I’m sensitive to Jewish prejudice against Christians because I married one. After my future wife met my family 28 years ago, and my father kept referring to her as Brenda Frazier (an airhead deb who drank herself to death), she said, “I’ve always known about anti-Semitism; I never knew about anti- anti-semitism.” Christians were the Other for my family; and we never differentiated among them.
So I can’t help calling attention to Eli Valley’s cartoon about evangelical voters in Alabama ahead of the Roy Moore-Doug Jones election last Tuesday. I have the greatest respect for Valley as someone who paid the price for taking on the Jewish establishment over its mindless support for Israel (he does it again this week), but here he is reducing all evangelicals to the very worst attitudes of some of them, ignorance and racism and Islamophobia, and using religious imagery to do so. When people do this to Muslims over support for Islamist terrorists or Jews over parasitical financiers, we call it Islamophobic or anti-Semitic. This is anti-Christian.
Myself, I have very little idea what Christian evangelicals think, or are like. I’m sure that A Lot of them are intolerant narrow-minded people (just like A Lot of Jews are Zionists, and support a militant ethnocratic state). But Shibley Telhami’s polling tells us that the community is somewhat varied. Evangelicals were for recognizing Jerusalem as the capital of Israel by 53-40, he said. Not an overwhelming number. Telhami’s Pool of evangelical voters is made up of Evangelical Christians and Born-Again Christians; and most of the born-agains are Democrats, he says. So that means a good number of Doug Jones’s white voters were probably born-again Christians (though, yes, he lost the white vote, 70-30). How many secular east coast journalists even know what born-again or evangelical mean?
Recently Phil Giraldi got fired by the American Conservative for reducing all Jews to warmongers in an article titled, “America’s Jews Are Driving America’s Wars.” There’s obviously something to be said for Giraldi’s argument: neocons have driven wars recently; neocons came out of the Jewish community and most of them are Jewish; they want Israel the occupying democracy to be the model for American conduct; and Jews have considerable power in the new establishment. But then most Jews opposed the Iraq war, etc. Journalists should differentiate among Christians in the same way.
Jewish anti-Christianism, like Christian anti-Semitism, is a vestige of a time when relations between Christians and Jews were much more hostile than they are now. These attitudes may still be passed down within families from one generation to the next, but the natural tendency is for them to die out as more and more young people realize that the world has changed. At least this would be so were it not for the baleful influence of the Zionist Right, which has formed a toxic symbiosis with the most archaic factions of Judaism.
How would Weiss present a more palatable ( to himself) cartoon to replace Valley’s which encapsulates the vile racism, hypocrisy and un-xian supremacism of the evangelical voters of Moore ( close finish to Jones) and Trump? I notice Weiss doesn’t object to Valley’s depiction of Moore and Trump. Trump’s presidency didn’t appear like magic.. he is in the white house because of votes. I applaud Valley’s cartoon.
I like both you guys so it pains me to see this squabbling (even though I am not a socialist haha). My thoughts are first of all if Christians are offended by this then I agree it is problematic. But I also think that ‘evangelical’ is actually a phantom designation and there really aren’t many, even if there are many who are taught to identify as that on surveys for political purposes, and even if their ‘leadership’ is vocal. Thus, there are not many who’d be offended by this but hey like I said I could be wrong and would want to know either way.
Overall I like the idea of child sacrifice, because that is a universal problem. However I think it’s wrong in this case. In fact, the Zio-Christians’ support for Jerusalem is not to sacrifice their own children but Jewish and Muslim. But these people are mostly very old and not very politically powerful any more, compared to a decade ago (or two).
Despite the ‘conventional wisdom’, Trump did this not to appeal to the Zio-Christians but to the plain old Zionists. Why? Because the deadline was Dec 1 and he had to make a decision. It was unrelated to Roy Moore!
PHIL- “I’m sensitive to Jewish prejudice against Christians because I married one.”
Just Christians? Common, Phil, all Gentiles are kind of lumped together as if all non-Jews were some sort of humongous affinity group rather than many smaller groups and individuals who have little feelings of kinship for their “fellow” Gentiles. And the notion of irrational and eternal Gentile anti-Semitism is a core myth of Zionism.
As for Trump and Moore, it should be pointed out that Trump campaigned for Luther Strange before the primary election. And much as I like Eli Valley’s “Israel Man and Diaspora Boy,” which is quite funny, the cartoon you show here is quite vicious and totally devoid of humor.
I’m a Liberal Christian and I don’t find the cartoon anti-Christian. I have some friends and family members who identify as Evangelicals who might find it offensive; but none of them live in Alabama, so maybe not. For the past forty years, fundamentalist Christians have been trying to coopt the broader umbrella-term, “evangelical” to try to spread their version of extreme right politics to a wider moderate to conservative group of Christians. Even though some of the leaders of the Moral Majority have died or semi-retired, there are still efforts to hold the Religious right together. Politicians like Donald Trump and Roy Moore have tested the strength of that alliance, not only because of their “moral shortcomings” but because of their lack of repentance (indeed, doubling down on defending actions which evangelicals consider sinful).