| By Administrator on Uncategorized  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. |
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