Monday, January 21, 2013

Holding Hands with End Timers

JayinPhiladelphia

Monday in the US, on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, our very own National Museum of American Jewish History here in Philadelphia was open and offering free admission to everyone.

Martin Luther King, Jr. was a friend of our people who knew exactly what to say in response to those who pretended to merely be 'anti-Zionist.'
“When people criticize Zionists, they mean Jews. You’re talking anti-Semitism!” -- Martin Luther King, Jr.
I do maintain that any non-Jewish person who self-identifies as an 'anti-Zionist' is clearly an anti-Semite. Others would say that all those who identify as same are such, but I am not one to judge, say, the Satmarim, whatever anyone might think of them.

That's above my pay grade.

I can absolutely, however, state without any hesitation whatsoever that this is blatant antisemitism:
It's enormously frustrating to see the Jewish people hold hands with End Timers merely for the money
And therein lies what I'm thinking of tonight. I'm wondering where this fits in amongst contemporary strains of anti-Semitism, and considering that we are possibly seeing something new here? After all, this doesn't quite fit into Sabeel-style left wing theological antisemitism. Nor does it match up with the Mainline Protestant BDS stuff, either, because even though I believe the leaders of that 'movement' are clearly driven by anti-Jewish sentiment, they 'at least' limit their hostility to the Jewish state of Israel.

Not to make too much of one blog comment on the site which has done as much as any other place over the past decade to mainstream antisemitism in the US, but it just feels so familiar. Are we witnessing the birth of a new strain of Jon Haber's Big Ugly?

What I see explicitly here in the case above is the specific claim of some sort of nefarious alliance between "The Jooooz" (as in not just Israel, but clearly Jews qua Jews) and far-out fringe characters amongst the Christian right, who though not all fit into the category of wanting to gather all the Jews in one place so their End Times can come, some certainly do.

Which is to say that while not all evangelical Christians can be accused of being temporary philosemites until their own theological purposes are served, some absolutely can. And there are some folks who believe we stand with the latter, just as sure as Mahmoud Abbas believes there was a conspiracy between Zionists and Nazis.

I certainly don't believe all evangelical Christians, by necessity, have nefarious intentions.

Yet some of them do, and it's those outliers which certain 'progressives' then aim to tar us with by association, and use against us. Just as some like to claim that the words of some fringe rabbi in Brooklyn or Har Nof apparently provides proof of moral equivalency between Israel and Iran, or something like that.

Let's just hope that there are not going to be an increasing number of people (who are welcomed with open arms) amongst the 'progressive' community these days who say things like "look at me! I am a reformed former fundamentalist, here to tell you that Teh Jooooz are consorting with undesirables!"

Because doesn't that sound familiar?

4 comments:

  1. This is excellent guys

    SAY WHAT? ANTI-SEMITES?
    WHO, US ANTI-ZIONISTS?

    By Steven Plaut


    http://www.freeman.org/m_online/oct03/plaut1.htm

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  2. Well, see here's the trick. The guy was raised as an evangelical Christian, so that must mean he's a 'right winger.' Despite everything and anything he now says. Once a right-winger, always a right-winger. Problem solved!

    Because as you and I both know, calling someone a 'right winger' is the easiest way to simply fob the problem off on others, and maintain the image that The Movement is pure.

    "A very famous Israeli writer told me on the phone a couple of months ago: "You really have become a right-winger." What? Right winger? Me? An old feminist human rights activist, even a communist when I was young? Only because I described the Arab-Israeli conflict as accurately as I could and because sometimes I identified with a country continuously attacked by terror, I became a right-winger? In the contemporary world, the world of human rights, when you call a person a right-winger, this is the first step toward his or her delegitimization."

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  3. Speaking of the King quote, I once cited it and some Jew hater "authority" told me that it was suspect, but Martin Kramer brilliantly put that baby to bed.

    http://www.martinkramer.org/sandbox/2012/03/in-the-words-of-martin-luther-king/

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    Replies
    1. Yeah, that was a great piece. Came across it somewhere the other day for the first time. Thanks for the reminder!

      Of course, those who hate that quote don't really care about the truth...

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