Month: November 2021

Israel Presents Zero Evidence to Justify Its Accusations Against Six Palestinian, Humanitarian Groups

Perhaps you are aware that the Israeli government recently accused six Palestinian humanitarian organizations in Israel of providing money-laundering services for terrorist organizations.

Naturally, the official announcement offered no substantiating evidence but promised to produce it later.

Well, now we have it.

As the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reports, the “evidence” presented to the US Congress has nothing to do with the six organizations in question but a seventh, entirely different group all together!

Below is an excerpt from the article entitled “In Congress, Israel Justifies Palestinian NGO Terror Tag with Evidence on Unrelated Group“:

The Shin Bet representative tasked with briefing U.S. Congress on Israel’s designation of six Palestinian civil society NGOs as terrorist groups presented evidence on an unrelated organization.

The document had previously been presented to European diplomats in May in an attempt to convince them to stop funding the organizations. Sources who were shown it at the time said it did not convince them. According to sources, additional evidence was presented to the U.S. State Department and other officials with higher security clearances. 

The document discusses a total of seven organizations: Six are the civil society organizations that Defense Minister Benny Gantz designated as terrorist organizations last week. The seventh, the Health Workers Committee, was designated as an unauthorized organization affiliated with the PFLP in January 2020. 

The Health Workers Committee is at the center of a trial in an Israeli military court that will begin in a few days. Israel is charging four of their employees with membership in the PFLP and inflating receipts to divert donor money for the organization’s benefit.

Read the entire article here.

Worse yet, Philip Weiss at Mondoweiss uncovers Israel’s real tactics and

Philip Weiss, journalist

motivation behind its attacks against these six NGOs in particular.

First, spurious “confessions” were obtained through torture.

Second, all six organizations have cases pending before the International Criminal Court accusing Israel of crimes against humanity.

Weiss writes:

Israel acted against the groups because they have been giving information to the International Criminal Court– whose prosecutor began a criminal investigation of Israel this year under a complaint filed by Palestine five years ago.

But surely, this must be a coincidence…

Karen Swallow Prior Laments Evangelicalism’s Selective Tolerance

Karen Swallow Prior has a good article in the Religious News Service lamenting the often hypocritical and dangerously excessive quality of

Professor Karen Swallow Prior

“tolerance” among evangelical Christians.

Her article is called “Truth, Justice and the Torturing of Tolerance.”

Ms. Prior describes her own acculturation into the norms of lopsided church tolerance — heavily tilted towards favoring men and conservative politics.

My only disagreement is with her description of “some conservatives” being intolerant of others. Sorry, but in my experience intolerance describes “most” conservative evangelicals.

Below is an excerpt:

. . . Conservative evangelicals often call out the hypocrisy of progressives whose tolerance goes only one way. But some conservatives have also made tolerance a one-way street, failing to support the religious and personal freedoms of those who believe differently than we do.

Instead of offering rigorous and compelling arguments in defense of what we understand to be true, some simply take up the other side of the rope in a tug-of-war game of intolerance, making each side no different from the other side.

I have a lot to process and even confess about what I have tolerated in Christian institutions and among fellow believers. A lot of us do. Too many in the church have tolerated too much for too long.

To be sure, situations can be complicated. Motives and actions can be mixed. Facts can be disputed. Perspectives can differ. Pictures can be incomplete.

Nevertheless, some things are clearly and simply wrong. It takes wisdom to discern what should be tolerated and what should not. It also takes wisdom to know when to speak up and when to wait. It takes wisdom to understand when institutions are set up to perpetuate wrong rather than prevent it, to recognize when corruption is a feature, not a bug.

And it takes courage to tolerate no more what is wrong — and to speak up and act for what is right.

You can read the entire article here.

My New Book, Like Birds in a Cage, Is Now in Print and Available

I am happy to announce that my new book, Like Birds in a Cage: Christian Zionism’s Collusion in Israel’s Oppression of the Palestinian People (Cascade, 2021), is now available.

So place your orders now (please!) and share what you learn with your family and friends. Just click this link.

Rather than talk about my own book, allow me to share a few of the recommendations the book has received from other scholars in this field:

A keenly reasoned, comprehensive, full-frontal critique of Christian Zionism. Equally at ease interpreting St. Paul, critiquing ideologies of privilege, deconstructing Israel’s discriminatory legal regime, and narrating scenes of unarmed, tear-gassed villagers, David Crump mounts a formidable case against the troubling logic, and deadly deployment, of ethnocracy and territorial exceptionalism. This prophetic call to walk not where Jesus walked, but as Jesus walked, is more urgent now than ever.

Bruce N. Fisk, Ph.D., Senior Research Fellow, Network of Evangelicals for the Middle East

This new volume by David Crump may be the most comprehensive critique of Christian Zionism by an evangelical author to date. As a former ‘insider,’ his unique perspective has delivered a tour de force by combining scholarly biblical exegesis of key texts the incisive theological analysis. His solid grasp of the relevant political and historical context of the Israeli-Palestinian struggle adds context and texture to this wonderfully written book. I hope this volume will be widely read and reviewed across the evangelical spectrum by pastors, biblical scholars, students, and perhaps most urgently, evangelical politicians.

Don Wagner, author of Anxious for Armageddon

Like Birds in a Cage is destined to become a standard text on Christian Zionism in the USA. With devastating precision, Dave Crump exposes the cancerous nature of this deviant theology. For Evangelicalism to survive with any credibility, it must repudiate the justification of apartheid and ethnic cleansing in Palestine. Crump’s book provides not only the diagnosis but also the cure.

Steven Sizer, Founder and Director, Peacemaker Trust

This book is quite unique in the way that it combines a sound grasp of the history of Zionism, careful interpretation of the Bible, and first hand, recent experience of everyday life for Palestinians living under occupation on the West Bank . . . My hope and prayer is that this book will help American Christians of all kinds to wake up to the very significant ways in which Christian Zionism has contributed — and continues to contribute — to this tragic conflict. They might then be more able to challenge their government’s policies.

Colin Chapman, author of Whose Promised Land?

Wise Christians Will Embrace Classical Liberalism

David French is a Christian, a political commentator, a former staff writer for the National Review, a columnist for Time Magazine, and senior editor of

David French

The Dispatch, a conservative news site.

He recently published an excellent piece entitled, “A Christian Defense of American Classical Liberalism,” in which he clearly and compellingly describes the equally malicious rise of authoritarianism from both the Right and the Left in America.

Both are dangerous in very similar ways. But, more than that, he explains why  Christian theology provides the church with the best framework for understanding these dangers.

Christian theology also offers the best framework for grasping the social and political benefits of classical Liberalism.

Below is an excerpt:

On the push and pull between ‘humans as made in the image of God and humans still trapped in sin.’

I’d like to introduce you to a term you need to know (indeed, many of you no doubt know it already). It’s “horseshoe theory,” and its short definition is relatively simple. As political movements grow more extreme, they grow more alike. Like a horseshoe, they bend closer together.

A classic example of horseshoe theory is represented by 20th-century European clashes between fascists and communists. It’s not that there aren’t differences between fascism and communism, it’s that in their totalitarian reality, the two competing regimes created quite similar conditions on the ground. 

Thankfully the American manifestations of horseshoe theory haven’t created anything remotely like the fascism and communism that led to history’s bloodiest war, but we’re seeing horseshoe theory emerge nonetheless, and its left-wing and right-wing manifestations have settled on the same target—American classical liberalism.

By “American classical liberalism,” I mean the specific structure of government created by the founding generation, modified and expanded through the Civil War Amendments, affirmed and extended through judicial precedent. While this constitutional structure is malleable enough to accommodate a wide variety of social, economic, and foreign policy choices, at its heart it is defined by a commitment to individual liberty, equality under law, and democratic government. 

On the left, the challenge most prominently comes from a series of critical theory-influenced ideologies that fundamentally reject that American founding (and American classical liberalism itself) as irrevocably stained and tainted (mainly) by America’s racial sins. Classical liberalism, in this telling, was the enabler of great injustice. 

Some definitions of critical race theory, for example, specifically reject liberalism, viewing liberalism as a “vehicle for self-interest, power, and privilege.” This is why, for example, critical theory-influenced colleges often attempt to pare back commitments to free speech and due process on campus. These “liberal” commitments are perceived as oppressive to women and people of color, enabling “hate speech” or sexual predation.

On the right, the challenge comes most prominently from a cohort of mainly Christian intellectuals, many of whom were featured in an extended New York Times piece about the new right and some of whom are in a marriage of convenience with Trumpist populism. They perceive liberalism as both problematic on its own terms and inadequate to the task of resisting “woke” post-liberals on the left. 

Whereas critical race theorists root their objections to liberalism in its coexistence with American oppression, many Christian post-liberals (perhaps we can call them “critical religion theorists”) root their objections in liberalism’s alleged contributions to American immorality and godlessness, with a particular emphasis on abortion and the sexual revolution. 

You will find the entire article here. Take a look.