From the Jerusalem Post:
A group of Israeli politicians and academics on Monday sought the support of Japan’s small but influential Christian community, part of an increasingly global Judeo-Christian alliance against radical Islam.
This was the fourth annual “Jerusalem Summit Asia”, an initiative of the Jerusalem Summit, which involves evangelical Christians, neo-Conservatives, and Israeli right-wingers – and which is financed by a controverisal Russian-Israeli billionaire.
According to the Post, the Tokyo summit was held in a Diet-owned building, and it brought together
…Israeli Tourism Minister Yitzhak Aharonovitch, lawmakers from the Knesset’s Christian Allies Caucus and conservative Israeli academics and thinkers together with Japan’s tiny but growing evangelical Christian community…
Among those present were MKs Gideon Sa’ar and Benny Elon, the far-right former tourist minister who supports the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians and who is particularly popular among right-wing American Christians. The rhetoric was predictable: the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is simply about radical Islamism, which should be opposed by a “Judeo-Christian alliance”. Elon boasted that
…the decision to enlist the support of Japanese Christians in the struggle against Islamic extremism followed marked success in working with the evangelical Christian community in other Asian countries, including the Philippines and South Korea, which, along with Singapore, had hosted such conferences in the past.
The “Jerusalem Summit” also targets Africa, and I blogged on a Cape Town event last year. As I noted then, its first session, in 2003, featured “Richard Perle, Senator Sam Brownback, Congressman Eliot Engel, Prof. Daniel Pipes, Amb. Alan Keyes, Cal Thomas, Benjamin Netanyahu and Uzi Landau.” The organisation believes that “the accepted version of the Palestinian narrative…must be branded as devoid of any legitimacy” (a toned-down re-formulation: the website used to say that “the entire Palestinian narrative must be discredited and de-legitimized as a historical hoax”), and it wants to organise financial inducements to persuade Palestinians to relocate to other countries.
The executive director is Dmitry Radyshevsky, and funding comes from Michael Cherney; Radyshevsky is a former head of the Michael Cherney Foundation. Cherney has been accused of links with the Russian mafia, which he and his supporters strenuously deny. Radyshevsky is also on the advisory board of the American Center for Democracy, alongside Richard Pearle. Speaking in Tokyo, Radyshevsky
urged Christians and Jews to unite “politically and spiritually” in the face of radical Islam, which he called “the reincarnation of fascism and Nazism.”
“Jews and Christians are one tree, with the Jews forming the roots and the Christians the branches; when it is united it is unbreakable,” he said.
The Post doesn’t tell us anything about the Japanese Christians who met the delegation, but it’s likely to have included Kenichi Nakagawa, who runs Harvest Times Ministries. Harvest Time is the largest televangelist organisation in the country, and Nakagawa is a strong supporter of Israel and Zionism.
(Cross-posted to Talk to Action)
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