Christian Zionism—an Heresy of the Antichrist?

An interesting occasional blog called Liberate America is written by Tammy Obeidallah, a Christian, whose name suggests a Moslem, perhaps Palestinian, origin. She writes:

I have been comforted by the divine wisdom and promise found in the Bible countless times throughout my life, yet it troubles me how this sacred book has been manipulated by so many into a “how to” manual of theft and destruction. Often I have been questioned by non-Christian friends regarding biblical passages commonly abused by Christian Zionists—those who believe that Jews are God’s Chosen and must be implanted in Palestine to precipitate the Second Coming of Jesus Christ—“Does the Bible really say that?”

My answer is always a resounding “no”. While it is possible to take certain passages out of context and ignore the historical perspective in which they were written to manufacture a case for a modern day nation called Israel, it is neither accurate nor theologically sound. Yet as many as 70 million people in the United States espouse the doctrine of Christian Zionism which endorses racism, ethnic cleansing and wholesale slaughter as manifested in the Israeli occupation of Palestine. This heresy is twofold—Zionist Christians have manipulated both biblical prophecy and the Bible’s historical content to support their murderous agenda.

The author offers some pages on Christian Zionism, this insidious pseudo-Christian political ideology used by Zionists to hold the USA in bondage to Israel.

Christian Zionists put Israel First!

Many alleged Christians unconditionally support the Zionist state. They are therefore called “Christian Zionists”. Their slogan is “Israel First”, showing that they are not at all patriotic, for they put their own country the USA only second after Israel, yet attempt to denigrate patriotic American Moslems. There are at least 50 million Christian Zionists in the United States, and it is this immense solid voting unit that forces US politicians to at least nod their heads to them and their dubious politics, and at worst use them to attack all Moslems and to generate funds and propaganda for the state of Israel. Their founders have done it by teaching the false doctrine that Jesus Christ will return when all Jews are gathered in Palestine, a policy that suits Zionism down to the hilt. The Palestinian people are Moslems and do not count as being human to these supposed Christians!

Christian Zionism has certainly proved immensely useful to political Zionists in getting a Jewish homeland in Palestine, even though Palestine was sixth on Theodor Herzl’s list of potential homelands at the First Zionist Congress in 1897, behind Argentina, Uganda and Turkey. Christian Zionists actually made the loudest call for a takeover of Palestine all along.

The Politics of Christian Zionism, 1891-1948 by Paul C Merkley shows that Christian Zionism predated Herzl, the father of Zionism. An 1893 pamphlet, The Restoration of the Jews to Palestine According to Prophecy, was written by William Hechler, the son of Anglican missionaries, who arranged meetings between Herzl and Kaiser Wilhelm II, promoting the Zionist aim of grabbing Palestine. Plymouth Brethren minister, John Nelson Darby (1800-1882), popularized the doctrine as “dispensationalism”, further spread by the Scofield Reference Bible of 1909 which has copious footnotes telling readers to interpret Bible verses and prophecy as the establishment of Israel as a modern nation state.

The Puritans saw themselves as the Children of Israel, escaping religious persecution in Europe just as in the exodus myth of the Hebrews following Moses out of Egypt. America was their “Promised Land”, and the doctrine of “Manifest Destiny”—that God’s will was for the new country to stretch from sea to sea—justified the genocide of Native Americans. By the same analogy, Christian Zionism justifies the genocide of Palestinians to clear the way for Zionists. Today, televangelists, who make large profits supporting Israel, preach an apocalyptic future which threatens to be self-fulfilling. They think it will bring about Christ’s Parousia, but it will just bring about world wide pain, suffering, and destruction, with no benefits. Only then will foolish believers realize they have been conned, just as they did when Christ never returned at the previous millennium. That eventually led to the Reformation, the removal of interpretation rights from the Catholic priesthood, allowing everyone to read the bible for themselves. Now, an ignorant population of Protestants, who do not have the sense to read the Bible for themselves, have let a den of thieves take over their churches and become latter day priests. So, the whole charade has begun again.

Zionist Christians are not merely a religion, so can hardly claim religious immunities or, for that matter, tax exemptions, which are unconstitutional anyway. They have organized political lobbies such as Christians United for Israel (CUFI), an openly political cause. By weight of numbers, especially in being manipulated by the wealthy and cryptofascist TV and talk radio pundits, they have much influence over US foreign policy. These Christian groups encourage Jewish immigration to Israel by financial gifts some at least of which help Zionist settlers to expand illegally into Palestinian land on the West Bank, protected by a massive composite wall largely built on land that was even designated as Palestinian after the original wars of occupation.

Ms Obeidallah urges true Christians to fight back actively against this lethal false doctrine—one that has caused far more death and destruction than Islamic extremists like the Saudi prince, Osama bin Laden—by closely examining biblical history. A Biblical Literalist is not necessarily a Christian Zionist. A literal reading of the bible—one free of the political interpretations that are read into innocent words by greedy hate mongering pastors—refutes what these children of Satan seek to spread—extreme mischief! It is an effective way to rescue innocent, if naïve, Christians from the dangerous heresy of Christian Zionism.

What Christian Zionists Don’t Know about Jewish History

God agreed a covenant with Abram—who became Abraham—whom modern day Jews, Christians and Moslems all revere as a patriarch. God promised Canaan (Palestine) to Abram and his descendants (Genesis 17:8). Later, in the Jewish scriptures, God makes the covenant with Abraham’s son Isaac, but in the Moslem version it is with Ishmael. One or the other was to have been sacrificed to God but Jews and Christians say it was Isaac, and Moslems say it was Ishmael. It might seem clear to Christians that the later writers of the Qur’an have changed the Jewish scriptures to suit themselves, but even granting this, God does not exclude Ishmael and his descendants from the original promise to Abraham of the land between the Nile and the Euphrates Rivers. Christian theologian Alfred Guillaume (1888-1965) addresses this point:

It is generally supposed that these promises were made to the Jews alone. However, this is not what the Bible says. The words “to thy seed” inevitably include Arabs, both Moslem and Christian, who can claim descent from Abraham through his first son, Ishmael. Ishmael was the reputed father of many Arab tribes…

Nor is the actual historical reason hard to find. The land in question is the Persian satrapy of Abarnahara which was never only Jewish, though the Jews had control of the temple. The Persians made reference to the different people to be found in the province. The specification of the Jews will have happened after the Persians had been defeated by the Macedonians, leaving the temple in the charge of the Jewish priests.

Christian Zionists base Jewish claims to Palestine on the false idea that they are directly and purely descended from the biblical Israelites, as members of a Jewish “race” rather than adherents to the religion of Judaism. Even the Zionist state recognizes it indirectly, because any convert to Judaism has the same legal right to emigrate to Israel, regardless of race. Intermarriage was prevalent early on. Isaac married Rebekah, so the Israelite lineage thereafter could not have been pure. Moses married the daughter of a Midianite, apparently an Arab tribe. Ruth was not originally Jewish but Moabite, and she is a direct ancestor of Jesus Christ, according to Matthew’s genealogy. Jacob’s youngest son, Joseph, married Asenath, daughter of Potipherah, an Egyptian priest, and her two sons, Manasseh and Ephraim adopted by Jacob became two of the tribes of Israel. None of this is at all paradoxical when Judaism is seen properly as the worship of Yehouah.

The tribes of Israel were to divide the land, but one tribe, the Levites, to whom Moses and Aaron had belonged, were to be a caste of priests and not entitled to land of their own. No Jew descended from a priest therefore has any right of ownership of land in Palestine. Two and a half tribes, those of Gad, Reuben, and half of Manasseh settled east of the Jordan River, in land now accepted as part of the Arab kingdom of Jordan. So far, Zionists have made no move to claim this land. No doubt they will!

The defeat of Judah by the Babylonians, in 597 BC, began the period of exile which ended when the Persians defeated Babylon and resettled Judah, now called Yehud, with settlers from Mesopotamia. This real event in the bible is called the “Return from Exile”. Those who returned had been taught an ethical religion based on the Persian religion, Zoroastrianism, and they were entrusted with setting up a temple to collect taxes and tariffs from the people of Abarnahara, to keep it safe until it was required by the Persian chancellery, and to serve as a priesthood for the new religion which was being spread throughout the Persian empire as a way of uniting a disparate empire. These were the priests of the Jewish religion, the congregation of which were the Yehudim, or Jews.

Biblical names and their biblical provenance are important to Zionists. Thus Craig Winn, author of Prophet of Doom writes quite unhistorically:

The name “Palestinian” was derived from the Roman Latinized name of the Philistines. The Assyrians murdered the last of the Philistines in 585 BC. There are therefore, no Palestinians alive today. There haven’t been for over 2,500 years.

The Philistines were one of the nations that lived in Abarnahara. They still lived in Abarnahara, even though the satrapy was set up by the Persians around two centuries after the date cited in this ignorant quotation. In any case, the Assyrians had been conquered by the Babylonians, and it must be Babylonians he means at the date he cites. By this time anyway, the Philistines—originally Greeks or other Mediterranean tribes—had lived in the area for 600 years or more and had become thoroughly assimilated with the surrounding people, mainly Canaanites, including the Israelites. It is far from clear that Philistines had not in this time mixed thoroughly with their immediate neighbors in the hill country, the Judahites. It is certain that Philistines could never have been wiped out. Their genes must still exist among people in the area, and among some who have emigrated elsewhere.

One of the biblical prophecies warped by Zionist Christians is:

…and in that day there shall be no more Canaanite in the house of Yehouah Sabaoth.

Zechariah 14:21b

This passage justifies the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. In the classification of people in the Jewish scriptures, the Canaanites were descended from Ham (African), not Shem, so were not Semitic and cannot be related to modern day Palestinian Arabs who are Semites. Moreover, the word read as “Canaanite”, is elsewhere read as “trader”, the sense of the whole passage being that eschatological Jerusalem would be a perfectly holy place, where commerce would not be appropriate.

Most importantly, though, is that the exclusion of one nation completely contradicts the whole of the meaning of the preceding passage, which is that all of the nations who were enemies of Israel would be scrambling to go to Jerusalem to make offerings to Yehouah Sabaoth. The Canaanites necessarily would be among them, so the exclusion is ridiculous, and any other reading is not only contrary to Christian principles, it is contrary to the triumphant sense of God’s victory after the eschatological battle. God has no need to encourage genocide, and both testaments of the bible explicitly forbid killing, and Christ urges mercy and loving kindness on to everyone, yet these deranged Christians—antiChristians, guided by their Satanic pastors— read the exact opposite of its plain meaning into it.

Christian Zionists have started to use the anniversary of the 11 September tragedy to accuse Moslems of celebrating the attacks. Traditional Christians ought to take back their faith by refuting the heresy of Christian Zionism and its racial and religious hatred. Christians who have read and accept Christ’s message of love seem too intimidated by the loud mouthed, unintelligent and threatened violence of the right wing Christians and their Christian Zionist coreligionists.