Only if we truly love our friends will we always tell them the truth and call them on their
bad behavior; and when religion and politics get in bed together, we the people for JUSTICE and PEACE get screwed.
Many of my Christian sisters and brothers are members of the fastest growing cult in America: Christian Zionism-which has nothing much in common with what Jesus was all about- and one of its leader is the fundamentalist fire and brimstone preacher, John Hagee.
On 6 November 2007, I attended a Hagee fest in Miami, Florida at the James L. Knight Center that was packed to the rafters with Hagee's tribe of Christian Zionists and south Florida's right wing Jewish community.
Zion's
Fire Banners, dancers, singers and a band whipped the crowd into a frenzy of
spinning, jumping, clapping, twirling and moved the rotund Hagee to link arms
with men in skull caps and dance the Hora-not to Hava Nagila- but to repeated
choruses of:
Shout for
joy and victory! Bat Yerushalyim
From one end of the stage to the other, the largest American and Israeli flags
I have ever seen were draped side by side and by the end of the evening I
imagined every star on the red-white-and blue had morphed into the Star of
David.
Miami-Dade County Commissioner Joe Martinez pointed to the flags and exclaimed:
"Isn't that beautiful up there together? I get goose bumps! All nations
have been created by an act of man, except Israel was created by an act of
God."
Rabbi Freedman delivered the Invocation, "We are all friends of the only
democracy in the Middle East."
I immediately recalled what American Israeli, Jeff Halper, the Founder and
Coordinator of ICAHD/Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions told me during
one of my five journeys to Jerusalem:
"Israel is a not a democracy but is an Ethnocracy, meaning a country run
and controlled by a national group with some democratic elements but set up
with Jews in control and structured to keep them in control."
Rabbi Freedman continued on, "From Mount Sinai to Mount Zion to Mount
Vernon we are all Zionists! Israel is second to America in how many immigrants
we have absorbed."
Immigrant absorption in Israel comes with perks and is called Aliyah, ["go
up"] and is a fundamental concept of Zionism enshrined in Israel's Law of
Return, which permits any Jew from any where in the world the legal right to
government assisted immigration and settlement in Israel, automatic Israeli
citizenship, unemployment benefits, free medical, and subsidized housing. Young
adult immigrants receive free room, utilities, and three meals a day for the
first five months and 100 percent of their tuition is paid by the government.
Hagee's mastery of manipulating the fears of his audience garnered him a
standing ovation as the shofars blew, "Israel was re-born by an act of God
and Israel lives! The Jews have suffered great persecution and survived slavery
and the Final Solution! God Jehovah will bury Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran! The
flag of Israel will fly over the undivided Jerusalem and be the praise of all
the earth! It's 1938 again and the new Hitler is Ahmadinejad! Radical
Islamisicts are threatening to develop nuclear weapons in order to destroy
Israel and then the USA! But we are indivisible and we are both here
forever!"
The oft repeated comment ascribed to President Ahmadinejad, that "Israel
must be wiped off the map," was addressed by Virginia Tilley, Professor of
political science who wrote:
The oft repeated comment ascribed to President Ahmadinejad, that "Israel
must be wiped off the map," was addressed by Virginia Tilley, Professor of
political science who wrote:
"In his October 2005 speech, Mr. Ahmadinejad never used the word 'map' or the term 'wiped off'. According to Farsi-language
experts like Juan Cole and even right-wing services like MEMRI, what he
actually said was 'this regime that is occupying Jerusalem must vanish
from the page of time.'
"In this speech to an annual anti-Zionist conference, Mr. Ahmadinejad was
being prophetic, not threatening. He was citing Imam Khomeini, who said this
line in the 1980s (a period when Israel was actually selling arms to Iran, so
apparently it was not viewed as so ghastly then). Mr. Ahmadinejad had just
reminded his audience that the Shah's regime, the Soviet Union, and Saddam
Hussein had all seemed enormously powerful and immovable, yet the first two had
vanished almost beyond recall and the third now languished in prison. So, too,
the 'occupying regime' in Jerusalem would someday be gone. His
message was, in essence, 'This too shall pass.'"
Tikkun is Hebrew for mend, repair and
transform the world.
Tikkun is also an interfaith organization which researched to discover that
there are three distinct elements energizing Christian Zionists:
1. A strong commitment to conservative and ultra-nationalist American politics
(so strong, I believe, that if the U.S. were to decide to break with Israel,
this part of the Christian Zionist leadership would go along with that and drop
its defense of Israeli policies).
2. Dispensationalist religious commitments that lead many of the Christian
Zionists to yearn for a cataclysmic "end of history" eschatological war in the
Middle East that will precipitate the second coming of Jesus and the Rapture in
which all true Christians will go to heaven and all Jews who have not yet
converted to Christianity will burn in hell for eternity.
3. A widespread understanding among many Christians that atonement and
repentance is needed for 1700 years of murder, rape, and oppression of Jews
that was frequently generated by the Church (though, of course, the
Evangelicals do not recognize that church as their church). In this category
are many Christian Zionists who genuinely feel terrible about what has happened
to the Jews and genuinely want to help the Jewish people. Their philo-Semitism
is real and sincere. [Rabbi Lerner, Tikkun Magazine page 9, Nov/Dec.
2007]
But in Miami that night, multitudes of misled and misinformed Christian's
celebrated military occupation, violence, power and political control but
ignored the gospel Jesus preached: "It
is the peacemakers who shall be called the children of God." --Matthew
5:9
Hagee repeatedly cited that all worship the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob,
but neglected to mention that the first mention of Israel is in Genesis 32:22,
when Jacob was renamed Israel for having wrestled and struggled with the
Divine.
Hagee threw out the names of all the Hebrew prophets, but not the fact that God
raised up prophets to speak truth to power and arrogance and to remind people
of what God desires:
"What does God require? He has
told you o'man! Be just, be merciful, and walk humbly with your Lord." -Micah 6:8
God also raised up prophets to remind them they cannot know the mind of the
Mystery of the Universe, for "His
thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, declares the
Lord." - Isaiah 55:8
God raised up prophets to admonish the "stiff
necked people" [Exodus 34:9, Proverbs 29:1] and that "My people are fools, they do not know
me! They are skilled in doing evil, they know not how to do good." -Jeremiah
4:22
Hagee invoked the "Torah Way" but neglected what the Torah commands:
"From Moses to Jeremiah and Isaiah, the Prophets taught...that the Jewish
claim on the land of Israel was totally contingent on the moral and spiritual
life of the Jews who lived there, and that the land would, as the Torah tells
us, 'vomit you out' if people did not live according to the highest moral
vision of Torah. Over and over again, the Torah repeated its most frequently
stated mitzvah [command]:
"When you enter your land, do not
oppress the stranger; the other, the one who is an outsider of your society,
the powerless one and then not only 'you shall love your neighbor as yourself'
but also 'you shall love the other.'" [Rabbi Lerner, TIKKUN
Magazine , page 35, Sept./Oct. 2007]
Because
I love ALL people as sisters and brothers and I seek SECURITY for Israel by
pursuing JUSTICE for Palestine, in 2005 I wrote KEEP HOPE ALIVE
Because as Don Hewitt always said: "The formula is simple and it's reduced to four words
every kid in the world knows: Tell me a story. It's that easy."
In Chapter 16, I told the story of A
CONFRONTATIONAL CONVERSATION
"Father Paul, you cannot possibly be telling me that an Episcopal priest has
been taken in by fundamentalist theology?" Terese incredulously asked the new
assistant to the rector at St. Joan of Arc Episcopal Church in Orlando, who
also served at the noon mass every Wednesday.
Father Paul Hendricks was a passionate evangelist on a mission to convert every Jew he encountered to become a Christian. Terese had kept her silence for the first six months she had been listening to his Wednesday noon sermons, but finally broke her silence after the rest of the parishioners had departed.
Paul sighed and shook his head. "Look, Mrs.
Hunter, I read your op/ed in the newspaper about Israel and Palestine, and we
both agree we want peace; we just go about it differently."
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