Monday, December 11, 2006

Message to my fellow Jews: Stop looking for enemies among friends.

Originally posted on http://eric-odessit.spaces.live.com/


I was listening to Dennis Prager, and he mentioned this article in New York Times:



WASHINGTON, Nov. 13 — As Israeli bombs fell on Lebanon for a second week last July, the Rev. John Hagee of San Antonio arrived in Washington with 3,500 evangelicals for the first annual conference of his newly founded organization, Christians United For Israel.


At a dinner addressed by the Israeli ambassador, a handful of Republican senators and the chairman of the Republican Party, Mr. Hagee read greetings from President Bush and Prime Minister Ehud Olmert of Israel and dispatched the crowd with a message for their representatives in Congress. Tell them “to let Israel do their job” of destroying the Lebanese militia, Hezbollah, Mr. Hagee said.


He called the conflict “a battle between good and evil” and said support for Israel was “God’s foreign policy.”

The next day he took the same message to the White House.

Many conservative Christians say they believe that the president’s support for Israel fulfills a biblical injunction to protect the Jewish state, which some of them think will play a pivotal role in the second coming. Many on the left, in turn, fear that such theology may influence decisions the administration makes toward Israel and the Middle East.

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[Rabbi Yechiel] Eckstein said he had discovered the depth of that [Evangelical] support when he ran television commercials on the Fox News Channel seeking donations. The response, mainly from evangelicals, “burned out the call centers,” Mr. Eckstein said. During the five-week war, his group added 30,000 new donors. Thanks to the influx of money, he said his organization has exceeded its income from the first 10 months of last year by 60 percent, putting it on track to pull in $80 million this year. “The war really generated a momentum,” Mr. Eckstein said.

Evangelicals’ support for Israel, of course, is far from uniform. Mr. Hagee is an author of several books about the interpretation of biblical prophecies. He says he believes the Bible assigns Israel a pivotal role as a harbinger of the second coming. Citing passages from Revelation and Ezekiel, he argues that conflict between Israel and Iran may be a sign that that time is approaching.

Others say they believe more generally that God maintains his Old Testament covenant with the Jewish people and thus commands Christian believers to help protect their “older brothers.”

“My theology indicates that Israel is covenant land,” Dr. Dobson said in an interview.


The lefty New York Times shows its bias even here, talking how "Israeli bombs fell on Lebanon", but forgetting to mention Hezbollah Katyusha rockets falling on Israeli population centers. So, in order to fix their bias a little bit, I replaced their link to Hezbollah stories with the one to the Time Magazine photo essay, featuring this lovely photograph:

I call these kids "Hezbo-Jugend", similarly to Hitler-Jugend.

But back to the Evangelicals. Let me share a personal story with you. I have a very good friend whom I met through work. He happens to be an American of Filipino descent and a very devout Christian. You might call him an Evangelical. When we first met, he had in his office a portrait of some Orthodox rabbi on one wall and a clipping of 1948 Los Angeles Times on another. The LA Times article described how fighter aircraft of newly formed Israeli Air Force chased away Egyptian bombers who were bombing Tel Aviv. I looked at this obviously oriental-looking guy and asked why he had all that. He replied that the fact that Israel was restored in 1948 proves to him the existence of G-d, because the Bible predicted it. He also said that his G-d is the G-d of the Jews and that his Messiah is a Jew. All these years that I know him he never ever expressed any idea that I should convert, even though I know he would like that. Jokes like "You don't keep Kosher anyway, so you might as well become Christian" don't count.

Thus, here is the message to my fellow Jews in America: Stop looking for anti-Semites on the Right. There are very few of them left. Nowadays the anti-Semites are found mostly on the Left.

Link to For Evangelicals, Supporting Israel Is ‘God’s Foreign Policy’ - New York Times

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