The post-9/11 years saw a vitriolic anti-Islam campaign. Those maliciously demonizing Islam and its adherents were self-proclaimed champions of human rights and liberty, the leaders of the Western world. When Osama bin Laden was killed, author and political commentator Debbie Schlussel exulted, “1 down, 1.8 billion more to go.” This was the mindset that led to the reprehensible murder of millions of innocent Muslims across the globe.
Christian Zionists profess that their self-serving interpretation of biblical texts should dictate American policies. They identify Israel as God’s timepiece and the fulcrum of biblical prophecy. Greater Israel, they profess, is an imperative of God’s divine plan that will trigger Christ’s second coming, his ruling the world from the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, and Armageddon, the end-time battle on the hills of Megiddo in Palestine. Sarah Posner, a known historian of the Christian right, writes: “In this scenario, war is not something to be avoided but something inevitable, desired by God and celebratory.”
These Armageddon seekers hold complete sway over US policy. It has aided and abetted Netanyahu’s genocidal war crimes. Bitterly opposed to the Oslo Peace Process, they sabotaged it. They also opposed the 2015 Iran nuclear deal and prevailed towards its annulment by President Trump, the moving of the US embassy to Jerusalem, and Israel’s relentless West Bank expansion.
It has also aided the Palestine Holocaust and the horrific murder of over 51000 Palestinians in Gaza, 17000 of them children. The UN says that at least 100 children are killed or wounded in Gaza every day since Israel’s resumption of airstrikes.
At the forefront of the Christian Zionist movement is Pastor John Hagee, founder of Christians United for Israel (CUFI), the largest pro-Israel organization with over 10 million members. In his bestselling 2005 book Jerusalem Countdown, Hagee extolls Jews to hasten the End Times and bring about the second coming of Christ. These views are shared by Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and Hal Lindsey, evangelists who dictate Washington’s Israel policy.
Of ardent Trump supporters, 80% of Christian Zionists believe that the conception of Israel was ordained by biblical prophecy. A 2017 Pew Survey found them holding the most negative views of Islam. Their leaders propagate that the God of Judaism and Christianity opposes the “false deity worshipped by Muslims” and that the divide between Islam and Christianity is an unbridgeable one.
Michael Coogan at the Harvard Divinity School is also Director of publications at Harvard’s Museum of the Near East and editor-in-chief of Oxford Biblical Studies. He writes in his recent work “God’s Favorites: Judaism, Christianity and the Myth of Divine Chosenness,” that the Jewish myth of being the chosen ones, along with the same Christian Zionist mindset, is for political and personal gain. He argues that it has resulted in incalculable bloodshed and the division of mankind. He describes it as a stain on the West’s collective morality.
Christian Zionists are vehemently anti-immigration, something central to the Trump policy. Coogan dubs it as “American apartheid.” He argues that beneath the myths and self-deluding fairy tales about human rights, freedom, and morality, xenophobia is the lens through which America views the (Muslim) world. Among other known intellectuals, Karen Armstrong, one of the most prolific authors of contemporary religions, identifies Christian Zionism with the Crusades. She asserts that these “fundamentalists have returned to a classical and extreme religious crusading.”
In Trump’s first term, Vice President Mike Pence, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and White House chief strategist Steve Bannon were self-declared Christian Zionists. This time, Mike Waltz is the National Security Advisor, Pete Hegseth, who called for building a Jewish temple at Al-Aqsa, is the Secretary of Defense, Elise Stefanik is the UN Ambassador, and Mike Huckabee is the Ambassador to Israel.
After Huckabee’s appointment, Jerry Nadler, a senior Jewish Democrat, said, “Huckabee’s (anti-Palestine) positions are not the words of a thoughtful diplomat. They are the words of a provocateur whose views are far outside international consensus and contrary to the core bipartisan principles of American diplomacy.” Needless to say, it was the Democrat administration that initiated and equally enabled the horrendous Gaza genocide.
In February this year, in an Oval Office meeting with Netanyahu, Trump compared the released Israeli hostages to Holocaust survivors. Earlier this week, sitting again with Netanyahu, Trump bizarrely tried to rewrite Nazi history. He declared that the Nazis had treated Jewish prisoners with love as compared to Hamas’s treatment of the Israeli hostages.
It is not only the Trump administration that is plagued with this mindset. In 1974, Ronald Reagan addressed a Conservative Political Action Conference. He described like-minded people as “prophets of our philosophy” and referred to America as “a part of a divine plan in whose hands God has placed the destinies of an afflicted mankind.”
George Bush boasted divine guidance for invoking horrors. Calling himself “a messenger of God doing the Lord’s will,” he told Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and Foreign Minister Nabil Shaath: “I am driven with a mission from God. He would tell me, George, go and fight those terrorists in Afghanistan, and I did. Then God would tell me, go end the tyranny in Iraq and I did.” The destruction of Iraq was brought about and built upon lies.
An excerpt from a report by the Working Group of the Church of England’s House of Bishops reads: “The sense of (America’s) moral righteousness is fed by the major influence of the Christian Right on US policy. A very worrying aspect, Christian millennialism has been taken up with apocalyptic overtones and a very clear political agenda in relation to the Middle East. Not only is political reading in the light of apocalyptic texts illegitimate but these texts need to be read as a critique of imperialism, rather than justification of a particular form of it.”
America was founded as the mythical land of the chosen ones. Its exceptionalism mimicked the belief that as God chose Israelites to receive the promised land, so were they ordained to get theirs by evicting the extant “heathen” population. Attributed to biblical roots, this narration was adopted to give legitimacy to the genocide of Native Americans. Irrespective of religion, weaponizing theology by Armageddon seekers can never justify the Palestine Holocaust or the removal of Palestinians from their homeland.
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The views and opinions expressed in this article/paper are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Paradigm Shift.
Mir Adnan Aziz is a freelance contributor.