First, I passionately believe in the right of Israel to exist, to defend itself and to live in peace and security. Not just because of the tragedies of history. Not only because of the realities of today. Not simply because of my party’s unstinting support for Israel through the decades, but also because it’s something I feel very deep inside of me.
— David Cameron, June 21, 2009.
You see, it’s like this. They own the land, just the mere land and that’s all they do own; but it was our folks, our Jews and Christians, that made it holy, and so they haven’t any business to be there defiling it. It’s a shame and we ought not to stand it a minute. We ought to march against them and take it away from them.
— Tom Sawyer to Huck Finn in Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer Abroad, 1894.
David Cameron, leader of the Conservative Party in Britain, recently described his personal support for Israel in startling anatomical terms. ((Jerusalem Post, June 21, 2009.)) The game changer for Cameron, as he admits, is not the Holocaust, not oil, not even hallowed party tradition. Rather it is an inchoate something lodged so deeply in the Cameron innards that it apparently defies description.
But we already know what that something is. Tom Sawyer gave it a rough prescience more than 100 years ago. Jimmy Carter had no trouble pinpointing it two years ago when he penned a watery defense of his book Peace not Apartheid in “A letter to Jewish citizens of America” saying: [T]he overwhelming bias for Israel comes from among Christians like me who have been taught since childhood to honor and protect God’s chosen people from among whom came our own savior, Jesus Christ. ((Jimmy Carter Issues Letter to Jewish Community on Palestine Peace Not Apartheid, December 15, 2006.))
(Carter’s pious blathering puts me in mind of the confession of an acquaintance raised a good Baptist who realized that after she stopped attending church and started dancing she was inexplicably dating only Jewish men. Eventually she realized that this peculiar attraction was simply a behavioral manifestation of her childhood theology. Nearer my God to Thee indeed!)
The public confessions of both Carter and Cameron passed with little notice, although naturally Cameron’s anatomical revelations received favorable coverage in the Jerusalem Post this past June. Expressions of religious fanaticism by Western leaders fail to excite the breathless commentary occasioned by those from bearded, swarthy monotheists.
The value of all of these confessions is that they shine a light on the dark heart of the relationship that Christendom has with the Zionist project or, as Angry Arab As’ad Abu Khalil calls it, the usurping entity. In fact, the left’s inability to grasp the emotionally charged and historic nature of Christendom’s religious relationship to Palestine is monumentally harmful. The effects of this deep culturally ingrained religiosity – Israel Shahak’s “weight of history” – cannot be underestimated. When such subjects are tabooed, as Shahak points out, their power over the discourse is strengthened. The dark underbelly of Christendom’s support for the usurping entity is rarely exposed to the light of day thus retaining its firm hold on Western public imagination.
However much the West boasts of its dedication to the Enlightenment, the document known as the Bible has Christendom securely in its vise-like grip. And the Bible (as Zionists will remind you) is nothing less than the founding document of their project. As the autobiography of what Gore Vidal has called the “Great Realtor in the Sky”, the Bible’s contents are by and large unlovely. The Realtor’s ongoing displeasure with just about everything and everyone and the violence resulting thereof fills its pages, so much so that The Skeptic has adjudged 26 of the 39 books of the Old Testament to have “no good stuff” whatsoever. ((The Skeptic’s Annotated Bible. ))
With its long history of broad dissemination in the West (just look in the drawer of that bedside table when next you check into a motel) the Bible has for centuries functioned as an instructional tool, literary repository, law book and cultural arbiter. For all the condescending mockery Westerners made of Mao’s Little Red Book, the late Chairman’s musings can’t hold a candle to the Bible as far as intensity of influence or range of distribution. No other single document has so permeated and affected every aspect of Western society, its influence increasing rather than lessening as the centuries passed.
But only within the borders of Christendom. Consider if you will this anecdote. A Palestinian Christian gentleman of my acquaintance – now deceased – took to delivering home Sunday school lessons to his numerous family after they were violently expelled from their village in northern Palestine by Zionist thugs in 1948. Wielding his “tawrat” (Old Testament) and with a foul Tatli cigarette smoldering from the corner of his mouth, he would gather the kids round him in the one room dwelling that was their post-Nakba shelter and proceed to read out hair-raising verse after hair-raising verse detailing the mayhem, expropriation, rapine, massacre, child abuse, drought and death visited by The Realtor on some hapless folk or other. He would then slam the covers shut and proceed to deliver his own commentary on the day’s text. “This is why we’re in this mess” he would rant, “Because of people who believe in this sort of crap.”
Denizens of Christendom these days are unable to make such connections, not the least because they have largely been spared from being on the business end of Biblical-inspired weaponry in recent history. In the past, when they did put two and two together, retribution was swift and fatal as in the case of brave Phoebe Ward, condemned to death because she “took a mighty disgust at Things of Religion” and was duly hanged at Tyburn in 1711 right around the same time jolly Jonathan Swift was publishing his satires on religion. ((Peter Limbaugh, The London Hanged, p.148.)) Little good did Swiftian satire or Phoebe’s imprecations do. Over the centuries Christendom’s masses were gradually disciplined by the rope, the stake, the lash, the workhouse, transportation, slavery, the factory or the prison and finally anesthetized by wealth, patriotism and excess. As a result, blasphemy is rare these days. More’s the pity.
We are imprisoned by the Bible here in Christendom’s heartland: Personal names, geographic names, hundreds of years of literature oozing with Biblical themes and allusion, the Ten Commandments on courthouse lawns, politicians tripping over each other to swear fealty to The Realtor, pledges of allegiance, in God we trust — you name it — Biblical influence has seeped into the entire cultural and political structure of the West in ways no other religious document has done anywhere else.
And then there are those Crusades, themselves inspired by the notion of Biblical ownership and lust for plunder, their spirit embodied in the Zionist project today. Clearly in spite of the passing of centuries they are still a sore spot, as Tom Sawyer reminds us. It is not for nothing that George Bush first referred to the war on terror as a “crusade”. It is not for nothing that Tony (“Tony’s Christian faith is part of him, down to his cotton socks”) Blair answered the question put to him by Jeremy Paxman, “Did you and President Bush pray together?” with a rattled negative followed by an inexplicable grin. ((“Bush and Blair never prayed together, their wives say,” March 2, 2009. Also see: “Blair believed God wanted him to go to war to fight evil, claims his mentor.”)) It is even unremarkable that Frenchy Papist Jacques Chirac conveniently remained mute on Bush’s 2003 ravings about combating Gog and Magog in the Middle East until only recently. ((James Haught, “A French Revelation, or the Burning Bush.”)) Christian solidarity is apparently paramount when waging the Crusade.
Even with the enormous historic weight behind Christendom’s unshakeable support for the usurping entity, the power of the Zionist lobby is nothing to sniff at. Highly organized, heavily funded, and brandishing a personal land contract from The Realtor, it has thousands of dedicated sayanim at the ready and is a force to be reckoned with. But because it operates on the pliant and welcoming home court of Christendom its perpetual success is assured for the nonce. ((“Home Court Advantage: Religion and the Israel Lobby.”))
There is nothing left but to continue to point out the rank hypocrisy of Christendom’s command and control central; an American hypocrisy and spite projecting outwardly on poor, dark-skinned folks its own imperial religious fanaticism in the endless “war on terror” with its correlate, lavish and craven support for the usurping entity. The Crusades are going strong these days, in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, Gaza and the US penal gulag.
The doctrine of preemption – that uniquely Talmudic and Calvinist construct — has replaced presumption of innocence. The gloomy patron saint of Protestantism lays down for us the Biblical legality behind the “indiscriminate and promiscuous slaughter” so expertly practiced today by both the armies of Christendom and the usurping entity:
The indiscriminate and promiscuous slaughter [of Joshua in Jericho], making no distinction of age or sex, but including alike women and children, the aged and decrepit, may seem an inhuman massacre, had it not been executed by the command of God. But as he, in whose hands are life and death, had justly doomed those nations to destruction, this puts an end to all discussion…. If anyone object that children, at least, were still free from fault, it is easy to answer, that they perished justly, as the race was accursed and reprobated. ((John Calvin, Commentaries on the Book of Joshua, c. 1533))
A new Krak de Chevalier has been erected in Baghdad’s Green Zone. Hundreds of American military bases — latter-day Rumeli Hisars — dot the globe, serving as Christendom’s armed outposts. The disconnect between Christendom’s pretense to humanism, secularism and enlightenment while providing full support for a vicious crusader theocracy engaged in a slow, deliberate and completely public genocide is ignored. Sending forth drones in Pakistan, murderously occupying and destroying Iraq, showering captive civilians with white phosphorus are all actions rooted in preemptive Biblical prerogative. From dispensationalists, to liberals, from the Green Party to left-wing Zionism, belief in the Bible’s land contract is a shared yet unacknowledged currency.
No doubt David Cameron smugly regards himself as the very epitome of an enlightened English gentleman. But for all the philosophy and politics the privileged Tory read down at Oxford he still admits to a seemingly mysterious intestinal affinity to the usurping entity. The weight of history is hard to face and even harder to purge. And as what passes as Christendom’s progressives sink into a terminal docility, Obama and the Zionists vigorously prosecute the new Crusade on all its fronts. The Bible tells them so.