Apocalyptic Extremism: No Longer a Laughing Matter

Rabbi Brant Rosen wrote about: Anti-Semitism, Great Britain, Holocaust, Israel, Nakba, Palestine, Politics, and Zionism in two articles which I can recommend to read.

The American rabbi is convinced that many have been scratching their heads trying to figure out why on earth the government of Israel and writes in “Zionism’s Marriage of Convenience to Anti-Semitism” that so many staunch Zionists are just fine with the election of Donald Trump

– the darling of the anti-Semitic alt-right.

Zionism not being new he does find it having a

cozy, if somewhat Faustian relationship with anti-Semitism since its very origins.

He argues that

Theodor Herzl (born Benjamin Ze’ev Herzl) also known in Hebrew as חוֹזֵה הַמְדִינָה‎, Chozeh HaMedinah (lit. “Visionary of the State”) an Austro-Hungarian journalist, playwright, political activist, and writer who was one of the fathers of modern political Zionism. – in Basel, 1897

The founder of modern Zionism, Theodor Herzl never made a secret of his belief that his new movement would have to depend upon anti-Semitism and anti-Semites in order to create a Jewish state. In his pamphlet, “The Jewish State,” he suggested raising money for the effort by means of a “direct subscription,” adding that “not only poor Jews but also Christians who wanted to get rid of them would subscribe a small amount to this fund.”

Scholars such as Yehuda Bibas, Zvi Hirsch Kalischer and Judah Alkalai were already promoting Zionist ideas before him.

Herzl grew to believe that anti-semitism could not be defeated or cured, only avoided, and that the only way to avoid it was the establishment of a Jewish state where there would be place to co-operate with those anti-Semites he even thought could become their most dependable friends and allies. {his diary}

Russian imperial statesman Vyacheslav von Plehve, whose efforts to uphold autocratic principle, a police-bureaucratic government, minister of the interior and an infamous anti-Semite who encouraged the Kishinev pogroms on April 19 and 20, 1903, and a second, smaller riot that erupted in October 1905.

Herman S. Shapiro. “Kishinever shekhita, elegie” [Kishinev Massacre Elegy]. New York: Asna Goldberg, 1904. Irene Heskes Collection. The illustration in the center of this elegy depicts the April 1903 Kishinev massacre.

The most popular newspaper in Kishinev, the Russian-language anti-Semitic newspaper Бессарабец (Bessarabetz, meaning “Bessarabian“), published by Pavel Krushevan, regularly published articles with headlines such as “Death to the Jews!” and “Crusade against the Hated Race!” (referring to the Jews).

The Times published a forged dispatch by Vyacheslav von Plehve, the Minister of Interior, to the governor of Bessarabia, which supposedly gave orders not to stop the rioters.

Today it is again that same region in eastern Europe where again such hate against the Jews is growing and infecting the West of Europe, by mouth of the right wing neo fascist groups. As in the previous century Plehve’s would not have worried

as long as the Zionists encouraged emigration of Jews from Russia, the Russian authorities would not disturb them.

perhaps several living in the Balkan, East and West Europe would not mind giving them time to leave.

Rabbi Brant Rosen looks at British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour who is perhaps best remembered for his World War I statement (the Balfour Declaration) expressing official British approval of Zionism. Though he may be long been lionized as a Zionist hero, he wasn’t particularly well-known for his love for Jews or the Jewish people.

(see: 1917 Balfour Declaration, 1905 Aliens Act)

The rabbi writes:

Balfour spoke of the “undoubted evils which had fallen on the country from an alien immigration which was largely Jewish.” Balfour, like many Christians of his class, “did not believe that Jews could be assimilated into Gentile British society.”

In this regard, it is worth noting that the sole Jewish member of British government, Edwin Montagu, strongly objected to the Balfour Declaration, submitting a memorandum to the British cabinet in August 1917 that resonates with haunting prescience today:

I wish to place on record my view that the policy of His Majesty’s Government is anti-Semitic and in result will prove a rallying ground for Anti-Semites in every country in the world…When the Jews are told that Palestine is their national home, every country will immediately desire to get rid of its Jewish citizens, and you will find a population in Palestine driving out its present inhabitants…

When the Jew has a national home, surely it follows that the impetus to deprive us of the rights of British citizenship must be enormously increased. Palestine will become the world’s Ghetto. Why should the Russian give the Jew equal rights? His national home is Palestine. Why does Lord Rothschild attach so much importance to the difference between British and foreign Jews? All Jews will be foreign Jews, inhabitants of the great country of Palestine.

He also looks at the most troubling example of Zionist association with anti-Semitism which occurred in 1933, when the Jewish Agency struck a deal with the Nazis’ Economic Ministry known as the Ha’avrah (Transfer) agreement.

Today we may wonder how it could come so far that the Zionist movement came to negotiate with Nazi Germany in order to facilitate the transfer of German Jews and their property to Palestine.

(see also an essay for Yad Vashem’s Shoah Resource Center, Israeli historian Y’faat Weiss pointing out that the Nazi regime’s participation in the agreement was motivated both by a fear of the boycott and its desire to rid Germany of its Jews.)

For the rabbi

it is not difficult to understand why, on a practical level, the Zionist movement would find a perverse kind of common cause with anti-Semitic regimes. As a form of ethnic nationalism, Zionism has always been dependent upon the maintenance of a demographic majority of Jews in the land. It makes sense that Zionists have been willing to deal with nations that were more than happy to rid themselves of their Jews in order that they maintain their own national ethnic homogeneity.

Would there be a big problem that there was taken a “Faustian bargain” like Brant Rosen calls it?

I would not think that Zionism from its origin has

necessarily fed off the existence of anti-Semites to justify the need for a Jewish state.

because normally every Jews and sincere Christian would know that God had promised a Holy Land to the descendants of Abraham. What I well can see is that several secular Jews saw a good opportunity to enlarge their power and to get some own state where they would be really their own boss.

Even more tragically, as Edwin Montagu predicted, Jewish ethnic nationalism did indeed result in a “population in Palestine driving out its inhabitants.”

I think one big problem is that Israel has too many secular politicians who allow the extremist fundamentalist Jews to take in the land of others and are not worrying about the respect human beings have to show to other creations of the Most High Elohim.

Our Christian believe that Jerusalem shall have to become the capital of the Holy Land and God’s Kingdom should be known to all lovers of God and to be a reality the world has to cope with. In the end God His Kingdom shall anyway establish.

Like rabbi Brant Rosen writes Millenarianism has taken on many forms, most of which were rooted in the belief that the physical restoration of the Jews to the land would be a necessary precursor to the apocalypse and the eventual second coming of the Messiah. This religious dogma, brought by a.o. English Puritan colonists but also by very liberal non-trinitarian Christians to North America, could evolve into previous century and present-day Christian and Jewish Zionism.

John Charles Hagee, the 5th of 6 pastors in his family, all of whom were named John Hagee, dating back to the colonial era.

In his second article he looks a.o. at Pastor John Hagee, founder and senior pastor of Cornerstone Church, a charismatic megachurch in San Antonio, Texas. He also is the the CEO of his non-profit corporation, Global Evangelism Television (GETV) and founder and National Chairman of the Christian-Zionist organization Christians United for Israel (CUFI), incorporated on February 7, 2006, the largest coalition of Evangelical Zionists in the world.

Hagee, who believes the Bible commands Christians to support the State of Israel and the Jewish people, is one of those American ‘prophets’ and doom preachers who makes his apocalyptic religious views clear.

The rabbi also looks at Hagee’s 2005 book (and not 2007) Jerusalem Countdown: A Warning to the World, where Hagee interprets the Bible to predict that Russia and the Islamic states will invade Israel and will be destroyed by God. This will cause the antichrist, (for Hagee) the head of the European Union, to create a confrontation over Israel between China and the West, getting Israel to be covered in “a sea of human blood.” .

Hagee’s attack against Christian antisemitism in his book Jerusalem Countdown claimed that Adolf Hitler’s antisemitism derived especially from his Catholic background (calling Hitler “a spiritual leader in the Catholic Church”), and that the Catholic Church under Pope Pius XII encouraged Nazism instead of denouncing it (pp. 79–81)

[The book echoes predictions made in The Late, Great Planet Earth, the best-selling 1970 book co-authored by Hal Lindsey and Carole C. Carlson.]

Rabbi Rosen also looks at Hagee’s more recent book, “Four Blood Moons,” in which Hagee promotes the Blood moon prophecy, and states that a tetrad (a series of four consecutive lunar eclipses —coinciding on Jewish holidays — with six full moons in between, and no intervening partial lunar eclipses) which began with the April 2014 lunar eclipse is a sign of the end times as described in the Bible in the Book of Joel, Acts 2:20 and Revelation 6:12. The tetrad ended with the lunar eclipse on September 27-28, 2015. (see what Haggee wrote).

[In January 2014, Mike Moore, the then General Secretary of Christian Witness to Israel, wrote a lengthy article dismissing the claims of Biltz and Hagee. Moore’s view was that no significance can be drawn from the eclipses]

David Brog, Executive Director of Christians United For Israel (CUFI), an American pro-Israel Christian organization

Further the rabbi looks at CUFI’s Jewish Executive Director, David Brog, who clearly serves to give cover to Christian Zionists, painting them as “mainstream” and not nearly as scary as their beliefs would indicate.

Bannon at the 2017 CPAC

Next former naval officer, banker, radio host, research director, film producer and media executive, Breitbart editor Stephen Bannon, currently serving as assistant to the President and White House chief strategist in the Trump administration comes under the attention. His documentary “Destroying the Great Satan: The Rise of Islamic Facism (sic) in America” can give us an idea how his mind may be tormented by the fundamentalist evangelist teachings.

While most of the Jewish concern toward Bannon has primarily focused on his alt-right leanings and his personal comments about Jews, less attention has been given to his apocalyptic world view. Strongly influenced by generational theorists William Strauss and Neil Howe’s book “The Fourth Turning: What Cycles of History Tell Us About America’s Next Rendezvous with Destiny”  Bannon ascribes to the theory that American history has operated in four-stage cycles, moving from major crisis to awakening to major crisis.

+

Preceding article

What to do in the Face of Global Anti-semitism

+++

Further reading

1. Zionism in Palestine
2. The relationship between Ariel Sharon and the Rebbe (Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson)
3. Israel loves wars.
4. Six Years Ago: The US-NATO-Israel Sponsored Al Qaeda Insurgency in Syria. Who Was Behind The 2011 “Protest Movement”?
5. Abby Martin and Eran Efrati on Institutionalized Israeli War Crimes and Oppression of Palestinians
6. From Washington to the Middle East, Should the World Brace for March 15?
7. Steve Cohen’s ‘That’s Funny, You Don’t Look Anti-Semitic’
8. Does Feminism Have Room for Zionists? – The New York Times
9. Emily Shire’s Zionist Feminism
10. From Washington to the Middle East, Should the World Brace for March 15? | James Perloff
11. The false teachings of Zionism & dispensationalism
12. How did the Talmudic “Noahide Laws” Become Part of American Law?
13. A Liberal Zionism for the Trump Era
14. The control-freakism of the CIA, UK and other western supposed “intelligence” organizations!
15. Origin Of The Oppression Of Palestine By israel
16. Canada offers tax deduction for promoting ethnic nationalism, war
17. Will the Royal Family Celebrate 100 Years of Shame by Endorsing Israel?
18. Pro-Palestinian activist: Zionism and feminism don’t go together
19. What Linda Sarsour Said
20. Zionism vs Islam – Which is More Dangerous?
21. The Millet System & Minorities in Israel/Palestine
22. The Charge of Replacement Theology is a Cover for Fuzzy Theology
23. Alliel – A Window Into Tribal Arrogance
24. “Many American left-liberal Jews believe that Israel only deserves to exist…if Israel serves as a ‘light unto the nations…’ and is ethically perfect”
25. The Rise of Anti-Seminism
26. What Type of Utopia Will Israel Be?
27. Italian rabbis accuse biblical conference of fueling anti-Judaism
28. On anti-Semitism, anti-Islam and fictitious alliances in U.S.
29. US 2018 Budget Guarantees Foreign Assistance Only for Israel, State Dept. Says
30. German newspaper backtracks after listing Netanyahu as a ‘crazy world leader’

+++

Related articles

• British universities have a duty to Jewish students to monitor Israel Apartheid Week
• Student politician who called for Zionists to be punched escapes sanction from his peers
• ADL: Pro-Islam Jobbik has infiltrated Trump regime
• Tel Aviv – launching the anti-occupation campaign
• Social media firms accused of ‘commercial prostitution’
• ‘A Day Without a Woman’ Strike Has Alarming Anti-Israel Partnerships and a Convicted Terrorist as a Leader
• Chris Evans Is Fighting Neo-Nazis On Twitter Because He’s Basically Captain America IRL
• Why Is Trump Silent on Islamophobic Attacks?
• Francois Fillon’s party apologises for tweeting anti-semitic caricature of rival Emmanel Macron
• Trump flips out on Jewish reporter for asking about anti-semitism

Shalom Rav

photo credit: Getty Images

In my previous post, I explored how Zionism has historically fed off of anti-Semites and anti-Semitic regimes to justify the need for a Jewish state. In this post, I’d like to discuss a phenomenon that has even more ominous resonance for the current political moment: the willingness of political Zionists, Israeli politicians and right wing Israel advocates to court the support of Christian millenarians and apocalyptic extremists.

Some history: In the century after the Protestant reformation, the religious ideology of millenarianism began to spread throughout Europe. Millenarianism took many forms, most of which were rooted in the belief that the physical restoration of the Jews to the land would be a necessary precursor to the apocalypse and the eventual second coming of the Messiah. This religious dogma was eventually brought by English Puritan colonists to North America, where it evolved into present-day Christian Zionism.

It is safe to…

View original post 1,326 more words