"These highlights of Kristol’s career have been detailed at length in the many obituaries about his death. But the story of one of Kristol’s most momentous — and cynical — maneuvers, the brokering of a tactical alliance between Jewish neoconservatives and openly anti-Semitic evangelicals, has been generally omitted.
In my book, “Republican Gomorrah: Inside The Movement That Shattered The Party,” I describe how Kristol initiated the alliance in July 1984, urging that American Jews, “enmeshed in the liberal time warp,” ally with Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority."
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still blogging even under duress. that's dedication.
ReplyDeleteEverytime I lay down, I feel like throwing up. Not when Im seated..
ReplyDelete"Kristol’s apologia was inspired by the anti-Semitic ravings of a preacher named Bailey Smith. “I don’t know why God chose the Jews,” Smith had said. “They have such funny noses.” When Jewish groups pounced on those remarks and on those of Jerry Falwell, who told his followers that Jews “can make more money accidentally than you can on purpose,” Kristol rushed to the preachers’ defense.
ReplyDelete“Why should Jews care about the theology of a fundamentalist preacher when they do not for a moment believe that he speaks with any authority on the question of God’s attentiveness to human prayer?” Kristol wrote. “And what do such theological abstractions matter as against the mundane fact that this same preacher is vigorously pro-Israel?”"
Here is why Zionism and Fundamentalists deserve each other, I wrote it elsewhere but it bears repeating -
ReplyDeleteThey both have that genocidal bent in the religious ethos. When you’ve seen one apocalyptic you’ve seen them all. Both want to move the “prophetic clock,” and they want to do it with violence. One speaks of the redemption to the land through force and other speaks of spectacular wars, both adhere to plenty of “wars and rumors of wars” in the so-called end times, they take their precedent in the genocidal “lord of hosts.”
If you were to take all religious nut cases and move them across the world, they would find each other and unite in no time. They both have a virulent mythology, taking religious writings as literal rather than obvious works of redaction and myth, and both rip off other regional religions or world religions but act as though they were some sort of revelation specifically to them. Whether it is the Calvinism of the chosen few in North America, the same in the Dutch Calvinism of the Afrikaners, or the chosen of Judaism, all reek of this special calling which sets them apart for every atrocity with the blessing of their god.
Both have leaders which use their religious wares to incite people against specific races and and regions. Whether it is the repugnant “manifest destiny” with its Christian religious overtones, or “redeeming the land” they are mutually twisted variations of the same story that brings death and destruction. They have a propensity to racism, violence, and both are the supposed “fulfillment of prophecy.” The elites use this as much as possible to inflame ignorant religious zealots who sing “Onward Christian Soldiers” or Hatikva through bloody force. In the case of Judaism, Zionism took its moderate peaceful quality and made it just like its fruitcake rivals – so now they are bedfellows. Now they all have the “White Man’s Burden,” trying to colonize they’re “lesser” people of color through brute force and murderous violence and discriminate against their so-called equal citizenry domestically.
God is a real estate broker, and every science like the archaeological spade is used as some sign of damned birthright to theft and murder. Yet people STILL have not understood the major thrust of religion, or the dictum of Voltaire – “those who cause you to believe absurdities can get you to commit atrocities.”