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By Daoud Kuttab, Ramallah, West Bank
As if we don’t have enough problems with Muslim and Jewish fundamentalists, we are now confronted with yet another -ist. Christian Zionists, mostly from the United States, are trying to throw their weight behind one of the parties, in effect calling for the continuation of the war and carnage in Lebanon.
A small minority of evangelical Christians have entered the Middle East political arena with some of the most un-Christian statements I have ever heard. The latest gems come from people like Pat Robertson, the founder and chairman of the Christian Broadcasting Network, and Rev. John Hagee of Christians United for Israel. Hagee, a popular televangelist who leads the 18,000-member Cornerstone Church in San Antonio, ratcheted up his rhetoric this year with the publication of his book, “Jerusalem Countdown,” in which he argues that a confrontation with Iran is a necessary precondition for Armageddon (which will mean the death of most Jews, in his eyes) and the Second Coming of Christ.
In the best-selling book, Hagee insists that the United States must join Israel in a preemptive military strike against Iran to fulfill God’s plan for both Israel and the West. Shortly after the book’s publication, he launched Christians United for Israel (CUFI), which, as the Christian version of the powerful American Israel Public Affairs Committee, he said would cause “a political earthquake.” With the outbreak of the war on Lebanon, he and others have called to their followers to pray for Israel, and for the continuation of the war on Lebanon. They have demanded that Israel not relent in what they call the need to destroy Hezbollah and Hamas. They seem to have completely forgotten the very core of the Christian faith.
I have been watching many American evangelicals trying to distance themselves from the calls in the name of the Almighty for the war to continue. As Christian leaders of all persuasions, including leaders of evangelical churches, are calling for Mideast peace and an immediate cease-fire, these Christian Zionists want their followers to pray only for Israel.
One e-mail message that was making the rounds came from a prominent U.S. evangelical Christian totally upset with an interview that Pat Robertson gave to the Jerusalem Post. In it, Robertson appears more pro-Israeli than the Israelis themselves and expresses anger at the notion that Israelis might not completely finish off Hezbollah — a task that he somehow sees as God’s will. The author of the above-mentioned e-mail message, Serge Duss of World Vision, a Christian relief organization, called the Robertson interview “a perversion of the Gospel of Jesus.” Duss writes that he is sure that many evangelicals strongly disagree and would gladly refute Robertson’s distorted theology.
Duss insists that American evangelicals are praying for 1) the people of Israel and Lebanon; 2) for a cease-fire, so that lives will be spared and 3) for peace with justice for all people in the Middle East.
The discussion has reminded me of so many calls I heard as a young Christian boy growing up in Bethlehem and Jerusalem: the false prophets that have predicted the end days and the presence of the anti-Christ are too numerous to list here. But I vividly remember the very same Pat Robertson in 1982 as he spoke on C.B.N.’s “700 Club.” He stood in front of a map of the Middle East, opened up a copy of the Old Testamant and claimed to know what a particular prophecy meant in geopolitical terms. As the Begin-Sharon army at the time was besieging Beirut, he pointed out exactly what he said would happen next. In particular he was keen to repeat that the P.L.O.’s leader at the time, Yasir Arafat, was none other than the anti-Christ himself.
Less than 13 years after that international broadcast, Robertson was filmed visiting Arafat in Gaza, delivering food and milk to Palestinians and applauding the peace agreement that Arafat had signed with Israel’s Yitzhak Rabin.
Christian Zionists who use religious rhetoric to justify political and military actions are no better than Jewish or Islamic fundamentalists who make similar outlandish claims. Peace in the Middle East should be about the liberty, independence and freedoms of all the people of the region, and not about whose promised land the Holy Land is.
For the time being, I, as a Christian Palestinian, prefer to follow the words of Jesus in his Sermon on the Mount. “Blessed are the peacemakers for they will be called the sons of God.”
BAGHDAD (Reuters) – There is no evidence the Iranian government is stirring trouble in Iraq, a U.S. general said on Monday, playing down suggestions that Tehran will retaliate for U.S. backing of Israel’s war on Hizbollah.
“There is nothing that we definitively have found to say that there are any Iranians operating within the country of Iraq,” Major General William Caldwell, the top U.S. military spokesman in Iraq, told a news conference.
U.S. officials have previously said the war between Israel and Iran-backed Hizbollah might encourage Tehran to make mischief in Iraq to pressure the United States, which has some 130,000 troops in the country.
“Iran has got Hizbollah in Lebanon. Iran has got some forces here. There is the possibility they might encourage those forces to create increased instability here,” U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad told reporters last week.
Caldwell said recently-manufactured Iranian weapons and munitions had been found in Iraq.
“We do believe that some Shi’ite elements have been in Iran receiving training. But the degree to which this is known and endorsed by the government of Iran is uncertain,” he said.
Several powerful Shi’ite militias, including the Badr Organization and the Mehdi Army, supporters of radical Shi’ite cleric Moqtada al Sadr, have long-standing ties with Tehran.
Caldwell said the contacts were via “third elements associated with Iran”.
“We do know that weapons have been provided and IED (improvised explosive device) technology has been made available to these extremist elements,” he said.
August 13, 2006
As BuzzFlash has repeatedly editorialized, the Bush Administration is a detriment to America’s national security. Our lives are increasingly at risk every day that they are in office.
They will never seriously battle the sources of terrorism in an effective, strategic fashion. That is because politically they need the terrorists as much as the terrorists need them. And the goals of the Bush Administration are the consolidation of power and the acquisition of natural resources and economic dominance, not the eradication of terror.
Only the naive and the Rush Limbaugh Stepford-Red Staters can possibly draw any other conclusion.
NBC just confirmed — as BuzzFlash editorialized earlier this week about the politics of terrorism — that the White House forced the UK to move up the timing of the alleged terror cell arrests, against the recommendations of the British intelligence agencies. By so doing, the Bush Administration compromised the investigation and kept it from obtaining further evidence and contact names. In short, for purposes of political timing — in order to make partisan points from the election of Ned Lamont — the Bush Administration compromised our national security.
Furthermore, NBC confirms that UK sources indicate that the alleged terrorist plan was not near operational. Indeed, some of the would-be hijackers did not even have passports!
This is an extraordinary betrayal of America’s national security, purely done so that Cheney, Snow and Bush could attack the Democrats as weak on national security, knowing that the arrest announcement was going to be made on Wednesday, because they picked the day of the arrest.
These use of Rovian-timed terrorist announcements — often extremely, extremely exaggerated (as in the case of the Liberty City Insane Clown Posse and the alleged Manhattan Tunnel explosions that would have defied the laws of gravity if they were planned to “flood” lower Manhattan) — are basically treason.
They are meant to frighten Americans into voting Republican. The only viable winning platform of the Busheviks now (and remember that they cannot afford either House of Congress to become Democratic, because it would likely lead to investigations and the impeachment and prosecution of the senior Bush Administration staff) is something like: “You see what the terrorists will do if the Republicans are not here to protect you. The Democrats will just mollycoddle them. Fear for your lives and vote Republican.”
After six years of cynical rule and five years of an alleged “war on terrorism” that has killed tens of thousands more people than the terrorists have, all the White House has to do is invoke premeditated fear into Americans.
And it has worked up to now.
Look at the media this week. The alleged British terror plot dominates the leads in television, radio and newpapers around the nation. Fear is a powerful tool. It goes right from the media into the brain. It appeals to our Reptilian sense of self-protection.
That is why it is the tool of demagogues.
Yes, there are terrorists out there who wish to do citizens of the United States harm. But yes, we also unleashed them in Iraq to do us and each other harm. Bush is breeding new ones every day in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Bush hasn’t reduced terrorism; he has increased its threat.
And that is fine with Rove, because Rove has been out front and openly stated through three election cycles that the GOP will win by painting the Democrats as soft on terrorism.
The Bush White House and GOP campaign apparatus will lie, cheat, steal, manipulate our emotions — and even carry out policies that breed terrorists, because they need terrorism in order to win elections. They would lose in a landslide if people were to vote on public policy issues.
So they need fear. It is the only fuel that will help them achieve a one-party dictatorial state for a century, as Grover Norquist and Karl Rove have promised.
Who is creating a new generation of terrorists? Not the Democrats (except for Joe Lieberman, but he has clearly cut a deal with the White House a long time ago to be one of them – and remain a Democrat on foreign policy in name only.)
Now, more than 60% of Americans oppose the war in Iraq. Ned Lamont — a descendant of the robber Baron J.P. Morgan, a fourth-generation Harvard graduate, and a self-made millionaire — is no radical.
It is the Bush Administration that is radical, extremist, and basically treasonous.
At the same time it was politically manipulating the arrests of the alleged British terrorists, it was trying to decrease a Congressional allotment of millions of dollars to increase our ability to detect explosives that could be carried on planes. It has already allowed box cutters, nail clippers, scissors and razors back on airplanes. It has done almost nothing to ensure the security of cargo that is shipped on planes, which the Libyan bombing of a Pan Am plane over Scotland showed how much a threat such cargo could be. (In short, you don’t even need a suicide terrorist to blow up a plane in mid-air.)
Bush blew off the warnings of an impending 9/11 and told the CIA briefer who came to him with them to get out and then used an expletive deleted. Bush then did nothing. He didn’t want his vacation disturbed — and then 9/11 happened. And when it did happen, after Bush failing to take steps to protect us, he read “The Pet Goat” for several minutes before his handlers could write “comments” for him. And then he inexplicably got on Air Force One and flew AWAY from Washington, D.C.
As Americans, all of us have our lives at stake while these cynical, power hungry, demagogues are ruling the nation.
Yes, there are terrorists in the world who wish us harm.
Many of them, have indeed, been drawn to terrorism as a result of Bush Administration action.
The goals of the White House are not to stop terrorism; the goal of the White House is to allow terrorism to fester in order to — as is the basic game plan for dictators goes — use fear to consolidate tyrannical power and do away with our Constitutional checks and balances of government and guarantee of individual liberties.
If you can’t see that they are traitors in the White House, then you are risking your own lives and the lives of your families.
If you value those lives – and your own – we cannot, as a nation, any longer afford a White House and a Republican party that only knows the politics of using terrorism as a political tool, while running only an ineffective “show war” to reduce the threat of terrorists.