The Moral and Biblical insanity that is Christian Zionism

The rapturous applause of the U.S. Congress for the unctuous nonsense that poured from  the mouth of the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, in recent days pales into insignificance when compared to the out and out idolatrous behavior of philo-Zionists like John Hagee. Even the Israeli Knesset  would not indulge their own Prime Minister in such a manner as  the U.S. congress let alone the hysterical ravings of those Christians who wrap themselves in a Zionist flag and sing Hallelujah.

I believe that the Christian Church in the U.S., and the church in those countries who choose to follow their example, are facing the greatest danger of  spiritual, moral and ethical collapse that has been seen in the Christian world for the last 500 years. This collapse into intellectual and theological bankruptcy is no doubt being lead by the Christian lobby that has replaced worship of its Savior with an allegiance to the state of Israel that would make David Ben Gurion blush. This insane devotion to the Zionist state forces Christians to abandon virtually every spiritual and ethical boundary for which they have been known for over the last 80 years. Like a co-dependent lover who can’t see that their relationship is destroying them, the Christian Zionists drown their own inner voices of conscience to the sound of praise for a secular state that opposes the preaching of the Gospel within its borders with greater vigor than Cuba or Venezuela ever have. The Zionist state forbids professing Christians to migrate to Israel. Similar behaviour by Arab states gets a firm rebuke by the religious right,citing this as evidence of the anti-Christ like nature of Islam as well as justification for supporting the state of Israel.

Advocates of the Christian right are almost universally supporters of anti-abortion doctrines. Laws allowing for abortion rights are deemed satanic and are frequently equated with Hitlers extermination of the Jews of Europe in  the Holocaust. Yet Israel, seeing itself as a liberal democracy, made in the mold of civilised Europe, allows some 40,000 abortions every year. It is the only country in the region that has pro-abortion rights legislation yet once again the Christian Zionist movement has suddenly nothing to say about the matter.

Attempts to bring universal health care to the U.S. have found their most ardent opponents being members of the religious right. Universal health care is seen as just another step down the dark road to Socialism. Yet the Israeli system of universal health care is never held up as an example of Godlessness in action by right or left wing religious conservatives in the west.

The religious right is often very skeptical about the so called Christian confessions of their political leaders, particularly if they are black and Democrat. They hate to see religious belief being exploited by those whose real goal is the attainment of power, status and wealth without true belief in the God of the Bible. They want their Christian political leaders to be the “real deal”. Yet Israeli leaders can be out and out atheists who clearly use biblical texts to bolster their arguments while in truth seeing those biblical texts as being nothing more than myth and legend. Once again they do this without a word of criticism by the Christian Zionist masses.

Professor Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin of Ben-Gurion University is alleged to have once made the sarcastic comment, “Our claim to the land could be put in a nutshell: God does not exist, and He gave us this land.” Any such comment showing such open cynicism and exploitation of biblical belief by U.S. politicians would ensure their political doom.

Religious right doomsday prophets routinely predict the demise of the U.S. due to its abandonment of biblical ethics and values regardless of the fact that it was Moses and not George Washington who stood on Mount Sinai and accepted the covenant made with them by God regarding the land their people was to inhabit. No curses of destruction of the U.S. nation for abandoning the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob are revealed in the Old Testament. Yet the very nation whose destruction IS promised in scripture if they disobey the commandments of God, continue to reject both Torah values and the acceptance of Christ without a word of warning by Christian Zionists.

The Christian Zionist disdain for the U.N. continues regardless of the fact that it was the United Nations that created the state of Israel and that the U.N. Charter is deeply dependent on values obtained from the Christian and Jewish scriptures. U.S. Evangelicals that support Israel speak of a Jewish people “returning home” when in fact the Jews of Europe who went there during the Zionist migrations to Palestine would have not known Hebron from Albuquerque. The hundreds of thousands of Palestinians ( now numbering in the millions) who were forced to leave their actual brick and mortar residences in Palestine during the ethnic cleansing that took place in 1948, are considered to be illegitimate candidates for citizens of the land where  they were born even though they still have the keys and the land title deeds to the houses they once occupied. Even if the Palestinians did leave of their own free will at the command of their Arab leaders (a point clearly refuted by the indisputable evidence from the archives of the Israeli  Defense Force) the Israelis have no right to deny them return.

I have personally spoken to hundreds of Muslim followers regarding the Israel-Palestine issue and never once have I detected any hatred of Jewish people or animosity towards Christians. Yet the Christian Zionist world continually derides the Islamic faith and paints the picture that it is Muslims who are bred to hate Jews and detest all forms of the Christian faith. I am a Bible believing Christian and I have been invited to speak to Muslims on a number of occasions about the Israel-Palestine issue. I have always been able to talk about my own faith in Jesus without fear of being persecuted while at any of those meetings. It has been my experience that Muslim people have done everything to respect my faith. This obviously is not the case in all parts of the Islamic world but it is certainly true in many instances. It has NEVER been my experience for Christian Zionists to respect the beliefs of Muslims. No Muslim has ever told me that Jesus is damned, while I have heard Christian Zionists scream, at the tops of their voices, that the prophet Mohamed is in hell, in public places like Rundle  Mall in the heart of Adelaide during rush hour. Whom is it that is being disrespectful of whom?

Muslims recognise that many Arabs in Palestine are Christian and even Hamas has allowed them to join them in government in Gaza. Yet these Christian brethren have been totally ignored by the religious right in the west. Their persecution by the Zionist state is not  a topic for discussion. Stories of Christian persecution in the Middle East are never allowed to include the suffering of Palestinian Christians at the hands of the Zionist state.

If the Zionist state of Israel ever falls, then I believe the Jewish people will still flourish in the rest of the world (even in the Middle East). Christian Zionism, however, will be consigned to the already huge pile of kooky and dangerous ideas that Christians have managed to invent out of their distorted understanding of the Bible. Zionist Israel is more important to Christians Zionists than it is to the Jewish people themselves. The CZ’s are more Zionist than Israel. Their lack of tolerance for those different from themselves and for the oppressed of the world makes them less Christian than the truly Islamic.

It has been said that the attitude of the U.S. to Cuba is like the attitude of a werewolf to a full moon. It suffices to say that the  Christian Zionist cult-like devotion to Israel does not permit them to be able to dispassionately debate the Israel-Palestine issue. I have discovered this, to my dismay, on too numerous instances to mention.

Craig Nielsen

ACTION FOR PALESTINE