Alabama Justice Roy Moore is to present the keynote address at a prayer breakfast to “honor Israel and Pray for the Peace of Jerusalem”, according to a press release carried by ASSIST Ministries. This is not the New York event discussed back in March, but a Memphis-based affair that has been going on for 23 years. The release tells us that Moore is
this amazing man, this faithful servant of America, who regularly hears from the God of the Ten Commandments.
(Some may be hoping that God of the Ten Commandments tells him to run against Bush, as rumoured)
The organiser is Ed McAteer, a Memphis businessman with longstanding influence in the Christian Right. McAteer’s gushing over Moore is not surprising, given that Moore (along with Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee) had pushed for him to be US Ambassador to Israel in 2001. McAteer explains that
The principal purpose of our breakfast is to show our unconditional love and solidarity with Israel and the Jewish People.
Well, not quite so unconditional, it turns out. One of the attendees will be Herbert Zweibon, Jewish head of Americans for a Safe Israel. In a statement reported by Ekklesia today, Zweibon complains that
In order to shore up his flagging political fortunes, Israel’s Prime Minister has betrayed the Zionist principles on which he served the nation as general and on which he ran for public office.
That’s right: Sharon is just too damn liberal. It doesn’t matter that he’s managed to get Bush to reverse 35 years of US policy on Israel, to support settlements in the West Bank and to reject the right of Palestinian refugees from Israel proper to return to their homes. The fact is that even talking about any sort of compromise is blasphemy: God has a particular plan for Israeli Jews, and any Jew who fails to go along with that plan, whether anti-Zionist, “soft-Zionist”, conservative or even (as in Sharon’s case) reactionary is a traitor. Israelis have a religious duty to expand Israel to its Biblical dimensions, and whatever bloodshed this may cause on either side is beside the point. Forget “blessed are the peacemakers”: holy war is inevitable, and at the end of it all those Jews still alive will see Jesus return and will convert. And Israel doesn’t need to worry, because, as LaHaye and Jenkins describe it, Jesus will dispatch all Israel’s enemies – including horses:
Men and women soldiers and horses seemed to explode where they stood…It was as if the very words of the Lord had superheated their blood, causing it to burst through their veins and skin…Even as they struggled, their own flesh dissolved, their eyes melted and their tongues disintegrated
(As an aside, Bush’s backing for Sharon’s plan does back up the view of those, such as The Revealer, who have said that Bush is less apocalyptic than some have suggested)
As well as various Israeli diplomatic figures, the breakfast in Memphis will bring together Christian Zionists such as Adrian Rogers, Gary Bauer, Thomas Ed Steele, and Bill McCartney (founder of the Promise Keepers), all of whom are vehemently against either a Palestinian state or equal rights for Palestinians in a bi-national state.
The event will also be graced by Holocaust survivor. I’m sure that none of the Christian Zionists will be tactless enough to say what I know many of them think: that the Holocaust was God’s punishment for the Jews’ rejection of Jesus, before He restored them to Israel.
Filed under: Uncategorized | 3 Comments »
