Canadian commentator, David Doel, host of the YouTube program Rational National, is right to mock Pat Robertson’s cold-hearted, uninformed, slanderous, Republican propaganda report on the CBN program, The 700 Club. Watch Doel’s comments below as Pat Robertson spouts neoliberal nonsense about the recently passed Senate Infrastructure Bill:
It is clear, as if it wasn’t before, that the CBN abbreviation actually identifies this channel as the CapitalistBroadcasting Network, or perhaps the Conservative Broadcasting Network.
There certainly is nothing Christian about any of THIS. (Robertson’s remarks conclude at the 4:20 mark):
This, folks, is neither news nor informed commentary. It IS hard-core, right-wing propaganda of the worst sort.
Of course, faithful Christians can be politically conservative. But God’s people cannot confuse lies, misinformation, slander, propaganda, or blind partisanship with honest, informative communication.
From all that I can see, neither Pat Robertson, the 700 Club, nor CBN are able to distinguish truth from falsehood much less integrity from manipulation.
Whether or not you watch CBN, I am sure everybody knows by now that Congress has passed a bipartisan infrastructure bill with a $3.5 trillion dollar price tag.
That may sound like a lot of money, but it really is pocket change when compared to the cumulative expense, contributing to the national debt, that piles up annually from our:
ever-expanding military budgets,
continual war-making around the world (I have never heard Pat Robertson, precious few conservatives at large, nor many Democrats for that matter condemn the many wanton, US military adventures we carry out around the world),
government subsidies paid out to America’s largest corporations (otherwise known as corporate welfare — Come on. Am I really supposed to believe that companies like Exxon haven’t yet figured out how to make a profit on their own dime?),
tax cuts consistently given to the largest US corporations,
additional tax cuts given to the wealthiest members of society (Remember, Trump’s big tax give away?),
the trillions of dollars the IRS estimates is lost by the US treasury each year through tax fraud and evasion among the richest Americans and corporations (Remember that Jeff Bezos, the richest man on the planet, paid no income tax last year!).
The list could go on…
Now, in the face of so many obscene, public injustices, all of which drain the public purse to the tune of billions if not trillions of dollars annually, conservatives are lamenting a direly needed infrastructure bill that will improve essential services for the poor, elderly, and working class members of our society.
The modern state of Israel was founded upon ethnic cleansing.
750,000 Palestinians were driven from their homes by a Jewish military that freely committed war crimes just as every invading army has violated civilian populations throughout history.
Below is a video telling the story of only one Palestinian family whose home was recently demolished in order to make way for Jewish settlers.
Zionist ethnic cleansing has never ceased, not since it began in 1947.
The Israeli government refers to the process as “Judaization,” that is the replacement of native Palestinians with Jewish settlers.
It is also referred to as “redeeming the land.” For political Zionism, redemption is not God’s business. It is Jewish Zionist business. And it is accomplished by ridding the land of the pollution created by Palestinians.
I could post several such videos and articles every dayand never run out of new material exposing the ongoing injustices of Israeli political Zionism.
So, here again is a new, representative story I have selected out of many, many possibilities this week alone.
Watch it and ask yourself, as well as your elected representatives, is this why the US subsidizes Israel to the tune of nearly $4 billion each year????
Robert Pape is a researcher at the Chicago Project on Security and Threats, a think tank he runs at the University of Chicago.
He recently published the results of a study into the backgrounds and identities of all those arrested and charged for their participation in the January 6th attack on our Capitol building in Washington, D.C.
We have long known that Christian Nationalism was an important, motivating ideology for many of the Trump followers involved in that attack.
Dr. Pape’s report now shows the equally important role played by White Supremacy in motivating that attack.
This marriage of Christian Nationalism with White Supremacy is not new, of course. It has a very long history in this country.
The fact that many people who call themselves Christians believed that Jesus Christ had blessed this violent attack; the fact that they claimed their involvement was integral to their patriotic, Christian witness; that “keeping America white” is a major plank in their “Christian worldview”; all combined with the evidence indicating that this movement continues to expand is more than abundant reason to weep for the evangelical church in this country.
If you know Christian leaders/teachers who are instructing their congregations about the gross, anti-Biblical, anti-Christian errors of this American idolatry, then please encourage them and offer your support.
If the leaders and pastors of your church are remaining silent or, worse yet, endorsing the heresies of Christian Nationalism and White Supremacy, then talk with them, correct them, express your dissatisfaction with their departure from Biblical truth; tell them that they are wrong and pray for their transformation.
The Truth of the Gospel of Jesus Christ is on the line.
Counties with the most significant declines in the non-Hispanic white population were the most likely to be homes to people who stormed the Capitol.
Jason Andrew for The New York Times
When the political scientist Robert Pape began studying the issues that motivated the 380 or so people arrested in connection with the attack against the Capitol on Jan. 6, he expected to find that the rioters were driven to violence by the lingering effects of the 2008 Great Recession.
But instead he found something very different: Most of the people who took part in the assault came from places, his polling and demographic data showed, that were awash in fears that the rights of minorities and immigrants were crowding out the rights of white people in American politics and culture.
If Mr. Pape’s initial conclusions — published on Tuesday in The Washington Post — hold true, they would suggest that the Capitol attack has historical echoes reaching back to before the Civil War, he said in an interview over the weekend. In the shorter term, he added, the study would appear to connect Jan. 6 not only to the once-fringe right-wing theory called the Great Replacement, which holds that minorities and immigrants are seeking to take over the country, but also to events like the far-right rally in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017 where crowds of white men marched with torches chanting, “Jews will not replace us!”
“If you look back in history, there has always been a series of far-right extremist movements responding to new waves of immigration to the United States or to movements for civil rights by minority groups,” Mr. Pape said. “You see a common pattern in the Capitol insurrectionists. They are mainly middle-class to upper-middle-class whites who are worried that, as social changes occur around them, they will see a decline in their status in the future.”
One fact stood out in Mr. Pape’s study, conducted with the help of researchers at the Chicago Project on Security and Threats, a think tank he runs at the University of Chicago. Counties with the most significant declines in the non-Hispanic white population are the most likely to produce insurrectionists. This finding held true, Mr. Pape determined, even when controlling for population size, distance to Washington, unemployment rate and urban or rural location.
Law enforcement officials have said 800 to 1,000 people entered the Capitol on Jan. 6, and prosecutors have spent the past three months tracking down many of them in what they have described as one of the largest criminal investigations in U.S. history. In recent court filings, the government has hinted that more than 400 people may ultimately face charges, including illegal entry, assault of police officers and the obstruction of the official business of Congress.
In his study, Mr. Pape determined that only about 10 percent of those charged were members of established far-right organizations like the Oath Keepers militia or the nationalist extremist group the Proud Boys. But unlike other analysts who have made similar findings, Mr. Pape has argued that the remaining 90 percent of the “ordinary” rioters are part of a still congealing mass movement on the right that has shown itself willing to put “violence at its core.”
Other mass movements have emerged, he said, in response to large-scale cultural change. In the 1840s and ’50s, for example, the Know Nothing Party, a group of nativist Protestants, was formed in response to huge waves of largely Irish Catholic immigration to the country. After World War I, he added, the Ku Klux Klan experienced a revival prompted in part by the arrival of Italians and the first stirrings of the so-called Great Migration of Black Americans from the rural South to the industrialized North.
In an effort to determine why the mob that formed on Jan. 6 turned violent, Mr. Pape compared events that day with two previous pro-Trump rallies in Washington, on Nov. 14 and Dec. 12. While police records show some indications of street fighting after the first two gatherings, Mr. Pape said, the number of arrests were fewer and the charges less serious than on Jan. 6. The records also show that those arrested in November and December largely lived within an hour of Washington while most of those arrested in January came from considerably farther away.
The difference at the rallies was former President Donald J. Trump, Mr. Pape said. Mr. Trump promoted the Jan. 6 rally in advance, saying it would be “wild” and driving up attendance, Mr. Pape said. He then encouraged the mob to march on the Capitol in an effort to “show strength.”
Mr. Pape said he worried that a similar mob could be summoned again by a leader like Mr. Trump. After all, he suggested, as the country continues moving toward becoming a majority-minority nation and right-wing media outlets continue to stoke fear about the Great Replacement, the racial and cultural anxieties that lay beneath the riot at the Capitol are not going away.
“If all of this is really rooted in the politics of social change, then we have to realize that it’s not going to be solved — or solved alone — by law enforcement agencies,” Mr. Pape said. “This is political violence, not just ordinary criminal violence, and it is going to require both additional information and a strategic approach.”
Mr. Pape, whose career had mostly been focused on international terrorism, used that approach after the Sept. 11 attacks when he created a database of suicide bombers from around the world. His research led to a remarkable discovery: Most of the bombers were secular, not religious, and had killed themselves not out of zealotry, but rather in response to military occupations.
American officials eventually used the findings to persuade some Sunnis in Iraq to break with their religious allies and join the United States in a nationalist movement known as the Anbar Awakening.
Recalling his early work with suicide bombers, Mr. Pape suggested that the country’s understanding of what happened on Jan. 6 was only starting to take shape, much like its understanding of international terrorism slowly grew after Sept. 11.
“We really still are at the beginning stages,” he said.
I suspect that I will eventually post a more thorough review of this work at some point in the future. But given my recent encounters with several books and articles examining the lustful, nationalistic ties that have long bound American Christianity to the nation’s callous, military bloodletting around the world, I wanted to write a short note on Dr. Williams’ defense of the pro-life movement.
Williams looks at four political issues that tend to divide Americans along party lines: abortion, marriage and sexuality, race, and wealth and poverty.
His goal is to show that all four of these concerns should equally animate all Christians into a bipartisan – or better yet, nonpartisan – alliance that would work together towards a wholistic “politics of the cross.”
If you have read my book, I Pledge Allegiance, you won’t be surprised to learn that I couldn’t help but notice that war and peace (unsurprisingly) don’t make it onto Dr. Williams’ list of important Christian political issues.
This absence was underscored as I read his biblical/theological arguments against abortion. He naturally begins with the early Christian apologists and church fathers who condemned abortion in the ancient world. Their arguments are important and powerful, laying the groundwork for Christianity’s longstanding opposition to abortion. [This point requires elaboration, but I won’t do that here.]
However, these same ancient, Christian leaders used similar arguments to oppose all Christian involvement with violence, warfare, and the military.The same men who condemned abortion and defended unborn children were equally adamant in insisting that all Christians must be pacifists who condemned all forms of violence.
Unfortunately, Dr. Williams continues the evangelical habit of cherry-picking the “prolife” evidence.
For the early Christians, the reasons we must oppose abortion (while simultaneously providing all the supportive social services required by a newborn) are the same reasons we must oppose war and refuse to be involved in violence.
You can’t claim one part of the argument while denying the other.
So, if abortion is wrong, all violence and warfare are wrong, too. Yet, precious few Christians in either the Republican or the Democratic (yes, that is the proper adjective) party openly advocate for a national “peace/antiwar” policy in this country.
And that’s a tragedy.
For, if you believe that abortion-providers deserve to be picketed and closed down, then so do military bases, nuclear weapons facilities, war colleges, ROTC programs, weapons manufacturers, and the Pentagon.
As the earliest Christian teachers and apologists all insisted, IF Christians should not get abortions, THEN neither should they join the military, serve in the police force, or work in the judiciary, because all these roles demand an association with or the execution of violence and dehumanization.
We can’t cherry-pick the Biblical evidence, folks.
Perhaps the most grotesque feature of American civil religion is its manipulation of Christian faith to fit the role of pious cheerleader for this nation’s militaristic imperialism throughout the world.
Of course, this requires the collusion of our religious leaders — I hesitate to call them “Christian” — who applaud the “sacrifice” of our noble troops, willing “to give their lives for the nation.”
More recently, Dr. Kelly Denton-Borhaug, a professor of religious studies at Moravian College outside Philadelphia, has written a book entitled, And Then Your Soul Is Gone: Moral Injury and US War-Culture.Her book explores the ways in which Christian vocabulary is used to justify, and to valorize, America’s endless wars.
She further explores the long-term damage of “moral injury” ravaging the consciences of soldiers who come home from the battleground.
Below is an excerpt of an interview with Dr. Denton-Borhaug conducted by Robert Scheer and Scheer Post. The interview transcript is titled, “Christianity is the Linchpin in America’s War Machine,” a title that ought to make every Christian gag. [All emphasis mine.]
RS: Well, really what you’re talking about is a sickness, a profound cultural sickness that has a unique, dare I say American-exceptional variant in its relation to Christianity, modern Christianity, that has inflicted great pain not only on the world–I shouldn’t say “not only”–and on innocent civilians throughout the world, but on the warriors that are summoned or encouraged or paid–mercenaries–to go out and do this. And you’re saying there’s a fundamental connection as well as a contradiction between this nation’s claim to be influenced by notions of a deity and an almighty and accountability in a religious sense, and the barbarism–the barbarism that has consumed our relation to the world.
KDB: That’s absolutely right, and you know, part of the–I’m really glad that you used the word “contradiction,” because contradictions abound in this landscape. And part of the contradiction has to do with the way that U.S. Americans tend to understand ourselves, and especially our system of government, with respect to religion. So we like to think that we have these nice and comfortable and straightforward separations between the ways that we operate in the world politically and whatever religious commitments we may have. We like to think that we have successfully relegated those kinds of commitments to the private sphere. But what I have come to understand is that that, in fact, is not true at all. There’s a tremendous amount of interplay that goes on between those supposedly private commitments and then the way that we understand and act within these much larger political realities.
So of course, a lot of this falls under the heading of what scholars call civil religion: the way in which religion is intertwined with, and impacts, our systems and our practices and our rituals of civil government. But I think we have tended to think that all of this is very conscious and under control, and thoughtfully executed. And my work really exhibited to me that there is this sort of deep emotional, rather subconscious and very destructive subterranean stream of religious violence that impacts the ways that we think about war, and actually that acts also as a very strong mechanism of concealment and mystification. So we tend not to see these things; we tend not to be aware of them. And simultaneously, we’re really deeply impacted by them. We approach the realities of war and militarization in the United States as a kind of sacred reality.
But, again, even as I say that, when these subterranean streams are lifted to the surface, because they have become sacred in so many people’s ways of thinking, it can be very disconcerting to hear them named as such. And it can raise a lot of uncomfortable feelings, and even feelings of anger, on the part of many people.
RS: Well, but your basic research is with the one set of victims. I mean, we should never forget that bombing weddings with drones creates, in a traditional sense, real victims out there that we sort of discard; we think of war as a video game now, and we just blow people up all over, and we’ve been doing it, whether it was shock and awe and the great display of military power, or what we do mindlessly, or our president does almost every day, whether it’s Biden or Trump. But you’ve focused on the warriors.
Dr. Rob Dalrymple and Vinnie Angelo both host the DetermineTruth podcast available at Patheos, an evangelical platform for a variety of religious blogs and websites.
Rob and Vinnie recently contacted me in order to interview me about my forthcoming book, Like Birds in a Cage: Christian Zionist Collaboration in the Suffering of the Palestinian People.
Dr. Rob Dalrymple
My interview is about 1 hour long. You can watch the video version of my discussion with Rob and Vinnie about Christian Zionism and my forthcoming book on YouTube here or you can listen to the audio-only version at the DetermineTruth website here.
Pastor Vinnie Angelo
Rob and Vinnie also discuss their own eye-opening awakenings to the problems of Christian Zionism and the oppression of the Palestinian people in an introductory discussion here.
My friends at the Network of Evangelicals for the Middle East (NEME) interviewed me last month about my book, Like Birds in a Cage: Christian Zionism’s Collusion in the Oppression of the Palestinian People (Cascade, 2021).
I am told the book will be available for purchase around October 1st. I am waiting to hear about the possibility of pre-publication purchases.
My friend, Dr. Bruce Fisk, formerly a New Testament professor at Westmont College in California, asked me a number of questions about the book as well as my experiences living in Palestinian Occupied Territory of the West Bank.
The interview is about 1 hour long. I hope you will take the time to watch and learn more about the truth of Israel as an apartheid state.
Also, feel free to share the video’s web link with your friends. (I tried to download the video onto this post, but it is too large.)
Then buy my book and share its message with as many Christian Zionist friends as possible. The majority of the American evangelical church needs to learn the truth about Israel-Palestine.
I am also eager to speak with any groups interested in listening, whether large or small. Please contact me for possible speaking engagements on the subjects covered in my book. Thanks.
US media regularly repeats Israeli talking points about “terrorist attacks” (the common description of unarmed civilians protesting in the streets) against Israel. Yet, these same outlets remain mute about Israel’s daily terrorist attacks against Palestinians.
It’s as if US corporate media is joined at the hip to the Israeli government propaganda department.
Israel may not be carpet-bombing Gaza at the moment — though bombing
Israeli journalist, Gideon Levy
has continued fairly consistently throughout the summer — but killing Palestinians in the West Bank continues apace without interruption.
Israeli journalist, Gideon Levy aptly labels the Israeli shooters as “death squads.”
Mr. Levy’s latest article in Haaretz newspaper describing the recent murders of 4 innocent, young men — stories you will never see covered by US corporate media — is entitled “The Media Yawns at the Israeli Army’s Death Squads.”
Israeli terror is at it again. The Israel Defense Forces’ death squads chalked up another successful week: four bodies of innocent Palestinians piled up between the two Fridays. There doesn’t seem to be a connection between the four incidents in which four sons were killed, but the link cannot be broken.
In all these cases, soldiers chose shooting to kill as the preferred option. In all four cases another way could have been chosen: Arrest them, aim for the legs, don’t do anything or simply don’t be there at all. But the soldiers chose to kill. It’s probably easier for them that way.
They come from different branches of the army with different backgrounds, but they share the incredible ease with which they kill, whether they have to or not.
They kill because they can. They kill because they’re convinced that this is how they’re expected to act. They kill because they know that nothing is cheaper than the life of a Palestinian. They kill because they know that the Israeli media will yawn and not report a thing. They kill because they know that no harm will come to them, so why not? Why not kill a Palestinian when possible?
They killed a 12-year-old boy and a 41-year-old plumber. They killed a 17-year-old youth and a 20-year-old young man attending a funeral, all in one week. An Israeli slogan during the 1948 war went “To arms, every good man,”
Israeli soldiers at the funeral of 12-year-old Mohammed al-Alami in the West Bank town of Beit Ummar Thursday. Credit Emil Salman
leading later to the concept of the IDF’s “purity of arms.” Four in one week, for no reason, with no hesitation, with no terrorist facing them. Four executions of young men with dreams, families, plans and loves.
None of the four endangered the soldiers, certainly not in a way that justified lethal fire. Thirteen bullets at a car driving by innocently, carrying a father and his three small children. Shooting a plumber holding a wrench and claiming that he was “moving rapidly toward the soldiers.” Three bullets at the stomach of a 17-year-old who was on his way to take his brother home.
All this can be called terror; there is no other definition. All this can be called the actions of death squads; there is no other description. It sounds horrible, but it really is horrific.
It could be less horrific if the Israeli media bothered to report on it, possibly shocking Israelis. It could be much less horrific if IDF commanders took the necessary steps given their army’s murderous recklessness. But most of the media believed that the killing of a child interests no one or is unimportant, or both, so this shocking incident wasn’t reported on.
If the soldiers had shot a dog – also a shocking act, of course – it would have attracted more attention. But a dead Palestinian child? What happened? Why should it interest anyone, why is it important?
“Are you working for the Arabs?” journalist Yinon Magal maliciously tweeted, addressing Haaretz’s Hagar Shezaf, virtually the only journalist who covered the boy’s funeral. This is the new journalistic ethos: Reporting the truth is tantamount to working for the Arabs.
Let’s leave aside the media of trivia and nonsense that was busy to the hilt with the modeling agent suspected of sexual misconduct and with lists of pedophiles – what does the media have to do with the killing of children? The question is: Where are the military commanders and the political leaders?
Their disgraceful silence leads to only one conclusion: They believe that this killing is acceptable. It’s exactly what they expect of soldiers: the killing of innocents. There is no other way to explain everyone’s silence without even a semblance of condemnation.
If the killers of the boy Mohammed al-Alami are still not in custody, then the IDF under Chief of Staff Aviv Kochavi – a person known to speak in lofty terms about values – is saying that the soldiers acted correctly. If the paratroopers who killed Mohammed Tamimi by firing three bullets into his body from their armored jeep are still walking around freely in the West Bank, this means the army salutes them.
And if the IDF salutes them, we really are talking about death squads, just like in the most dreadful regimes.
I recently came across this interview with the well-known US, mega-
Pastor John MacArthur
church pastor, John MacArthur. He is being asked about Critical Race Theory, which he describes as THE greatest danger to the evangelical church in the last 100 years.
Really?
Check it out below. My thoughts appear afterwards:
First, the majority of MacArthur’s remarks are, frankly, incoherent. He is rambling. There is no logic to anything he says. He is simply making “authoritative” declarations, without any apparent logical connection linking them together, while expecting his listeners to take him seriously.
Apparently, MacArthur has basked in his status as an adored, authoritarian mega-church preacher for far too long.
Second, MacArthur is obviously a dedicated American individualist, as are most evangelicals in this country. He speaks strictly in terms of individual sins and personal responsibility. But that is only half the picture. Every society is a collective enterprise in which the whole becomes greater than the sum of the parts.
Thus, social evils are always sins of the collective. And the collective is only changed through new legislation, restructuring, and advocacy for a renewed type of social conscience. MacArthur is either unwilling or incapable of recognizing this fact. Thus, his comments have little relevance to people working to improve the broken social structures in which we live.
To pursue justice within a society, it is not only possible but necessary to address the problems of BOTH individual AND corporate, collectivesins. Like far too many evangelicals, MacArthur cannot or will not acknowledge this fact.
Third, MacArthur believes that the current controversies over “social justice” (SJ) within evangelicalism pose the most dangerous threat to the church in the past century!
Frankly, that assertion strikes me as a remarkable “chicken little” type of over statement, to put it mildly.
Why does he believe the social justice movement is so dangerous? Because, (a) in his view, social justice is actually socialism, the eternal boogey-man for American conservatives. [Does he honestly not understand that history has been filled with godly Christian socialists?] (b) He further claims that SJ is simply a “euphemism for equality of outcomes.” (c) “Critical Race Theory only wants to destroy,” “to abolish everything.” And (d) CRT insists that individuals are not responsible for evil; only society bears that responsibility.
MacArthur’s claims are nothing more than fear-mongering falsehoods. Frankly, he does not know what he is talking about, plain and simple. Each of these points is demonstrably false.
CRT uncovers the many ways in which western society, constructed by white Europeans, has legalized an unequal social system that has historically granted significant advantages to white folks while denying them to people of color. That sort of system needs to be torn down in same way that slavery was torn down by Christian politicians in 19th century England.
Every follower of Jesus, who sees every fellow human being as made in the Image of God, should want to see all racial privilege and systemic inequalities abolished! There is nothing the least bit radical about any of this!
The fact that SJ is now “dividing the church” simply reveals how deeply paternalistic, reactionary conservatism — more specifically, white, paternalistic, reactionary conservatism — is embedded within American evangelicalism!
It is always difficult for those who rest easy in the enjoyment of their social privileges to recognize, confess, and repent of their ignorance and indifference to the difficulties created for others by the very system from which they have always benefited.
I do not know John MacArthur’s heart. But I will say that he is a misguided, reactionary white man whose “criticisms” of SJ and CRT are very similar to the arguments used by Southern segregationists as they combatted the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s and 70s.
Leaders like John MacArthur need to be ignored when they address important topics with such arrogance and self-satisfaction.
I am sure you have heard about the Israeli ruckus occurring in the wake of Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream company deciding to join the international BDS
Israeli journalist, Gideon Levy
movement by no longer supplying ice cream to the illegal Jewish-only settlements in the West Bank.
Certain US news outlets have gotten this wrong. Ben & Jerry’s is not boycotting the entire West Bank, only the Jewish settlements now housing some 700,000 Jewish colonizers occupying stolen Palestinian land.
Israeli politicians, as well as the citizens they represent, are up in arms over this latest “antisemitic” attack against the Jewish state.
There is so much propagandistic malarkey at play in this recent Israeli temper tantrum, it would be funny were it no so tragic.
Gideon Levy, columnist for the Israeli daily newspaper, Haaretz, gives us the necessary perspective on this latest display of Zionist insanity. His article is titled “A Tempest in an Ice Cream Tub Revealed Some Truths to Israelis.” (All emphasis is mine):
If Ben & Jerry’s keeps to its word and pulls its product from the settlements in a year and a half (and there’s good reason to doubt it will, given the pressure expected from American Jews), I will start eating its ice cream. I will be able to enjoy a product that shows a little more caring, more involvement, more conscience and, above all, more decency.
Until then, one can only laugh at the summer frenzy that has broken out and will disappear when the next storm of vanity emerges. Do Israelis now need to boycott the ice cream to protest the company’s decision? Or should we buy more in a show of support for the patriotic local franchisee, who will continue selling in the settlements until its contract is up? Meanwhile, what we have is a tempest in a tub of ice cream that teaches us more about Israel than a thousand scholarly papers.
The Ben & Jerry’s affair has made Israelis happy. There aren’t a lot of things they love more than the appearance of an external threat. It brings us together, to wallow in the bitter fate that we of all peoples must face, to create a repulsive unity and groupthink, and to launch a bombastic counterattack, with the knee-jerk accusation of antisemitism for dessert.
When the franchisee of our beloved McDonald’s, Omri Padan, decided to boycott the territories, collective Israel shrieked a lot less. Why? Because Padan is a patriot who in no conceivable way can be tarred as an antisemite. He is untouchable. With an American company, it’s a lot easier.
Ice cream succeeded where the deaths of 67 children in Gaza failed – to remind Israelis of the occupation. Still, the madness remains: The occupation is a victim, the only victim. It boggles the mind that whenever someone dares remind Israelis that something is still wrong, the issue immediately becomes how Israel is the victim. Headlines, endless talk, and the only thing no one asks is – why?
Why would any reasonable person want to boycott Israel? Well, maybe because of the pressure exerted by BDS. Only because of such pressure. Otherwise, there’s no way an ice cream company might come to the conclusion on its own that it no longer wants to sweeten the lives of the settlers. There’s no chance of there being business people with values. It’s just the consequence of pressure. The mechanisms of repression and denial that Israeli society has developed won’t drink from the cup of Chubby Hubby. It’s society’s Iron Dome – it can’t be abandoned.
Therefore, the situation demands nothing less than a real boycott of Israel, of all Israelis, everywhere – a painful, costly, destructive one. Not a boycott-lite on the ice cream sold at the Rami Levy supermarket at the Etzion Junction, but one that all of Israel will feel in its pocket. Only one that can relieve Israel of its blindness and expose the lie it has been feeding itself for so many years.
Equally amazing is all the unity and groupthink that the affair has created. Suddenly, it has become clear that we’re all settlers. The Green Line has long ceased to exist. The Ben & Jerry’s affair has revealed that there’s no difference between the radical right and the left. Everyone is for the settlements. Everyone opposes their being harmed, even if it’s minor harm to the contents of their freezers.
But is it really so sudden? Yair Lapid talks about antisemitism and Economy and Industry Minister Orna Barbivai acts if she dreams of being Miri Regev when she grows up. Meanwhile, we can ask ourselves why we deserve ridiculous politicians like these and why no one has mustered the courage to thank Ben & Jerry’s for acting in their small way.
In any case, the step the company took is artificial: It’s no longer possible to separate the settlers and the rest of Israel. The tempest in the tub proves that.
We should praise the ice cream makers from Vermont: They won’t end the occupation – that’s not their job – but on a hot summer day they revealed a few truths to Israelis. Only one question remains for all reasonable Israelis to ask themselves: What would they think of an ice cream company that boycotted South Africa?
motivating ideology for many of the Trump followers involved in that attack.
The fact that many people who call themselves Christians believed that Jesus Christ had blessed this violent attack; the fact that they claimed their involvement was integral to their patriotic, Christian witness; that “keeping America white” is a major plank in their “Christian worldview”; all combined with the evidence indicating that this movement continues to expand is more than abundant reason to weep for the evangelical church in this country.
American idolatry, then please encourage them and offer your support.
Politics of the Cross: A Christian Alternative to Partisanship
learn that I couldn’t help but notice that war and peace (unsurprisingly) don’t make it onto Dr. Williams’ list of important Christian political issues.
ancient evidence together for the modern reader. It’s called 
of American evangelicalism with our militaristic, national idolatry in my book, 
Dr. Rob Dalrymple and Vinnie Angelo both host the 
