The pro-Israel CAMERA organization plans to hold a conference in order to woo US evangelical Christians back into the Christian Zionist fold. The event is set for Monday, January 18, and will take place, perhaps fittingly, in Hollywood.
As I have reported in a number of previous posts ( see here, here and here ) support for Israel is evaporating among US evangelicals, especially among younger members of the faith. Apparently the Internet is making it impossible to conceal the brutality of the Jewish state’s occupation of Palestine, the accompanying crimes from which are now starting to pile as high as heaven, you might say.
A formal announcement about the conference appears here. I cannot tell you precisely what “antidotes to the troubling campaigns to undermine the historical and theological support for Israel among Christians” the organizers plan to present. But if you visit CAMERA’s website you will see that they seem particularly vexed about the Christ at the Checkpoint series of events that have been held, as well as several documentaries released in recent years, including Porter Speakman’s With God on Our Side.
You can also go here to view a video promoting the conference and uploaded by CAMERA four days ago. “Palestinian advocates,” says the narrator, “are pushing a false narrative that Jesus wasn’t Jewish but a Palestinian. This false narrative is making inroads into the evangelical Christian community and undermining traditional Christian support for Israel.”
Just to be clear: dwindling support for Israel among Christians has very little, if anything, to do with any claims about Jesus being Palestinian. It has everything to do with Israel’s policies.
To any Christians who may plan on attending this event on Monday, I have only a few words to say, and these are not my own words, but the those of Jesus:
Make a tree good and its fruit will be good, or make a tree bad and its fruit will be bad, for a tree is recognized by its fruit.
Israel has produced bad fruit for the past 67, nearly 68 years of its existence. The bad fruit includes periodic wars, murders, assaults upon civilian populations, land theft, home demolitions, and destruction of olive trees. In the past two years we have even seen the atrocious burning alive of two young Palestinians by Jewish settlers–the murder of 16-year old Muhammed Abu Khdeir, who was forced to drink gasoline and set on fire on July 2, 2014, and 2015’s arson attack on the Dawabsha home, which killed 18-month-old Ali Dawabsha and took place on July 31. If all this isn’t bad fruit, what is it?
The above words by Jesus are from Matthew 12:33. He goes on, in verses 34-37, with the following (speaking directly to the Pharisees):
You brood of vipers, how can you who are evil say anything good? For the mouth speaks what the heart is full of. A good man brings good things out of the good stored up in him, and an evil man brings evil things out of the evil stored up in him. But I tell you that everyone will have to give account on the day of judgment for every empty word they have spoken. For by your words you will be acquitted, and by your words you will be condemned.
The mouths of Israel’s supporters and apologists speak what their hearts are full of.
And when evil people speak, out pours the evil that is stored up inside them.
You can count on it every time.
Richard Edmondson is an author, novelist, poet, and journalist whose writings often focus on Middle East issues, the Zionist lobby, and religion. His latest novel is The Memoirs of Saint John: When the Sandstone Crumbles, a story about an archaeological team doing a dig in Syria and set amidst the current conflict in the country.
In 2014 Richard attended an International Conference on Combating Terrorism and Religious Extremism, held in Damascus. The book is part two in the Memoirs of Saint John series.
Two other books by Richard are Rising Up: Class Warfare in America from the Streets to the Airwaves, relating his experiences founding and operating an unlicensed or “pirate” FM radio station in San Francisco in the 1990s, as well as a volume of poetry entitled American Bus Stop: Essay and Poems on Hope and Homelessness.
Richard is cognizant of the words of the early Christian writer Tertullian, who in the second century-basically prognosticating the fall of the Roman Empire-wrote: “We have made merry amid the ludicrous cruelties of the noonday exhibition.”
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