April 6, 2006
As
if AIPAC wasn’t enough, the Christian Zionists in America have
organized a new "Christian pro-Israel lobby," a "more powerful …
version of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee" that will
"target senators and congressmen on Capitol Hill" and demand they show
ever-increasing fealty to the tiny outlaw state of Israel, reports the
Israeli newspaper Haaretz.
At the center of this effort is televangelist John Hagee and other
Christian Zionists, including Jerry Falwell and Gary Bauer, president
of the American Values organization. Hagee was given the "Humanitarian
of the Year" award by the San Antonio, Texas, B’Nai B’Rith Council, the
first time this award was bestowed upon a Gentile. He was also
"honored" with the ZOA (Zionist Organization of America) Israel Award
by Jean Kirkpatrick, a "fellow" at the neocon criminal organization,
the American Enterprise Institute, where Bush gets his "minds," that is
to say AEI provides Bush with warmongering reactionaries.
Another Christian Zionist, Rev. Malcolm Hedding,
believes, as do most Israelis and American Christian Zionists, there
"is no such thing as a Palestinian," in other words the Arabs living in
Palestine are illegitimate and they should be forced off the land they
have lived on for centuries, or short of that treated as something less
than human. For the Christian Zionists, everything Israel does is
sanctioned by God. According to author Grace Halsell,
"Christian Zionism is a dangerous and growing segment of Christianity,
which was popularized by the 19th-century American Cyrus Scofield when
he wrote into a Bible his interpretation of events in history. These
events all centered around Israel—past, present, and future. His
Scofield Bible is today the most popular of the reference Bibles."
Halsell believes "that Christian Zionism threatens not just the lives
of Palestinians and other Arabs, but the very existence of the United
States. Because of the cult of Israel, we have become a nation that
does not have its own Middle East policy, but the policy the government
of Israel tells us to have." Hagee’s new Christian Zionist version of
AIPAC will increase this threat.
Since the Palestinians do
not exist, as the Rev. Malcolm Hedding tells us, it stands to reason
they do not need food or medicine or any sort of humanitarian
consideration whatsoever. According to Al Mezan Center for Human Rights,
this neglect is currently reaching dire proportions. The Al Mezan
Center for Human Rights reports "basic alimentary goods are gradually
disappearing from markets and food prices have increased" in the OPT
(Occupied Palestinian Territories). "Flour is becoming scarce and
quantities of bread are not meeting customer needs." An engineered
Israeli policy tantamount to genocide is devastating Palestinian
society:
Based on Al Mezan field reports, markets
have run out of children’s medicines, in particular antibiotics and
suppositories, in addition to medication for heart problems and
rheumatism. The closure of Karni crossing is having severely negative
impacts on Palestinians in the Gaza Strip; economic sectors are being
entirely paralyzed and construction projects suspended due to lack of
basic construction materials such as iron and concrete, sewage pipes
and other essential materials for the reconstruction and paving of
roads demolished by the IOF. Furthermore, Palestinian farmers are
suffering great economic losses due to the closure and the damage of
vegetables and flowers which were to be exported.
Dov
Weissglas, the comatose Ariel Sharon’s onetime political advisor,
compares this systematic program of gradual starvation to "an
appointment with a dietician," a regimen he insists "won’t starve"
Palestinians to death but will make them "a lot thinner." As Ghali Hassan
writes, "Israel’s genocidal policy of systematic control and
imprisonment of the Palestinian people can only be compared with Nazi
concentration camps," a policy enthusiastically supported by the
Christian Zionists in America. Hassan cites grim statistics:
Recent
UN reports reveal that 60 percent of Palestinians are now living in
acute poverty, a figure which has tripled in just four years. Over 22
percent of children under the age of 5 are suffering from serious
malnutrition and 16 percent from acute anaemia, many of whom will
suffer permanent damage to their physical and mental development as a
result. The majority of families are now eating only once a day and
over 50 percent of Palestinians are now completely dependent on food
aid.
The UN report which was presented to the Donors
conference last year said that, "37 percent of the estimated 3.7
million Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza Strip had trouble
getting food in 2004. Another 27 percent were at risk of running into
such difficulties." About half the "Palestinian population was poor,
with poverty rate in the Gaza Strip reaching a staggering 65 percent,"
added the UN report. "Up to 16 percent of Palestinians—550,000—were
living on $1.50 a day, with the likelihood that the figure will rise to
35 percent if aid is not forthcoming." In addition, "child mortality
rose by 15 percent and the average unemployment rate reached 28
percent."
Now that the IOF has closed the Karni
(al-Muntar) commercial crossing and the Kerem Shalom crossing, these
dire statistics will get worse, as the World Food Program (WFP) warns.
The WFP stated in a press statement two weeks ago "that Gaza is facing
a remarkable shortage of food supplies" and called "on the Israeli
authorities to allow the flow of food shipments to fulfill the needs of
dozens of thousands of Gaza residents, who depend on food assistance to
survive," reported al-Jazeera.
"By
severely restricting Palestinian access to international markets,
Israel has become virtually the sole supplier of food to the WBGS [the
West Bank and Gaza Strip], accounting for over 95 percent of the
latter’s total agricultural imports and almost 100 percent of its
exports. Thus, border closures have extreme consequences for the food
security of the Palestinian people. Other measures have included
confiscation of agricultural land and water resources. It is estimated
that freshwater resources available to the WBGS population amounts to
112 cubic metres/caput/year compared to 377 for Israel," reports the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations
(FAO). "Since November 2001, FAO has had plans to field a mission to
the WBGS to assess the food and nutrition situation but this has not
been possible due to the prevailing adverse security conditions.
Nevertheless, all available information points to a major catastrophe
underway in the WBGS."
All of this is disgustingly similar to
the Nazi program of forced starvation of the Warsaw Ghetto Jews. In
addition, the construction of Israel’s apartheid wall reminds one of
the Nazi construction of a wall around the Warsaw Ghetto. In America,
however, these comparisons are never made by the corporate media,
determined to portray the Israelis as brave and noble in the face of
terrorism (actually resistance to occupation).
John Hagee
and the Christian Zionists—selfishly preoccupied with their own
"rapture" and the return of Jesus Christ that will only occur after
David’s temple is rebuilt—are enthusiastic advocates of starving
millions of Palestinians to death. "Christian Zionists are uninterested
in peace," writes Austin Cline,
"they take literally the Bible’s claims about Armageddon and they
expect it to happen because of the Palestinian issue," in other words,
unless the Palestinians are defeated through starvation and murder, the
selfish Christian Zionists will not enter the Kingdom of Heaven.
It
appears 40 million Christian Zionists in America are in favor of a
genocidal policy against a few million Palestinians and Hagee’s
Christian Zionist "AIPAC" will "lobby" Congress to make sure every last
Palestinian is either ethnically cleansed or systematically starved to
death. In normal times, this would be considered an immense crime, a
violation of not only humanitarian law but the teachings of Jesus
Christ as well. But we no longer live in normal times and the foreign
policy of the United States is currently under the control of a handful
of vicious Straussian neocons and their Zionist and Christian Zionist
allies, determined not only to eradicate Palestinians but also turn
much of the earth into a living hell of perpetual war. For the heirs of
Leo Strauss, the Christian Zionists represent a future of religious
radicalism and evangelical intolerance, spiritually driven to engage in
mass murder and starvation, a necessary condition for a brave new
future of a Machiavellian society ruled over by the Platoian princes of
fascist authoritarianism.