Rabbis critisize evangelicals in Israel

http://www.guardian.co.uk/worldlatest/story/0,1280,-4075504,00.html

JERUSALEM (AP) - Prominent Israeli rabbis are for the first time speaking out against Israel's profitable alliance with evangelical Christians in the United States who have funneled tens of millions of dollars to the Jewish state.

The rabbis fear the Christians' real intent is to convert Jews, their aides said Monday. Others are concerned about the evangelicals' support for Israel's extreme right-wing, opposing any compromise with the Palestinians.

The dispute touches on an increasingly sensitive issue in Israel: the country's dependence, both economically and politically, on conservative American Christians.

Besides contributing tidy sums to projects in Israel, some evangelical Christians have lobbied in support of the Israeli government in Washington.

Troubling to Israelis is the fact that one influential group of evangelicals believes in a final, apocalyptic battle between good and evil in which Jesus returns and Jews either accept him or perish - a vision that causes obvious discomfort among Jews.
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defeats mere mortals.

and I hope it gains momentum.

The unholy alliance between the fundamentalists and likkudnicks is creating 75% of the troubles we have.

This is exactly the kind of movement needed.

unholy alliance.

This cynical support from the evangelical right does much to harm the prospects for peace.
Scott

Their beliefs are bonkers, but they are at the heart of power

US Christian fundamentalists are driving Bush's Middle East policy

George Monbiot
Tuesday April 20, 2004
The Guardian


~snip~
And among them are some of the most powerful men in America. John Ashcroft, the attorney general, is a true believer, so are several prominent senators and the House majority leader, Tom DeLay. Mr DeLay (who is also the co-author of the marvellously named DeLay-Doolittle Amendment, postponing campaign finance reforms) travelled to Israel last year to tell the Knesset that "there is no middle ground, no moderate position worth taking".

So here we have a major political constituency - representing much of the current president's core vote - in the most powerful nation on Earth, which is actively seeking to provoke a new world war. Its members see the invasion of Iraq as a warm-up act, as Revelation (9:14-15) maintains that four angels "which are bound in the great river Euphrates" will be released "to slay the third part of men". They batter down the doors of the White House as soon as its support for Israel wavers: when Bush asked Ariel Sharon to pull his tanks out of Jenin in 2002, he received 100,000 angry emails from Christian fundamentalists, and never mentioned the matter again.

The electoral calculation, crazy as it appears, works like this. Governments stand or fall on domestic issues. For 85% of the US electorate, the Middle East is a foreign issue, and therefore of secondary interest when they enter the polling booth. For 15% of the electorate, the Middle East is not just a domestic matter, it's a personal one: if the president fails to start a conflagration there, his core voters don't get to sit at the right hand of God. Bush, in other words, stands to lose fewer votes by encouraging Israeli aggression than he stands to lose by restraining it. He would be mad to listen to these people. He would also be mad not to.

~snip~
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Columnists/Column/0,5673,1195727,00.html

:toast:

Finally, some common sense.

"Um, yeah, they give us a lot of money, but, er, they think most of us are going to die if we don't convert during their little Armageddon. Should we keep taking their money?"

It's almost as odd a situation as the fact that, according to Orthodox Jews, there shouldn't even be a Jewish homeland until their Messiah returns.

I'm not saying Israel shouldn't exist - it's been there for decades, it's a moot point now - but it's just an interesting observation that I thought I'd throw out there.

By no means do all Orthodox Jews believe that only the Messiah can bring the Jews to their homeland. In fact only a minority of Orthodox Jews hold that anti-Zionist position.

Thanks in advance!

From http://www.jewfaq.org/israel.htm :
"Most Jews today support the existence of the state of Israel. However, there are a small number of secular Jews who are anti-Zionist. There is also a very small group of right-wing Orthodox Jews who object to the existence of the state of Israel, maintaining that it is a sin for us to create a Jewish state when the messiah has not yet come. However, this viewpoint does not reflect the mainstream opinion of Orthodoxy. Most Orthodox Jews support the existence of the state of Israel as a homeland, even though it is not the theological state of Israel that will be brought about by the messiah."


This small minority is known as Neturei Karta. A Google search yields plenty of info about them.

Hope that helps!

NT!

This unholy alliance is at the core of what Israel has become, just as campaign money is at the core of what America has become.

It will take a lot more than the courageous outspokenness of a few Rabbis to bring the Israelis to their senses. It will probably take an event of unfathomable horror.

In my view the lynchpin of both the Likudniks and the US fundies is their absurd adoration of the Bible as "The Word of God." Unfortunately, most of the rest of the US believes the same thing, though in perhaps a less literal sense.

The Bible is a book riddled with errors, contradictions, impossibilities, deceit, blood lust, sexual horrors, and tall, tall tales. It is NOT "The Word of God."

But the Bible is what sustains both the fundies' appocalyptic visions, and the Zionists' fanatical belief that God literally gave their tribe the "Holy Land" some 3,500 years ago.

The Bible is the lynch pin of all of this fanatical evil. To say it is "The Word of God" is blasphemy!

The rabbis fear the Christians' real intent is to convert Jews

That *IS* their intent.

is to have Israel be the host of Armegeddon. I think they actually want Israel to be at the center of a nuclear conflagration.

I can't understand how Israelis can make common cause with people who have that agenda.

selves a graft off the vine of Judaism.

There is no way that the Christian god is the same god as the god of Judaism''

No way. It is a different god, one which declares a Jesus as a god and the trinity as the concept

This, is not the god of the Jews at all.

The evangelicals insist that they love the Jews, however their theology does not show that they love Jews. It shows that the Jews will be horribly destroyed by their god, save for 144,ooo of them who have converted to Christianityl. The rest of the Jews are to be punished and to be ruthlessly murdered, in the greatest holocaust ever to be known by manking, because the Jews would not convert and adore Jesus as their Messiah.

So, why do we see this comaraderie between Christian evangelicals and Christians such as the born again Bush, when obviously the beliefs of the Christians is definately anti-semitic and they are in total joy over this killing and murder in the ME, because they believe it is the harbinger of the Armageddon and the second coming of their god, and they will be sucked up into the sky to meet the god

Point is that politically we see a conjoining and it does not make a bit of sense to me at all.

This article caught my eye a few days ago:


Israeli businesses eye the growing U.S. evangelical market


By Sarah Bronson

A Ramat Gan-based marketing company, which previously specialized in advertising to the Haredi market in Israel, has announced its plans to invest up to $ 3 million over the next four years in marketing Israeli products to evangelical Christians in America.

...

The aggressive campaign, a Bolton spokesperson said, will eventually reach so deeply into the evangelical market that Israeli products will be advertised in individual Church's newsletters.

"There are 70 million evangelical Christians in the United States, and they are very supportive of Israel" says Shlomo Loshinsky, a spokesman for Bolton. "You would not believe how many people in America would buy an Israeli product even though it's more expensive, because it was made in Israel." Bolton represents, among other clients, Elite, Strauss, Wissotzky, Efrat Wineries and Hazorfim silversmiths.

...

"We are taking our clients out of the box," states Loshinsky. "Right now the distributors are stuck in the mindset of considering only the northeast American Orthodox Jew. If we can get to a church fair in Alabama and the people can hold Hazorfim products in their hands and sample Elite products, there will be so many Americans the distributors can get to."

A co-owner of Hazorfim says that his company has proven, through respectable sales in Italy, that almost any product can be sold to non-Jews if packaged correctly. "The etrog boxes are sold as jewelry boxes," Doron Merdinger explains. "The candelabras are used as centerpieces. The kiddush cups are simply called goblets. Sometimes they are used for baptizing; because it is made in the Holy Land, it has a high spiritual value." Merdinger says that currently, 45 percent of his business is in exports to the U.S., but 99 percent of his customers there are Jews, a fact he hopes Bolton will help change.

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/424754.html

guess they were afraid of biting the hand that fed them

Ronnie McReagan was responsible for starting this whole mess, or at least he was the one who put it into high gear

http://www.haaretzdaily.com/hasen/spages/425473.html

<snip>

"The ongoing battle in the religious sector over the status of The International Fellowship of Christians and Jews, a fund that transfers millions of dollars a year to Israel from Christian donors around the world, has seen a new development over the past fortnight.

Some two weeks ago, Rabbi Mordechai Eliahu - one of the national-religious camp's most highly regarded halakhic authorities, alongside Rabbi Avraham Shapira - published a letter in which he backtracked on his ruling that Jews can enjoy the fund's bounty despite it being a gift from Christians. "Now, it appears otherwise to me," Eliahu wrote in his new letter. "And as a result, I concur with what was written by the great rabbi, the genius Rabbi Avraham Shapira ... and, therefore, my statements or writings from before this letter are all null and void, and I am party to the prohibition."

<snip>

" The campaign against The Fellowship has been spearheaded for a number of years by a lone woman - Mina Penton, who serves on the Jerusalem City Council on behalf of the NRP. Penton reasons her crusade against The Fellowship on the claim that the fund is based on money from Christians who wish, in the end, to convert the Jews. She even argues in her publications that The Fellowship's head, Rabbi Yechiel Eckstein, has admitted in a book he wrote in the past that he is a "Jew for Jesus."

That would be quite an admission . . . and the plot thickens.

Of course, many secular Israelis have often felt uncomfortable about this "support" and "60 minutes" last year had a good report about this. But with true allies of Israel far and between, and with most Israelis still do not feel safe and secure, they grabbed for whatever they could get.

with Sharon whose alliance with Bush is unraveling though stubbornly bleeding the region. It would be interesting to see the conservatives there dumping their butcher as model for how to get rid of ours.

For better or worse, it often seems the Dems are laying back and waiting for the Right here to cry uncle and solve their own problem. it is the only way impeachment would work and there are few new trolls like Hagel who would like to redeem the party and supplant the Bush dynasty.