next president will confront an Israeli-Palestinian situation in which, unlike the days prior to the first Bush and Clinton administrations, mainstream Israelis and Palestinians are almost in full agreement about what peace will look like. If George W. Bush can repeatedly endorse "two states, living side by side in peace and security," his successor can make it happen.

The best news that came out of Obama's trip is when he said, repeatedly, that he will press for an Israeli-Palestinian agreement "starting from the minute I'm sworn into office." Unlike Iraq, Iran, North Korea, and a host of other more complex issues, this is one that can be wrapped up quickly. All it takes is the will.

OBAMA ANTICHRIST

2008-07-22T10:53:00.000-05:00

By Jan McGirk on the Huffington Post:

On Wednesday, Israel's Christian Zionist tourists and thousands of resident Millennial Jews are expected to come out in force to catch a glimpse of Obama. He may forgo a planned walkabout through the alleys of Old Jerusalem because of security concerns, but Obama is almost certain to don a skull cap and visit the Western Wall where prayers are scribbled on slips of paper and hang like chads from the chinks between the ancient stones. Some apocalypse-hastening Bible-thumpers already equate the Democratic candidate with the antiChrist, so there often is a mixture of mistrust and excitement whenever Obama's name comes up. All the tedious talk radio buzz about Hussein, his Muslim middle name, his Indonesian primary school, and his severed ties to a manic hometown preacher Jeremiah Wright gets re-examined in a neo-Zionist context.

WHY DID THE NEW YORK TIMES PUBLISH THIS?

2008-07-21T08:02:00.000-05:00

By David Bromwich on the Huffington Post

Benny Morris Justifies Israel's Coming Attack on Iran

Posted July 18, 2008 | 10:36 PM (EST)

On Friday July 18 the New York Times published an op-ed by the Israeli historian Benny Morris. It is entitled "Using Bombs to Stave Off War." Morris chose this American venue to announce that Israel would "almost surely" attack Iran some time in the next few months. And he indicated that America would be well advised to support the attack.

The reputation of Benny Morris is founded on unquestioned scholarly achievement and a far more dubious political stance. As one of Israel's "new historians," he recovered the record of harassment, murder, and expulsion of the Palestinians in the war of independence--a finding that largely discredits the Israeli myth that the inhabitants fled from their own timidity, or because they were told to flee by Arab governments.

But speaking as an Israeli citizen, more recently, Morris has declared his view that the mistake of Ben Gurion and the leadership of 1948 was that they did not carry the expulsion of the Palestinians all the way. Morris sees Israel in 2008 as a state under perpetual siege and the focus of a clash of civilizations; he sees Palestinians--and to a degree, all Arabs; and Iranians, too--as a species of animals not yet inducted into full humanity. Thus in a well-known interview
with Ari Shavit, published in Haaretz on January 5, 2004, Morris described the Israeli problem with the Palestinians:

"Something like a cage has to be built for them. I know that sounds terrible. It is really cruel. But there is no choice. There is a wild animal there that has to be locked up in one way or another."

In the years since Benny Morris spoke those words, the construction of the Israeli wall in the West Bank, and the blockade of Gaza by land, sea, and air have created the cage he believed was necessary.

Now, writing from Israel for the American newspaper of record, Morris offers his advice concerning the proper treatment of Iran and Iranians. Since Iran is five years from being able to make a nuclear bomb (Morris says one-to-four years), Israel is compelled to bomb Iran "in the next four to seven months."

One may notice that the Israeli attack goes on a much faster schedule than the Iranian pace of research and discovery. Why the haste for destruction? Could it have something to do with the American presidential election of 2008 (which comes at Morris's four-month lower limit), or something to do with the inauguration of a new president in 2009 (thirty days before his upper limit of seven months)? Morris does not say. He writes, he says, because people need to
realize that the success of Israel's coming "conventional assault" on Iran will be good for Israel, for the United States, and even for Iran. If, on the other hand, this conventional assault fails, Israel will some day launch a nuclear attack; and that will be less good.

The choice, Morris concludes, lies with the rest of the world, and especially with the United States. If Iran does not submit rapidly to the next round of international pressure, the world had better support Israel and hope for the success of its first aerial assault against Iran.

Morris confesses, or implies, one reservation. It would better if the United States could launch the attack. But, being realistic, he remarks the lack of enthusiasm among Americans "for wars in the Islamic lands."

"Which leaves," says Morris, "only Israel."

There is an irritant driving this article, a motive more deeply lodged than Morris is willing to avow. For he suspects Israel alone cannot do the job well enough. So having first dismissed the U.S. and the American public as faint-hearted and unequipped for "wars in Islamic lands," and having then come half way to ask again, Morris at last accuses the United States. If we do not soon intervene, and attack Iran as he counsels, the result will be further nuclear progress by Iran. This will be terminated eventually with a nuclear attack by Israel against Iran.

A nuclear attack on a nation of seventy million people (a great many of them innocent of the desire to wipe Israel off the map) is morally indefensible. How can Morris defend it? He can because he knows?-not believes but metaphysically knows--that the moment that Iran comes into possession of its first weapon, the leaders of Iran will commit national suicide in order to obtain the pleasure of destroying Israel.

Morris alludes to his ulterior knowledge in two sentences so full of blandness, abstract jargon, and bureaucratic euphemism that their meaning is not initially clear; but if one reads with care, one sees that the message is never in doubt:

"Given the fundamentalist, self-sacrificing mindset of the mullahs who run Iran, Israel knows that deterrence may not work as well as it did with the comparatively rational men who ran the Kremlin and the White House during the cold war. They are likely to use any bomb they build."

Iran will use a nuclear bomb, Morris is sure, as soon as it has one, even knowing that to do so means the destruction of Iran. The Mullahs will do it because that is the kind of people they are.

Here then is the way around the charge that Israel, in attacking Iran some time before March 2009, will be committing a crime. By Morris's logic the attack by Israel will be an act of self-defense. Indeed, it will be preemptive--hardly more than common sense--given the knowledge that Benny Morris possesses of the "fundamentalist, self-sacrificing" nature of the leaders of Iran. No evidence for his intuition is ever offered?-evidence from (say) the history of Iranian foreign policy over the past fifty years, or 200; evidence founded on actions rather than words. What if Iran's words since 1979 have been wilder than its deeds? What if Israel's actions since 2002 have been wilder than its words (wilder, even, than Benny Morris's words of 2004)? These findings could not possibly touch the argument. Morris writes as a man in possession of a racial and religious knowledge that is superior to evidence.

Of course, he hopes that Israel will not be forced to go all the way (though he has deplored Ben Gurion's failure to go all the way with expulsion of the Palestinians). He imagines most Iranians would prefer not to see "Iran turned into a nuclear wasteland." Morris has thus given the readers of the New York Times a vision of a hellish future, but then atoned for the extravagance by
suggesting that, if things fall out so, it will be the fault of Iran and the United States. Israel will have done the best it could with a monstrous and implacable enemy and a reluctant ally.

All circumstances taken together, this New York Times op-ed by Benny Morris is at once the most overt and the most peculiar intervention we Americans have witnessed thus far, by an Israeli attempting to influence U.S. policy in the Middle East. The article is weakly founded on partial facts and conjectural truths. It passes without transition from mock-prudential calculations to a tyrannical threat to destroy a civilization for the good of the world. Yet, though unpersuasive, it acquires significance when published between a recent visit to the U.S. by the Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert and the current visit by the defense minister Ehud Barak. Morris's article is meant to be read in the context of such recent assurances as Olmert's, for example, that President Bush "understands the severity of the Iranian threat and the need to vanquish it, and
intends to act on that matter before the end of his term in the White House."

But let us return for a last look at Benny Morris.

No person into whose mind had entered the idea that an Iranian may be a human being--and that there are millions of innocent Iranians--could have generated with such casual facility the image of Iran as a "nuclear wasteland." Yet this was the image of Iran that the Israeli Benny Morris decided to conjure up for American readers in the New York Times.

In the Haaretz interview of January 5, 2004, the following exchange occurred between the interviewer Ari Shavit and Benny Morris:

"Would you describe yourself as an apocalyptic person?"

"The whole Zionist project is apocalyptic. It exists within hostile surroundings and in a certain sense its existence is unreasonable. It wasn't reasonable for it to succeed in 1881 and it wasn't reasonable for it to succeed in 1948 and it's not reasonable that it will succeed now. Nevertheless, it has come this far. In a certain way it is miraculous. I live the events of 1948, and 1948 projects itself on what could happen here. Yes, I think of Armageddon. It's possible. Within the next 20 years there could be an atomic war here."

This apocalyptic danger Morris may conceive himself to have put off a few more years by writing an editorial on behalf of Israel's coming attack. But whether the attack on Iran comes sooner or later, whether it is executed by Israel or the U.S. or both, and whether carried out with conventional or nuclear weapons, Morris has no doubt of one thing. It will have served the "apocalyptic" vision of the "whole Zionist project," and it will coincide with the highest values of
humanity properly defined.

BRACE YOURSELVES

2008-07-20T15:14:00.002-05:00

Nothing much happened at the recent meeting between Iranian and US representatives?

Not hardly.

Iran seems to have been looking forward to a long negotiation process over considerable time. Anyone who has ever bought anything from an Arab knows what this is about: six cups of strong coffee, how's your family, I really can't sell you this rug for that. (Okay, Persians are not Arabs, but it's the same.)

The US representative, however, has said he will not sit down with Iranians again, and that Iran has two weeks to announce it will stop, not its weapons program (if it actually has one), but its nuclear enrichment program, which it has every right to conduct. And if they don't, Israel is unleashed?

This sounds an awful lot like pre-Iraq. Same government, same bullshit. Brace yourselves.

JUST HOW CRAZY ARE THEY GETTING IN ISRAEL?

2008-07-20T10:31:00.000-05:00

Using Bombs to Stave Off War

By BENNY MORRIS in the New York Times
Published: July 18, 2008

ISRAEL will almost surely attack Iran’s nuclear sites in the next four to seven months — and the leaders in Washington and even Tehran should hope that the attack will be successful enough to cause at least a significant delay in the Iranian production schedule, if not complete destruction, of that country’s nuclear program. Because if the attack fails, the Middle East will almost certainly face a nuclear war — either through a subsequent pre-emptive Israeli nuclear strike or a nuclear exchange shortly after Iran gets the bomb.

It is in the interest of neither Iran nor the United States (nor, for that matter, the rest of the world) that Iran be savaged by a nuclear strike, or that both Israel and Iran suffer such a fate. We know what would ensue: a traumatic destabilization of the Middle East with resounding political and military consequences around the globe, serious injury to the West’s oil supply and radioactive pollution of the earth’s atmosphere and water.

But should Israel’s conventional assault fail to significantly harm or stall the Iranian program, a ratcheting up of the Iranian-Israeli conflict to a nuclear level will most likely follow. Every intelligence agency in the world believes the Iranian program is geared toward making weapons, not to the peaceful applications of nuclear power. And, despite the current talk of additional economic sanctions, everyone knows that such measures have so far led nowhere and are unlikely to be applied with sufficient scope to cause Iran real pain, given Russia’s and China’s continued recalcitrance and Western Europe’s (and America’s) ambivalence in behavior, if not in rhetoric. Western intelligence agencies agree that Iran will reach the “point of no return” in acquiring the capacity to produce nuclear weapons in one to four years.

Which leaves the world with only one option if it wishes to halt Iran’s march toward nuclear weaponry: the military option, meaning an aerial assault by either the United States or Israel. Clearly, America has the conventional military capacity to do the job, which would involve a protracted air assault against Iran’s air defenses followed by strikes on the nuclear sites themselves. But, as a result of the Iraq imbroglio, and what is rapidly turning into the Afghan imbroglio, the American public has little enthusiasm for wars in the Islamic lands. This curtails the White House’s ability to begin yet another major military campaign in pursuit of a goal that is not seen as a vital national interest by many Americans.

Which leaves only Israel — the country threatened almost daily with destruction by Iran’s leaders. Thus the recent reports about Israeli plans and preparations to attack Iran (the period from Nov. 5 to Jan. 19 seems the best bet, as it gives the West half a year to try the diplomatic route but ensures that Israel will have support from a lame-duck White House).

The problem is that Israel’s military capacities are far smaller than America’s and, given the distances involved, the fact that the Iranian sites are widely dispersed and underground, and Israel’s inadequate intelligence, it is unlikely that the Israeli conventional forces, even if allowed the use of Jordanian and Iraqi airspace (and perhaps, pending American approval, even Iraqi air strips) can destroy or perhaps significantly delay the Iranian nuclear project.

Nonetheless, Israel, believing that its very existence is at stake — and this is a feeling shared by most Israelis across the political spectrum — will certainly make the effort. Israel’s leaders, from Prime Minister Ehud Olmert down, have all explicitly stated that an Iranian bomb means Israel’s destruction; Iran will not be allowed to get the bomb.

The best outcome will be that an Israeli conventional strike, whether failed or not — and, given the Tehran regime’s totalitarian grip, it may not be immediately clear how much damage the Israeli assault has caused — would persuade the Iranians to halt their nuclear program, or at least persuade the Western powers to significantly increase the diplomatic and economic pressure on Iran.

But the more likely result is that the international community will continue to do nothing effective and that Iran will speed up its efforts to produce the bomb that can destroy Israel. The Iranians will also likely retaliate by attacking Israel’s cities with ballistic missiles (possibly topped with chemical or biological warheads); by prodding its local clients, Hezbollah and Hamas, to unleash their own armories against Israel; and by activating international Muslim terrorist networks against Israeli and Jewish — and possibly American — targets worldwide (though the Iranians may at the last moment be wary of provoking American military involvement).

Such a situation would confront Israeli leaders with two agonizing, dismal choices. One is to allow the Iranians to acquire the bomb and hope for the best — meaning a nuclear standoff, with the prospect of mutual assured destruction preventing the Iranians from actually using the weapon. The other would be to use the Iranian counterstrikes as an excuse to escalate and use the only means available that will actually destroy the Iranian nuclear project: Israel’s own nuclear arsenal.

Given the fundamentalist, self-sacrificial mindset of the mullahs who run Iran, Israel knows that deterrence may not work as well as it did with the comparatively rational men who ran the Kremlin and White House during the cold war. They are likely to use any bomb they build, both because of ideology and because of fear of Israeli nuclear pre-emption. Thus an Israeli nuclear strike to prevent the Iranians from taking the final steps toward getting the bomb is probable. The alternative is letting Tehran have its bomb. In either case, a Middle Eastern nuclear holocaust would be in the cards.

Iran’s leaders would do well to rethink their gamble and suspend their nuclear program. Bar this, the best they could hope for is that Israel’s conventional air assault will destroy their nuclear facilities. To be sure, this would mean thousands of Iranian casualties and international humiliation. But the alternative is an Iran turned into a nuclear wasteland. Some Iranians may believe that this is a worthwhile gamble if the prospect is Israel’s demise. But most Iranians probably don’t.

Benny Morris, a professor of Middle Eastern history at Ben-Gurion University, is the author, most recently, of “1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War.”
More Articles in Opinion »

We have to hope that this is an example of an old Nixon tactic - i.e., we're insane in Israel, so Iran better back down.

THE LESSER OF TWO EVILS?

2008-07-19T16:51:00.000-05:00

Obama, McCain and the Question of US Policy Regarding Israel

Written by Benjamin Dwyer for the Alternative Information Center (AIC)
Thursday, 17 July 2008

Democratic presidential candidate, Sen. Barack Obama, addressing the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) forum on Foreign Policy in Chicago, March 2007.
The US Democratic party's presidential candidate, Sen. Barack Obama, addressing the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) Forum on Foreign Policy in Chicago, March 2007.

After a long and tortured primary season, Barack Obama, the junior Senator from Illinois, took the Democratic Party nomination for US president from Hilary Clinton, who many thought likely to become the party’s candidate. John McCain, a Senator from Arizona and former Republican presidential candidate in 2000, emerged from a group of mediocre candidates to clinch the Republican nomination.

The candidates themselves, varying dramatically on domestic issues, and, to a lesser degree foreign policy issues, find themselves united as all American politicians are, in their unreflective, uncritical and self-serving support of Israel and the status quo. Much like US policy towards Cuba, a small but diligent group of voters has enforced a continuing policy that may not be beneficial to the United States.

John McCain, shedding the “maverick” label that he had defined for himself since his unsuccessful bid for the presidency in 2000, has become increasingly hawkish in the intervening years, especially in regards to Iraq and Iran. McCain has now articulated a position on Iraq that essentially calls for American soldiers to remain on the ground for “maybe 100” years. While he later clarified those statements in an attempt to temper their meaning, saying that he foresaw an American presence similar to that in Korea or Japan, McCain added another layer of meaning. Taken in conjunction with the largest armored diplomatic compound in the world, which the United States has constructed over the last several years, and the recent granting of no-bid, immensely lucrative contracts to western oil companies, this would seem to indicate that McCain is perfectly comfortable continuing the neo-colonial corporate endeavors undertaken by the Bush administration. McCain has, as recently as June, employed 22 ex-oil lobbyists on his campaign, and adopted a platform that calls for the cutting of corporate taxes, a move that would save the oil companies involved in the no-bid Iraq contracts US$1.7 billion.

With regards to Iran, McCain has stated that “Iran is dedicated to the destruction of Israel...” and has used this unequivocal commitment to Israel's security in tandem with Iran's purported nuclear ambitions to develop an Iranian policy that is aggressively Israel-centric. McCain is not alone in doing so, however. The US response, from both parties, to the Iranian bomb has been formed through a prism of support for Israel. Rather than focusing on some of the more pertinent regional destabilization and proliferation issues, central to any discussion of Iranian nuclear ambitions, has been the existential question of Israel's territorial integrity. Contrary to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's absurd and troubling statements about the Holocaust and possibly mistranslated remarks about wiping Israel off the map, there are larger strategic issues in regards to an Iranian nuclear weapon program that have gone unaddressed by both campaigns.

Saudi reappraisal of the strategic balance in the Middle East has caused a resurgence of rumors that Saudi Arabia will undertake a nuclear weapons development program. Saudi Arabia certainly has the financial wherewithal to develop such a program, along with the technical ability, and increasingly a motive. In May of this year the United States signed an agreement with the Saudi kingdom to bolster its civilian nuclear energy program. This comes shortly after Russia and Egypt signed a similar deal, and the United States has tacitly signed on to a Jordanian nuclear program. Despite India's nuclear program, and its non-membership in most anti-proliferation treaties, the United States in 2006 gave India access to its civilian nuclear technology, totally undercutting the global non-proliferation regime. By eviscerating the non-proliferation regime, the United States looks hypocritical, and can only turn to the threat to Israel as a motivator to impose sanctions, or, as it looks increasingly likely, to conduct strikes on Iran. Perhaps one of the most tasteless moments of this campaign to date has been McCain's Iran serenade: “You know that old Beach Boys song, Bomb Iran? Bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran.” McCain followed that comment up with the statement that “Iran is dedicated to the destruction of Israel. That alone should concern us but now they are trying for nuclear capabilities. I totally support the President when he says we will not allow Iran to destroy Israel.”

Rather than seeking to grasp the regional, historical or symbolic significance of nuclear weapons in Iran, it seems as though the US has chosen to understand the Iranian weapon solely through Iran's malicious intentions towards Israel; this prism has thus created a distorted image of Iran's intentions, practices, statements, and strategic actions.

While there is no doubt Iranian nuclear aspirations are troubling for Israel, one wellspring for Mr. McCain's support for Israel is perhaps equally troubling. Senator McCain has never been a fan of the evangelical right, and they have reciprocated, helping secure the 2000 Republican presidential nomination for George W. Bush. In this campaign, however, Senator McCain has made a major push for evangelical support and has received it, including from figures such as John Hagee. John Hagee, a major force in the US evangelical movement, has stated that Hitler acted as God's agent, and that the Holocaust was the will of God. Perhaps if the word “God” was replaced with “Allah,” one might confuse his remarks with the appalling statements of a certain Iranian president. Nonetheless, John Hagee is seen as one of the staunchest supporters of Israel, based on the notion of Christian Zionism. Christian Zionism is predicated on the biblical interpretation that Christ cannot come, bringing with him the apocalypse, without the restoration of the Jewish state of Israel. This self-serving theology has lead to a bizarre relationship between groups such as the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee ( AIPAC) and evangelical leaders; this relationship has served as the backbone for right-wing Christian support for Israel that has sought to undercut any sort of peace process.

John McCain has been forced to distance himself from John Hagee, due to the latter’s acidic comments about Catholics as well as Jews, but there is no doubt that the endorsement by John Hagee has helped shore up support for McCain amongst evangelicals who were leery of supporting him.

Although Hagee is an extreme example of the Christian Zionist current in American politics, McCain himself is more representative of a mainstream sentiment that the United States and Israel are to some degree “fighting the same fight.” McCain has said that we must be steeled against “...the transcendent challenge of our time: the threat of radical Islamic terrorism.” This sentiment, that the United States and Israel are natural allies in the war on terror, and that Israel stands as a Western bulwark against the encroaching Orient, is a common sentiment in the US.

The false dichotomy between us and them has provided powerful ammunition to those who would propagate these myths. Even voters who may not usually recognize such a false dichotomy have blithely accepted Israel as essential to a successful war on terror, rather than fatally undermining it. Presidential candidates should recognize this and realize that perhaps the most successful method to combat terrorism is to take away radicals' ammunition by resolving the Israel/Palestine conflict.

This issue, much more so than evangelical support for Israel, has helped shore up support for Israel.

Mr. Obama, running a campaign based on change, hope, and audacity, has shown precious little of these amorphous aspects in regards to the Israel/Palestine conflict. The day after his nomination was numerically assured, he gave a speech at the annual conference of AIPAC in which he kowtowed to the status quo, calling for the failed two-state solution and, perhaps surprisingly, calling for Jerusalem to remain undivided as Israel's capital. He has since attempted to rescind these statements prior to a trip to Israel and the West Bank, scheduled for 22-23 July. This is sure to perpetuate American Jewish fears about Obama's commitment to Israel, despite the willingness he has shown at this point to pander. The American Jewish mistrust of Obama is largely based on a whisper campaign that has falsely claimed that he is a practicing Muslim, educated in a madrassah (religious school) and has willfully misconstrued his stated willingness to negotiate with Iran. The most positive aspects of Mr. Obama's campaign have been his willingness to resort to diplomatic solutions, as well as his ability to retain skilled and intelligent advisors. His advisors, however, have been a source of criticism by those who doubt his commitments to Israel. Zbigniew Brzezinski, the former National Security Advisor to President Jimmy Carter, has long been a subject of great attention amongst those who have sought to oust former President Carter's advisors from the public sphere. Mr. Brzezinski has in the past defended the highly controversial book “The Israel Lobby” by Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer. Mr. Brzezinski wrote in Foreign Affairs: "Given that the Middle East is currently the central challenge facing America, Professors John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt have rendered a public service by initiating a much needed public debate on the role of the 'Israel lobby' in the shaping of US foreign policy.”

Another advisor, General Merrill McPeak, former Air Force Chief of Staff and Obama's military advisor and national campaign co-chairman, has consistently criticized what he sees as the American Jewish and Christian Zionist pressure that has obstructed peace efforts in Israel.

Obama's Jewish surrogates have moved quickly to staunch criticisms of Obama, and have worked particularly hard at fighting the whisper campaign that had disseminated misinformation about Senator Obama. The latest New Yorker cover most succinctly sums up many American and Jewish fears about Mr. Obama; the cover depicts Obama in traditional Muslim garb, while he fist-bumps his wife, who is dressed as a black radical with an AK-47 slung over her back. An American flag is burning in a fireplace behind them, with a portrait of Osama bin Laden on the wall. While the American Left has raised holy hell in the last few days about the cover, it's a telling piece of satire that is an indication of just how explosive Mr. Obama's character is perceived to be, by the Right in its misperceptions, aided and abetted by the media, and compounded by the Left's vitriolic reaction to a caricature.

The greatest substantive criticism that can be leveled at Senator Obama is simply that he lacks a far-sighted or original vision for the Middle East, and the Israel/Palestine conflict. He is clearly an intelligent man, capable and well versed in policy, even with a tendency to get a little wonky. But when it comes to Israel/Palestine, he is content with the status quo. He has offered some criticisms of the settlements, but they were tepid at best. Given Senator Obama's commitment to social justice, a cause he has worked for on the ground for years, his understanding of early Zionist commitments to socialism and justice are encouraging, but do not result in any meaningful understanding of the present. In an interview with Jeffery Goldberg he said: “...that (desire for a sense of place) mixed with a great affinity for the idea of social justice that was embodied in the early Zionist movement and the kibbutz, and the notion that not only do you find a place but you also have this opportunity to start over and to repair the breaches of the past. I found this very appealing.”

Obama understands the powerful vision for social justice, a call for equality and a place for the Jews, but also for the Palestinians, that is found in early socialist Zionist ideology. But he fails to understand just how warped and twisted Zionism as a concept, and a conception, has become in modern Israel. Obama's issue is not his frame of reference, or even his values. It's that he refuses to take them to their logical conclusions. Rather than denouncing the settlements as a threat to the early visions of Zionism (or even modern Zionism a la Ariel Sharon or Olmert) or as a flagrant violation against the idea of social justice, Senator Obama in that same interview anemically stated “Settlements at this juncture are not helpful.” Hardly inspiring words from someone attempting to lay claim to the mantle of social justice.

Jeffery Goldberg in a New York Times opinion piece perhaps put it best when he wrote “but what Israel needs is an American president who not only helps defend it against the existential threat posed by Iran and Islamic fundamentalism, but helps it to come to grips with the existential threat from within. A pro-Israel president today would be one who prods the Jewish state—publicly, continuously and vociferously—to create conditions on the West Bank that would allow for the birth of a moderate Palestinian state.”

I would perhaps put it in stronger terms, questioning whether Israel's moral authority has been squandered beyond credibility, but certainly an American president who forces genuine reflection on the political status and internal existential crisis that has gripped Israel would be a step in the right direction. Moreover, a strong denouncement of the Wall and settlements would go a long way in beginning to address the tangible elements of colonial Zionism that has sought to co-opt what it could not ontologically obliterate.

Barack Obama, at this juncture, is not a step in the right direction towards a just resolution in Israel/Palestine. John McCain is clearly a destructive step in the wrong direction, however. The question then becomes, what is a reflective, informed American voter to do? In the American two-party system, we are given few options, or choices ranging from dreadful to mediocre. I don't have a pensioner's party to vote for out of protest, nor do I have Meretz, much less anyone even further to the Left. So do I hold my nose and vote for Senator Obama, hoping he'll come around? At this point the status quo is so toxic that it threatens to poison the entire direction of the Israel/Palestine conflict, so supporting Barack Obama's Israel/Palestine position is something I wonder if I will be able bring myself to do.

J STREET POLL

2008-07-18T19:44:00.000-05:00

From The Jewish Week:

A new poll by J Street, the pro-peace process political action committee and lobby, showed overwhelming Jewish support for new peace moves in the region, but strong resistance to territorial compromise on Jerusalem.

The survey of 800 respondents by the new group, which is trying to convince lawmakers and congressional hopefuls that it's okay to support a more robust peace process, also included these predictable findings: American Jews strongly disapprove of the war in Iraq and by an even bigger margin disapprove of the way President George W. Bush is handling his job.

Overwhelmingly, Jews surveyed say Israel is less secure since Bush moved into the White House.

But that didn't necessarily translate into great news for Democratic presidential contender Barack Obama. Asked about their current presidential choice this year, 58 percent indicate they back Obama, with another 4 percent saying they "lean" toward the Democrat.

If those numbers hold, Obama would still win a majority of Jewish votes -62 percent - but fall short of recent Democratic presidential nominees. And Sen. John McCain, the presumptive GOP nominee, would get about 32 percent, a big increase from President Bush's 24 percent in 2004.

J Street being a pro-peace process group, it's hardly surprising the group asked questions about Jewish support for the kind of strong U.S. involvement the group advocates.

87 percent in the poll say they support "the United States playing an active role in helping the parties to resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict."

The pollsters then added a zinger to the question, asking whether they would support such a role "if it meant the United States publicly stating its disagreements with both the Israelis and the Arabs." Support dropped only slightly, to 86 percent.

Then J Street asked the question again, this time asking whether respondents favor an active peacemaking role if it means U.S. pressure on both sides to achieve a compromise. Support dropped, but again only slightly - to 81 percent.

When asked simply if they support "a two-state solution that declares an end to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, resulting in all Arab countries establishing full diplomatic ties with Israel and creating an independent Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza," 78 percent said yes, 22 percent said no.

But support dropped when they asked if respondents supported a full peace that included an Israeli withdrawal from "most of the West Bank" and the dismantling of "many of the Israeli settlements, with 59 percent supporting, 40 percent opposing.

The numbers flip when it comes to Jerusalem; 56 percent say they would oppose ceding Palestinian neighborhoods in East Jerusalem to a new Palestinian state, suggesting that the city has a much stronger emotional hold on Jews than the territories, that groups like the Orthodox Union that have been campaigning against any compromise on Jerusalem are having an impact - or both.

J Street's goal is to create a "comfort zone" for politicians who support Israel but also support a more active peace process and more extensive compromises.

That was explicit in several questions asking respondents to evaluate statements from "a candidate from Congress," and say whether the statement would make them more or less likely to vote for the candidate.

Not surprisingly, candidates who reflected J Street positions did the best.

The survey also asked a number of questions about Christian Zionism and its most visible practitioner, Pastor John Hagee, whose Christians United for Israel (CUFI) holds its Washington Summit next week.

Hagee, who has stated strong opposition to territorial compromise and support for Israelis who want to remain in the West Bank, fared poorly when respondents were asked about their feelings towards individuals and organizations; only 7 percent view the CUFI founder positively, barely above the 5 percent scored by Obama's former pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright. On a different question, 50 percent said they had a negative impression of CUFI, 19 percent a positive one. A full 30 percent said they didn't know anything out the organization.

Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.), once an icon of the Jewish community, was viewed unfavorably by 48 percent, favorably by 37.

Finally, the poll suggests that Israel, while an overwhelming political priority for the activist community, remains far down the list for Jewish voters in general.

Asked about the "issues…most important for you in deciding your vote for President and Congress this November," 55 percent said the economy, 33 percent the war in Iraq, 21 percent health care, the same for terrorism and national security.

Israel registered at only 8 percent as an issue in the elections.

There's a ton more data; read it at theJ Street Web site. Scroll down the page and look at the documents.

THEY DON'T LIKE OLMERT

2008-07-17T19:39:00.000-05:00

From Bartholomew’s Notes on Religion

Christian Zionist “Outrage” at Olmert
Posted on July 16, 2008 by Richard Bartholomew

Reuters reports on Christian Zionist disillusionment with Ehud Olmert:

Olmert raised about $70,000 for the New Jerusalem Foundation at a single Christian fundraiser in Dallas in 2002. But this year, the evangelical leader who helped organise that event voiced “outrage” at Olmert’s starting talks about sharing the city with the Palestinians as part of the U.S.-backed Annapolis process. He vowed to “do everything in my power” to prevent it.

Curiously, the donation figure is considerably smaller than was reported at the time, in the Jerusalem Post:

More than 4,000 Christians gathered in this Dallas, Texas, suburb Sunday to mark the 35th anniversary of the reunification of Jerusalem, offering prayers for Israel’s capital and donations to its children who have fallen victims to terrorism.

…[Mike Evans] reported that participants in the Dallas gathering gave more than $400,000 in cash and pledges, and that all gifts would go to the New Jerusalem Foundation for the victims of terrorism in Jerusalem.

Maybe those “pledges” never amounted to much.

Evans - who believes God struck Franklin Roosevelt dead for his failure to be more supportive of Zionism - has for a while now been railing against George Bush’s “betrayal” of Jerusalem, and doubtless it is he who is now going to “everything in his power” to oppose Annapolis.

CUFI LIKES JEWS, DISSES CHRISTIANS?

2008-07-16T10:30:00.001-05:00

From The FundamentaList by Sarah Posner on The American Prospect:

Criticism is Leading CUFI to Alienate Core Supporters.

A former regional director for Christians United for Israel (CUFI) tells me that attendance at next week's Washington Summit will be down from last year, not because Christian Zionism is losing its currency but because Christian Zionists are disappointed that John Hagee is working too hard to win the hearts of Jews at the expense of Christians.

Jim Hutchens, a former military chaplain, is president of the hard-line Christian Zionist group The Jerusalem Connection International, which has opposed any Israeli-Palestinian peace deal even more vociferously than CUFI has. Hutchens told me that after he confronted Hagee last year over the assertion in Hagee's most recent book that Jesus did not come to be the Messiah for the Jews, CUFI removed him as Mid-Atlantic regional director. He was offered a co-director position for the District of Columbia, Hutchens said, but he decided to cut ties with CUFI completely. (A spokesperson for CUFI said she didn't know what had precipitated the split, or which party initiated it.)

With Hagee's efforts to garner Jewish support for CUFI, "the focus now," said Hutchens, "is Jews united for Hagee." Hutchens lamented that Hagee is too fixated on reaching out to Jewish constituencies, particularly in the reform movement, and has emphasized politics over what Hutchens believes to be biblical imperatives. "The focus should be on Christians," said Hutchens, adding that "[Hagee] has done to his base what McCain has done to his -- and that is neglect them."

Hutchens and the other Christian Zionists he says share his concerns and are skipping the CUFI Summit represent the hardcore fringe of Hagee supporters. As Hagee has felt pressure from Jewish groups alarmed by his prophecies of their demise at the end of days unless they convert, he has inched away from his more extremist Christian alliances. So anxious is Hagee for respectability that CUFI has now even toned down its rhetoric on Iran, claiming that it will lobby next week for stepped-up diplomacy and sanctions to thwart Iran's nuclear ambitions, rather than the military intervention that has long been the centerpiece of Hagee's apocalyptic theology. But Hagee's efforts to make himself seem like a reasonable moderate with a purely political, not religious, agenda just won't work -- nor will his attempt to shut out critics by convincing YouTube to remove all videos of him on copyright grounds or by closing next week's summit to the press. Abundant evidence of his extremism remains in plain sight, and Jews whose approval he craves will continue to question the core claim of his Christian Zionist project: that he is a good friend to them and to Israel.

THE KOOKS

2008-07-14T10:30:00.000-05:00

In the Tenth Cow I talk about the connection of the Settler Movement, actually Gush Emanim, with the messianic Jews who consider secular Zionists to be "donkeys" who unwittingly helped them move toward turning Israel into a theocracy. The progenitor of this approach was Abraham Isaac Kook (1865–1935), the first Ashkenazi chief rabbi of the British Mandate for Palestine, the founder of the Religious Zionist Yeshiva Merkaz HaRav and a Kabbalist. Wikipedia notes that Kook believed that the modern movement to re-establish a Jewish state in the land of Israel had profound theological significance and that the Zionists were pawns in a heavenly plan to bring about the messianic era. Per this ideology, the youthful, secular and even anti-religious Labor Zionist pioneers halutzim were a part of a grand divine scheme whereby the land and people of Israel were finally being redeemed from the 2,000 year exile (galut) by all manner of Jews who sacrificed themselves for the cause of building up the physical land, as laying the groundwork for the ultimate spiritual messianic redemption of world Jewry. His teachings are partially responsible for the modern religious settlement movement in the disputed territories. Many of his ideological followers in the Religious Zionist movement settled in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

His son, Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook, was the leader of the settler movement, Gush Emunim. He also taught that secular Zionists, through their conquests of the Land of Israel (Eretz Yisrael), had unwittingly brought about the beginning of the "final redemption", which would end in the coming of the Jewish messiah.[3] Gush Emunim supporters believe that building Jewish settlement on land God has allotted to the Jewish people as outlined in the Hebrew Bible, is an important step in the process of redemption.

Just in case anyone thought I didn't know what I was talking about.

There is another Kook now somehow involved with CUFI.

BUSH BACKS ISRAELI PLAN FOR STRIKE ON IRAN

2008-07-13T09:41:00.002-05:00

From the Sunday Times:

As Tehran tests new missiles, America believes only a show of force can deter President Ahmadinejad

Uzi Mahnaimi in Washington

President George W Bush has told the Israeli government that he may be prepared to approve a future military strike on Iranian nuclear facilities if negotiations with Tehran break down, according to a senior Pentagon official.

Despite the opposition of his own generals and widespread scepticism that America is ready to risk the military, political and economic consequences of an airborne strike on Iran, the president has given an “amber light” to an Israeli plan to attack Iran’s main nuclear sites with long-range bombing sorties, the official told The Sunday Times.

“Amber means get on with your preparations, stand by for immediate attack and tell us when you’re ready,” the official said. But the Israelis have also been told that they can expect no help from American forces and will not be able to use US military bases in Iraq for logistical support.

Nor is it certain that Bush’s amber light would ever turn to green without irrefutable evidence of lethal Iranian hostility. Tehran’s test launches of medium-range ballistic missiles last week were seen in Washington as provocative and poorly judged, but both the Pentagon and the CIA concluded that they did not represent an immediate threat of attack against Israeli or US targets.

“It’s really all down to the Israelis,” the Pentagon official added. “This administration will not attack Iran. This has already been decided. But the president is really preoccupied with the nuclear threat against Israel and I know he doesn’t believe that anything but force will deter Iran.”

The official added that Israel had not so far presented Bush with a convincing military proposal. “If there is no solid plan, the amber will never turn to green,” he said.

There was also resistance inside the Pentagon from officers concerned about Iranian retaliation. “The uniform people are opposed to the attack plans, mainly because they think it will endanger our soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan,” the source said.

Complicating the calculations in both Washington and Tel Aviv is the prospect of an incoming Democratic president who has already made it clear that he prefers negotiation to the use of force.

Senator Barack Obama’s previous opposition to the war in Iraq, and his apparent doubts about the urgency of the Iranian threat, have intensified pressure on the Israeli hawks to act before November’s US presidential election. “If I were an Israeli I wouldn’t wait,” the Pentagon official added.

The latest round of regional tension was sparked by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, which fired nine long and medium-range missiles in war game manoeuvres in the Gulf last Wednesday.

Iran’s state-run media reported that one of them was a modified Shahab-3 ballistic missile, which has a claimed range of 1,250 miles and could theoretically deliver a one-ton nuclear warhead over Israeli cities. Tel Aviv is about 650 miles from western Iran. General Hossein Salami, a senior Revolutionary Guard commander, boasted that “our hands are always on the trigger and our missiles are ready for launch”.

Condoleezza Rice, the US secretary of state, said she saw the launches as “evidence that the missile threat is not an imaginary one”, although the impact of the Iranian stunt was diminished on Thursday when it became clear that a photograph purporting to show the missiles being launched had been faked.

The one thing that all sides agree on is that any strike by either Iran or Israel would trigger a catastrophic round of retaliation that would rock global oil markets, send the price of petrol soaring and wreck the progress of the US military effort in Iraq.

Abdalla Salem El-Badri, secretary-general of Opec, the oil producers’ consortium, said last week that a military conflict involving Iran would see an “unlimited” rise in prices because any loss of Iranian production — or constriction of shipments through the Strait of Hormuz — could not be replaced. Iran is Opec’s second-largest producer after Saudi Arabia.

Equally worrying for Bush would be the impact on the US mission in Iraq, which after years of turmoil has seen gains from the military “surge” of the past few months, and on American operations in the wider region. A senior Iranian official said yesterday that Iran would destroy Israel and 32 American military bases in the Middle East in response to any attack.

Yet US officials acknowledge that no American president can afford to remain idle if Israel is threatened. How genuine the Iranian threat is was the subject of intense debate last week, with some analysts arguing that Iran might have a useable nuclear weapon by next spring and others convinced that President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is engaged in a dangerous game of bluffing — mainly to impress a domestic Iranian audience that is struggling with economic setbacks and beginning to question his leadership.

Among the sceptics is Kenneth Katzman, a former CIA analyst and author of a book on the Revolutionary Guard. “I don’t subscribe to the view that Iran is in a position to inflict devastating damage on anyone,” said Katzman, who is best known for warning shortly before 9/11 that terrorists were planning to attack America.

“The Revolutionary Guards have always underperformed militarily,” he said. “Their equipment is quite inaccurate if not outright inoperable. Those missile launches were more like putting up a ‘beware of the dog’ sign. They want everyone to think that if you mess with them, you will get bitten.”

A former adviser to Rice noted that Ahmadinejad’s confrontational attitude had earned him powerful enemies among Iran’s religious leadership. Professor Shai Feldman, director of Middle East studies at Brandeis University, said the Iranian government was getting “clobbered” because of global economic strains. “His [Ahmadinejad's] failed policies have made Iran more vulnerable to sanctions and people close to the mullahs have decided he’s a liability,” he said.

In Israel, Ehud Olmert, the prime minister, has his own domestic problems with a corruption scandal that threatens to unseat him and the media have been rife with speculation that he might order an attack on Iran to distract attention from his difficulties. According to one of his closest friends, Olmert recently warned him that “in three months’ time it will be a different Middle East”.

Yet even the most hawkish officials acknowledge that Israel would face what would arguably be the most challenging military mission of its 60-year existence.

“No one here is talking about more than delaying the [nuclear] programme,” said the Pentagon source. He added that Israel would need to set back the Iranians by at least five years for an attack to be considered a success.

Even that may be beyond Israel’s competence if it has to act alone. Obvious targets would include Iran’s Isfahan plant, where uranium ore is converted into gas, the Natanz complex where this gas is used to enrich uranium in centrifuges and the plutonium-producing Arak heavy water plant. But Iran is known to have scattered other elements of its nuclear programme in underground facilities around the country. Neither US nor Israeli intelligence is certain that it knows where everything is.

“Maybe the Israelis could start off the attack and have us finish it off,” Katzman added. “And maybe that has been their intention all along. But in terms of the long-term military campaign that would be needed to permanently suppress Iran’s nuclear programme, only the US is perceived as having that capability right now.”

Additional reporting: Tony Allen-Mills in New York

FROM "THE GREAT DERANGEMENT" EXCERPTED IN NEWSWEEK

2008-07-12T23:47:00.000-05:00

‘The Great Derangement’

A book excerpt by Matt Taibbi.
Newsweek Web Exclusive
Updated: 6:21 p.m. ET Jul 12, 2008

To be perfectly honest, I knew all about Pastor John Hagee—his Cornerstone Church was one of the reasons I'd come to San Antonio in the first place. Hagee was one of the most influential evangelical preachers in the country—not because his ministry was so very large (although he claimed up to 4.5 million viewers a week for his Sunday sermons), but because of his near-absolute conquest of a very trendy niche in the market: Christian Zionism.

Not exactly a new idea, Christian Zionism in simplest terms describes Christians who believe in supporting, politically or otherwise, the State of Israel. It has risen as a force in international politics primarily because of two factors. The first is a rise in America in belief in dispensationalist Christianity, i.e., End Times prophecies--the belief that Armageddon is coming and that, with it, the True Believers will be whisked up to Heaven by God, while the nonbelievers stay on earth to suck eggs and generally suffer various tortures. The enormous success of the Left Behind books and movies (which depict the earth during Armageddon as a delicious chaos, with airplanes suddenly stripped of their believer pilots, buses flying off highways, blood-soaked atheists realizing their tragic mistake far too late, etc.) helped spread these beliefs, so much so that dispensationalism is now more or less the default doctrine of most Southern Baptists. If you enter a megachurch practically anywhere in America these days, you can expect that much of the congregation will be actively awaiting the end of the world.

But you can't have Armageddon without certain preconditions, and most important among those is a final battle that the Prophet Ezekiel predicted will take place between a satanic army (in most interpretations, a force of Arabs led by Russia) and God's chosen people, Israel. Most End Timers believe the key alliance here will be between Russia and Iran and that only following a savage military confrontation between those states and Israel, probably of a catastrophic nuclear nature, will Christ reappear and begin his glorious second reign.

Thus the whole idea behind Christian Zionism is to align America with the nation of Israel so as to "hurry God up" in his efforts to bring about this key final showdown. Practically speaking, this manifests itself, mainly, in the form of American evangelical Christians endorsing pro-Israel policies, support that Israel itself has been happy to receive (Benjamin Netanyahu has even appeared at Hagee's Cornerstone Church) despite the fact that dispensationalist doctrine also envisions the mass conversion of all Jews to Christianity after the final battle, with dire consequences for those who don't. I wonder exactly how most Israelis would feel about the sudden warmth being shown them by American evangelicals if they knew, for instance, that people like ardent End Timer Hal Lindsey had predicted the "mother of all Holocausts" for those Jews who refused to convert at the Second Coming.

Anyway, Pastor Hagee, that drawling, white-haired, barrel-organvoiced Texan with the kindly smile who gives such powerful ministry on TV, is one of America's chief pitchmen for Christian Zionism. He founded a group called Christians United for Israel (CUFI), whose mission is to rally Christians to Israel's cause. According to the Washington Post, Hagee has regular access to the White House and has many followers among George Bush's staff. Remarkably, when CUFI held a conference in Washington this past summer, no less a personage than Republican National Committee chairman Ken Mehlman gave the keynote address. Also participating as speakers were Senators Sam Brownback and Rick Santorum, while George W. Bush and Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert sent recorded greetings.

When I first started reading about Hagee and about the felicitous alliance between the American religious right and the hard- liners in the Israeli government, my first reaction was to applaud it as a brilliantly cynical piece of international politics. Whether it was conceived in the corridors of Mossad headquarters or in some dreary archcapitalist think tank funded by the Smith Richardson Foundation (and I'm guessing it was probably some combination of both), I had no idea, but it was unmistakably an ingenious solution to the problem of how to rally southern conservative Christians a few generations removed from their cross-burning Klan days to the cause of Israel. If it turns out that it was dreamed up by the same guy who figured out how to get laid-off midwestern factory workers to whoop for freetrade Republicanism by plastering the airwaves with French- kissing men, I have to say, that guy deserves some kind of special medal—a Triple Order of Satan, or something like that.

PRIESTLY GARMENTS NOW ON SALE TO KOHENS

2008-07-12T13:06:00.002-05:00

From the Indian Express:

Priestly garments give Jews hope of new temple at Jerusalem
Associated Press
Posted online: Tuesday, July 08, 2008 at 2229 hrs Print Email

JERUSALEM, July 7: In a stuffy basement off an Old City alleyway in Jerusalem, tailors using ancient texts as a blueprint have begun making a curious line of clothing that they hope will be worn by priests in a reconstructed Jewish Temple—the spiritual centre of Judaism destroyed by Roman legions two millennia ago.

The project, run by a Jerusalem group called the Temple Institute, is part of an ideology that advocates making practical preparations for the rebuilding of the ancient Temple on a disputed rectangle in Jerusalem sacred to both Jews and Muslims.

Jews call the site the Temple Mount and venerate it as their holiest place. The Temple itself was destroyed by Roman legions two millennia ago. For the past 1,300 years, the site has been home to Islam’s third-holiest shrine, the Noble Sanctuary, including the golden Dome of the Rock and the Al-Aqsa Mosque.

These conflicting claims lie at the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and past efforts to upset the status quo have erupted into violence.

The Temple Institute has made priestly garments in the past for display in the small museum it runs in the Jewish Quarter, but those were hand-sewn and cost upward of $10,000 each. The institute recently received rabbinic permission to begin using sewing machines for the first time, bringing the cost down and allowing them to produce dozens or hundreds of garments, depending on how many orders come in.

If you are a descendant of the Jewish priestly class, a full outfit, including an embroidered belt 32 biblical cubits (48 feet, 15 meters) long, can be yours for about $800. “Before, the clothes we made were to go on display. Now we’re engaged in the practical fulfillment of the divine commandment,” said Yehuda Glick, the Temple Institute’s director, at a ceremony marking the workshop’s opening last week.

The thread, six-ply flax, was purchased in India, and the diamond-patterned fabric was woven in Israel. The blue dye, which the Bible calls “tchelet,” is made from the secretions of a snail found in the Mediterranean Sea, and the red colour comes from an aphid found on local trees.

The priests, made up of descendants of the Biblical figure Aaron, were an elite group entrusted with the Temple and its rituals, such as sacrificing animals and making other offerings to God. The memory of belonging to that class has been preserved by Jews through the centuries. Their most common family name is “Cohen,” meaning priest.

The Temple Institute and similarly minded believers think those modern priests will soon have to resume the rituals of their ancestors in a rebuilt Temple, and that by preparing their garments they are bringing that day closer.

However, Adnan Husseini, formerly the top Muslim official at the site and now an adviser on Jerusalem affairs to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, called the work of such groups a “provocation”. “If they talk about building the third Temple, what does it mean? It means they will destroy the Islamic mosques,” Husseini said.

THE JULY CUFI SUMMIT

2008-07-11T10:15:00.001-05:00

From Common Dreams.org:

Christian Zionist Gathering Mired in Controversy
by Bill Berkowitz

The battle lines over Pastor John Hagee have been drawn, redrawn, and are no doubt being drawn again as this is being written. The San Antonio, Texas-based mega-preacher with the multi-million-dollar empire has always been controversial, but these days, the pastor is a lightning rod for critics.

And as the days pass leading up to Hagee’s annual Christians United for Israel (CUFI) conference in Washington next month, new revelations of his anti-Semitism have come to light.

At last year’s CUFI conference, Senator Joseph Lieberman called Hagee “an Ish Elochim”, saying he is “a man of God, and, like Moses, he is the leader of a mighty multitude.”

When it was first revealed that Hagee had made a series of anti-Catholic remarks, critics, including Bill Donohue of the conservative Catholic League, went ballistic. Hagee apologised. When Hagee blamed gay people for causing Hurricane Katrina, many were offended. Hagee offered up a half-hearted apology and quickly moved on.

However, when Hagee’s remarks about Hitler being sent by God to force the Jews to pack their bags for Israel became a You Tube sensation — and then garnered the attention of the mainstream media — longtime allies in the Jewish community began to question what Hagee was up to.

To his credit, Arizona Senator John McCain, the Republican Party’s presumptive presidential nominee, quickly threw Hagee off the bus, despite having spent a year courting the pastor for his endorsement.

However, the condemnation hasn’t been universal. A number of fellow Christian conservatives and Jewish leaders have rushed to defend the beleaguered pastor. While last year Hagee was treated like royalty at the annual conference of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, he prudently chose not to attend this year’s meeting earlier this month. Nevertheless, when his name was brought up by CUFI executive director David Brog, “the crowd broke into a lengthy round of applause, ending in a standing ovation,” the Jewish Daily Forward reported.

From Jul. 21-24, Hagee’s Christians United for Israel will be holding its third annual “summit” in Washington. Among the scheduled speakers are Gary Bauer, a CUFI board member and longtime religious right activist and president of American Values; former Republican senator Rick Santorum; Israel’s ambassador to the United States, Sallai Meridor; Brad Gordon, co-director of Policy and Government Affairs at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC); Daniel Pipes; and Senator Joseph Lieberman.

Leonard Fein, in a Jewish Daily Forward piece titled “Our Hagee Problem Has Yet to Be Addressed” asked: “How many of these [the scheduled speakers at the CUFI conference] will now, in light of the new information about Hagee’s beliefs, cancel out? Or will they twist and turn to rationalise their continuing support for this false witness?”

Despite pleas not to attend the Washington meeting from a number of organisations, including the newly formed Jewish group J Street — which has partnered with Democracy for America in an effort called “Say It Ain’t So, Joe” — Lieberman appears thus far steadfast in his willingness to stand with Hagee.

Some of the other guests are also being asked to forgo attending the conference. At the same time, Hagee’s pals are urging their followers to go to Washington and support the embattled preacher.

In defending Hagee, Stephen Strang, president and chairman of Christian Life Missions and regional director for CUFI, wrote that “Hagee has done more than any other Christian in our generation to show love to the Jews and to stand strong with Israel. Yet he made one comment, taken out of context about Hitler, that some liberal blogger says makes him anti-Semitic.”

One comment as Strang alleges? Bruce Wilson, the investigative journalist who first put together the video of Hagee’s Hitler sermon, has uncovered more anti-Jewish material tucked away in the Hagee archives.

In an e-mail interview, Wilson told IPS that all of the Hagee material that he has been “writing about and making videos (short documentary videos in some cases) of has come from material that Hagee has mass marketed himself, mostly from his sermons.”

According to Wilson, at Hagee’s Cornerstone Church in San Antonio on three consecutive Sundays in March 2003, the pastor delivered “sermons heavily loaded with anti-Jewish memes, stereotypes, slurs and conspiracy theories, one of which was almost identical to what was perhaps Adolph Hitler’s favourite conspiracy theory, which alleged that an international Jewish banking cabal, led by the Jewish Rothschild banking family, controls the fates of entire nation, even the progression of world events and history, through the manipulation of global money markets.”

The three sermons — delivered on the eve of, and just after, the invasion of Iraq — were packaged and sold by Hagee’s ministry as “Iraq: The Final War.”

Wilson claims that Hagee’s sermons are part of a distinct and “deeply disturbing pattern.” He notes that Hagee’s Cornerstone Church members have sung “Blow the Trumpet in Zion” at CUFI’s “signature event”, the Night to Honour Israel, with scripture drawn from the Second Book of Joel, Chapter 2, verses 1-11.

“That scripture…concerns prophecy forecasting the invasion and ‘desolation’ of Israel expected by Hagee and his church flock, which is divided into 12 administrative units each named for a Tribe of Israel,” Wilson said.

Although the preaching of Hagee and other conservative Christian evangelicals has been going on for decades, “Few in the American Jewish community, or the Israeli Jewish community, grasp the magnitude of the anti-Jewish hatred that has been stoked from American pulpits and American televangelist broadcast networks,” Wilson recently wrote.

“The propaganda has been slightly coded but in the end not very subtle. Rather than directly vilify Jews, Christian fundamentalist preachers and leaders have for decades vilified groups and terms that traditionally, for better or worse, have been associated with Jews.”

While some Jewish leaders reject out of hand the End Times theory that sees Israel as the final battleground before the return of Christ, others prefer to look away, sometimes even laughing off the loopier aspects of these apocalyptic visions on the one hand, while accepting millions of dollars of support for their favourite Israel charities and powerful political network the Christian Zionists have built.

Bruce Wilson’s research, and the attendant publicity it generated, has likely forced Hagee to the sidelines for the bulk of the presidential campaign. When asked whether his new discoveries will lead to the severing of ties between Hagee and some of his most fervent Jewish supporters, Wilson told IPS that “were they to get anything close to the same level of media play as the ‘God sent Hitler’ video it might. Barring that, it would probably take something even more shocking to cause such a rift.”

Will Lieberman and Pipes continue backing Hagee regardless of what other anti-Jewish commentaries might be discovered? Will CUFI continue to escalate its push for the Bush Administration to deal militarily with Iran? These questions might be answered when CUFI members flock to Washington next month.

Bill Berkowitz is a longtime observer of the conservative movement. His column “Conservative Watch” documents the strategies, players, institutions, victories and defeats of the U.S. Right.

SHAHAR OZERI ON PERVERSE EGALITARIANISM

2008-06-11T14:12:00.001-05:00

John Hagee: Lunatic, Friend to our Politicians

June 11, 2008 by Shahar Ozeri

I’ve been watching McCain and Lieberman dance their way around their respective connections with John Hagee over the last few months and now I just can’t resist any longer. Not so latent reactionary Joe Lieberman recently described his good friend John Hagee as an eesh elokim like Moses (eesh elokin literally means “man of God,” but it also can mean prophet, clearly the intent here–yikes). Wow, way to go Joe! A new low! I guess that if you bring together lots and lots of those creepy “pro-Israel” Christians in order to lobby for a war with Iran in the hopes that Israel can be wiped out in order to fulfill God’s wishes you’re ok with Joe Lieberman. But hey, it’s ok, Joe just figures that this has to happen. Why? Well, it’s simple, because Hagee told him that what God wants. Hagee and company needs all those stiff Jewish bodies to get into the Kingdom–a last minute conversion for Lieberman? Yeah, Christian Zionism is great for Israel. Let’s not forget that this is the very same John Hagee who believes (and has even said publicly) that the Antichrist will be “a blasphemer and a homosexual” who is “at least partly Jewish, as was Adolf Hitler, as was Karl Marx.” Nice one! From the Huffington Post:

In his 2006 book “Jerusalem Countdown”, Hagee proposed the theory that “anti-Semitism, and thus the Holocaust, was the fault of Jews themselves — the result of an age old divine curse incurred by the ancient Hebrews through worshiping idols and passed, down the ages, to all Jews now alive.” He also wrote that “Most readers will be shocked by the clear record of history linking Adolf Hitler and the Roman Catholic Church in a conspiracy to exterminate the Jews.

Antisemitism just isn’t what it used to be, maybe a pogrom in Crown Heights would get everyone’s attention. Don’t worry though, Hagee is equal opportunity! He also hates Muslims because they are “mindless murderers that are mandated by the Koran to kill Jews and Christians.” Not only that, he hates Harry Potter:

As millions of people anticipate the release of the latest Harry Potter book and film, we’re reminded once again of Satan’s ongoing attempt to deceive and destroy. The whole purpose of the Potter books is to desensitize readers and introduce them to the occult.

MICHAEL EVANS OF TEXAS

2008-06-10T08:33:00.003-05:00

From Daily Online Alochona:

Christian Fundamentalism, the Global Crusade and
Muslims

Yoginder Sikand

If Christian fundamentalists are to be believed, America's invasion of Iraq and the consequent brutal slaughter of thousands of innocent civilians in that country are all part of a grand divine plan that will finally culminate in the 'second coming' of Jesus Christ. Establishing an empire that will extend all over the globe, Christ will rule like a powerful monarch, saving those who believe in him and dispatching non-believers, all non-Christians and non-conformist Christians, to everlasting perdition in hell. This is no childish nonsense for millions of Christian fundamentalists, who sincerely believe this to be predicted in the Bible. Not surprisingly, American Christian fundamentalists are today among the most fanatic supporters of Bush's global imperialist wars, in Iraq and elsewhere, which they see as in keeping with the divine mandate. They are no eccentric or lunatic fringe elements, for today Christian fundamentalists exercise a powerful influence in American politics. Among them is George Bush himself, who insists that the American invasion of Iraq has been sanctioned by God, with whom he claims to be in personal communication.

While the Western press is awash with stories, real and exaggerated, about 'Islamic fundamentalists', rarely is mention made about Christian fundamentalists, who, with their vast resources and close links with the current American administration, are a potentially more menacing threat than their Muslim counterparts. According to newspaper reports more than a third of Americans are associated with one or the other Christian fundamentalist outfit, most of which are fiercely anti-communist, anti-Muslim and are passionate advocates of free-market capitalism, global American hegemony and the myth of the civilizing mission of white America. In recent years, these fundamentalist groups have been engaged in aggressive missionary work in other countries as well, including in the so-called 'Third World'. Fired by a passionate hatred for other religions, which they dismiss as 'false' and even 'Satanic', they are today among the most well-funded missionary groups in large parts of Asia and Africa. Crusading for Christ, these fundamentalist groups are not simply out fishing for souls. Rather, for them Christianity is only part of the agenda, which also includes aggressively promoting American and Zionist interests. Today, these groups preach not only Christ but also Pax Americana and even American-led imperialist wars, which they bless as holy causes to usher in the final arrival of Jesus.

Texas-based author and preacher Michael Evans is one of the most notorious American Christian fundamentalist preachers today, a passionate advocate of war in the name of Christ. In a recently published book, titled Beyond Iraq: The Next Move-Ancient Prophecy and Modern-Day Conspiracy Collide (Whitestone Books, Florida, 2003), he spells out a grand design for American global hegemony, blessed in the guise of a holy global war. Key players in this 'divine' plot include the CIA, the American government and army, and Israel, besides various Christian fundamentalist outfits. The book is dedicated, among others, to what Evans describes as 'two old friends', Ehud Olmert, former Israeli Vice President, and the former Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. Equally revealingly, the book begins with a quotation which graces the lobby of the original headquarters of the CIA.

Evans is no petty crank who claims to be God-possessed, although his writings might seem to suggest that. The jacket of the book describes him as a 'TIME magazine best-selling author', who has appeared on the BBC and on American television channels and who has written for such papers as the Wall Street Journal and the Jerusalem Post. He hobnobs with the highest of American and Israeli politicians and religious leaders, and is evidently taken very seriously in Christian fundamentalist circles. That Evans is also a passionate Bush-backer is amply evident in his clam that, 'I know, from a first hand, personal interview with him that Bush is a man of faith who believes in the Bible'.

Evans is the founder of the 'Jerusalem Prayer Team', which, he says, he established after having been visited by God in a vision. Among those who participated in the inauguration of his outfit were such names as Franklin Graham, Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell, all notorious American Christian fundamentalist leaders, Governor Dick Perry and Representative Dick Armey, and Benjamin Netanyahu, former Israeli Prime Minister. Thousands of others in America and elsewhere, so he claims, have joined his movement in the aftermath of 11 September, 2001. His ultimate aim, he writes, is to have one million 'intercessors praying daily for the peace of Jesus and God's protection for Israel' so that 'demonic powers will be defeated by holy angels in a battle that cannot be seen with the natural eye'.

A fierce Christian Zionist, Evans has close links with the Israeli establishment. The book's jacket states that he received the 'Ambassador Award' from the government of Israel and relates that he has been 'a confidante to most of Israel's prime ministers and to both of Jerusalem's mayors'. The jacket quotes Benjamin Netanyahu as praising Evans for having 'consistently demonstrated the moral clarity that is necessary to defend Israel from the lies and distortions of its enemies'. This is no empty boast: the book contains pictures of Evans with Menachem Begin endorsing his first book, 'Israel: America's Key To Survival', praying with Shimon Peres, comforting Jewish victims of a bomb blast in Israel, launching the 'Jerusalem Prayer Team' along with Jerusalem's mayor, pledging support to Israel before Yitzhak Shamir along with half a million signatures of fellow Christians, championing Israel's cause at the royal palace in Madrid and keeping company with American soldiers in Lebanon and Somalia.

Christianity, War and the 'Defence' of Israel

For Evans, and numerous other rabid Christian fundamentalist preachers of hate like him, one of the most crucial purposes of America's invasion of Iraq is the 'defence' of Israel, which he regards as a solemn Christian duty. If till recently Jews were routinely reviled by the Church as 'Christ-killers', and, accordingly, hounded by Christian authorities, many of today's Christian fundamentalists, like Evans, are passionate advocates of the state of Israel. This does not, however, represent any shift in their fervent belief, intrinsic to mainstream Christianity, that non-Christians, Jews included, are destined for Hell. Rather, it is part of a wider conversion agenda. Jesus, they believe, will return to the world to rule only once the Jews have 'returned' to Palestine and have rebuilt the temple of David that was destroyed almost two thousand years ago. After this momentous event, many Jews will convert to Christianity and those who refuse to will be sent to hell. Till then, Christian fundamentalists argue, the Jews and their state must be passionately defended from their 'enemies', who are invariably identified as Arabs and Muslims.

The 'defence' of Israel, a central point in the Christian fundamentalist agenda, is typically argued in racist terms. Israel, Christian fundamentalists believe, are God's 'chosen people', and they quote the Bible as making this claim, suggesting, therefore, that non-Jewish peoples are somehow lesser beings. Evans, too, makes this point and argues that according to the Bible 'God will bless those who bless Israel' and will 'curse those who curse it'. 'History records', he says, 'that God deals with nations in accordance with how those nations deal with Israel'. Hence, in the 'defence' of Israel,Christians, Evans argues, have no choice. If they are true to their faith, he says, they must join hands with America in its war for 'defending' Israel, and must 'support Israel in every possible way'. 'We must either choose Mount Zion [Jerusalem] and be among those who obey the voice of the Spirit of the Lord', he writes, 'or we will be left to the passions of our flesh, drinking the wine of her [Bablyon's or Iraq's] fornication'.

The invasion of Iraq, and the broader American 'war on terror', is, Evans says, is akin to 'divine light [.] proclaiming like a trumpet a spiritual battle of monumental proportions', pitting Babylon, the Biblical Iraq, the 'spiritual centre of darkness', against Jerusalem or contemporary Israel, the 'spiritual centre of light'. But so that this 'divine light' should spread beyond the confines of Babylon, Evans pleads for America to extend its war all over the globe, to every country that dares to challenge American supremacy and the state of Israel. This war, he says, should aim at the elimination of all 'terrorists', defined as those who refuse to support Israeli and American interests. In this, the invasion and occupation of Iraq is of vital importance, Evans says, because it will 'become a US base' to destroy 'terrorist' networks elsewhere in the Middle East and eventually to usher in what he calls 'the apocalyptic battle' of Armageddon, 'the final battles of the ages' as allegedly 'prophesied in Daniel, Jeremiah and Revelations', chapters of the Bible.

America, as Evans sees it, must be ready to sacrifice itself to protect Israel, because that, he says, is precisely what the Christian God wants. Hence, Palestinians resisting the illegal occupation of their land and all those who opposed to Israel and its imperialist and expansionist policies must be crushed with the might of American arms, he insists. The Christian God does not brook any peace with such people, he argues. The Bible, he announces, says that those who fight against Israel, God's supposedly chosen people and recipients of His 'special blessing', would be destroyed by God Himself. He quotes the Bible as declaring: 'And this shall be the plague with which the Lord will strike all the people who fought against Jerusalem: Their flesh shall dissolve while they stand on their feet. Their eyes shall dissolve in their sockets. And their tongues shall dissolve in their mouths'.

Given this supposed divine backing, Evans exhorts America to invade and subjugate all countries opposed to Israel, specifically naming Lebanon, Syria and Iran. The ultimate agenda, he says, is to destroy these countries and establish what Zionists call Eretz or Greater Israel, extending to and including Iraq. This is because, Evans quotes the Bible as saying, God allegedly gave this vast stretch of land, from the Nile to the Euphrates, to Abraham and his son Isaac and his descendants, ancestors of the Jews, as a covenant and as their 'everlasting possession'. Echoing hardliner Zionists, Evans insists that there can be no peace with the Palestinians at any cost, because, he claims, the Christian God is opposed to this. If Israel and America are to faithfully abide by the Christian God's will, he says, they must not let anything get in the way of the establishment of Eretz Israel. Thus, various peace proposals that involve any territorial concessions on the part of Israel are ruled out. This is because, as Evans alleges, God has given the entire territory to the Jews till eternity.

He quotes the Bible as saying that while God specially blessed Isaac and his descendants, the Jews, he had a different plan in mind for the Arabs, descendants of Ishmael, Abraham's other son. Referring to Ishmael Evans quotes the Bible as saying, 'He will be a wild man; His hand shall be against every man and every man's hand against him'. This racist stereotype, so deeply rooted in traditional Christian discourse about Muslims, is held by Evans to be what he calls 'a fitting description of the Arab terrorist' and, presumably, as justifying the annihilation of the Arab people, as well as other Muslims. Evans goes so far in vilifying Arabs and Muslims as to call Muhammad a proto-terrorist, alleging that he had banished and killed Jews for not believing in him. 'Terrorism', he claims, is a logical consequence of Islam, and he argues that 'Muhammad set a sordid example for his present-day disciples, the Qadafis, Khomeinis, Arafats and bin Ladens and Husseins of this world'. Claiming knowledge of the unseen, he even announces that Islam is 'a malevolent manifestation of a religion conceived in the pit of hell'.

Evans thus equates Islam with the forces of the 'Anti-Christ', against whom he appeals to Christians to marshal all the resources at their command. Ironically, while spewing hatred and calling for a global war, he presents Christianity as peace-loving, contrasting it with Islam, which he equates with 'terrorism'. 'Christianity differs from Islam as day differs from night', he claims, completely unmindful of the sordid and blood-soaked history of the faith he claims to
champion. In the same breath as he issues a general summons to Christians to wage war in the name of their faith he refers to the Bible as instructing Christians to 'turn the other cheek' when slapped, in order to argue that, unlike Christianity, Islam is an inherently vile religion, equating it with what he terms 'the law of the bullet, militancy, treachery, terrorism and violence'.

Christianity, America and Oil

Christian fundamentalists are ardent advocates of free-market capitalism, having played a key role in America's war against communism during the Cold War. Christ, capitalism and American supremacy go together, Evans believes, and so, while announcing that an American-spearheaded global war is precisely what Christ mandates, he approvingly quotes Isser Harel, founder of the Israeli secret services' organization Mossad, who speaks of the 'terror' threat to America's 'freedom', 'capitalism' and 'power', and exhorts America to take appropriate defence measures. Evans goes so far as to advise the America to capture all the oil wealth in Arab lands in order to prevent 'terrorists' from using oil wealth to target Israel, home to God's supposedly 'special people'. A more ingenuous excuse to justify American greed could hardly be devised!

Since Muslims, especially the Arabs, are branded virtually as agents of the Devil, Evans argues that America, as self-appointed agent of Christ, should have no qualms about invading oil-rich Arab lands. This would, he says, break America's dependence on Muslim countries for oil. If America seizes all Arab oil-fields, it would, he says, sharply reduce oil prices, forcing Muslim countries 'to their knees', giving them only two options: 'cooperate with the war on terror or go bankrupt'. At the same time as he exhorts America to invade and occupy all the countries, no matter what the human cost, Evans warns that it should not be serious about its rhetoric of exporting 'democracy' to the Middle East, for, he argues, it would lead to anti-American and
anti-Israeli Islamists taking over.

Invasion of Iraq and the Ushering in of Global Christendom and Pax-Americana

Evans sees America's invasion and occupation of Iraq as the unfolding of a divine plan for the world. It is nothing less than what he calls a grand 'spiritual battle', between Christianity and Satanic forces and 'demons', as represented by Muslims and other non-Christians. Accordingly, he fervently welcomes America's invasion of Iraq and pleads that America should expand the theatre of war by invading various other, mostly Muslim, countries. The murder and destruction that America has wrought in Iraq is nothing to grieve about, Evans seems to suggest. It is a price, he argues, that God is supposedly exacting from Muslims for having been 'coerced' by Satan to 'loathe' the Jews, 'God's Chosen People'. It is also a divine punishment, he says, for Iraq having allegedly possessing 'deadly chemical, biological or nuclear weapons', echoing the bogus claim made by Bush, Blair and their henchmen which they used to justify their invasion of that country. Weak-hearted Christians who might disagree are advised to fall in line, for, Evans says, this is precisely what the Bible predicts and what God mandates. 'I will raise against Babylon an assembly of great nations from the north country, for she has sinned against God', the Jewish prophet Jeremiah is said to have announced, and Evans takes this as evidence of his claim that the American invasion of Iraq is demanded by God and that all America is doing is to faithfully follow God's will.

Iraq, the Biblical Babylon, Evans insists, represents the forces of Satan, and hence deserves to be crushed by America, God's agent, through invasion and war. 'Babylon is fallen, that great city, because she has made all nations drink of the wine of the wrath of her fornication', he quotes the Bible as saying. 'I will rise up against them [.] I will cut off from Babylon her name and survivors, her offspring and descendants [.] I will turn her into a place for owls and into swampland. I will sweep her with the broom of destruction', Evans quotes the Biblical God as having declared. He marshals other Biblical verses to press the argument about Iraq being allegedly inherently 'evil' and hence deserving harsh repression at American hands. Eve and Adam are said to have committed the 'first sin' there; it was in Iraq that occult and astrology were invented; Nebuchadnezzar, ruler of Babylon, conquered Israel and enslaved the Jews; the Babylonians built the Tower of Babel, thereby defying God by trying to reach heaven without His permission; and the Bible describes Babylon as the 'seat' of the Anti-Christ and the 'Beast', the 'seat of Satan's evil', in contrast to Jerusalem, the 'seat of God's righteousness', against whom it is destined to be pitted in the final battle that will usher in Jesus' 'second coming'.

In all, then, Evan argues, America is simply acting as the Christian God's handmaiden in wreaking destruction and death in Iraq. Instead of being blamed or castigated for this, he argues, it should be praised. This destruction is Biblically mandated, he repeats, for the Bible has announced that, 'Babylon, the great, has fallen and has become a dwelling place of demons, a prison for every foul spirit, and a cage for every unclean and hated bird [.] Therefore, her plague will come in one day-death and mourning and famine. And she will be utterly burned with fire [.] Thus with violence the great city Babylon shall be thrown down and shall not be found anymore'.

But this terrible destruction in Iraq is only the beginning of a bloody trail of events mandated by a supposedly blood-thirsty and vengeful God. According to Evans' reading of the Bible, the American invasion of Iraq is what he calls 'the dress-rehearsal' for the grand global battle of Armageddon between the forces of Christ and Satan. Prior to this battle, he quotes the Bible as saying, 'demons and spirits' bound up in the Euphrates in Iraq will be released, and, with an army of 200 million, will kill off a third of the world's total inhabitants through nuclear war. This grand battle, Evans writes, is not far off. Hence, he appeals to Christians to 'put on the armour of God' and 'engage in spiritual battle'. Now, is the time, he says, to prepare for the impending return of Christ. Presumably, after Iraq is destroyed through the agency of the Americans, Christ will suddenly appear in Jerusalem and establish his global empire, ushering in the end of the world as we know it.

Horrendous as Evans' views are, they do find a powerful echo in Christian fundamentalist circles today, more so given their growing influence in policy-making circles in the West, particularly in America. If the world is to be saved from the Armageddon that Evans and his ilk are bent on calling down from the heavens it is imperative that Western imperialism and Christian fundamentalism be interrogated, challenged and opposed, particularly by sincere Christians themselves.

A GREATER LOVE FOR PEACE

2008-06-09T08:28:00.001-05:00

A lasting love for Israel, but a greater love for peace
By Michael Felsen in the Boston Globe
June 9, 2008

IN FEBRUARY, John McCain eagerly accepted the endorsement of megachurch televangelist and Christian Zionist leader John Hagee. But almost immediately, the presumptive Republican nominee was under siege by Catholic advocates grossly offended by Hagee's characterization of their church as "apostate" and "the great whore." McCain wavered and Hagee publicly apologized; a close call, but the relationship survived.

A few weeks ago, a Hagee sermon from the late 1990s surfaced. In it, Hagee interprets Jeremiah 16 as foretelling Theodor Herzl's efforts to shepherd Diaspora Jews back to the Land of Israel. When Herzl's attempts proved inadequate, Hagee tells us, God ushered Hitler, the "hunter," onto the scene, because "God said, 'my top priority for the Jewish people is to get them to come back to the Land of Israel.' "

McCain called these statements "crazy and unacceptable," and promptly repudiated not only the pastor's words but his endorsement as well. As far as McCain was concerned, this was pretty toxic stuff.

Not so for Senator Joseph Lieberman, who days ago confirmed that he will be a keynote speaker at the annual Washington-Israel summit to be held this summer by Christians United For Israel, a lobbying group founded by Hagee. Also slated to speak are Sallai Meridor, Israel's ambassador to the United States, and a handful of other Jews.

Is something wrong with this picture? Should Jews care about Hagee's remarks? Or should we forgive them, in the face of his professed love for Jews and the state of Israel, and the material contributions made by his followers as apparent evidence of that love?

Heartfelt as it may be, Hagee's love arises from his reading of Scripture that also eagerly anticipates an imminent apocalyptic war heralding Jesus' return. As prelude to the second coming, Jews in great numbers are required to return to biblical Israel and reestablish their dominion. Hagee and his flock have supported this venture. They have helped bring Russian Jews to Israel, and have buttressed settlements in the West Bank through financial and political support. They have also opposed peace talks with the Palestinians and the ceding by Israel of even one centimeter of the West Bank, while vigorously encouraging preemptive military strikes against Iran.

As Hagee reads the Bible, God is evidently prepared to engage in the most heinous acts imaginable to reach the "end times" when Jesus will return. Hagee thinks the Holocaust was simply God's means to an end, a horrific but effective and necessary method for impelling to the Holy Land those Jews who survived. But there's more.

Now that Israel has been established as a Jewish state, the stage is set for another impending horror: the cataclysmic battle of Armageddon (in which countless Jews and other nonbelievers will die), followed by Jesus' triumphal return, with salvation for those who accept him, and perdition for the rest.

Despite the implications of this theology, Hagee and Christians United For Israel profess love for Jews and Israel, and they claim to take political action accordingly. As part of the conference this summer, thousands of Christian Zionists will lobby Congress. When they do, I hope they will communicate their love - consistent with the desire for peace of the majority of Israelis and Palestinians - by urging US lawmakers to vigorously support a fair and equitable two-state solution to the conflict, along the lines of, for example, the Geneva Accord.

I hope they will advocate the use of all possible diplomatic and nonmilitary means to address the problems that plague the region. I hope, rather than rattling sabers in excited anticipation of a coming apocalypse, they will promote new and creative means to plant the seeds of lasting peace amongst the peoples of the region. I hope. Because efforts by Christians United For Israel to the contrary - aided by Lieberman and others, and whether intended to or not - seem all too likely to draw us closer to Armageddon. That's love we can do without.

Michael Felsen, an attorney, currently serves as president of the Boston chapter and on the National Executive Board of Workmen's Circle, a 100-year-old Jewish communal group.

FROM AN ARTICLE BY BRUCE WILSON ON ISRAELENEWS

2008-06-07T20:38:00.002-05:00

John Hagee and his Cornerstone Church members sing for the invasion and devastation of Israel, quite literally … the Middle East is quite heavily armed and tensions are always high … and so one single act of terrorism could set the entire end-times conflict in motion. And, as CUFI Regional Director Billye Brim has pointedly declared in an internationally televised "Believer's Voice Of Victory" segment, "God's plan" doesn't simply happen of its own accord. Humans make it happen. Chirped Brim, to millions maybe, "It takes you". ..

Brim stated that humans can consciously and actively play a role in enacting "God's [end-tine] plan" - which Hagee, Brim and others claim to know personally--down to every last jot and tittle, every last river of blood and thermonuclear blast. Billye Brim has also said she knows exactly when God, presumably [per Brim's views - which John Hagee probably shares] acting through human agents, will destroy the Dome of the Rock, Islam's 3rd holiest site on Earth. Billye Brim spoke publicly of the need, according to beliefs of hers which are widely shared among CUFI's Christian membership, that the Dome of the Rock must be removed --by force one would guess, because the late-7th Century, sublimely elegant and graceful Islamic structure will not simply grow legs and relocate of its own volition - an act which the State of Israel classes as a national security, terrorist threat of the highest order given the widespread expectation that such a destructive act of religious desecration, against the Islamic holy site revered by hundreds of millions of Muslims worldwide, could trigger regional war or even a world war. "God has a plan for that hill," declared Billye Brim.

MOFAZ SAYS ISRAEL WILL ATTACK IRAN

2008-06-06T22:17:00.002-05:00

Shaul Mofaz, a member of Ehud Olmert's cabinet, said today that if Iran continued with its plan to develop nuclear weapons, Israel will attack it. With Olhmert in trouble on corruption charges, Mofaz could be the next prime minister of Israel. So he has to be taken seriously.

Not only did he say that he would attack Iran, he also said that economic sanctions have not worked and would not keep the Iranians from building nuclear weapons and the only solution he sees is to attack Iran and destroy their facilities, which he said Israel would do before Iran has a chance to complete their work. Mofaz also stated that the US would support any Israeli action against Iran. That, however, assumes a Bush presidency, which suggests the possible timing for this attack.

Here are the problems with Mofaz' position: 1) the CIA recently said there was no active program in Iran for building nuclear weapons, and 2) consider what the Israelis would do if the shoe was on the other foot. It would certainly not be acquiescence in the destruction of their nuclear facilities. It would likely be all-out war.

So why is Mofaz taking this position? It could have to do with the fact that he was born in Teheran. It could be because he has spent his entire life in the military. It could be that he comes from Likud. It could be because he is responsible for tactics against Palestinians which have been condemned elsewhere in the world, and that the Israeli left have called for his prosecution for war crimes. It could be because he recommended the US invasion of Iraq. It could be because he regards Muslim regimes as enemies in the same way Bush has. Read this for more possibilities. It could because he has ordered expansion of settlements in the West Bank.

What I have not found is his religious affiliation - and that's what I really want to know.

AIPAC LOVES HAGEE

2008-06-05T17:50:00.001-05:00

By Nathan Guttman in the Jewish Daily Forward:

Controversial evangelical leader Pastor John Hagee did not attend this week’s annual policy conference of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, but the continuing support he enjoys within the pro-Israel community was nevertheless on display.

Just two weeks ago, presumptive Republican presidential nominee John McCain rejected Hagee’s endorsement due to the pastor’s past controversial comments about the Holocaust and the Catholic Church. But in a closed-door, off-the-record session at the Aipac conference devoted to the topic of evangelical support for Israel, there was plenty of enthusiasm for the embattled pastor among those who crowded into a Washington Convention Center meeting room.

Speakers at the session, titled “Friends in Faith: Evangelical Christians and the Pro-Israel Movement,” included Gary Bauer, president of American Values; John Buhler, founder of Christian Advocates for Israel, and David Brog, executive director of Christians United for Israel, the group led by Hagee.

“I want to take a moment to discuss with you a good man, evangelical pastor John Hagee,” Brog said to the audience. Before Brog could finish the sentence, the crowd broke into a lengthy round of applause, ending in a standing ovation. Among the few attendees who did not cheer at the mention of Hagee’s name was the Anti-Defamation League’s national director, Abraham Foxman, who has occasionally been critical of the ties between the Jewish community and Christian Zionists.

Leaders of the Union for Reform Judaism spearheaded the criticism of Hagee last month, after it emerged that in past sermons the pastor had portrayed the Holocaust as an attempt by God to force Jews to move to Israel.

Last year, Hagee was one of the keynote speakers at the Aipac policy conference and was warmly welcomed by attendees. According to Brog, Hagee was invited to join this year’s conference as a participant but could not attend due to his busy schedule.

VERY GOOD NEWS

2008-06-04T12:48:00.002-05:00

Seth Coulter Walls in the Huffington Post:

Clinton Tag Teams With Obama At Israel Conference

June 4, 2008 11:41 AM

According to some observers, Sen. Barack Obama faced the prospect of a cool reception during his speech Tuesday morning at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee's annual policy conference. After receiving a massive ovation upon entering the crowd's view at the Washington Convention Center, however, the newly crowned presumptive Democratic nominee for president apparently felt comfortable enough to meet any residual doubts about his record on Israel's security with a touch of humor and a boatload of specifics.

Referencing chain emails filled with what Obama described as "tall tales" regarding his positions on Israel, the Illinois Senator asked AIPAC delegates to let him know "if you see this guy named Barack Obama, because he sounds pretty frightening." He proceeded to tell the audience that he would speaking from his heart, and then hit a series of specific pro-Israel positions that brought the crowd to its feet several times.

And then he got a hand from the next speaker: Sen. Hillary Clinton. "Let me be clear, I know that Senator Obama will be a good friend to Israel," she said. "I know Sen. Obama shares my view that the next president must be ready to say to the world. Our position is unchanging, our resolve unyielding, our stance non-negotiable. The United States stands with Israel, now and forever."

While Clinton studiously avoided referencing Obama's surge past the magic number of delegates needed to cinch the Democratic nomination, she took up the cause of defending him against criticisms Sen. John McCain made during his speech to AIPAC on Monday. Her response to McCain was explicit in a way Obama's was not, perhaps due to his attempt to respect the gathering's non-partisan spirit.

Clinton, however, had less to worry about in terms of alienating a group that was much more familiar and comfortable with her brand. Clinton told those in attendance: "Let me underscore that I believe we need a Democrat in the White House next January. ... President Bush has moved us in wrong direction." Referencing McCain's "strong rhetoric" from his speech to the conference on Monday, Clinton told AIPAC that the Arizona Republican's policies would weaken America and Israel's security, "making the Middle East a more dangerous place."

Chief among his own pledges, Obama said he would "never take military action off the table" in defending America's interests or those of Israel. "Do not be confused," he instructed the crowd. He also called on Egypt to cut off the smuggling of weapons into Hamas-controlled Gaza, described the return of Israeli soldiers captured by Hezbollah as a priority of U.S. policy, and said he would never "compromise when it comes to Israel's security." He also identified Jerusalem as Israel's capital at the end of any two-state solution.

Still, Obama sought to draw contrasts with the Bush administration, and by extension John McCain. The presumptive Democratic nominee noted that he had opposed holding elections in the Palestinian territories in 2006 with Hamas on the ballot -- a stance that drew cheers. Obama also said he would not wait until the "waning days" of his presidency to press for Israeli-Palestinian peace, an implicit rebuke to President Bush, who is seen as having contributed too little too late to that negotiation track.

When Obama invoked the Hebrew phrase "tikkun olam," regarding the need to "repair this world," a large whoop of cheers went up from young AIPAC staffers who had been herded around the press area -- perhaps to make certain the media heard loud praise for Obama. If their placement and volume was calculated, it turns out AIPAC need not have been so concerned.

A sustained round of enthusiastic applause from the entire conference followed Obama as he left the stage and shook hands with more than three dozen AIPAC board members that were seated behind him -- an elaborate process that was projected onto the hall's eight jumbo monitors. Each previous speaker at the conference, by contrast, only air-kissed and shook hands with those board members conveniently seated on the aisles behind the podium. But for Obama, the individual attention was perhaps a necessary and appreciated touch.

This may be Step One toward the so-called unity ticket.

MOONEY BRICE REDUX

2008-06-03T22:34:00.003-05:00

Like Mooney Brice in The Tenth Cow, Hagee is in with the President.

From People for the American Way

Hagee Had Line to the White House

Back when we first started writing about John Hagee back in 2006, we took issue with Kathleen Parker’s claim that people like Hagee were not very influential because nobody at the White House took them seriously. As we noted at the time, that argument would have been more effective had Hagee and others from his Christians United for Israel not regularly been invited to the White House and had President Bush not been sending messages to their annual gatherings.

As it turns out, Hagee did indeed have significant influence at the White House, as Scott McClellan confirmed yesterday in an interview on NPR’s “Fresh Air” – from the transcript:

GROSS: My guest is Scott McClellan. He was the White House press secretary from July '03 to May of '06. And his new memoir about those years is called "What Happened."

I've got a John Hagee question for you. You devote some of your memoir "What Happened" to social conservatives and their influence on policy in the Bush administration. And I know when John Hagee, who's been so much in the news lately, ever since his endorsement of McCain, which that's a bond that's been broken.

Mr. McCLELLAN: Yes.

GROSS: When he had his first summit for the Christian Zionist group that he founded, Christians United for Israel, President Bush sent a recorded greeting to Hagee and to the conference. Did Hagee have much sway within the Bush administration?

Mr. McCLELLAN: Well, he was one of a number of evangelical pastors, social conservative ones that were certainly part of our outreach at the White House. We had a person and a public liaison that was specifically tasked with reaching out to social conservative leaders. And so those leaders, yes, had a heavy influence on some of the White House policies. And I think that was one of the things that also hurt the president was that, at times it looked like his emphasis was on some of these issues that were important to social conservatives, like Terry Schiavo, like the constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage, and stem cell research. I think a lot of people were wondering, `Why are you spending so much time focusing on these issues when, you know, there are issues on energy and health care and the economy that need to be addressed?'

GROSS: So Pastor Hagee was influential within the Bush administration?

Mr. McCLELLAN: I'd say he was one of a number that certainly had some influence and was able to quickly get someone on the phone at the White House. So yes.

2008-06-02T14:51:00.001-05:00

MORE ISRAELI HOUSING IN THE OCCUPIED WEST BANK

2008-06-01T12:48:00.002-05:00

From Reuters:

Israel to build new homes in occupied West Bank
Sun Jun 1, 2008 12:18pm EDT

JERUSALEM (Reuters) - Israel announced plans on Sunday to build hundreds of new homes in an area of the occupied West Bank the Israeli government considers part of Jerusalem, despite U.S. and Palestinian calls to halt settlement expansion.

The announcement came two days before Prime Minister Ehud Olmert sets off for Washington for a three-day visit where he will meet U.S. President George W. Bush.

The 2003 peace "road map", reaffirmed by Israeli and Palestinian leaders at a conference hosted by Bush in November, requires a halt to all settlement activity on occupied land where Palestinians seek statehood.

Housing Minister Zeev Boim instructed his office to publish a tender to build an additional 763 housing units in Pisgat Zeev and 121 housing units at Har Homa, an area Palestinians refer to as Jabal Abu Ghneim.

Olmert later praised the housing plan at a meeting of his Kadima faction.

"We need to continue to strengthen Jerusalem as the capital of the state of Israel. This government is committed to it, it has been since its first day. It has lived up to its commitment and will continue to add and expand," Olmert said.

Both sites are located on lands captured by Israel during the 1967 Middle East war, and were incorporated into the municipal borders of Jerusalem in an act not recognized internationally.

Yasser Abed Rabbo, a senior aide to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, said Olmert's government "talks about peace while at the same time works on undermining the basis of peace by increasing settlement activity in Jerusalem and around it".

Olmert, in keeping with the previous government's policy, has vowed to keep West Bank settlement blocs, including enclaves near Jerusalem, under any future peace accord.

Israel regards all of Jerusalem as its capital. Palestinians want East Jerusalem to be the capital of the state they hope to establish in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Last month Boim instructed his office to publish a tender to build 286 new homes in the Jewish settlement of Beitar Illit, near Jerusalem.

Palestinian leaders say settlement expansion around Jerusalem could cut off Palestinians' access to the holy city and carve up the West Bank in a way that would deny them a contiguous state.

(Additional reporting by Wafa Amr in Ramallah)

(Reporting by Avida Landau; editing by Elizabeth Piper)

AREN'T WE TIRED OF THE VICTIM MENTALITY YET?

2008-06-01T09:36:00.008-05:00

From Boston.com:

Hagee was, and wasn't, wrong on Holocaust

By Jeff Jacoby
June 1, 2008

IN THERESIENSTADT, a Nazi ghetto and labor camp near Prague from which tens of thousands of Jews were deported to their deaths during World War II, a tiny storeroom, unbeknownst to the Gestapo, was transformed into a synagogue. There Jewish inmates would gather in secret, a few at a time, to pour out their hearts in prayer - an act as stirring for its courage as for its demonstration of faith.
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What was in their thoughts as they prayed we can only speculate. But they left some clues. On the walls of the clandestine chapel, elegantly painted in red and black, were Biblical verses and passages from the Hebrew prayer book. Today many of the words have faded away. But those that are still legible express poignantly the heartache and hope of the doomed Jews who prayed in that small room as the Holocaust raged around them.

"We implore You," said one passage taken from the daily liturgy, "turn back from Your anger and have mercy on the treasured nation that You have chosen." Pleaded another: "Despite all this, we have not forgotten Your name - we beg You, do not forget us."

There has been some controversy in recent days over comments about God and the Holocaust made by the Rev. John Hagee, the influential evangelical pastor of San Antonio's 19,000-member Cornerstone Church. In a sermon delivered a decade ago and recently unearthed, Hagee suggested that the Holocaust was part of a divine plan, and that Hitler was a "hunter" whose persecution of the Jews was not only willed by God but foretold by the prophet Jeremiah 2,500 years ago. "Why did it happen?" Hagee asked. "Because God said, 'My top priority for the Jewish people is to get them to come back to the land of Israel.' "

Hagee's interpretation of scripture was grotesque and jarring, to say nothing of presumptuous in its claim to know the mind of God. But his long-forgotten sermon became news for one reason only: He had endorsed John McCain for president, and the left saw a target of opportunity. Many denounced the pastor's remarks, some doubtless hoping that the storm would neutralize political damage caused to Barack Obama by the America-damning diatribes of his longtime mentor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Others went even further, demonizing Hagee as an anti-Semite and smearing him, in the words of one Huffington Post blogger, as the kind of person who "celebrate[s] the Holocaust."

For his part, McCain wasted no time cutting his ties to Hagee. He called the comments about Hitler "crazy and unacceptable," and repudiated the preacher's endorsement.

As a Jew who believes in God and as the son of a Holocaust survivor, I find Hagee's theological explanation for the extermination of 6 million Jews strained and incoherent. Auschwitz and Babi Yar were not God's handiwork. They were created by men and women who were endowed with free will and chose to commit evil. Hagee's theory that God willed the murder of Europe's Jews because they didn't embrace Zionism smacks of blaming the victims - and worse, of letting their victimizers off the hook.

And yet . . .

And yet the belief that the Holocaust, like all calamities, is part of God's plan is hardly alien to Jewish or Christian thought. The Jews of Theresienstadt, risking their lives to gather in prayer, surely believed the horror surrounding them must be willed by God. That is why they begged Him: "Turn back from Your anger and have mercy."

As anyone even fleetingly familiar with the Hebrew Bible knows, it is not "crazy," let alone anti-Semitic, to believe that Jewish suffering can be a punishment from God. What is, if not crazy, then at least reckless, is to claim to know God's reasons for permitting the Holocaust. How a good and loving God can allow such evil is an old, old question, for which we have, in the words of Isaiah, only one ultimate answer: "For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, says the Lord."

John Hagee is no anti-Semite. Far from it: He is a passionate enemy of anti-Semitism, who has built a great ministry upon the conviction that Jew-hatred is a sin. The Jewish people and the Jewish state have few friends in the Christian world so devoted and indefatigable - even if it is politically unfashionable to say so.

Jeff Jacoby can be reached at jacoby@globe.com

Jacoby is correct that there are many Jews who believe the Holocaust was God's punishment for Jewish sins. There are also many Jews who believe (as is discussed in The Tenth Cow) that the Jews will suffer another Holocaust for having created the state of Israel. If you accept the first premise, then the second is also possible - and you have a mere doctrinal dispute. These are the kinds of arguments that cause so much pain in the world.

It is understandable if Israelis make the realpolitikal decision that Hagee's beliefs mean nothing in the face of the substantial support he gives them. A sensible Israeli would be debating Hagee's support on the moral question of whether the ends justify all means. Or whether it's okay to sucker Hagee's flock by playing along with the (as Jews see them) lunatic notions of Christian Zionism for Israel's financial benefit.

That's a Kissengerian approach - extremely cynical, but justified when your back's against the wall. The thing is, though, that Israel's back is not against the wall. It's fascinating that the same Jews who crow about Israel's power at the same time appear to be so terrified that it won't last that they refuse to consider the options that will make it last.

It's time to get past the eternal Jewish feeling of victimhood, and exercise a little noblesse oblige. Unless Jews become victims again. Or unless the policies Israel follows turn the world against the Jews and create the possibility of returning victimhood.

Sometimes I think some Jews cannot live without feeling like victims - which, in the face of current Jewish successes, looks like a mental illness. But even more sick, I think, are those who are making deliberate efforts to convince the world that Jews continue to be victims as a way of deflecting envy of, and protecting, those successes. The Nazis used that technique very successfully all the way up to the beginning of WWII. It is simply unacceptable for Jews to use it, too. And the even greater risk is that those Jews' behavior may not only create the appearance of victimhood, but the returned reality of it. Maybe this behavior is the precise kind of sin which will provoke God to abandon us again. After all, if we can play at being Kissinger, so can God.

Tags: tenth cow, red heifer, mishnah, book of numbers, chapter 19, evangelical, end of days, messiah, second coming, jesus, antichrist, kabbala, kabbalah, polo, aram, schefrin, novel, fiction, israel, jerusalem, bush, aipac, mount moriah, dome of the rock, tsfat, safed, second temple, golan heights, shekhina, jezreel valley, har megiddo, christian friends of israel, christian zionism, numbers 19:2, ANTICHRIST, revelation, rapture, tribulation, foundation stone, ein sof, sitra achra, neturei karta,iran, iraq, john hagee,

BLOWING UP THE DOME OF THE ROCK

2008-05-30T08:40:00.004-05:00

By Bruce Wilson on Israel eNews:

United States Senator Joseph Lieberman has called for banning "terrorist videos" from YouTube but Mr. Lieberman has failed to recognize that he has closely associated and allied himself with a group that has repeatedly and very publicly incited acts, against Israel, which the state of Israel considers acts of terrorism posing a security threat of the highest magnitude. Yesterday Journalist Max Blumenthal, on the Huffington post, elaborated on Lieberman's continuing association with a US organization inciting terrorist acts against Israel. [ALSO SEE: Christian Zionism in 60 Seconds

At the July 16-18, 2007 Christians United For Israel (CUFI) yearly conference in Washington D.C., Senator Lieberman lavished praise on Christians United For Israel's founder, Texas megachurch evangelist Pastor John Hagee, likening Hagee to Moses, calling Hagee a "man of God", and stating that, like Moses, Hagee was the leader of a 'mighty multitude'.

But on July 18, 2007, at the nonprofit 501(c)(3) group's "A Night To Honor Israel" capstone event of it's three-day conference, CUFI Regional Director Billye Brim suggested that "God has a plan" for the Dome of The Rock, Islam's 3rd holiest site on Earth and the spot from which Muslims believe Moses ascended into Heaven. In the eschatolgical, or "End-Time" belief system held by most Christians United For Israel members, The Dome Of The Rock must be removed or destroyed to make way for the construction of a 3rd Jewish temple.

"Upon that hill, there is a rock," Brim told the audience in attendance at the July 18 "Night To Honor Israel" event, which was attended by former speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, former Speaker of The House Tom Delay, other prominent US politicians and both current and former Israeli military and political leaders. "Upon that rock there is a dome," continued Billye Brim--as she addressed, in a stern and portentous tone, the attending crowd of up to 5,000 Christians United For Israel, while journalist Max Blumenthal and videographer Thomas Shoemaker, along with DayStar TV, filmed the event and while I watched and took notes. "God has a plan for that hill," declared Brim, to the cheers of the crowd.

Billye Brim did not directly call, on July 18th that night, for the destruction of The Dome of The Rock, but the message was clear--the Dome had to go--and in an undated audio recording I have discovered, from Billye Brim addressing a moderate sized and nearly orgiastic religious gathering, Brim makes the point more directly, stating that while she was with a group of evangelical Christians who were covertly praying around and on Jerusalem's Temple Mount Brim received a message directly from God which told her "that dome's coming down" and Billye Brim suggested that she knew the very date on which The Dome Of The Rock would be destroyed. "That dome's coming down," exulted Brim to her audience, and then she emitted what could be called nothing other than a triumphant ululation of victory.

Israel's Shin Bet security service is charged with protecting The Dome of the Rock and the nearby Al Akhsa mosque, from attempts by Jewish, American and Islamic extremist groups to damage or destroy the Islamic holy sites, and the State of Israel considers such attempts to pose a top-level security threat to Isrsel, because it is widely assumed that the destruction would touch off a regional, or even a world, war.

In his 2000 book The End of Days: Fundamentalism and The Struggle For The Temple Mount, Israeli journalist Gershom Gorenberg described the apocalyptic aspirations of the many fringe religious groups aspiring to bring on the Apocalypse and the "end of days" through attacks on the Dome of The Rock and the Al Akhsa mosque. The danger of such attacks is not hypothetical: the last several decades have seen both individual and organized group efforts to attack the Islamic religious sites on and around the Temple Mount, from both Christian and Jewish fundamentalist groups.

But Christians United For Israel, as an organization, is itself implicated in inciting attacks upon the Temple Mount holy sites. In early 2007, a year after the launch of the Christians United For Israel organization, which Pastor John Hagee has claimed can project it's purportedly "pro-Israel" message to millions of American voters via the email lists of numerous prominent evangelists, I publicized the fact that the Christians United For Israel organizational logo, distributed on all CUFI literature and paraphenelia, which also headed all web pages on CUFI's official organizational website, featured a photographic image of Jerusalem's Temple Mount from which the Dome of The Rock had been, literally, as was done by Stalin's agents to official Kremlin photographs of Politburo members who had been assassinated, airbrushed out of the image.

Tags: tenth cow, red heifer, mishnah, book of numbers, chapter 19, evangelical, end of days, messiah, second coming, jesus, antichrist, kabbala, kabbalah, polo, aram, schefrin, novel, fiction, israel, jerusalem, bush, aipac, mount moriah, dome of the rock, tsfat, safed, second temple, golan heights, shekhina, jezreel valley, har megiddo, christian friends of israel, christian zionism, numbers 19:2, ANTICHRIST, revelation, rapture, tribulation, foundation stone, ein sof, sitra achra, neturei karta,iran, iraq, john hagee,

FIGHTING "EVIL" - DEFINED AS WHAT?

2008-05-30T08:40:00.003-05:00

From the Jewish Journal:

May 29, 2008

Interfaith pep rally for Israel rocks the Forum

By Brad A. Greenberg

Karen Lyons kept smacking my leg and acting as if she was going to jump out of her seat. She's a church-going Christian from Pacific Palisades, married to a temple-attending Jew, and she's prone to such reactions when asked why she loves Israel and what she thinks of those who criticize its actions.

"It makes me physically ill, because that is not the Word of God. God have mercy on their souls because they are ignorant," she said. "He says pray for the peace of Jerusalem. Pray for the peace of Jerusalem! That is where he is coming back!"

Such faith -- the kind that Lyons said prevents her from voting for a presidential candidate who would promote a peace process that included dividing the Holy City -- was what drew her last week to the last major local celebration of Israel's 60th birthday.

On May 21, about 5,000 people streamed into the Forum in Inglewood, once the house of worship for the Lakers and now that of Faithful Central Bible Church, for a three-hour ceremony honoring three "Heroes of Israel" retired from the military: Col. Shimon Cahaner, who was senior commander during the 1967 capture of East Jerusalem; Brig. Gen. Dov Tamari, the first chief intelligence officer; and Lt. Gen. Moshe Yaalon, who was chief of staff during the second intifada.

"We are strong because of the spirit, the spirit which inspires me tonight here in Los Angeles," Yaalon said, noting Israel's achievements in science, technology, agriculture and the military. "The spirit of Judaism, Christianity, the faiths who believe in God and believe in good and believe in compassion, fighting the evil, those who are trying to destroy the State of Israel."

The event was hosted by the Israel Christian Nexus, its biggest gathering in years, and was sponsored by the Israeli consulate, The Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles and a plentitude of local synagogues and churches. Christian clergy offered prayers in Hebrew, a Jewish choir sang "Avram Avinu" in Ladino and Christian speakers reminded Jews over and over that they were God's first love, that salvation came to the world through David's offspring and, by extension, that every good Christian considers them spiritual brethren.

"I love God; I love Israel; I love the Israeli people," the Rev. Billy Ingram, of Maranatha Community Church, proclaimed.

With shofars blowing constantly throughout, philo-Semites waving plastic blue-and-white flags and regular interruptions from raucous applause, the celebration felt a lot like a pep rally for a league-winning sports team.

I wasn't sure all the children of Jacob in the crowd knew what to make of the outpouring. After all, the shouts they were hearing of "hallelujah" and "amen" were coming from Christians.

Sure, no group has proven more essential to American support for Israel than evangelical Christians, but the relationship between Jews and their apostate neighbors -- or vice versa depending on the perspective -- has been filled with many more moments of tension than transcendence: the Crusades, countless expulsions from European countries, passion plays and blood libels and pogroms, not to mention the Holocaust.

"I grew up in a world in which it would have been absolutely unfathomable that I would stand at a podium in a Christian house of worship, embracing Christian colleagues," said Rabbi Isaac Jeret of Congregation Ner Tamid of the South Bay, the evening's emcee. "The world has changed, ladies and gentlemen."

Indeed it has, evident in the two dominant strands of Christianity regarding God's chosen. While Catholics, Orthodox Christians and many in liberal mainline denominations believe Jews stopped being the elect when they rejected Jesus as lord and savior, evangelicals hold that the Tribe remains the apple of God's eye and that it is the duty of Christians to defend Israel and redeem Jewish souls.

"God brought Israel into being. It is part of his eternal plan, and anyone who doesn't love Israel doesn't love God -- plain and simple," Jim Tolle, pastor of The Church on the Way, a 20,000-member congregation in Van Nuys, said before the celebration began. He added, "I want Jews to love the idea of the messiah as is spoken of in the Prophets. I know him as Jesus Christ."

Christian Zionism has not been without controversy, though, because it's based on the belief that Jesus will not return until the Jews are back home, which -- as was recently revealed -- led the Rev. John Hagee, the influential leader of Christians United for Israel, to say in one sermon that Adolf Hitler was anointed by God to prod the Jews back to Palestine. (The release of this statement prompted Republican presidential hopeful Sen. John McCain to repudiate Hagee, whose endorsement he had embraced.)

But, in general, Israel has welcomed support from the American Christian community, partially because the two have a common enemy in Islamic extremism and a common struggle in the existential fight for Israel's survival.

"Tonight we send a steadfast message: Evildoers and your followers, you will never win!" Israeli Consul General Jacob Dayan shouted. "Today, for the first time in perhaps 2,000 years, we are seeing that we are no longer dealing with Jews vs. Christians but good vs. evil, humanity vs. brutality, freedom vs. tyranny and love of life vs. the glorification of death."

"To our brothers and sisters in the Christian community, I want to thank you for your support. It is a testament to your love and to your faith," he added. "By herself, Israel is strong, but with your support, Israel is almighty!"

Tags: tenth cow, red heifer, mishnah, book of numbers, chapter 19, evangelical, end of days, messiah, second coming, jesus, antichrist, kabbala, kabbalah, polo, aram, schefrin, novel, fiction, israel, jerusalem, bush, aipac, mount moriah, dome of the rock, tsfat, safed, second temple, golan heights, shekhina, jezreel valley, har megiddo, christian friends of israel, christian zionism, numbers 19:2, ANTICHRIST, revelation, rapture, tribulation, foundation stone, ein sof, sitra achra, neturei karta,iran, iraq, john hagee

THE TRAGEDY OF CHRISTIAN ZIONISM

2008-05-30T08:33:00.001-05:00

From Talk to Action:

The Tragedy of John Hagee's Christian Zionism
By Ruth Thu May 29, 2008 at 08:09:14 PM EST

John Hagee is the perfect example of the tragedy of today's apocalyptic Christian Zionism. How is it possible that the most vehemently pro-Israel of Americans can hold such Judeophobic beliefs and spread them around the world? This is what I call the "Perverse Paradox" and Hagee is currently one of its best known worldwide purveyors. Behind the big Israeli flags and the protestations of great love for Jews, the foundation of this dispensationalist belief system is its total obsession with answering the problem of the Jewish rejection of Jesus. This obsession is pursued to the point of exclusion of other Christian doctrine. In dispensationalist theology, an elaborately detailed and futuristic prophecy timeline solves the problem as Judaism is ultimately defeated and humbled in a final bloody Holocaust, with only a repentant converted Jewish population being spared. A version of this narrative is the basis for sermons, movies, and literally millions of books sold in the last decade.
topic: Analysis of Christian Right
Historically philo-semitism has been a term to describe those groups that were tolerant of their Jewish population for whatever reason, whether that tolerance was based on acceptance or something less benign. However, apocalyptic philo-Semitism is not acceptance or even tolerance of the humanity of Jews or Israel; it is the other edge of the sword of anti-Semitism. Both anti-Semites and apocalyptic philo-Semites are obsessed with Jews and Judaism, and consumed with the imagined role that Jews play in world events. Both view Jews as supernatural in their abilities to alter the course of the world and both stereotype Jews in a way that suits their own goals but has little to do with Jewish reality. The difference is that dispensationalists see a possibility for eventual redemption if Jews will only fulfill their assigned role in the end-times drama, and they are driven by the belief that their generation is the one to finally bring about this miraculous transformation of Judaism.

One cannot blame previous generations of Jews for choosing apocalyptic philo-Semitism over overt anti-Semitism. Often in history there were no other choices for survival. But the great tragedy of the current relationship between some Jewish leaders and apocalyptic Christian Zionism is that there was another choice. Jews have been accepted in American society as something other than a supernatural pawn for many years. It is the humanity of American Jews which is being stripped away every time a Jewish leader stands on stage with an apocalyptic televangelist.

Likewise, Israel's humanity is being stripped from her. Historically, Jewish Zionism aimed to humanize Jews in the eyes of the rest of the world. One of the goals of giving Jews a homeland was the removal of the supernatural mantle and associated horrors that had been repeatedly placed upon Jews and Judaism for hundreds of years. Hagee and others have spent the last three decades reversing this process by turning the clock back to a time when Jews were seen as nonhuman players whose actions, or refusal to act, manipulate the course of the rest of the world. A flesh and blood state of Israel was supposed to help free Judaism from this mantle, but apocalyptic Christian Zionism, in partnership with small groups of extremist Jews, have worked to make Israel the modern precedent for apocalyptic based policy. Hagee, and other dispensationalists, are televised worldwide and have become the new face of Zionism that the world sees, even though many Jews and Israelis may not know who they are. Turn on a television in a hotel room in Europe, Asia, or Africa and you will likely find Hagee or another apocalyptic televangelist describing a required nuclear war with Russia and the Arab world that will result in a greater Israel that spreads to the Euphrates. This widely publicized vision for Israel is alienating anyone who disagrees with foreign policy based on supernatural biblical interpretation.

The sad truth is that Hagee and his followers probably really do believe that they have a great love for the Jewish people and Israel. Many of their followers are well intentioned, but are being taught that there is nothing offensive in this view of Jews. Certainly there are areas where Jews and Christians must agree to disagree about religious differences. But dispensationalists have been openly embraced by a few Jewish leaders who have refused to either see or challenge their apocalyptic messages before joining forces with them, thus giving them the ultimate validation.

Through the efforts of Hagee and other Christian Zionists the world has been flooded with a wave of books, sermons, television shows, movies, and children's activities filled with Jewish portrayals that hold striking similarities to old conspiracy theories. This has created a revival of the view of Jews as the force that controls the destiny of a hapless Gentile world.

A significant portion of a young generation worldwide has been bombarded in recent years with this portrayal of Jews as the great supernatural force on which the rest of the world is being blessed or cursed. We have silently let it happen. Much of this generation will turn away from literal apocalyptic beliefs now that the apocalyptic frenzy of the millennium has come and gone. But these young people will likely forever harbor residual ideas from the supernatural objectification of Jews that they have been fed by Hagee and other dispensationalists. The zeal for Israel will be gone and only the Judeophobia will remain. The Jewish community needs to understand this.

Tags: tenth cow, red heifer, mishnah, book of numbers, chapter 19, evangelical, end of days, messiah, second coming, jesus, antichrist, kabbala, kabbalah, polo, aram, schefrin, novel, fiction, israel, jerusalem, bush, aipac, mount moriah, dome of the rock, tsfat, safed, second temple, golan heights, shekhina, jezreel valley, har megiddo, christian friends of israel, christian zionism, numbers 19:2, ANTICHRIST, revelation, rapture, tribulation, foundation stone, ein sof, sitra achra, neturei karta,iran, iraq, john hagee,

REAL ANTI-SEMITISM (IN CASE YOU WERE CONFUSED)

2008-05-29T20:46:00.006-05:00

By Bruce Wilson on the Huffington Post

Aimed at Children, Nationally Distributed Christian Comic Book Called a "Training Manual" For "The Next Pogrom Against Jews"

Posted May 29, 2008 | 05:37 PM (EST)

For several years now, I have been tracking and studying the covert aspects of Christian Zionism but today an anonymous source -- a devoted and concerned student of the spread of anti-Semitic ideas within American pop-culture and religious culture -- sent to me a product, currently sold at Barnes and Noble bookstores, that suggests the historically covert anti-Semitism within American Christian Zionist culture is mutating, changing and entering a new phase: the anti-Semitism is becoming overt. The Christian Zionism of Tim Lahaye and of Senator John McCain's recently renounced political endorser Pastor John Hagee, which has traditionally perpetrated coded attacks on Jews while also declaring them to be blessed by God, especially if they move to Israel, may be entering a new and very dark phase.

According to Chip Berlet, senior analyst at Political Research Associates, based near Boston, the portrayal of Jews found in a Manga comic now sold in Barnes and Noble depicts "A colorful comic training manual for motivating young leaders of the next pogrom against Jews. Not just offensive -- ghastly and horrific in content with a clear enemy scapegoat identified for venting apocalyptic religious bigotry."

Tyndale House, one of the largest Christian and Christian Zionist publishers in the United States, was built largely on the breakthrough publishing success of Tim LaHaye's and Jerry Jenkin's "Left Behind" books, movies and other paraphernalia attached to the now enormous "Left Behind" brand name and Tyndale publishes books by James Dobson, head of the enormous Colorado Springs Christian conservative nonprofit organization "Focus On The Family".

My source who originally discovered what Berlet identifies as a "comic training manual" for "the next pogrom against Jews" states that she:

"bought this copy of Manga Messiah at a local Barnes and Nobles, day before yesterday. Tyndale, the Christian publishing house, was also the publisher of the wildly successful Left Behind series, which popularized dispensational Christian Zionism and provided sales of over 60 million books. The growing acceptability in our society of this stereotype of Jews is not happening in spite of the apocalyptic Christian Zionist movement. It is happening because of it! This movement has been the incubator of media objectifying Jews as non human as well as the source of media that is mainstreaming anti-Jewish conspiracy theory. It is dressed up as biblical interpretation or futuristic prophecy but the images are being projected to millions of people all over the world. Even worse, the images are being validated in the minds of these millions as an acceptable way to view Jews because of the visible participation of Jewish leaders with the movement."

In the aftermath of the recent controversy over a video which I made and which subsequently was shown widely on national television, CNN's Wolf Blitzer credited the website I co-founded with journalist Frederick Clarkson with as having forced Arizona Senator John McCain to drop Texas megachurch Pastor John Hagee's February 28, 2008 endorsement of McCain's current presidential bid -- because my video showcased an audio excerpt from a sermon Hagee had given which, I believed at the time, had been given "in the late 1990s", in which Hagee stated that "God sent Hitler" and that Jews were not "spiritually alive".

Many news reports have minimize the audio excerpt, passing it off as a one-time event and as "historic". But, Pastor Hagee has not denied his remarks that God sent Hitler, and John Hagee Ministries up to the moment I am writing this, May 29, 2008, 3:49 PM EST, still sells the 3-sermon "Countdown To Crisis" DVD set from which I extracted the audio clip (the "Battle For Jerusalem" sermon). And, Pastor Hagee has over the years, in his sermons, books and films, promoted a wide range of anti-Jewish themes: most of the classic anti-Semitic tropes and slurs that have simmered in the background of Christianity and sometimes come to the foreground -- with tragic results.

But how can Pastor Hagee, who has raised substantial amounts of money to help Jews make Aliyah to Israel, who have publicly shed tears over the Holocaust, possibly be anti-Semitic ? The answer is complex and far beyond the scope of this short article, but one particular historical anecdote shines a telling light on the question.

As described in the book Henry Ford and The Jews, by Neil Baldwin, from the period of 1913 to 1920, Henry Ford made a regular, and generous, gift of new Ford automobiles to a one-time neighbor of Ford's: Rabbi Leo Franklin. By 1920, Franklin was on his 7th gifted Ford auto but in the years Franklin had enjoyed Ford's largesse, the Rabbi had risen in local Jewish leadership circles and by 1920 had come to a realization which led the Rabbi to return Ford's 7th gifted auto, a customized Model T; Rabbi Franklin had come to the moral realization he could no longer accept gifts from a man, Henry Ford, whose publication the Dearborn Independent was launching vicious anti-Jewish fusillades and which had begun to echo the evolving German Dolchstosslegende, the German "stab in the back" myth that formed a substantial part of the anti-Jewish animus growing in Germany in the early 1920s and which attributed the German loss in World War One to a Jewish plot.

As my anonymous source for the striking Manga comic book material featured in this post explains:

"Henry Ford believed that his friend, Rabbi Franklin, should not be concerned about Ford's spread of the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion," because as his spokesperson explained, he was only targeting "a certain type of Jew to open up the way for those Jews' self-correction." There could not be a better description of the current dispensationalist activities. They happily embrace the "good Jews" who will play their role in bringing about the violent apocalyptic drama that will end the "Jewish Question" forever and bring Jews to correct belief. However, while wrapped in the protection of a big Israeli flag, they are free to brutally attack "a certain type of Jew" which is the source of the moral degeneration in America and the obstacle to the Christian millennial reign."

In the 1920s, automaker Henry Ford paid for a mass printing of his "The International Jew" pamphlet, a close derivation of the "Protocols", and through such nakedly anti-Semitic literature Ford helped shape the ideological climate in Germany that fed the rise of Third Reich and The Holocaust. But, Ford did not believe he hated Jews as a people: only the "wrong" Jews.

As conservative Baptist scholar David P.Gushee described, in an address given at the Andover-Newton Theological Seminary, in Andover Massachusetts, during the summer of 2006, there are many troubling similarities between the narrative of cultural despair and cultural complaint that prevailed in Germany of the 1930's and corresponding narratives of cultural despair and complaint that have been on the rise in America in recent decades:

"It was this cultural despair--a toxic brew of reaction against secularism, anger related to the loss of World War I, distress over cultural disorientation and confusion, fears about the future of Germany, hatred of the victorious powers and of those who supposedly stabbed Germany in the back, and of course the search for scapegoats (mainly the Jews)--that motivated many Germans to adopt a reactionary, authoritarian, and nationalistic ethic that fueled their support for Hitler's rise to power. A broadly appealing narrative of national decline (or conspiratorial betrayal) was met by Hitler's narrative of national revenge leading to utopian unity in the Fuhrer-State.

"Conservative American evangelicals in recent decades have been deeply attracted to a parallel narrative of cultural despair. Normally the story begins with the rise of secularism in the 1960s, the abandonment of prayer in schools, and the Roe decision, all leading to an apocalyptic decline of American culture that must be arrested soon, before it is too late and "God withdraws his blessing" from America. While very few conservative evangelicals come into the vicinity of Hitler in hatefulness, elements similar to that kind of conservative-reactionary-nationalist narrative can be found in some Christian right-rhetoric: anger at those who are causing American moral decline, fear about the future, hatred of the "secularists" now preeminent in American life, and the search for scapegoats. The solution on offer -- a return to a strong Christian America through determined political action -- also has its parallels with the era under consideration."

In Germany of the 1920s the key purported villains behind an alleged national, cultural and moral decline were the same as today in America of the early 3rd millennium: liberal Jews, socialists, liberals, gays, artists and those in society who follow non-conventional lifestyles and cleave to non-conventional, leftist politics. Germany in the 1920s was culturally one of the most liberal, permissive societies on Earth, but that changed radically -- and in a breathtakingly short period of time -- with the rise of Nazism.

Pastor John Hagee professes, with great apparent sincerity, even to tears, to love Jews. But Hagee also promotes, in his sermons and literature, conspiracy theories that trace back, in their lineage, to "The Protocols of The Elders of Zion" and Henry Ford's "The International Jew". How, then, can these clashing views of John Hagee be reconciled ? One answer comes, in the form of a question, from the account of Henry Ford and Rabbi Frankel -- what is the nature of friendship and what is the nature of love ? Another answer comes from the field of criminology, which recognizes: love, hate and murder are, all too often, tragically, not far apart.

As Political Research Associates Senior Analyst Chip Berlet further characterized the Manga comic book "Manga Messiah" currently sold at Barnes and Noble bookstores, the comic:

"Portrays a version of reading Biblical text about the crucifixion of Christ rejected by most Christians for decades--especially since the Nazi genocide of Jews.

"Many readers of the Bible's New Testament will recognize the jibes from the jeering crowd as coming from Jewish chief priests, elders, scribes, and Pharisees. If readers don't know the references, the Bible verses cited below the images can be consulted to make clear the Jewish identity of the bloodthirsty crowd taunting Jesus.

"These images of Jews as the Christ killers make Mel Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ" hideous snuff movie seem tame in comparison."

Thanks a lot, Joe Lieberman.

Tags: tenth cow, red heifer, mishnah, book of numbers, chapter 19, evangelical, end of days, messiah, second coming, jesus, antichrist, kabbala, kabbalah, polo, aram, schefrin, novel, fiction, israel, jerusalem, bush, aipac, mount moriah, dome of the rock, tsfat, safed, second temple, golan heights, shekhina, jezreel valley, har megiddo, christian friends of israel, christian zionism, numbers 19:2, ANTICHRIST, revelation, rapture, tribulation, foundation stone, ein sof, sitra achra, neturei karta,iran, iraq, john hagee,

ARMY WANTS TO CONVERT IRAQIS TO CHRISTIANITY

2008-05-28T21:37:00.004-05:00

From McClatchey - which, as it claims, tells truth to power:

Marines pass out Gospel verse to Iraqi Muslims, Iraqis say
Marines handing out coins with a Gospel verse

By Jamal Naji and Leila Fadel | McClatchy Newspapers

FALLUJAH, Iraq — At the western entrance to the Iraqi city of Fallujah Tuesday, Muamar Anad handed his residence badge to the U.S. Marines guarding the city. They checked to be sure that he was a city resident, and when they were done, Anad said, a Marine slipped a coin out of his pocket and put it in his hand.

Out of fear, he accepted it, Anad said. When he was inside the city, the college student said, he looked at one side of the coin. "Where will you spend eternity?" it asked.

He flipped it over, and on the other side it read, "For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life. John 3:16."

"They are trying to convert us to Christianity," said Anad, a Sunni Muslim like most residents of this city in Anbar province. At home, he told his story, and his relatives echoed their disapproval: They'd been given the coins, too, he said.

Fallujah, the scene of a bloody U.S. offensive against Sunni insurgents in 2004, has calmed and grown less hostile to American troops since residents turned against al Qaida in Iraq, which had tried to force its brand of Islamist extremism on the population.

Now residents of the city are abuzz that some Americans whom they consider occupiers are also acting as Christian missionaries. Residents said some Marines at the western entrance to their city have been passing out the coins for two days in what they call a "humiliating" attempt to convert them to Christianity.

In the markets, people crowded around men with the coins, passing them to each other and asking in surprise, "Have you seen this?"

The head of the Sunni endowment in Fallujah, the organization that oversees Sunni places of worship and other religious establishments, demanded that the Marines stop.

"We say to the occupiers to stop this," said Sheikh Mohammed Amin Abdel Hadi. "This can cause strife between the Iraqis and especially between Muslim and Christians . ... Please stop these things and leave our homes because we are Muslims and we live in our homes in peace with other religions."

"Iraq is investigating a report that U.S. military personnel in Fallujah handed-out material that is religious and evangelical in nature," said Rear Adm. Patrick Driscoll, a U.S. military spokesman, in a statement e-mailed to McClatchy. "Local commanders are investigating since the military prohibits proselytizing any religion, faith or practices."

In interviews, residents of Fallujah repeated two words — "humiliation" and "weakness".

"Because we are weak this is happening," said a shop owner who gave his name as Abu Abdullah. "Passing Christianity this way is disrespectful."

"The occupier is repeatedly trespassing on God and his religion," said Omar Delli, 23. "Now the occupier is planting seeds of strife between the Muslims and Christians. We demand the government in Fallujah have a new demonstration to let the occupier know that these things are humiliating Islam and the Quran."

The controversy over the coins that Iraqis said some Marines are passing out comes on the heels of a tempest triggered by a U.S. sniper who used the Quran, Islam's holy book, for target practice. The sniper was pulled out of Iraq after tribal leaders on May 9 found a Quran with 14 bullet holes and graffiti on the pages.

In Islam, the holy book is never to touch the floor, let alone be defaced. Iraqi leaders condemned the actions, U.S. generals apologized and President Bush offered a personal apology to Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki.

In Fallujah, Mohammed Jaber saw one of the coins and said he thought of the bullets lodged in the Quran, the torture of Iraqi men at the Abu Ghraib prison in 2004 and the rape of a 14-year-old girl and her murder and that of her family in Mahmoudiya.

"Now we have this missionary way by these coins," he said. "We feel the Muslims are weak and we hope that we will reach a point when we are strong to let them know what is wrong and what is right. "

Naji is a McClatchy special correspondent in Fallujah.

Tags: tenth cow, red heifer, mishnah, book of numbers, chapter 19, evangelical, end of days, messiah, second coming, jesus, antichrist, kabbala, kabbalah, polo, aram, schefrin, novel, fiction, israel, jerusalem, bush, aipac, mount moriah, dome of the rock, tsfat, safed, second temple, golan heights, shekhina, jezreel valley, har megiddo, christian friends of israel, christian zionism, numbers 19:2, ANTICHRIST, revelation, rapture, tribulation, foundation stone, ein sof, sitra achra, neturei karta,iran

HIJACKED BY THE RIGHT

2008-05-27T17:11:00.003-05:00

Jim Lobe on LobeLog.com:

Neo-Cons Silent on Hagee Repudiation by McCain

One would have expected at least some debate among neo-conservatives about last week’s repudiation of Christian Zionist Rev. John Hagee by Sen. John McCain, but the silence to date has been positively deafening. Virtually nothing has appeared in the National Review Online, and nothing at all in Bill’s Kristol’s Weekly or Daily Standard. Most remarkably, Commentary’s hyper-active on-line blog, ‘Contentions’ — which, like the other two publications, has been obsessed with Obama and the Rev. Wright — has simply ignored the event, as if it never happened. Is it because any comment at all is seen as too politically risky? Criticizing McCain for so peremptorily rejecting the man who, after all, was the keynote speaker at last year’s AIPAC convention could undermine his courtship of Jewish voters and funders. Agreement with McCain’s decision, on the other hand, could be taken badly by the Christian Right, a strategic ally of the neo-cons since before the 1980 election campaign.

After all, it was the neo-cons, mainly Irving Kristol and Commentary’s former editor, Norman Podhoretz, who, like the Likud party (whose then-leader, Prime Minister Menahim Begin, gave the late Jerry Falwell his first private jet), saw Christian Zionists as a key political constituency in the U.S. that would mobilize effectively against any inclination by a future U.S. president to pressure Israel to dismantle Jewish settlements on the West Bank or remove Jewish settlers from East Jerusalem as part of a peace deal with the Palestinians. That Christian Zionists like Falwell and Hagee have seen a Greater Israel as simply the necessary instrument for hastening the “Rapture,” the “Second Coming,” and Armageddon (and the annihilation of all the world’s Jews — except for a few thousands who accept Jesus as their savior as depicted in what I consider to be the thoroughly anti-Semitic Left Behind series by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins) was of no consequence. As Kristol wrote in Commentary’s pages in 1982, the same year that Hagee launched his “Nights-to-Honor-Israel” ministry, “Why would it be a problem for us? It is their theology; but it is our Israel.”

In the 26 years since, this “devil’s bargain” between hard-line neo-conservatives and the Christian Right has been embraced by the increasingly neo-conservative and Likudist leadership of the organized American Jewish community, a development highlighted not only by Hagee’s starring role at the AIPAC convention, but also by an astonishing letter to the editor of the New York Times written last month in his defense by no less than seven former chairmen of the community’s most powerful organization, the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations. “Pastor Hagee has been a true friend of Israel for many years,” it said. “[His] Christians United for Israel [CUFI] is among the strongest supporters of Israel in the United States.”

Now, it’s true that Hagee has raised millions of dollars from his followers on Israel’s (and Jewish settlers’) behalf, but that’s a drop in the bucket compared to the many billions of U.S. taxpayers have provided. And what has been the price of Hagee’s “support?” Pressure on the Israeli and U.S. governments to reject a more conciliatory approach toward the Palestinians, an approach that might actually advance a just and sustainable end to the conflict based on territorial compromise? Pressure on the Israeli government, in particular, to reject any move to halt the West Bank settlement project, let alone to reverse it? This is the point made so eloquently last weekend by Jeffrey Goldberg when he wrote in the Times: “The leadership of the organized American Jewish community has allowed the partisans of settlement [which includes the Christian Zionists] to conflate support for the colonization of the West Bank with support for Israel itself.” That is the same leadership, of course, that invited Hagee to speak at the AIPAC convention and that signed the letter defending him.

The only leading voice among the mainstream national Jewish institutions who has spoken up clearly against Hagee has been Rabbi Eric Yoffe, the president of the Union for Reform Judaism, who early last month called on Jewish organizations to disassociate themselves from the pastor and CUFI which, he noted,

“…rejects a two-state solution, rejects the possibility of a democratic Israel, and supports the permanent occupation of all Arab lands now controlled by Israel. If implemented, in fact, these views would mean disaster for Israel, and would lead to diplomatic isolation, increased violence and the loss of Israel’s Jewish majority.”

Yoffe went on to warn against Christian Zionist leaders, such as Hagee, who “have engaged in repeated attacks, expressed sometimes in shocking and unacceptable language, directed against other religious traditions. This is not a matter of highlighting differences in belief but of making use of overheated rhetoric that spews hatred and vitriol toward the Muslim and Catholic faiths.”

Indeed, Barry Block, a Reform rabbi in San Antonio who has observed the pastor for many years, noted last week that Hagee “has a long history of making hate-filled statements about a variety of groups.” The most recent controversy over his remarks about Hitler and the Holocaust marked “the first time …we’re dealing with a problematic statement about Jews, but we should be equally concerned about his record on Muslims, Islam, Catholics, Catholicism, and gays and lesbians,” Block, who added that he did not consider Hagee anti-Semitic, told the Washington Times.

I’m not well enough informed, theologically speaking, to know whether Hagee’s remarks about Hitler and the Holocaust that spurred McCain’s decision to break with him reflected a defensible interpretation the Book of Jeremiah — as some of his Jewish defenders have claimed — or not. But it’s very clear from his past statements that he, like Rev. Rod Parsley, Falwell, Pat Robertson, James Dobson, and others of that ilk, holds rather hateful views, as Block noted, about a range of groups and religions, particularly Muslims and Islam. How inciting Islamophobia enhances Israel’s (let alone the U.S.’) long-term security or how it reduces anti-semitism is quite beyond me, but this is clearly something that unites Christian Zionists with hard-line neo-conservatives, such as Michael Horowitz, Daniel Pipes, and Frank Gaffney, to name a few. That national leaders of the organized Jewish community would also associate themselves with such views is also quite beyond me.

Of course, in the wake of the latest controversy, both neo-conservatives and the organized Jewish leadership appear to be keeping their heads down, at least for now. So far, the only prominent neo-con who has defended Hagee has been Dennis Prager, who last week told his radio audience, “Identifying John Hagee with anti-semitism would be like identifying Raoul Wallenberg, the great Swede who saved thousands of Jews in the Holocaust, with anti-Semitism.” (For a wonderfully concise statement of Prager’s worldview — minus any mention of Israel — see his Dec 17 op-ed in the Wall Street Journal celebrating Saddam Hussein’s capture.)

It will be most interesting to see if Sen. Joe Lieberman, a neo-conservative “independent” Democrat who in the past has compared Hagee to Moses and repeatedly praised his “pro-Israel” positions, follows through on his acceptance to be the keynote speaker at CUFI’s annual “Washington-Israel Summit” here July 22. The J Street Project has launched a petition drive to persuade Lieberman to stay away.

Tags: tenth cow, red heifer, mishnah, book of numbers, chapter 19, evangelical, end of days, messiah, second coming, jesus, antichrist, kabbala, kabbalah, polo, aram, schefrin, novel, fiction, israel, jerusalem, bush, aipac, mount moriah, dome of the rock, tsfat, safed, second temple, golan heights, shekhina, jezreel valley, har megiddo, christian friends of israel, christian zionism, numbers 19:2, ANTICHRIST, revelation, rapture, tribulation, foundation stone, ein sof, sitra achra, neturei karta,iran, iraq, john hagee, jim lobe

INTO THE GOOD NIGHT

2008-05-24T21:52:00.004-05:00

Shlomo Ben-Ami, former Israeli Minister of Foreign Affairs, wrote the following in Le Figaro, obviously without consulting AIPAC in advance (sorry, accents not available in my fonts):

"Sa victoire a couper le souffle contre les armees arabes en 1967 n'a pas selement confere de la grandeur a Israel. Elle a aussi condit a un declin moral et politique. Quarante ans apres ce conflit, Israel est encore incapable de s'extraire de l'occupation de terres palestiniennes et de la marche folle de l'expansions des colonies.

"C'est le paradoxe de l'existence d'Israel, un sentiment de puissance mele a une peur apocalyptique de l'aneantissement ... L'experience historique des Juifs ne les incite pas non plus a la concilation. La crise de conscience juive en passant de l'Holocauste a un Etat n'a pas encore ete totalement surmontee. En donnant une reponse territoriale a la peur atavique des Juifs, Israel a ete trop longtemps incapable de briser les murs de l'heritage juif ...

"Une triste constante du conflit israelo-arabe veut qu'aucune guerre perdue par une partie arabe humiliee n'a precipite d'accord de paix, pas plus qu'une guere largement gagnee par Israel n'a incite des dirigeants a se montrer magnanimes. Leur percees vers la paix ont presque invariablement commence par des geste arabes, et pas israeliens. Ce fut le cas avec la guerre in 1973 declenchee par le president Sadate dans le but de forcer les Etats-Unis a negocier une paix entre l'Egype et Israel. Ce fut aussi le cas de l'Intifada palestinienne de 1987 qui a contraint Israel a abandonner le confort de l'inertie et a s'engager dans un processus qui culmina avec les accords d'Oslo."

That is a perspective I have heard from no other Jew.

He also points out (I'm translating and paraphrasing now) that the Israeli psyche now oscillates between "Tel Aviv" and "Jerusalem." "Tel Aviv" is secular and focused on economics. It has replaced the pioneer spirit with longings for modernity, liberalism and normalcy (haven't we all, looking out from Starbucks Nation.) It wants to take its place in the global village and escape from "Jerusalem"'s provincial Judaism. And "Jerusalem" views this normalcy as superficial, almost a crime of indifference toward the depth of the Jewish memory and the lessons of history which bring a profound fear of Arabs and unchanging distrust of gentiles and the international community.

Why is it that, here in America, we only hear about "Jerusalem"? If you listened only to AIPAC, you wouldn't know that "Tel Aviv" exists. (Well, sure, AIPAC likes to crow about Israeli scientific and financial achievements, but doesn't want to credit the profoundly secular for those.)

"Jerusalem"'s attitude is certainly understandable. The history of which they fear a repetition is undeniable. But sooner or later you have to put the past behind you, or, like Osama Bin-Ladin, you become its captive and you cannot move forward to new accomplishments.

Some Israelis - and lots of American Jews - use the Holocaust to justify disrespecting others and claiming a dominance which they don't really need. Of course the Holocaust must never be forgotten - but it should not be lived with every day, it should not define the Jew's future relationship with the world. Things are pretty good for Jews these days, for the most part. It would be helpful if we could drop the fear and extend ourselves a bit.

Obama is presenting America with that opportunity - which, no doubt, is why so many older Jews are afraid of him. Those older Jews can't change, and we shouldn't expect them to. But nor can we allow them to define the relationship of the next generation of Jews to the world at large. They need to go gently into the good night of personal disengagement from politics, leaving behind them enough of their awareness that we don't forget. And they need to go before they poison the new century.

HAGEE'S JEWS

2008-05-23T11:38:00.004-05:00

Max Blumenthal on The Huffington Post:

My Interview With Pastor Hagee On His Anti-Semitic Statements (and What Will Lieberman Say Now?)

Posted May 22, 2008 | 08:23 PM (EST)

During a press conference at the 2007 Christians United for Israel Washington-Israel Summit, I asked CUFI Executive Director Pastor John Hagee about passages in his book "Jerusalem Countdown" in which he appeared to blame Jews for their own persecution. Hagee was visibly piqued by my question, insisting that his statements were directly inspired by the Book of Deuteronomy. When I attempted to ask Hagee a follow-up question, a public relations agent, Alison Silverman, the former assistant communications director for AIPAC, cut me off.

Moments later, a team of off-duty DC police officers hired by CUFI surrounded my co-producer and I and demanded that we immediately leave the conference, threatening us with arrest if refused to comply. You can view my exchange with Hagee and the ensuing fracas at 7:45 of my video report on CUFI's summit, "Rapture Ready":

For nearly two years, a handful of independent journalists and I have raised the alarm about Hagee's long record of anti-Semitic statements. Until now, our reporting has been largely ignored by the mainstream press and the politicians who have clamored for Hagee's support. The supposedly "pro-Israel" groups that have joined with Hagee in support of Israeli military aggression, providing him with much-needed moral cover in the process, have also turned a blind eye to the pastor's Judeophobic tendencies.

Michelle Goldberg was, as far as I know, the first journalist to point out Hagee's Holocaust apologia, exposing his now-infamous "Hitler was a hunter" statement in a piece for the Huffington Post in November 2006. When AIPAC invited Hagee to headline its annual conference in March 2007, I noted Hagee's repugnant views on the Holocaust and his record of anti-Semitic remarks in a Huffington Post article entitled, "AIPAC Cheers an Anti-Semitic Holocaust Revisionist (and Abe Foxman Approves)."

Though this disturbing information was widely disseminated, and was accessible simply by Googling Hagee's name, the John McCain campaign courted Hagee's endorsement, and ultimately accepted it in a highly publicized ceremony three months ago.

Now, thanks to the work of the tenacious researcher Bruce Wilson, the website Talk2Action, and a massive push by the liberal blogosphere, the McCain campaign has been forced to cut ties with its most influential Christian right supporter. But McCain's reversal on Hagee's endorsement does not in any way signal that Hagee will suddenly recede from politics, or that the pastor's influence in Washington will wane. In fact, Hagee still maintains a close relationship with one of McCain's key political allies, a turncoat senator who is likely to become his secretary of defense if he is elected president: Joseph Lieberman.

During a banquet at CUFI's 2007 convention, I watched with astonishment as Lieberman strode to the stage, then compared Hagee to Moses. "I want to take the opportunity to describe Pastor Hagee in the terms the Torah used to describe Moses," Lieberman declared. "He is an Ish Elohim. A man of God. And those words really do fit him. And I have something else," the senator continued. "Like Moses, he's become the leader of a mighty multitude. Even greater than the multitude that Moses led from Egypt to the Promised Land."

Was Lieberman aware at the time of Hagee's statements about Jews and the Holocaust? I don't know. But with McCain's tacit acknowledgment of Hagee's anti-Semitism, Lieberman must now decide: is Hagee a man of God, or just a mamzer?

Update: A friend just sent me Lieberman's defense of Hagee during a 5/13/08 Fox News segment:

SEN. LIEBERMAN: Well, look, I think that the DNC is obviously doing this because they set Pastor Hagee as some kind of response to Reverend Wright for Senator Obama. But I don't think that's fair in the basic way that everybody's already said which is that John McCain never went to Pastor Hagee's church. He accepted his endorsement. He represents a lot of people in this country, particularly Christians who care about the state of Israel. He founded a group called Christians United for Israel.

And statements that were brought out that he had made about the Catholic Church were a total surprise to me. I know to Senator McCain they were obviously reprehensible. And I give Pastor Hagee a lot of credit for just plain apologizing. And I must say there's a difference because Reverend Wright never did apologize. He just restated the objectionable and reprehensible things he had said.

Tags: tenth cow, red heifer, mishnah, book of numbers, chapter 19, evangelical, end of days, messiah, second coming, jesus, antichrist, kabbala, kabbalah, polo, aram, schefrin, novel, fiction, israel, jerusalem, bush, aipac, mount moriah, dome of the rock, tsfat, safed, second temple, golan heights, shekhina, jezreel valley, har megiddo, christian friends of israel, christian zionism, numbers 19:2, ANTICHRIST, revelation, rapture, tribulation, foundation stone, ein sof, sitra achra, neturei karta,iran, iraq, john hagee,

HAS ANYONE NOTICED THAT THE PEOPLE WRITING THESE BALANCED ARTICLES ON ISRAEL ARE ALL JEWISH? THANK GOD ALL JEWS AREN'T NEOCONS. BUT SHARON WAS.

2008-05-18T22:13:00.005-05:00

David Bromwich on the Huffington Post:

A Two-State Solution for the United States and Israel

Posted May 18, 2008 | 02:52 PM (EST)

We are slowly leaving the Bush presidency. Can we leave it fast enough for the safety of the world?

George W. Bush thought it would be a good idea to help Israel celebrate its 60th birthday. So he showed up to celebrate, in spite of the gross contradiction his presence there offered against an appearance of impartiality in the negotiations between Israel and Palestine -- an accord whose success the president has said he intends to show as the diplomatic legacy of eight years in office.

In his speech to the Knesset, President Bush praised Israel in familiar and effusive terms. He also threatened Iran almost to the point of implying that Israel's birthday present from America would be a war against Iran initiated by the U.S. Finally, and strangely, he went out of his way -- in violation of a decorum observed by previous American presidents on foreign visits -- to attack a political rival in the United States.

Senator Biden, Barack Obama, and others were quick to respond to the charge that talking (not giving things away) to a hostile country must constitute "appeasement"; but the coat-trailing use of the word, meanwhile, caught the attention of the press; and Chris Matthews, interviewing a talk radio shouter, was led to some characteristic rumblings:

"You think it was fair to go overseas and take a shot at a fellow American?... Why is Israel now the center of the Republican Campaign?... Why the focus on Israel?.... Why are we turning Israel into Hyde Park Corner?"

The questions are pertinent and not easy to answer. Why has Israel become the place to test an American politician for loyalty and strength? Loyalty to what and strength about what? Something about the American view of Israel, and his own exaggerated version of it, made George W. Bush believe he could get away with the provocative words he used and the graceless choice of an occasion.

In the American mind today, Israel stands for a policy of benign chauvinism, justified preemptive war, and provisional domination of the Middle East: the very policy the Bush administration has sought to graft onto the United States, while borrowing Israeli army rules of engagement for use in Iraq. Doubtless the unpopular president felt a certain exhilaration and nervous release in cutting down a member of his family (nationally speaking) in front of another family. But there was a personal as well as well as a generic reason for it. Probably Israel today seems to George Bush a friendlier place than most of America does. It is, to him, a sort of fifty-first state, a good deal like Texas but cleared of the protesters.

One might end here, merely observing that, not for the first time, George W. Bush acted below the dignity of his office. Yet his defects were forgiven by his hosts; and that is not where the interest of the occasion lies.

When an American of such high visibility speaks without inhibition of American divisions to Israelis, one is made to reflect on the extraordinary censorship exercised by the American mainstream media against all allusion to the current political controversies in Israel. For example, the Israeli divisions over the oppressive treatment of the West Bank Palestinians. The word "appeasement" was misused by the president; but why should we not use it accurately? Why should Americans not follow the Israeli opposition, and speak of the appeasement by successive Israeli governments of the fanatical sects of settlers who seek to dispossess the Palestinians of their lands?

Condoleezza Rice broke the silence once. On a visit in October 2007, she said the sufferings of the West Bank Palestinians reminded her of the civil-rights struggles of American blacks in the South. Indeed, as Idith Zertal and Akiva Eldar show in Lords of the Land, the more thuggish settlers in cities like Hebron have enjoyed many of the privileges that Americans associate with white gangs in the Jim Crow South -- a routine of harassment and ad-hoc violence against an inferior caste. The Israeli government acts as the federal government of the United States would have acted if it had said it could not move against the gangs because "these are our people."

Israel, Munich, and appeasement came up again when John McCain said, of Barack Obama's willingness to speak with diplomatic representatives of Iran, that one must never negotiate with anyone who calls Israel a "stinking corpse." But why should political thought be silenced and action obstructed by the trash talk of a small-time dictator? Demagogues say many things. It is in their nature not to be in a position to mean everything they say.

Nikita Khrushchev spoke for world communism in direr terms than these when he addressed to Americans the words: "We will bury you." Khrushchev went beyond calling his enemy a stinking corpse. He acknowledged that we were still alive, and said we were going to be turned into a corpse, and declared that he would be the one to do it. And Khrushchev actually held the levers of power in the Soviet Union -- something that cannot be said of Ahmadinejad in Iran. Yet President Eisenhower negotiated with Khrushchev, and President Kennedy negotiated with him, too. The idea that all contact with a hostile country that is not war, is therefore necessarily appeasement, is a poisonous offshoot of the Bush dogma which says "If you are not with us you are against us." Palestinians oppressed by Israeli settlers and looking anywhere they can for help are neither with the United States nor against us. If we treat them as enemies, they may well become enemies.

Another piece of the Bush doctrine -- a piece borrowed from Ariel Sharon, which John McCain seems poised to inherit -- is the idea that wars always improve the stature and increase the power of a warrior nation. Six years into the American occupation of Iraq, this ought to have become questionable. Yet John McCain's advisers on foreign policy are, to a man, neoconservatives -- supporters of the Lebanon as of the Iraq war, and disposed to flatter the militarism that is the most consistent trait of McCain's political temperament.

Israeli opinion covers a far wider range than American neoconservatism. In the Cooper Union debate on the "Israel Lobby" controversy, in September 2006, the former Israeli foreign minister Shlomo Ben-Ami said that the United States had become a Colossus -- "an intrusive colossus that is hated throughout the Arab world," because of its support for the Arab autocrats. The solution, Ben-Ami implied, was not for the U.S. to intrude still further into the affairs of the Middle East but to change its course and resist the promptings of organizations like AIPAC. He wondered why so many American lawmakers were intimidated by the lobby, since the most it could do was to stop someone from getting elected, and, where a public good was concerned, not to be elected or re-elected might seem a small sacrifice for a politician whose duty is to tell the truth.

Tags: tenth cow, red heifer, mishnah, book of numbers, chapter 19, evangelical, end of days, messiah, second coming, jesus, antichrist, kabbala, kabbalah, polo, aram, schefrin, novel, fiction, israel, jerusalem, bush, aipac, mount moriah, dome of the rock, tsfat, safed, second temple, golan heights, shekhina, jezreel valley, har megiddo, christian friends of israel, christian zionism, numbers 19:2, ANTICHRIST, revelation, rapture, tribulation, foundation stone, ein sof, sitra achra, neturei karta