Trump’s ambassador to Israel, David Friedman, spoke at the Boca Raton synagogue last month on a “Night to Celebrate Israel,” and shared the dais with Ben Shapiro, a rightwing commentator.
Two Florida Republicans kicked off the night with video speeches: Senator Rick Scott and Governor Ron DeSantis. DeSantis, who is considered a likely presidential candidate in 2024, called it an “incredible event,” and said, “It is great to see two patriotic Florida residents, Ambassador David Friedman and Ben Shapiro, sharing the stage for a night to celebrate the Jewish state.”
Shapiro, a religious Jew, then endorsed an extremist plan: building a Jewish temple on the Temple Mount/Haram al-Sharif in occupied Jerusalem. Asked about his favorite place to visit in Israel, Shapiro said:
The place that is still controversial for anyone to mention is going up on Har HaBayit [Temple Mount]. So I did, I went to mikvah [ritual bath], I went up on Har HaBayit, I think Jews should go up on Har HaBayit. It’s controversial territory but I believe frankly we should build a shul on Har HaBayit. If they [Muslims] have a dome and a mosque, having a shul on Har HaBayit is not a bad idea. To say that anything except for the holiest site in Judaism– which in fact is not the kotel [Western Wall]– it’s Har HaBayit, would be a mistake.
Friedman then seemed to echo Shapiro and make a joke about the idea.
So I said that once and I started a riot when I was ambassador, so I’m not going to say it again. It didn’t work out well the first time.
Googling the history here– Friedman in 2018 visited an orthodox community and was greeted by a Temple Mount activist who showed off a picture of the Muslim holy sites replaced by a Jewish temple, and Friedman seemed to enjoy the moment, but later apologized. He claimed then he was more “mortified” than any Palestinian by the image.
Haram al-Sharif is very sacred in the Muslim tradition. The Al-Aqsa mosque and the Dome of the Rock stand on the plateau, which is administered by authorities in Jordan.
Efforts by Jewish extremists to pray at the site, or promote Jewish sovereignty of that land, have triggered demonstrations and clashes.
At that January event in Boca Raton, Friedman, a bankruptcy attorney who is the son of a rabbi, explained that Zionism IS Judaism, and “if you do not support Israel… you are antisemitic.”
Everyone agrees. Judaism, no matter where you live– Judaism is in large part about the return of the Jewish people to the land of Israel. So if you do not support the state of Israel you do not support Judaism, therefore you are antisemitic.
He said the Bible gives Jews a title to the land. He explained how he sells Israel to Jews who are “lost” and to Christians too, as a “miracle” that is not just another country.
My views are not uniformly accepted, but –and I was comfortable saying this even when I was a public servant– but I start with the notion that Israel’s a miraculous place. It is derived from an ordained biblical promise that the Jewish people would be restored to their ancient homeland. And it happened, it happened against all odds. The first thing that at least Jewish people should do and Christian people should do is they should see the miracle. They should understand the 3000-year history. There is no other people– the Phoenicians are gone, the Nabateans are gone, you know, and we’re the only ones left. I think that once you understand that, you understand that you’re on a multi-thousand year continuum, we don’t want to break the chain. That I think is the starting place, because without that, it’s just another country, and it’s the same political nonsense we talk about all day long.
You would think such ideas should be openly derided as a religious interference in politics. But Hillary Clinton spoke of Israel as a “miracle” when she was running for president. Nancy Pelosi describes Israel as a “historical miracle, the greatest political accomplishment of the [20th] century.” And when FL Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz prayed at the Western Wall in occupied Jerusalem two days ago, she linked that prayer with U.S. foreign policy in support of Israel– it “reaffirms how vital this ally is to America.”
What the hell is up with Chuck Todd having former national security advisor Stephen “16 words) Hadley on to discuss analyze the Putin invasion of Ukraine. So many of the Iraq war criminals being invited especially on MSNBC (not so much CNN and not Fox) to discuss the invasion of Ukraine. Talk about war criminals Bush and those complicit with those war crimes, Hadley,, Frum Kristol calling out war criminals/Putin. All of this bs about following laws, international agreements etc etc, respecting sovereign nations borders etc etc.
This is especially nauseating
https://www.msnbc.com/mtp-daily/watch/fmr-bush-national-security-adviser-putin-has-built-a-much-more-formidable-military-than-2008-133766725809
Quote:
Shapiro, a religious Jew, then endorsed an extremist plan: building a Jewish temple on the Temple Mount/Haram al-Sharif in occupied Jerusalem. Asked about his favorite place to visit in Israel, Shapiro said:
I am aware that Reform Jews refer to their houses of prayer as temples and maybe when you use the phrase “building a Jewish temple on the Temple Mount” you might simply be referring to the building of a house of prayer, rather than rebuilding THE House of Prayer: a third Temple. Still you need to be precise in your language, because there are those who indeed favor rebuilding The Temple and it was such a photoshopped photo of The Temple that was presented to Ambassador Friedman.
I do not favor building a Jewish shul on the Temple Mount, specifically because East Jerusalem, including the Temple Mount, is occupied territory and to be specific occupied territory where insufficient efforts to include the nonJews of East Jerusalem as citizens has been made.
Nevertheless the shul that Ben Shapiro advocates is not a temple (a term used for nonOrthodox houses of prayer) and that word “temple” should be avoided unless accompanied by specific explanations that this would be merely a house of prayer and not a Third Temple. As presented the use of the term is sloppy journalism.
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The Antisemitic Face of Israel’s Evangelical Allies (jacobinmag.com)
Jacobin, Feb. 20/22 “The Antisemitic Face of Israel’s Evangelical Allies”
by Julian Sayarer
EXCERPT:
“Evangelical Zionists want Jews to move to Palestine to set the stage for the divine requital of Armageddon. This hasn’t stopped Israel from sealing alliances with even nakedly antisemitic evangelicals, so long as they support the dispossession of Palestinians.
“That the Israeli state has comfortable relationships with known antisemites is hardly news. If Donald Trump is an arch-Zionist, those who marched on Capitol Hill in his support wore clothing that professed the Holocaust insufficient. Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro’s ties to the German far right and his historical revisionism terming the Nazis ‘leftists’ have proven no impediment to his boosting bilateral ties with Israel. Hungarian premier Viktor Orbán has institutionalized Holocaust revisionism & is relentless in criticism of Jewish financier George Soros as a sort of global puppet master. But the Hungarian-Israeli relationship is tight.
“Each such relationship represents a political calculation on the part of Israeli authorities. Underlying each partnership is the assumption, or wager, that such potential partners are either more Islamophobic than they are antisemitic (often true), or above all committed to their own nationalism (also mostly true), such that any whiff of antisemitism is overridden by a deeper commitment to the principle that a state can do whatever it wants inside the territory it controls. By either road — Islamophobic or isolationist — Israeli decision-makers are willing to excuse a little antisemitism for the certainty of silence or support in Israel’s incessant abuses against Palestinians.
“However, the panoply of right-wing, conservative, and antisemitic Israeli allies also features one grouping less avowedly political than religious: evangelical Christians, who number some 90 million in the United States alone. Insofar as their inspiration is based in theology rather than hard realpolitik, it is also less rational, subject as it is to supposedly divine influences and, crucially, how their scriptures are interpreted down on earth.”(cont’d)
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“The basis of the Israeli-evangelical relationship — and so, too, evangelical support for using Israelis to dispossess Palestinians — is a belief that God gave Palestine to the Jews, and so Jews should be in Palestine. So far, so simple. But the ‘yikes’ moment of the Israeli-evangelical love-in is that the Jews being in Palestine is seen as precondition for an Armageddon to rain down on earth, exterminating Jews and other non-converts to evangelism while bringing the return of Christ in the apocalyptic Second Coming found in Revelation, the final book of the Bible.
“Jewish Zionists seem unconcerned by this proposition, which naturally doesn’t make it into the Torah, or Old Testament. More secular Zionists seem confident such otherworldly powers do not in fact exist to destroy the world and Israel, and — alternatively — that the most madcap evangelicals can be kept out of the Pentagon.
“Israel has deliberately sought out such ties. In 2017, the Israeli government initiated an annual Christian Media Summit to enhance communications with Christian figures, including far-right preachers. In a 2019 state visit to Brazil, then prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu heaped praise on both Brazilian evangelicals and the Bolsonaro government, saying, ‘We have no better friends in the world than the Evangelical community.’
“So if you do not support the state of Israel you do not support Judaism, therefore you are antisemitic.” says Friedman.
I’ve started reading “A Land With A People” ( https://mondoweiss.mystagingwebsite.com/2022/02/a-land-with-a-people-new-book-shares-an-array-of-voices-united-in-anti-zionism/ ) and the first 50 pages documents extensive resistance to the idea of a “Jewish state” – by Jews. Martin Buber, just to give one example –
https://jayshams.medium.com/what-kind-of-zionist-was-martin-buber-a1bb7c4863c
“But both Buber and Ahad Ha’am shared an idea for a structure for a Jewish state. They believed in a Zionist ideal where Israel would be the fulcrum of Jewish culture as well as a binational state where Arabs and Jews shared equal rights. That ideal was the basis for Brit Shalom, a political group founded in 1925 that Buber joined. The group was small until the end – its membership never exceeded a hundred at any single time – but it was still influential. Among its other supporters were Arthur Ruppin, Gershom Scholem, Hans Kohn, Hugo Bergmann, and Albert Einstein.”