The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: What Would Jesus Do?

By Wayne Allensworth

This people honoureth me with their lips, but their heart is far from me Mark 7:6

After 9/11, there was much ballyhoo in certain quarters about “religion” and war—hadn’t people who had their Holy Book and their vengeful God been responsible for most of the bloodletting in human history? Weren’t Christian Right Bible thumpers and Al Qaeda type fanatics basically cut from the same cloth? This was mainly coming, of course, from professional atheists whose ultimate target was not jihadist Islam, but Christianity. They targeted the faith of their fathers that they resented and hated as much as Milton’s Satan did the Supreme Being he did not wish to serve.

I tried to explain to whomever would listen that if Christians behaved in a bloodthirsty manner, they were not following Christ’s example. If jihadists made war, they were, in fact, following the example of their prophet. Their God was an arbitrary deity, their prophet a warlord.

It didn’t take long for me to see many of my countrymen, including lots of Christians, behaving as if war were a sport. I heard them cheering and laughing about the U.S. “shock and awe” campaign against Iraq, as if war were a video game. They had their all too self-righteous leader in George W. Bush. “W’s” minions deluded themselves and deceived millions with their false claims that Iraq had “weapons of mass destruction” and intended to use them against the Shining City on a Hill they all pretended to believe America still was. That falsehood was apparently bolstered by fabricated “intelligence” that partly came from their favorite country—no, not ours, but Israel—which wanted its American patrons, or stooges, to flatten Iraq for them. And the Israel firsters were soon hinting that Iran was next.

What goes around comes around and here we are, with a segment of our citizenry, especially Left Behind Christians, bellowing for the Gaza Palestinians to be wiped out like the Canaanites. Genocide was and is apparently sanctioned by God in the eyes of many ostensibly pro-life Christians. The general thrust of these holy terrors is “kill ‘em all, let God sort ‘em out!” At least some of the Israelis I’ve seen angrily railing against the Palestinians on social media have allowed that the women and children can leave before the Gaza strip is carpet bombed into oblivion.

As Hamas is tied to Iran, neo-con calls for strikes on Tehran weren’t far behind. Naturally, the warmongers included more aid to Ukraine on their wish list. We mustn’t let a crisis go to waste. Congressman Matt Gaetz, who led the charge against former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy partly over Ukraine funding, has nevertheless voted for billions in military aid to Israel in the past. The reliably belligerent Senator Lindsey Graham told Fox News that we are in a “religious war” and called for the Israelis to “level” Gaza.

So, what in the name of all that is holy—or unholy as the case may be—is going on with these people? As I observed in my recent article on why Americans should stay out of this conflict, our own country is being destroyed in front of our eyes. Yet I have seldom, if ever, seen the kind of passion now currently on display concerning the fate of our America. It can’t all be because of a distorted version of the Christian faith or globalist designs.

I think that another part of this puzzling, depressing picture is the fact that so many Middle Americans have been conditioned to believe that any display of passionate, defensive attachment to their own country is verboten. That would be “racism,” which appears to be the only sin many housebroken Christian leaders are willing to condemn. Both mainstream mass media and a lot of Christians make an exception for Zionist ethno-nationalism, of course. Blustering over Israel is a form of displaced patriotism, one bolstered by plenty of propaganda from the Holocaust industrial complex.

And strangest of all is that in citing alleged Biblical sanctions for indiscriminate slaughter, many of those same people will point to Canaanite sexual perversity or child sacrifice as a just cause for a massacre. And they live in a post-modern, sexually unhinged society.

Oh, my people! Have far you have strayed.

Chronicles contributor Wayne Allensworth is the author of  The Russian Question: Nationalism, Modernization, and Post-Communist Russia, and a novel, Field of Blood.