A little Jeffrey self-confidence:
There is much to unpack here. First, there is Joe [Klein]'s assertion that Bush's Christianity has "nothing to do" with his push for war. I think this will surprise a lot of people, including George W. Bush. Second, I think Joe is essentializing, to employ an unwieldy term, the Jews who supported the war. There's no denying - nor should it be denied - that American Jews, and American Christians as well, worry about Israel's security. (That Christian bit is important, by the way; I know this drives Mearsheimer and Walt crazy - and I know that Joe is no Mearsheimerite - but polls show the majority of Americans are sympathetic to Israel, despite the best efforts of the Mearsheimers and Walts of this country to blame Israel for America's woes. No Jewish lobby would be powerful enough to influence American foreign policy if it worked in opposition to the feelings of a majority of Americans.)Jeffrey Goldberg/Atlantic 03.Nov.08
[...]
This doesn't absolve the Jews in the Bush Administration of incompetence and negligence, but it doesn't absolve the non-Jews either, especially because, and I know Joe doesn't want to hear this, the Jews were not quite the all-powerful figures in the White House and Pentagon that people imagine them to have been.
But this brings me to a deeper question: Why is it illegitimate for American Jews to care about Israel's security and argue for American measures that would strengthen Israel's security? In a conversation earlier this year, Joe told me the following: "I just don't want to see policy makers who make decisions on the basis of whether American policy will benefit Israel or not."
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Keep on unpacking though, and lo and behold, the whole frame dissolves.
To even begin to consider Christianity, especially American Protestant Christianity, as a separate religious endeavour, separate from Judaism, with separate aims and separate interests, as Klein does:
and as Goldberg willingly accepts, even while taking his position opposite Klein, though within the frame, is just more persiflage.Furthermore, I don't use the Christianity of Bush et al against them because their Christianity had nothing to do with their support for the war.
For all Klein's good intentions, the real lies go unremarked.
Christianity's founding documents were written exclusively by Jews, the entire Old Testament is no more or less than a history of the Jews, told by themselves to themselves, with a consistent emphasis on their entitlement and their speciality in the eyes of God.
Christianity's founding documents were written exclusively by Jews, the entire Old Testament is no more or less than a history of the Jews, told by themselves to themselves, with a consistent emphasis on their entitlement and their speciality in the eyes of God.
Their God, who is also the God of everyone else, even those who've never heard of him.
The New Testament, after a complete break in the prior narrative, in the Christian Bible, suddenly becomes the story of the foretold Jewish Messiah, foretold by Jewish prophets speaking to and for the Jews as a people, who creates by his presence, and by his execution, a new story.
Suddenly the narrative goes completely off the track, and everything is different - the Jews are swept aside, and the story is now all about Christians getting to heaven and the end of the earthly world and about Christians as the truer more Chosen People, and the final judgment of souls, and not about the Jews at all being central, but only tangential to the real story. Bing.
The New Testament, after a complete break in the prior narrative, in the Christian Bible, suddenly becomes the story of the foretold Jewish Messiah, foretold by Jewish prophets speaking to and for the Jews as a people, who creates by his presence, and by his execution, a new story.
Suddenly the narrative goes completely off the track, and everything is different - the Jews are swept aside, and the story is now all about Christians getting to heaven and the end of the earthly world and about Christians as the truer more Chosen People, and the final judgment of souls, and not about the Jews at all being central, but only tangential to the real story. Bing.
Even though the judgment of souls will be valenced by their obedience or lack of obedience to the rules and laws and commands and directives of the Old Testament.
So how could Bush's Christianity ever have influenced his decisions concerning the Middle East and Israeli/Jewish interests?
So how could Bush's Christianity ever have influenced his decisions concerning the Middle East and Israeli/Jewish interests?
Impossible! (spoken in a cartoon slobbery lisp as by Sylvester the Cat or Daffy Duck)
America is still humming with fundamentalist and semi-fundamentalist Christians who are being fed constant streams of End Times factoids, and pseudo-information like that Obsession video, two-dimensional deceitful and misleading garbage propaganda about Israel and Palestinians and Arabs and Muslims, fed through the multi-level marketing infrastructure their churches provide. This is taking place entirely outside the view of the rest of us, it's ungoverned and it's unchecked and it's virtually unreported.
Bible worship, especially the sanctification of the Old Testament, can be seen in this light as a reverential elevation of what is, among many other things, an ancient real estate document - the deed to the Holy Land.
What's most difficult to talk about regarding all this is the actual power, in the physicist's sense, of the organizations, of the belief systems involved. Because you'll first have to prove beyond doubt that something like telepathy functions in human beings, and group telepathy or something like it in groups of human beings, and that this group telepathy by its nature has a kind of immortality and power directly proportional to the size and longevity of its congregation, that the believers are creating or augmenting or amplifying what they believe in.
America is still humming with fundamentalist and semi-fundamentalist Christians who are being fed constant streams of End Times factoids, and pseudo-information like that Obsession video, two-dimensional deceitful and misleading garbage propaganda about Israel and Palestinians and Arabs and Muslims, fed through the multi-level marketing infrastructure their churches provide. This is taking place entirely outside the view of the rest of us, it's ungoverned and it's unchecked and it's virtually unreported.
Bible worship, especially the sanctification of the Old Testament, can be seen in this light as a reverential elevation of what is, among many other things, an ancient real estate document - the deed to the Holy Land.
What's most difficult to talk about regarding all this is the actual power, in the physicist's sense, of the organizations, of the belief systems involved. Because you'll first have to prove beyond doubt that something like telepathy functions in human beings, and group telepathy or something like it in groups of human beings, and that this group telepathy by its nature has a kind of immortality and power directly proportional to the size and longevity of its congregation, that the believers are creating or augmenting or amplifying what they believe in.
That's what was done, and that's how it was done.
And it's what's being done, and how, now.
Trying to say who's doing it is a pretty frustrating task, because the language we've been given to do that with has no terms for it, and the cultural foundation from which we begin that task has no precedent for that naming.
It's all or nothing, either the trademarked and copyrighted proprietary mumbo-jumbo of delusional fantasists, or the dull void of empty space still in process of being catalogued, with here and there little dots of stars and mundane worlds like Earth, on which nothing metaphysical ever happens, nor ever could.
That neither of those versions is even minimally accurate is a very unpopular thing to say. But here I am, saying it.
There's truth in both of them, but their incompleteness makes them wrong, false, and dangerously misleading.
Except to those who benefit from the lie, and the lies.
