Backgrounder on Christian Zionism (4 yrs old but still relevant)

The Evil Zionism Has Created
By Joachim Martillo (ThorsProvoni@aol.com)

Here is a brief summary of some research on Neoconservatives and Neoconfederates.

The anti-anti-Semitism of Israel Lobby organizations like the ADL tends to serve as a distraction from the evil that Zionists planned and committed in murdering Arab Palestine and in driving out the native population. Such Zionist behavior is clearly comparable to Nazi goals for Eastern Europe. The evil is less well-known that Zionism created in forcing DPs (Displaced Persons) to settle against their will in the State of Israel after WW2 and in inciting Arab Muslim hostility toward Arab Jewish communities, which were ultimately destroyed as a result of Zionist crimes in Palestine. But the most insidious evil of Zionism from the standpoint of America lies in inspiring the alliance of American Zionists, Neoconservatives and Neoconfederates. These political factions have joined together in a commitment to maintain a racist Jewish colony in Palestine by means of the brutal oppression and suppression of the native population.

American Zionists are mostly inspired by misguided feelings of guilt and a confused need for atonement. But they have chosen an incorrect method of satisfying this need because giving Zionists a license to commit the sorts of crimes against native Palestinians that Nazis committed against European Jews is a completely mistaken form of expiation. American Zionists only succeed in supporting Zionist crimes against humanity in Palestine and in becoming a major driving force for anti-Palestinian, anti-Arab and anti-Muslim prejudice in the USA.

Neoconservatives are intellectual descendants and often the blue-stripe diaper babies of American Revisionists or Jabotinskians. They argue for a muscular American Empire so that Israel can serve as a middleman or colonial surrogate for the USA in the Middle East just as their forbears claimed a Jewish colony in Palestine could serve the British Empire. Neoconservatives thrive on the disorder that the presence of Israel creates, for they want the USA to treat the symptom by interfering with Arab governments, invading Arab countries and by stationing troops in the Middle East. Neoconservatives absolutely reject any idea of doing away with one of the major causes of Middle East turbulence by forcing the State of Israel to renounce Zionist racism and to make full restitution for Zionist crimes against the native population.

Neoconfederates are white Apocalyptic Evangelical Fundamentalists. They are the most bizarre block of the supporters for Israel and really require a separate study. Intellectually they are the descendants of racist unrepentant and unreconstructed Southern Confederates, who turned to religion with the defeat of the Confederacy. They found spiritual solace in Premillennial Dispensationalism particularly in the form espoused by the Moody Bible Institute and Cyrus Ingerson Scofield. They believe that the creation of Israel in the 1947-8 murder of Arab Palestine is a genuine sign of the beginning of the End of Time. Because they believe they have a realized eschatology, they are completely irrational and think mythographically. They are extremely dangerous. (See Notes below.)

This unholy political union that is centered on the State of Israel brings together ideologies of racism, racist colonialism, prejudice, bigotry, social intolerance, religious intolerance, social Darwinism, biological determinism, imperialism, millennialism, extremist nationalism, contempt for democracy and contempt for human rights. Never has there been anything closer in the USA to a genuine American Nazism. Defeating this sort of politics is absolutely necessary for the salvation of American democracy and will require a long-term effort with careful planning.

Notes

Because I have not had the time or resources fully to research the issues described in the following, the material below should be considered more a hypothesis of connections and relationships, but I have read a lot of the material available here in the Boston area, and I believe there is a good deal of support for the hypothesis, and the hypothesis suggests other areas of investigation (e.g., it helps explain the attitudes of people like Krauthammer toward affirmative action) and has -- I believe -- some predictive value.

I attended the following discussion at the Wellesley Hillel last semester.

"Evangelical Christians, Jews and Israel." Speaker: Stephen Marini, religion. Tuesday, April 8, 2003, 12:30-1:30 pm, Hillel Lounge. Sponsor: Hillel. Info: x4088. 

Marini makes the distinction between eschatological fundamentalists and chiliastic fundamentalists. I call them apocalyptics and literalist fundamentalists. Apocalyptics believe that the End is immanent while literalist fundamentalists accept as a matter of intrinsic belief that the Christian millennium will arrive one day and that they must order their life accordingly.

It was quite interesting. He tied in modern American eschatological fundamentalism to the tail end of the 2nd Great Awakening and the Millerites, a connection of which I was unaware, but which makes sense.

A good book on the Millerites is The Disappointed, edited by Butler and Numbers.

The original Millerite fundamentalist eschatology identified 1843 as the year the end would begin. Obviously, it did not happen, and then they tried again for a date in 1844, and it also did not happen at the later date. Faced with the failure of their calculations, they developed the idea that on the 1844 date, Jesus began to construct the temple in heaven -- a claim not subject to verification.

This sort of eschatological fundamentalism continued to play an important role in American religion straight through the 19th century. Dwight Moody's premillennialist dispensationalism is an important example. He created the "Moody Bible Institute, which became one of the most important training grounds for evangelical pastors and trained lay people." The 1909 Scofield Reference Bible incorporated and popularized much of Moody's theology, and "became the standard version for many evangelicals" (viz Epic Encounters by Melani McAlister).

[You might want to check out "Cyrus Ingerson Scofield, Author of the Scofield Reference Bible" (http://www.cc-vw.org/articles/scofield1.html) , which is a chapter in Stephen Sizer's doctoral thesis, Christian Zionism: Its History, Theology and Politics (http://www.cc-vw.org/articles/articles.html#ChristianZionism).]

The Fundamentals, A Testimony to the Truth, by Torrey, A.C. Dixon and Others (1909) is a basic book of American Fundamentalist Evangelicalism.

Premillennial Dispensationalist theology appealed in particular to a subset of unreconstructed and unrepentant racist Confederates and their descendants. They saw the destruction and the humiliation of the South as the premillennial tribulation. Darby's premillennial dispensationalist theology identifies a dispensation of the Jews, which will take place in Palestine, and a dispensation for white American fundamentalist evangelicals. Premillennial dispensationalists interpret evidence of truth of this Jewish dispensation as support for the "Neoconfederate" dispensation by analogy.

"In their fascination with the Holy Land as the once and future site of God's action in history, these early twentieth-century evangelicals were to become the spiritual inspiration for the fundamentalist turn to Israel nearly a century later, in the 1970s and 1980s." (Vide McAlister.) These Neoconfederates take the Zionist conquest and suppression of the native population of Palestine as a sign by analogy that they will be able as part of their dispensation to subordinate American non-white and non-Anglo populations.

Marini explained that during the 20th century fundamentalists peaked in the 20s. I would argue that they were coasting during the time period from Bryan's departure from Wilson's cabinet as a matter of principle until Clarence Darrow humiliated Bryan (a prairie populist not a Neoconfederate) during the Scopes Monkey Trial.

During this time period, Mencken was quite effectively scorning and deriding everything about the fundamentalist evangelical movement.

Fundamentalism came back stronger in cycles during the 50s, 70s and 90s. George W. Bush is their poster boy because he was a 40-year-old substance abuser that had a vision of God and turned his life around (not unlike the apostle Paul). He prays to God before every major decision. I believe I have read that Bush still has the occasional vision or conversation with the divine. (Acid flashbacks?)

Marini did not actually know the tie-in with Jabotinsky's faction of the Zionist movement, which is the predecessor of Herut (Freedom - Begin's), Gahal and then the Likud (Alliance - Sharon and Netanyahu's) Israeli parties. (The unfamiliarity is not surprising, for Marini is a specialist in 18th and 19th century American religious history.)

I discussed it with him outside after the talk.

During the early 1900s Jabotinsky co-opted a lot of the religious Zionists to his faction. Jabotinsky was a highly Russianized Ashkenazi from Odessa. Because one cannot simply become Russian (Russki) but at best can only be Russianized (Rossitski) if one's ancestry is not Rus, he fell into Zionism. Because he was so far from religion, he actually got along very well with many religious Zionists, who did not mind him as much as they did Zionists, who were closer to religious Judaism and more actively rejected it.

In his private opinion, which can be found in Jabotinsky's Russian writings, Jabotinsky considered the religious Zionists to be idiots that had lots of energy and were infinitely manipulatable.

In the 1920s Jabotinsky came to the USA to found American Revisionism, which is to a large extent the origin of the Neoconservative movement. During the late 1920s he and his followers established their fist contacts with American fundamentalists. He considered them just as much idiots and as manipulatable as the Jewish religious Zionists.

As I noted above, the American fundamentalists were in decline at this point, and they were becoming a national joke. Movies from this time period tend to reflect the contempt with which fundamentalist evangelicalism was treated after the Scopes Monkey Trial.

Jabotinsky and his followers, who included Benzion Netanyahu, Binyamin's father, Rabbi Korf -- later Nixon's advisor and confident -- and Bergson, a nephew of Rav Kook, who at the time was the spiritual leader of the Religious Zionist movement, helped to revitalize American fundamentalism by directing them toward Zionism with a reinterpretation of the literalist fundamentalist eschatological or chiliastic message within the framework Zionist primordialism.

The Revisionist Zionists worked the fundamentalist movement straight through the 30s under Jabotinsky's direction and then in the 40s under Netanyahu's direction.

Under the American Revisionist reinterpretation of American Fundamentalism, the creation of the State of Israel in 1948 is the critical event that proves the truth of the eschatology. Thus Christian Zionist eschatological (and many chiliastic) fundamentalists believe they have a fully realized eschatology (something historically unprecedented).

This belief in realized eschatology makes them very fanatic and precludes most rational discussion.

The possession of a realized eschatology -- in their minds -- brought about increased interest and the beginning of a renaissance in American fundamentalism.

From the 50s onward the Israeli Revisionists continued to strengthen their ties with American fundamentalists through frequent invitations to Israel and a very politicized Biblical archeology, which also helped to create ties between the fundamentalists and other parts of the Zionist movement. The studios began to respond with blockbuster religious films, which in turn sparked more interest in fundamentalist religion. Cecile B. de Mille's Samson and Delilah, The Ten Commandments, Quo Vadis and Ben Hur are examples. As increased ties developed between fundamentalists and Zionist parties across the political spectrum, through the 60s & 70s we see a growing Zionization of the American fundamentalists. Hollywood seems to notice because the Biblical Blockbuster is replaced at this time period by the Zionist blockbuster.

With the ascent of fundamentalists in American politics, Zionists can count on a 25-50 million-voter block in the USA. This voter block has tremendous linkage to Neconservatism via the movement's original incarnation as American Revisionism.

Where is H. L. Mencken when you need him? Unfortunately, he is dead and buried in Baltimore. But this recrudescence of religious nuttiness might even be too much for Mencken, for in comparison to the 20s the fundamentalists are probably too strong to shame back under their rocks.

I asked Marini if he thought the argument that I make to distinguish among ancient Israelites, Greco-Roman Judeans and modern Ashkenazim would be effective in dissociating American fundamentalists from Right-wing Zionism. He rejects the idea because American fundamentalists think mythographically from their eschatology, and they believe the End has already begun. Note that they do not merely live in a world of myth; they write (and rewrite) the myths by which they understand the world to correspond to their understanding of the End, which began in 1948 with the creation of the State of Israel. They make very strange and bizarre connections between events.

They fit contemporary politics into their vision of the coming rapture and apocalypse and then backwards rewrite the past to conform to their vision of the future.

Thus, the facts are completely irrelevant, and they simply do not care about any injustices done or being done to Palestinians because there is a state named Israel in the ME, whose "Jewish" population can be connected to the prophesies of Daniel, Ezekiel and the Revelation of St. John.

References that you might wish to check out are:

Militant Zionism in America: The Rise and Impact of the Jabotinsky Movement in the United States, 1926-1948 (Judaic Studies Series) by Rafael Medoff and

Zionism and the Fin de Siècle: Cosmopolitanism and Nationalism from Nordau to Jabotinsky by Michael Stanislawski.

You must read both cum grano salis. Rafael Medoff does not read Russian and does not realize that Jabotinsky is lying when he pretends devotion to democracy in English. Michael Stanislawski does read Russian and does not make that particular error, but his world view is somewhat distorted by Zionist indoctrination, and his analysis sometimes reflects this Zionist bias and a certain ideological exceptionalism that characterizes Jewish studies. Nevertheless, it is probably the best English language intellectual historical analysis of the beginnings of Zionism.

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