The Myth of "Judeo-Christian Values"
(Alternative Right) -- By Paul Gottfried
Reading Larry Auster's website over the years, I find there is much in his spirited commentaries that I agree with. Larry's attacks on liberals and neoconservatives, his stress on the enormous overlap between these two only minimally different groups, his focus on the immigration issue, and his critical examination of the government's war on traditional social relations and religious morals are invariably of high quality. Larry dares to say things that one would rarely see in mainstream liberal and neoconservative publications, and therefore we on the real right owe him a debt of gratitude for these efforts.
An issue, however, that he and I strongly disagree about is his conception of a Judeo-Christian war against Islam. First, I have never shared Larry's fierce revulsion for all Muslims as bearers of violence and hatred. I have known practicing Muslims for most of my life, and among them I have numbered personal friends. I have also never perceived any signs of violence or malice in dealing with these Muslims. Last Sunday my wife and I were with a young Turkish couple in a Turkish restaurant in Allentown, PA; and I found nothing off-putting about the Muslims I saw coming in to eat Halal food. They looked, acted, and ate like the Orthodox Jews whom I have known, and I felt much safer in their company than I would have felt among the inner-city minorities, who may be Pentecostal Christians. Such non-Muslims, in any case, were doing drug deals outside the restaurant in which we were dining.
Although I agree with Larry about the need for a moratorium on immigration, particularly from Latin America, and although I share his view that decadent, childless Europeans are committing physical and demographic suicide by repopulating their countries with lower-class Muslims, who often incline toward Islamic Fundamentalism, I strongly dissent from his unqualified generalizations about adherents of Islam.
Moreover, I think that there is something other than a sense of emergency that has fueled Larry's call for a Judeo-Christian front against Muslims as a collective enemy. To be very blunt (and I may be in view of the fact that Larry has scolded me more than once as a self-hating Jew), my friend may be addressing a personal problem when he grasps for conceptual straws, as a Jew who converted to Christianity. In order to bridge the poles in his hyphenated existence, he appeals to a desirable but (alas) fictitious unity. To say that Christians and Jews are both being targeted by Islamic Fundamentalists does not mean that they share a close friendship based on common religious convictions.
Larry may wish that such a community of belief in fact existed. And so do the Christian Zionists and the Christian employees of the neoconservatives, who share Larry's rhetorical habit when they refer to "Judeo-Christians." Admittedly one could describe Jesus, Peter, and Paul as Judeo-Christians but they may have been the last Jews who would answer to that description. In the first century total war broke out between two rival Jewish sects, the Pharisees and the Jewish Christians. While the Jews had the upper hand, which they didn't for very long, they went after the Christians, and from the High Middle Ages on, the Church paid back the Jews in a more devastating way, from a greater position of strength.
Significantly, the issues Jews had and still have with Christians are theological and cultural, as well as the result of persecutions inflicted on Jews by some European societies in the past. The central Christian beliefs, that God became man in Christ and atoned on the cross for human sins, are utter blasphemy from a Jewish or Muslim perspective. And the Rabbinic attacks on Jesus that are found in the Talmud are directed against the founder of Christianity as a blasphemer. David Gordon revisits all these facts in detail in a review of George Weigel's Faith, Reason, and the War against Jihadism. But let me add other facts. The Rabbinic attacks against Christian beliefs were not a response to Christian persecution since they were produced in Babylonia, in what was then a predominantly Zoroastrian society. The only Christians whom the authors of the Talmud were likely to have encountered were Monophysites, who rejected the Trinitarian statement formulated at Chalcedon and who were living in Babylonia as a powerless minority...
Until the mid-1980s when the neoconservatives started building an alliance with the Christian Zionists, Commentary featured scathing invectives against the Christian belief system as well as the "crucifixion myth" as the source of the Holocaust. Larry might wish that Jews thought differently about Christian believers since he himself is one, but alas most of them don't. Jewish organizations here and in Europe view Christians as people whose exaggerated guilt over the Holocaust can be channeled into support for the Israeli government. Prominent Jewish groups, such as the World Jewish Congress, the Canadian Jewish Congress, and the Anti-Defamation League, show nothing but indifference or hostility to the continued existence of Christian institutions in what used to be Christian countries.
Such behavior is not restricted to countries in which established Christian churches once persecuted Jews. It is equally present in predominantly Protestant countries, which have no significant histories of anti-Semitism. Why do most American Jews loathe the Philo-Semitic Christian Right, a religious force that only a lunatic would mistake for the anti-Jewish Russian Orthodox Church of the 19th century? In surveys about religious intolerance in America, as Norman Podhoretz rightly notes, Jews seem inordinately upset about Evangelical Christians, a group whose ethical positions are the same as those taught by Hebrew Scripture and who adore Israel almost as much as Larry.
My explanation, which Larry may not want to hear, is that Jewish distaste for Christianity is so deep-seated that it can not be written off as a legacy of Christian anti-Semitism. This unfortunate hostility actually seems to grow in intensity or expressiveness as Christians try to reach out to Jews. Christophobia may be weakest among Jews in Muslim countries, who have only minimal dealings with Christians, or among Israelis, who view Christians as a distant ally. But these Jews would not be likely go about celebrating Larry's "Judeo-Christian" values, although they might use and have used Christian Zionists as a link to Republican administrations, when the occasion presents itself.
I must also dissent from Larry's tendency to blame Jewish thinking about Christians on the effects of liberalism. Jews helped create and propagate this particular ideology largely as a protective device against an older Christian civilization. There might well be problems with the liberal ideas that Jews have supported until now, but it is simply wrong to pretend that Jewish liberals act from liberal motives that have nothing to do with their Jewish fears and hostilities. I've never met a Jewish liberal whose leftist politics was not in some way connected to his self-identity as a Jew. Larry might believe (and I wouldn't dispute his judgment) that this typically Jewish ideological stance is inappropriate for Bible-believers or incompatible with long-range Zionist interests. But it is the way that Jews have responded to their anxieties in the Christian West. And mixed with this anxiety at some level is a sense of marginality grounded in theological difference. Here we come back to Larry's existential problem, which is his need to avoid confronting the Judeo-Muslim rejection of core Christian teachings...MORE...LINK
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Chris Moore comments:
I've long suspected that the most tenacious of the Judeo-Christian Zionist dispensationalists and the "clash of civilization" cheerleaders between the "Judeo-Christian" West and Islam were themselves crypto-Jews.
This piece confirms it.
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Updated:
--Jewish Zionists in Israel are as anti- “white,” anti-Christian and anti-Western civilization as are liberal Jews and most Jewish Zionists (either openly or subversively) in America. Most believe (or profess to believe) that whites and Christians are to blame for the Holocaust, the pogroms, European anti-Semitism, etc. (I believe organized Jewry has overstated all of these claims for purposes of Jewish unification and cohesiveness, just as they have overstated the extent to which Jewish Zionists in Israel are the “victims” and Palestinians the “aggressors.”)
--Western Jews that have any intention of assimilating have done so by now, or are in the process of doing so, and so aren’t tenacious Zionists. The most tenacious of Zionists have no intention of ever coming to any kinds of reconciliation or “live and let live” accord with Christians, despite their poses otherwise. The recent push by “conservative” American Jews to pass off Jewish lesbian and multi-culturalism advocate Elena Kagan as herself “conservative” and install her in the last remaining Protestant seat in the Supreme Court proves as much.
--Gentile neocons and “Christian” Zionists are NOT reliable advocates of Western civilization. They view Western civilization as did Rumsfeld -- as anti-Semitic “old Europe.” They are more interested in money and warmongering (as demonstrated by their war profiteering with Israel as the linchpin in stirring up American wars in the Middle East) and some kind of fantastical, brave new “Judeo-Christian” Americana Empire, which is really a Frankenstein monster of Empire, authoritarian Statism and foreign policy social-engineering mindful of Soviet Communism (which itself originated as yet another Jewish (Bolshevik) authoritarian scheme.)
Warmongers, war profiteers, Jewish authoritarian collaborators and Statism-pushers are not reliable Christians; Jewish Zionists who hate Western civilization are not reliable advocates of the West.
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Update#2
“SE Asian” writes: “The number of persons who were born and brought up as "moderate" Muslims in so called "secular" and "liberal" families, and who took to jihad and mass-killing of non-Muslims; and then the emotional and moral support they got from their "secular" and "moderate" families; bears testimony to this peril that non-Muslims need to guard against.”
So even the moderate, secular and liberal Muslims will go ballistic at the drop of a hat. Sounds like a pretty good reason not to go into the Middle East and poke fingers in their eyes. In fact, it's a pretty good argument for simple containment, given that the only other alternatives are getting bogged down there for perpetuity or wholesale incineration of Muslims. Which course would you prefer Americans take, "SE Asian"?
You write: "let us not fall prey to guile, nor drop our guards; for it will be battle for survival."
Two points for a schmaltzy Winston Churchill imitation, but actually, I agree...let us not fall prey to warmongers, war profiteers, militarists, Jewish Zionists manipulating us into fighting and dying for Greater Israel, dispensationalists too brainwashed to know what's good for them, and left-liberals pimping a warfare-welfare state.
As your screed suggests, we're just beating our heads against a brick wall. And for what? Elites, opportunists, manipulators, fools and back-stabbers who have squandered American lives and treasure, and "governed" the country straight into the ditch.
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