Israel Matters (Updated) - and One Year Later

June 2010 Update

We revisited our "Memorial Day Optimism" essay from a year ago, here; now it’s time to again revisit “Israel Matters”, also from almost exactly a year ago. (Scroll down to read the original essay).

Historian Victor Davis Hanson (a Brushfires favorite), has recently commented in National Review Online (here) on the stunningly virulent reaction to Israel’s action to defend itself against an obviously staged PR provocation by terrorists-posing-as-humanitarians in the ‘flotilla’ to the Gaza Strip. Hanson writes:

No one in Europe worried much about the constant shower of missiles from Gaza in the past. No one in Europe said a word when North Korea torpedoed and slaughtered South Koreans on the high seas. No one objected when the Iranians hijacked a British ship and humiliated the hostages. …

What explains this preexisting hatred, which ensures denunciation of Israel in the most rabid – or, to use the politically correct parlance, “disproportionate,” terms? It is not about “occupied land,” given the millions of square miles worldwide that are presently occupied, from Georgia to Cyprus to Tibet. It is not a divided capital — Nicosia is walled off. It is not an overreaction in the use of force per se — the Russians flattened Grozny and killed tens of thousands while the world snoozed. And it cannot be the scale of violence, given what we see hourly in Pakistan, Darfur, and the Congo. And, given the Armenian, Greek, and Kurdish histories (and reactions to them), the currently outraged Turkish government is surely not a credible referent on the topic of disproportionate violence.

Hanson goes on to speculate as to various reasons for the ‘preexisting hatred’, and includes basic anti-Semitism among them. He’s right, but doesn’t go far enough.

The aggressive and malicious intellectual left, which now has official voice in the DC establishment—in the White House, the State Department and the UN ambassador, is utterly and completely godless; it hates the very idea of the God of Judeo-Christianity. It hates the America of the founding for that fundamental reason, and it takes hate to a new dimension of hysteria when the subject is Israel. They think if they can just extinguish God and human faith in God once and for all—and for them that means extinguishing everything that visibly stands for faith in God instead of man—they will at last have supreme power over the ignorant masses they are so determined to rule. Israel is their No. 1 target, and the America of the founding is No. 2. America is probably the real No. 1 target, but Israel’s small size makes it seem especially inviting as a target. The leftist can badger and blame and bluster and fume against Israel, and a huge segment of the spiritually vacuous throughout the world just shrug it all off and figure, what the hell, who needs Israel anyway?

Humanity needs Israel; humanity needs the America of the founding. More accurately, humanity needs the God of Judeo-Christianity, which is why humanity needs spiritually insightful thinkers and leaders who recognize the role of ‘the children of Israel’ in human history. Because here’s the open secret: the children of Israel will ultimately be understood as describing not a set of human beings with a traceable lineage, but a humble, spiritually-minded condition of thought that is reverent toward and obedient to God and the laws of moral living that He has provided. Therefore, insofar as we attempt to live our lives in accord with the Judeo-Christian teachings of the Bible—and the founding fathers of America certainly intended to create a sovereign nation that would do just that—we are ALL children of Israel. If and when we allow the destruction of Israel, we are allowing the destruction of America and of ourselves.

In June of 2010, the worldwide children of Israel seem on the run from a determined hoard of hateful leftists determined to place humanity back under the rule of godless men—which historically has always been evil and tyrannical in its results. But Pharaoh’s hoard failed thousands of years ago; so did Herod’s; so will this one. But there is work to be done by all children of Israel. What kind of work? Try:

     The Call to Pray for America
     The Call to Faith
     In God We Trust
     America's Return to God

Israel matters. To us all.

Paul Gable

March 2010 Update

We wrote nine months ago of the danger of the Obama administration’s attitude toward Israel (see below). The latest escalation, complete with the disgusting image of a shrill Hillary Clinton railing away at the Israeli Prime Minister, only reinforces the extent of that danger.

We’ll speak bluntly and in terms you won’t find many other places: the Obama administration’s hostility toward Israel is a direct proxy for the godlessness of this administration. It’s a telltale indicator of its hatred of the America of the founding, which is and will always be an America grounded in Judeo-Christian theology. The White House spin-controllers can work overtime to create talking points about unjust ‘settlements’ disrupting ‘peace processes’ forestalling ‘two-state solutions’; they can trumpet moral equivalence between the Israelis and Palestinians; they can count on an echo-chamber in the Pravda media to paint their worldview as accurate—but none of this will make it so.

Israel is Ground Zero in humanity’s theological struggle. That’s not a reference to or an encouragement of war between individual people or even groups of people, but it is a reference to the struggle between the vision for human society that emerges from the foundation of Judeo-Christian teaching about God and man (and freedom and responsibility and justice), vs. that which emerges from Mohammed’s teaching on these questions. College professors can wish there was or is a secular explanation for the Israeli-Palesntinian conflict and secular way out of it, but there isn't. It's a fundamental conflict of vision; a fundamental recurrence of old question: what is truth?

There is no objective observer of the human condition who could walk through the Gaza Strip and downtown Tel Aviv and not know which society offers a brighter, healthier, safer outlook for its men, women and children. But alas, the godless leftist isn’t an objective observer, and has no standard of truth, but is instead an observer blinded by hatred of the very idea that there can be a God, or 'self-evident' truth over which they have no control. Leftism is ultimately false and baseless, and so the focus of the leftist is to harangue, intimidate and scold that portion of humanity which has history's longest, most open and most tenacious embrace of the idea of truth. For millennia, that means the Jews. (And for the leftist who thinks that getting rid of the Jews is the answer to world peace, there is an uncomfortable fact facing him: if the world were entirely Islamic, there would be nothing for the leftist to complain about, because there would be no leftists. They would all have been killed as infidels).

The result of all this is a grotesquely misguided Obama administration that makes Israel the easy whipping boy for all "Middle East tension", while a lunatic, fanatic, and tyrannical Iranian regime receives diplomatic bows and curtsies as it threatens to turn nuclear weapons loose throughout the world.

The list of reasons for Americans to wake up and rise up to remove the Obama administration just grows and grows. Their treatment of Israel is yet another, and is also a signal of just how deeply anti-American this crowd really is.

Paul Gable

Updated, March 15, 2010

Original Essay

The determination to leave theology out the Middle East equation will lead to catastrophe

The Bible talks of “spiritual wickedness in high places” as the enemy of mankind. If only societal familiarity with the Bible were on a par with “American Idol”—we might recognize more accurately the war we are engaged in right now.

We’ve written of ‘the spiritual shallowness of intellect’ so evident in Barack Obama; it’s obvious this same shallowness permeates the radical left that infests this administration. While ‘spiritual shallowness’ ‘might sound much less dangerous than ‘spiritual wickedness’, they are indistinguishable in effect. The world is very likely to pay a terrible price for the irrational, unjust, undiscerning and spiritually vacant hard line being taken by the Obama administration against Israel.

It’s easy enough to see the godless intellectual’s calculation of ‘strategy’ for the Middle East. Israel is a tiny country, around 7 million people, with no oil and not much of any other natural resource (except a lot of brilliant, innovative and hard-working people). They are surrounded by countries with millions of Muslims and billions of barrels of oil. The ivory tower calculation of proportional fault between Jews and Muslims is at best a 50/50 proposition (more often Israel is seen as more responsible for Middle East tensions than any of its Muslim neighbors). Operating at this very simple level, many a godless intellectual speeds to the “screw the Israelis’ conclusion. Then add to this mixture the intellectual’s disdain for all matters of theology. To him, this is a subject which can be okayed as interesting for the merely curious, but otherwise irrelevant and foolish if seriously considered, and outright dangerous if actually believed by anyone of any faith. The result is a worldview that, if given a chance, would gladly squeeze the Jewish state into oblivion in the interests of ‘regional stability’.

Stripped from diplo-speak, this is the conclusion of the Obama administration.

If there were really no God; if religion were truly just an opiate of the masses or the bitter clingers; if pigs could fly—the Obama administration’s position might represent a long-term answer for the Middle East. Maybe the administration wouldn’t go all the way into actually supporting a second Holocaust, but they would be willing to force another Diaspora until there’s no Jew left in the Middle East. And then everyone could live happily ever after.

The Obama administration’s position is dead wrong and deadly wrong, and far from reducing tension in the area, it is accelerating a confrontation. The silver lining may be that if the Israelis act soon enough and are able to act decisively enough against Iran, they may actually set the stage for a saner Middle East once Obama is no longer President. But the extreme danger the world is in right now will materialize in nearly unthinkable ways if the Israelis do not act or are unable to act decisively.

Here’s a little plain-speaking that may shock but at least wake up people of the Judeo-Christian faith of America and the world.

• Humanity’s progress “up from the swamps” didn’t start with the founding of the United States of America. It started with Moses and the children of Israel.

• Christianity didn’t start with the life of Jesus. Jesus’ arrival and mission fulfilled the prophecy, or spiritual vision, of the descendants of Moses and the children of Israel.

• The Declaration of Independence and Constitution were not the clever creations of America’s founding fathers; they were the product of centuries of hard-fought progress in the understanding of God and man, as begun with the Ten Commandments and the children of Israel and continued with the Sermon on the Mount of Jesus.

• America became and is the ‘shining city on a hill’ because of this Judeo-Christian heritage.

• America’s influence in the world, as derived by adherence to the Judeo-Christian concept of individual freedom and responsibility under God, has been overwhelmingly on the side of good. The Japanese and Germans, the South Koreans, the Kosovars, the Kuwaitis, the Iraqis, the Afghans—all have not been conquered but freed by the forces and influence of America.

• Islamic teachings have not contributed in any way to this path of humanity’s progress over the past several centuries. Islamic societies have been violent, repressive, oppressive, and intolerant; the people forced to live in these societies have lagged miserably in health, the treatment of women and children, and generally in achievement and excellence in virtually all fields of human endeavor; and they persist in a ritual hatred of Jews and the actual condoning and encouraging of murder and mayhem toward the Jews. It is Muslims who owe America a thank you for saving the lives of so many Muslims as well as an apology for the extremism and violence that has been perpetrated in the name of Islam.

• The standard of living—and by this we are not talking about TVs and microwaves, but about the level of love, unselfishness, honesty, mercy, tolerance, respect, excellence and simple joy and happiness—in Islamic societies is undeniably far below those of Western civilization. It is not the purpose or place of the leaders of Western civilization to apologize for the plight of lagging Islamic societies. It is up to Muslim leaders to honestly appraise the condition of their societies, and show why they should not look for higher and better models and aspirations beyond the ritual blaming of something or someone external to them.

• There is nothing remotely close to moral equivalence between the free and democratic Israeli society and Palestinian society as dominated by Islamists of various stripes. That’s just a fact, as any honest observer of the real situation on the ground knows.

None of this is or should be taken as condemnation of any individual Muslim (or Jew or Christian or Hindu or anyone else). Individuals are born innocent, and before they are cognizant of the capacity for choice, they are often indoctrinated or forced by factors not of their choosing and not under their control into a worldview detrimental to them. They can and often do feel powerless to change their circumstances—as the vast majority of ordinary Palestinians and Iranians would no doubt tell you if they could speak without fear. Which is all the more reason why the leaders of Western civilization must maintain clarity about which society is better, which society has the most need of adjustment, and which set of doctrines must be changed or defeated if humanity is going to advance.

Obama and the leftists around him have nothing but disdain for these simple, plain-spoken truths. They disdain the very idea of God and truth, and believe they can forge a new way without regard to God or truth. This is the height of ‘spiritual wickedness in high places’. Driving Israel to extinction is their way of showing their disdain and their belief in their own wisdom and omnipotence.

What they don’t know is that they have neither wisdom nor omnipotence, and they can’t extinguish Israel—not even if they control the media and all the bombs and all the soldiers and all the money in the world. Israel ultimately embodies an idea—the idea of individual men and women with freedom and responsibility under God. That idea is critical to humanity’s progress; it can't be destroyed; and it must and will be relearned and preserved.

Israel matters that much.

Paul Gable

Posted June 6, 2009