Jewish enslavement of Christian Church in U.S.
Douglas Wilson, the prominent pastor of Christ Church, is almost always by turns provocative, brilliant, infuriating, dead wrong and plain right. This influential Calvinist (“Reformed”) theologian writes, lectures and broadcasts in a Geneva-like citadel in the north Idaho town of Moscow, where Christian conservative institutes and families have arisen like fields of sunflowers. He writes a lively blog at https://dougwils.com/
His Canon Press this month published American Milk and Honey, provocatively subtitled “Antisemitism, the Promise of Deuteronomy, and the True Israel of God.” It contains facts which radically undercut some of the reigning orthodoxies of evangelical and conservative Protestantism; and Wilson being Wilson, makes other assertions which radically undercut his radical undercutting.
In the early pages of the book he writes, “I am a supercessionist, a doctrine which holds that the promises given to Israel in the Old Testament have been fulfilled in the New Israel, which is the Christian church. The Greek word Iudaios can be rendered either as ‘Jew’ (as opposed to Gentiles), or as ‘Judean,’ as opposed to Galilean…
“… because there is no salvation apart from Christ, modern Jews, who reject Christ as their Messiah, are rejecting their only possible hope of salvation. I am not a Zionist, Christian, or otherwise, which means I don’t believe there was a theological case to be made for the establishment of Israel and Palestine in 1948… I believe that the Holocaust was a horrific evil, but I don’t believe it sui generis-the human race has it been every bit as wicked as that before, and on numerous occasions.”
The preceding two paragraphs are, in our post-modernist 21st century, burn-‘em-at-the-stake heresies, and if that form of capital punishment were still around Rev. Mr. Wilson would be consigned to the flames, which tells us that his book is not for the mainstream or the Establishment. It is for a minority in America, though a substantial-and in the Republican party-significant one; this minority being Right-wing Protestant Christendom.
Let’s call the author’s paragraphs the “Three Theses.” He has nailed them to the door of the Church. They contain points which, as Elvis stated in one of his hit songs, are “guaranteed to blow your mind,” or at least the minds of Franklin Graham, Mike Pence, Ron DeSantis, Jonathan Greenblatt and their minions: 1. The Church is Israel Now. 2. God did not establish “the State of Israel” in Palestine. 3. There were many holocausts in history, not just one.
Having asserted these chili pepper-hot dissents, none of which would have been particularly controversial in Christianity a century ago, Douglas Wilson is hereafter unlikely to be invited to lecture at the Pontifical Academy in Rome, the Israeli Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum, the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, or the numerous Scofield Dispensationalist mega-churches that dot the map of America.
Israeli Propaganda 101
Then tragedy strikes. After he affirms the preceding courageous truths, Dr. Jekyll morphs into Mr. Hyde. It pains me to say this, given my esteem (as I wrote at length in our review of his book Mere Christendom, “Christian Nationalism: Blessing or Menace?”).
In view of the datum that he is emerging on the national scene as the pre-eminent theologian of a muscular, masculine faith that harkens to the roots of our nation at Plymouth Rock and Lexington and Concord, we ignore his serious misdirection in American Milk and Honey at our peril.
I’m distressed and confounded by that fact that a man of Wilson’s luminous vision and intellect would sketch a history of Palestine which is a gullible regurgitation of Israeli Propaganda 101, exhibiting no healthy skepticism of Zionist axioms, and little or no familiarity with indispensable histories by eminent Judaic scholars such as Ilan Pappé, Noam Chomsky, Richard Falk, Rabbi Yaakov Shapiro, Norman Finkelstein and Alfred Lilienthal. We get a reference to militant Zionist Dennis Prager and zero reference to a little incident known as the Nakba, when 700,000 Palestinians were expelled from their ancestral lands and thousands were murdered by terrorists commanded by future Israeli Prime Ministers Begin and Shamir.
Pastor Wilson accepts without question the Israeli hasbara endlessly parroted in the U.S. that the Palestinians were offered a viable, independent state of their own and those “terrorists” rejected this Zionist munificence. Wilson writes: “In the year 2000, they (Israel) offered the Palestinians their own state, including Gaza, and 95% of the West Bank. But the Palestinian leadership rejected the offer, and sent waves of terrorists into Israel.”
Pastor Wilson is referring to the Oslo Accords. The documentary record is as follows: the Israeli government issued a diktat that the Palestinians were “to accept unconditionally its peace program: the creation of a demilitarized Bantustan without independent foreign or economic policy, and without the huge settlement blocks in Gaza, the greater Jerusalem area, the Hebron mountains, or the Jordan Valley.”
In return for this radically reduced concept of “Palestine,” the Palestinian leadership “was asked to declare the end of the conflict and the end of all its previous demands, including the right of the (hundreds of thousands of displaced) Palestinian refugees to return to their homes. Needless to say, the future of the Palestinians in Israel was not part of the program.” (Cf. Pappé, The Forgotten Palestinians: A History [Yale University Press, 2011], pp. 221-222).
The founding human rights principle of the Israeli state is The Right of Return of the Jews to their Biblical Homeland. But “the right of return” is also sacred to Palestinians. On this point enter the realm of Talmudic supremacism’s race dogma, where rights claimed by Arabs are diminished and denied due to their status as “lesser souled” beings (BT Sanhedrin 57a; Bava Kamma 113, Bava Metzia 24A).
In the Tanya of Shneur Zalman of Lyady we encounter the doctrine that the souls of the gentiles contain no good whatsoever, as it is written in the Etz Chayim, which teaches that…all the good which the gentiles do is from self-serving, egotistical motives and as such this apparent good is actually a type of sin.”
Tanya Likutei Amarim I: ‘This law law is taught: in the case of Israel, this soul of the kelipah is derived from kelipat nogah, which also contains good, as it originates in the esoteric ‘Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil.’ The souls of the nations of the world (gentiles) however, emanate from the other, unclean kelipot which contain no good whatever, as is written in Etz Chayim, 49: 3, that all the good that the nations do, is done from selfish motives. So the Gemara comments on the verse, ‘The kindness of the nations is sin,’- all the charity and kindness done by the nations of the world is only for their own self-glorification.”
It is important to place this ghastly dogma in context. First, the majority of Jews in the world have no idea that these teachings exist and if they did they would repudiate them. Anyone who would use the facts in the preceding paragraph to negatively stereotype a majority of the Judaic people of the world would be guilty of propagating a type of collective hatred without exception, which is what we see aimed at the people of Gaza by the Zionists. Researchers and activists of integrity should make precise distinctions and eschew generalizations.
Second, the contempt for gentiles in the Talmud of Babylon and successive sacred halachic volumes was, in general, not often acted upon, and did not constitute a praxis until it was weaponized by Zionism.
It is Zionist-Talmudism that now predominates in the Knesset (Israeli legislature). We elucidated the perimeters Talmudism before and after Zionism in our study, “The Disaster of Israeli Zionism: The Cryptocracy’s Covert Stratagem for the Destruction of the Jewish People.”
In light of the fact that the Palestinians are subjugated by a Zionism which has reanimated once dormant Talmudic injunctions, how likely is it that the Palestinians will receive fair treatment at the hands of the Israeli government?
Any peace treaty, the Palestinians insist, must include a Law of Return for Palestinian refugees: “It has remained their fundamental objective since 1948. Their determination on the return issue has endured despite warfare, suffering, an enormous, social, and political changes.” (Ibid., Pappé).
Wilson, relying on the paint-by number “history” served up by Dennis Prager and other polemicists posing as historians, expects the Palestinians to forfeit that which Israelis hold sacred. This is the Talmudic double-standard which the Palestinians were right to reject. They too seek a Right of Return. Why not?
I cringe at Right-wing Christendom’s implicit naiveté, which holds that the Israelis made an honest, good faith offer to the Palestinians which the Israelis firmly intended to uphold; that claim is a sinister joke.
Every government of any nation lies and breaks its word on occasion; it’s a given. Yet, for the Israelis, deceiving and breaking agreements is the default method of conducting relations with the subjugated Palestinians. Does Wilson factor this fact into the history at hand? He discredits his thesis by failing to do so.
As a representative example of the long history of institutionalized mendacity and deception, let’s examine the outrageous lie told by Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion (born David Grün in Russian Poland) a founding father of the Israeli state, concerning a 1953 massacre by the Israeli military. On August 5, 1953 Ariel Sharon was placed in command of military Unit 101, tasked with terrorizing Arab civilians into fleeing Palestine. On October 14 troops from Sharon’s Unit 101 bombed and shot up the Palestinian village of Qibya. At least sixty Palestinian men, women and children were massacred. There were no Israeli casualties.
Israeli historian Benny Morris writes: “Sharon and the IDF (Israeli armed forces) subsequently claimed the villagers had hidden in sellers and attics, and the troops have been unaware of this when they blew up the buildings. But in truth, the troops had moved from house to house, firing through windows and doorways, and Jordanian pathologists reported that most of the dead had been killed by bullets and shrapnel rather than by falling masonry or explosions. In any event, the operational orders from (Israeli) CO central command to the units involved, dated October 13, had explicitly ordered ‘destruction and maximum killing.’
“…On October 19 Ben Gurion went on the air with a wholly fictitious account of what had happened… ‘we have carried out a searching investigation, and it is clear beyond doubt that not a single army unit was absent from its base on the night of the attack on Qibya.’ But everyone understood that the military was responsible, and that the operation had been authorized by the government.” (Benny Morris, Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab conflict, 1881-1999 [New York, 1999, pp. 278-279; italics added).
“Systematic Israeli prevarication”
“The Palestinian claim that Israel refuses to implement signed agreements and violates its commitments in various other ways is beyond dispute. A simple comparison of the September 1993 declaration of principles (“Oslo”), the September 1995 Interim Agreement, (Oslo II), the January 1997 Hebron Protocol, the October 1998 Wye River Memorandum, and the September 1999 Sharm el Sheikh agreement, reveals a clear pattern in which Israel first refuses to implement its own commitments, seeks and obtains their dilution in a new agreement, subsequently engages in systematic prevarication, and finally demands additional negotiations, leading to a yet further diluted agreement. (Cf. Mouin Rabbani, The New Intifada [2001], pp. 72-78).
Despite the cynical realpolitik involved, Wilson swallows whole the Israeli line with the utopian credulity of a grammar school choir boy: “the Palestinian leadership…could have a Palestinian state tomorrow (not counting Jordan, which already is a Palestinian state), if they would simply acknowledge Israel’s right to exist, and agree to live in peace.”
Zionist deceit and denial related to the Israeli Attack on the USS Liberty
Douglas Wilson is a Navy veteran who, with no qualms or doubts, asserts his complete faith in the Israeli allegation that they offered a genuine and generous peace deal to the Palestinians. He doesn’t ask how a government that massacred American sailors and then lied and deceived for decades concerning the atrocity, would prove an honest broker for peace with the Palestinians.
The Israeli account of their deliberate bombing and strafing of the US Navy ship Liberty in 1967, killing 34 American sailors and wounding 173, consists of outrageous lies and disinformation. According to the testimony of Admiral Thomas Moorer, former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, “the Israeli air attack lasted approximately 25 minutes, during which time unmarked Israeli aircraft dropped napalm canisters on USS Liberty’s bridge, and fired 30mm cannons and rockets into our ship, causing 821 holes, more than 100 of which were rocket-size; survivors estimate 30 or more sorties were flown over the ship by a minimum of 12 attacking Israeli planes which were jamming all five American emergency radio channels.
“…the torpedo boat attack involved not only the firing of torpedoes, but the machine-gunning of Liberty’s firefighters and stretcher-bearers as they struggled to save their ship and crew; the Israeli torpedo boats later returned to machine-gun at close range three of the Liberty’s life rafts that had been lowered into the water by survivors to rescue the most seriously wounded…there is compelling evidence that Israel’s attack was a deliberate attempt to destroy an American ship and kill her entire crew…That in attacking USS Liberty, Israel committed acts of murder against American servicemen and an act of war against the United States.”
What chance does Rev. Wilson think the Palestinians have in finding an honest partner for peace, when Israelis committed an act of war against their own American “ally” and have attempted to fool the world about it for 56 years?
Dissimulation and prevarication are permitted by Talmudic halacha (BT Yevamot 65b, Bava Kamma 113a, Sanhedrin 11a; also cf. Judaism Discovered, pp. 595-608).
In studying the texts at length one discovers a process of legitimating the expansion of grounds for prevarication and duplicity. The permission to lie creates an ever larger body of precedent for ever more situations under which falsehoods are sanctioned. The Tosafot on Baba Metvia 23b states that “all permitted lies are really subsets of one sweeping permission found in Yevamot 65b.”
12,000 Palestinian civilians murdered in a matter of weeks but Churchianity has it that Israel “is constrained by just war theory”
Wilson further discredits his argument by making the evidence-free, indeed completely bonkers observation that Israel “is constrained by just war theory.” As Jonathan Cook notes, “even when Israel commits crimes against humanity in broad daylight…Western establishments still refuse to acknowledge those crimes…”
I’m reading Pastor Wilson’s mind-boggling assertion in the wake of the 12,000 Palestinians murdered in October-November of this year, as collective punishment for what Hamas terrorists perpetrated on October 7:
“As of November 25, in less than two months, more than twice as many women and children have been reported killed in Gaza by Israeli forces than in Ukraine after two years of war.
“…the pace of death during Israel’s campaign has few precedents in this century. People are being killed in Gaza more quickly, they say, than in even the deadliest moments of U.S.-led attacks in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan…Israel’s liberal use of very large weapons in dense urban areas, including U.S.-made 2,000-pound bombs that can flatten an apartment tower, is surprising, some experts say…
“In one documented case, Israel used at least two 2,000-pound bombs during an Oct. 31 airstrike on Jabaliya, a densely populated area just north of Gaza City, flattening buildings and creating impact craters 40 feet wide, according to an analysis of satellite images, photos and videos by The New York Times. Airwars independently confirmed that at least 126 civilians were killed, more than half of them children…
“It’s beyond anything that I’ve seen in my career,’ said Marc Garlasco…a former senior intelligence analyst at the Pentagon. To find a historical comparison for so many large bombs in such a small area, he said, we may ‘have to go back to Vietnam, or the Second World War.’…More than twice as many women and children have already been reported killed in Gaza than in Ukraine after almost two years of Russian attacks, according to United Nations estimates….Women and children account for nearly 70 percent of all deaths reported in Gaza…More than 60,000 buildings have been damaged or destroyed in the Gaza Strip, satellite analysis indicates…
“Every day, local journalists in Gaza report strikes that hit private homes, some of which kill a dozen or more people as families shelter together in tight quarters. On Oct. 19, Israel struck a Greek Orthodox church where hundreds of Gaza’s small Christian community were sheltering at dinnertime, killing 18 civilians, according to an investigation by Amnesty International.” Source: “Gaza Civilians, Under Israeli Barrage, Are Being Killed at Historic Pace,” New York Times, Nov. 25. 2023.
If this is “just war theory” in action, I would hate to see what an unjust war would look like.
“We are fighting human animals, and we are acting accordingly,” said Yoav Gallant, the Israeli defense minister. “You must remember what Amalek has done to you, says our Holy Bible - we do remember,” said Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, referring to the ancient enemy of the Israelites in scripture, representing a call to exterminate their “men and women, children and infants.”
Hate speech used to describe the Palestinian people by journalists, retired generals, celebrities, and social media influencers has proliferated. Calls for Gaza to be “flattened,” “erased” or “destroyed” have been mentioned about 18,000 times since Oct. 7 in Hebrew posts on X, the site formerly known as Twitter. The cumulative effect has been to normalize genocide-talk of “erasing” the people of Gaza and the nuclear annihilation of the Arab people. In early November Amichay Eliyahu, an Israeli official, told an Israeli radio station that there is no such thing as noncombatants in Gaza. He advocated that the Israeli military drop a nuclear bomb on the territory.
Eyal Golan, a star of the Israeli pop music scene, stated in a TV interview with Israeli Channel 14, “Erase Gaza. Don’t leave a single person there.”
In a radio interview in October, Israel’s First Lady, Sara Netanyahu, said in regard to the Palestinians, “I don’t call them human animals because that would be insulting to animals.”
