The other day a friend sent me a piece by the columnist "Spengler" of Asia Times online, saying that Israel is the happiest country in the world, while Arabs are "miserable" and their covetousness makes the idea of peace in the region impossible. These neocon horse feathers were trimmed out with theology about Islam and Judaism. I wondered who the hell Spengler is.
Then yesterday, a guy called Mark wrote to me, pointing out an even uglier statement by Spengler, on May 8, in an online forum Spengler leads:
The hidden premise of Islam is that Israel is chosen; that is why it [Islam]
had to invent a "final revelation" to replace Hebrew Scripture,
substitute Ishmael for Isaac, etc. etc. The nations desire Eternal
Life, of which they first heard from the Jews, and covet God's promise
to the Jews, who never can "unchoose" themselves, because no-one ever
will believe them. The Arabs are a dying culture and Islam is a dying
religion, and the only sensible thing to do is keep death at a
distance.
So: more war, more barbed wire, more killing, please! [emphasis mine]
Who is this murderous person? Wikipedia informs that Spengler has not been forthcoming about his religion, ethnicity or identity. My new friend Mark told me that he thinks Spengler also writes under the pseudonym "Shushon." Here are Mark's first couple of emails to me [and I will freely interpolate my comments within his, in brackets]:
I’d
like to draw your attention to an article in the current issue of First
Things, a monthly journal of “religion, culture and public life” [edited by neoconservative Father Richard John Neuhaus]. The
article is entitled “Zionism for Christians” and is written by “David
Shushon”.
I put the author’s name within quotation marks because I think it’s a
transparent pseudonym, almost certainly for the anonymous internet
gadfly “Spengler.” First Things once previously published an article
by Spengler under his Spengler pseudonym (“Christian, Muslim, Jew” –
October 2007), and anyone familiar with his style and thought will recognize “Zionism for Christians” as his work.
[In a rapid hunt of the 2 pieces, I find that both quote extensively from Franz Rosenzweig, including his statement that Christians and Jews are “laborers at the same task,” and both speak of anti-semitism as a form of neopaganism, i.e., not Christian. This guy Mark is making sense to me.]
The idea of this most recent article is to persuade Christians that
support for the state of Israel is theologically mandated by their
faith. What does “support for the state of Israel” mean, from the
Spengler perspective? Perhaps the best way to summarize that phrase
from Spengler’s point of view is to quote a recent comment he made on
his forum–the kind of comment he avoids in the urbane pages of First
Things. [And here Mark quotes the “barbed wire” comment from above]
Obviously, such comments are difficult to make under a true name in
mainstream media, so Spengler has been making them pseudonymously. For
more polite audiences he has now found a forum at First Things, where
he couches his ideology in pseudo-theological terms.
The bottom line is that Spengler is seeking to convince Christians that support for the Greater Israel
agenda that you decry is hardwired into Christian theology. He is also
probably trying to bolster the flagging Jewish support for this
ideology.
First Things touts the article in these terms: “The issue features, as well, David Shushon’s “Zionism for Christians.” That’s this month’s free article, available even to non-subscribers–but, then, why are there any non-subscribers, when you could read in the print version Shushon’s fascinating essay, which begins: ‘Israel
always matters. Biblical scholars have devoted endless pages to ancient
Israel as a religious idea, and pundits have penned endless newspaper
columns about modern Israel as a geopolitical entity. The deeper
implications, however, have received less attention than they deserve
in recent years, overshadowed by the exigencies of Middle Eastern
politics. Indeed, real questions remain: What does the sheer existence
of the modern state of Israel mean for theology–particularly for
Christian theology? And what does that theology mean for the continuing
existence of Israel?'”
What, in effect, Spengler is attempting is to persuade the Catholic
Church–or, at least and less grandiosely, influential intellectuals
and opinion shapers within it–to sanction a specific form of
nationalism: Zionism. The practical benefit Spengler sees would be an
increase of support for a radically Zionist Israel within influential Catholic circles, and the Catholic Church
remains the largest and most influential single Christian grouping in
the West.
Spengler’s attempt rests upon a fundamentalistic reading of
the Bible, specifically of the Abraham and Exodus stories. While one
might expect the Catholic Church
to be immune from such a fundamentalist appeal, that is not the case.
Catholic scriptural theology has been deeply infected with
fundamentalist readings since the Reformation–essentially, they were
put on the defensive by the Reformers and are unsure how to distance
themselves from fundamentalism without seeming to renounce scriptural
authority. I speak on a popular level–the official statements of the
Church do struggle to effect this distancing, but very cautiously and
not entirely coherently, for fear of the “modernists” among them. So,
Spengler’s appeal could well be considerable among the “conservative”
Christians (including Catholics) especially in America.
By the way, as you may know, in Jewish mysticism the “shushon/shushan flower”
seems to be a symbol for Zion – six points/petals to the flower. [Didn’t know that. By the way, Switchboard lists nobody with the last name of Shushon in the U.S., suggesting that it is a madeup name] So,
for those in the know, the pseudonym Shushon may be a code for
Zionist.
[I asked Mark what’s wrong with Spengler, whoever he is, using pseudonyms.]
First Things has given Spengler/Shushon a forum to try to recruit Catholics to
the Zionist cause. Spengler/Shushon presents Zionism in a theological
way, whereas Spengler’s real interests are very practical. He conceals
what may be entailed for those who are deluded into believing that
support of the state of Israel is a matter of fundamental theology for
Catholics: once on board with that concept, they may (if Spengler has
his way) be called upon to support “more war, more barbed wire, more
killing, please!” (Reminds me of the bar scene in Fawlty Towers.)
After all, if support of the Zionist cause is written into the Creed,
so to speak, there’s no backing away from the implications: the end
will justify the means at that point. For that reason, I think Neuhaus
owes it to his readers to reveal who the author Shushon is, so they can
be aware that his agenda is not academic theology but power politics.
[Weiss again: I think the sale of Zionism to evangelical Christians gets at one of my big problems with Zionism. Because
Israel has depended from the start on the west and Zionists generally
believe as an article of faith that gentiles won’t protect Jews
when it comes right down to it, Zionism’s advocates have often tried to market Zionism as being in the west’s best interest, and at times that claim
feels like so much snake oil. During the Cold War it made realist
sense, to some, to overlook the landgrabs. Since then it’s been
problematic. The whole idea of “Islamofascism” clearly helped–the
claim that the U.S. and Israel are in the same war (a claim that Trita
Parsi has said was dreamed up by Israelis in the ’90s).
But this idea hasn’t worked out very well in Iraq, not in the blue states anyway, and meantime the
American Jewish interest in Zionism has weakened: young Jews don’t feel
they have to flee to Tel Aviv, not when they’re marrying privileged
gentile peers.
[I raised the snake-oil issue with Mark.]
It’s precisely the snake-oil aspect of what he’s peddling–his effort
to couch his product in terms that will appeal to the intellectual
pretensions of the Christian chattering classes–that needs to be
addressed. You
don’t have to be a Christian to have grave doubts as to the
compatibility of “more war, more barbed wire, more killing, please!”
with what are generally supposed to be the tenets of Christian faith,
nor for that matter do you have to be Jewish to have the same
reservations regarding the compatibility of what he’s saying with the
best in the very diverse Jewish tradition.
