Focus on Israel

Laurie Cardoza-Moore: Hello and thank you for tuning in to Focus on Israel. I'm Laurie Cardoza-Moore, president of Proclaiming Justice to the Nations, a non-profit organization dedicated to educating Christians about their biblical responsibility to the Jewish people. Many Christians do not realize that the Word explicitly tells us to stand with our Jewish brethren and defend the land God calls His. In our last show, we discussed the roots and history of antisemitism.

Today, we're going to see how a new antisemitism has taken hold following the establishment of the State of Israel. It emanates from the far left, radical Islam, and the far right, and tends to manifest itself as opposition to Zionism and the State of Israel. It is tantamount to demonization and has led to a resurgence of attacks on Jews and Jewish symbols and increased acceptance of antisemitic beliefs in public discussion and mainstream media.

You often hear that history is repeating itself. In the case of Jewish hatred leading up to the Holocaust, Jews were portrayed as scapegoats and as an evil scourge of Germany and Europe. Thus, many came to believe that killing Jews was acceptable. Today, Israel is portrayed as the most evil state on the planet. The Arab world and its allies are spewing out antisemitism unequaled since the days of Hitler. Once again, wiping Israel and thus Jews from the world has become acceptable.

In 1973, the foreign minister of Israel, Abba Eban, identified anti-Zionism as the new antisemitism, saying, "We have witnessed the rise of the New Left, which identifies Israel with the establishment, with acquisition, with smug satisfaction, with in fact all the basic enemies. Let there be no mistake: the New Left is the author and the progenitor of the new antisemitism.

Anti-Zionism is merely the new antisemitism. The old classic antisemitism declared that equal rights belonged to all individuals within the society, except the Jews. The new antisemitism says that the right to establish and maintain an independent national sovereign state is the prerogative of all nations, so long as they happen not to be Jewish." This new antisemitism is a dangerous and ungodly threat that we as Christians must stand firmly against.

Guest (Male): The establishment and military success of Israel has fostered what has been termed a new antisemitism. Its advocates include the left, the far right, and radical Islamists. This new hatred is aimed at the State of Israel and Zionists, and thus the Jewish people as well.

Guest (Male): There is a new antisemitism that comes not only from the right but also from the left. It is no longer fashionable in certain quarters to be antisemitic, and so you use the political moment and events to accomplish the same kind of odious result. By delegitimizing the Jewish state, you delegitimize all Jewish aspirations and the Jewish people in turn.

Guest (Male): As in the Nazi Germany of the '30s, the far right has always been a danger for Jews as well as to a free society. Today's neo-Nazi and white supremacist groups have been both vocal and violent haters of anything or anyone Jewish. Although these groups have never become a part of the mainstream, they have continued to grow in size and number and have seen a frightening resurgence in Germany and other parts of Europe.

Militant Islamic groups have joined with this rising tide of neo-Nazism, and together have increased attacks against their common enemy: the Jew. A key element of the far right's hatred includes Jewish conspiracy theories, most notoriously embodied by The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a book fabricated in 1902 that outlines world domination by the Jews.

Guest (Male): Saudi Arabian government officials, neo-Nazi groups, and state religious leaders often promote the idea that the Jews are conspiring to take over the entire world. As proof of their claims, they publish and frequently cite the Protocols as factual.

Guest (Male): There are many people involved in conspiracy theories by which they think that the Jewish people are responsible for all of the ills in the world. It would be as though they were some group of ogres that are sitting somewhere in splendid isolation, orchestrating all of the problems that exist in the world today.

We as Christians, above all people, should be saying this is not true. We shouldn't be looking for conspiracy theories trying to blame something on the Jewish people when, indeed, they're not responsible.

Guest (Male): The most recent conspiracy theory revolves around September 11th itself. This theory pedals the idea that the Mossad, Israel's secret agency, carried out the attack to turn the West against Islam and that thousands of Jews working in the World Trade Center were warned and didn't turn up to work. Both death records and witnesses have completely discounted this.

Guest (Male): Today, in the Muslim world, Jews are hated on two distinct levels. First, because they are Jews and despised by Allah; and secondly, because of Israel and Zionism. The perception through Islamists' eyes is simple: the infidel powers gave a country to a people whom God had abandoned on land that had been in Islamic hands for almost 1,400 years.

This violated the fundamentalist Muslim theology doctrine of sacred space. Under this centuries-old law, any land that is occupied by Muslims becomes Islamic for all time. It is strictly forbidden to give up any claims to it.

Guest (Male): "The Day of Judgment shall not come to pass until the tribes of Islam kill the tribes of Israel." In Jerusalem and the surrounding nations, the trees will cry out, the stones will cry out, "There is a Jew hiding behind me. Come, oh Muslim, come and kill him."

So these studies of the ends of times, according to Islamic theology, was permeating through the whole Middle East—that the reason the Jews came to this land is that we are about to destroy them all.

Guest (Male): From the Muslim perspective, there are only two solutions: the elimination of Israel and ideally the slaughter of all Jewish Israelis, or the wholesale conversion of Israeli Jews, thus bringing the land back within the fold of Islam.

Guest (Male): Their objective is not to have a two-state solution with somewhat different borders than Israel wants. When they talk about occupied Palestine, they mean Tel Aviv. They want to destroy the Jewish state. Ahmadinejad is explicit about it in Iran. It is explicit in Hamas's charter. It is explicit every way one can think of in what Hezbollah says and does.

Guest (Male): In most of Islamic society, the mainstream press portrays Jews in the vilest terms. National TV channels beam out soap operas based on The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and schools teach the hatred of Jews as part of normal formative education.

One Saudi newspaper suggested that hatred of all Jews is justifiable, and textbooks encourage Muslims to engage in jihad to vanquish Jews.

Guest (Male): The Al-Azhar University of Egypt, the number one university for Muslim scholars that graduates Muslim clergy all throughout the Middle East, issues an edict, a fatwa, that it is permissible for a Palestinian to kill themselves in one condition: when they are killing Jews in Israel.

Even though Islam in itself condemns suicide, there's a special edict that you can now kill Jewish civilians. A video is worth a thousand academia. You see it in the footage where a Palestinian finally has Jewish blood on his hands. He shows them in the window; the whole world sees it.

You see when the bodies are dumped from the window. You see when the Palestinians and the people of Ramallah, the entire capital of Palestine, are there stabbing on the faces and the heads and gutting these people and tearing them apart. They're jumping with joy like it's winning the lottery.

Finally, you had Jewish blood in your hand. What we accuse the Jews of doing with the blood libel—and movies like Drakoola—and supposedly the Jews are killing Christian children and bottling the blood for the matzos and for the rabbis, what we accuse the Jews of doing, we were carrying it out literally.

Guest (Male): In the Middle East, anti-Zionist propaganda frequently adopts the terminology and symbols of the Holocaust to demonize Israel, comparing Israel's treatment of the Palestinians to Nazi Germany's treatment of Jews or South Africa's apartheid. At the same time, the Holocaust is denied throughout the Muslim world.

Guest (Male): Twisting history, victimology, and myth is being taught as fact—Holocaust denial. All these elements produce terrorism. Today, most world politicians insist that all Israeli settlements must be removed from the West Bank because they serve as the main obstacle to peace.

The reality is that the Middle East conflict has very little to do with Palestinian statehood and even less to do with Israeli settlements. With foolish reluctance, Israel has agreed to the creation of a Palestinian state subject to some security conditions, such as recognizing Israel's right to exist.

Guest (Male): What the Westerners don't understand is that this is not a war over land. This is not a war over land. You can show them umpteen million hours of footage of the Holocaust. They will sit there enjoying watching the Holocaust or denying the Holocaust because it's not the Holocaust that to them is a problem.

What they want is what you see them doing to Joseph's Tomb. What they want is what you see them doing to the greenhouses and the communities that were given to them in Gaza. They want the destruction of everything Jewish.

They want the destruction of everything Christian, to the point that they even go to the place where Jesus was born, and they desecrate that place as well. The world community and the Christian world as a whole looks at this and still doesn't get it.

Guest (Male): The Middle East conflict is based on an incredible absence of historic facts and on a series of misconceptions about Middle East history. The anti-Israel lobby counts on the ignorance of much of the world concerning how the Middle East got to this point.

Guest (Male): The West Bank—the last time it was part of a real state, it was the Ottoman Empire. It has been either in uncertain status as part of the Palestinian mandate operated by Britain, being administered by Jordan for a time and then not.

It's not as if there were a Palestinian state there that Israel had conquered in an aggressive war. Israel's wars have all been defensive anyway. They keep having to fight because they get attacked. It's what happened in '48, it's what happened in '67, it's what happened in '73, and each time they were attacked, they won and ended up, particularly after the '67 war, with some increased territory that they occupied.

Guest (Male): Arab aggression and stubbornness has made the creation of a Palestinian state impossible. Since 1948, the Arab world has refused to come to terms with Israel's existence within any set of borders and has maintained a state of war with Israel.

With the invention of the Palestinian people, Arab aggression and Islamo-fascism gained a political and moral pretense. The Arab fascists appeared to the world to be pursuing a noble effort of protecting a mistreated and oppressed minority group.

Thus, the promotion of a two-state solution has radicalized and Nazified most Arabs who now openly support Arab parties and politicians who call for violence against Jews and for the destruction of Israel.

Guest (Male): Muslim Palestinians blow themselves up, and Palestinian Christians don't blow themselves up because it has nothing to do with poverty either. It has something to do with racism, antisemitism, and anti-Christ religion—an anti-Christian system that says we must destroy the Sabbath people and then the Sunday people, the Christians.

Guest (Male): For there to be peace, most people believe that Israel must end its occupation of Palestinian land. The problem is that any Palestinian state, regardless of who rules it, will produce nothing but escalated violence, terror, and warfare in the Middle East.

The recent handing over of Gaza by the Israeli government is an obvious example. With the creation of a Palestinian state, there would be a brief time while the world celebrates the outbreak of peace in the Middle East.

But this new terrorist state alongside Israel would be a major step in the Arab war against Israel's existence. Once forced back to its 1967 borders, it would then again be 10 miles wide at its narrowest and susceptible to a new Arab war that would draw in the entire Muslim world in its quest to destroy Israel.

Guest (Male): It is very difficult to take reasonable steps when you're dealing with a fanatic, totalitarian, genocidal enemy and have that regarded as anything other than weakness. Britain and France thought they were taking reasonable steps in the 1930s.

Each time from '35 to '39 there was a crisis that the Nazis gendered up, and the Nazis, being genocidal fanatics, thought that each step was weakness, not reasonableness. I think that's the way Hamas and Hezbollah will interpret reasonableness, and therefore, I think both have to be effectively completely defeated.

Guest (Male): In many respects, the two-state solution has much in common with the Nazis' final solution—just another solution for killing Jews.

Guest (Male): The Nazis were rather enamored of Islam, and it continues to this day. We know, for instance, that the Germans recruited an SS unit among Serbian Muslims during the Second World War. Islam was fertile ground for Nazi recruitment.

Today, the most diffuse book in the Arab-Muslim world is none other than Mein Kampf. It is standard schoolbook issue in Hamastan, otherwise known as Gaza. The Hamas and even the PLO types, whom I call the Palestine Light Opera, Fatah, enjoy the idea of disseminating Mein Kampf.

If this is indeed the case, one can only imagine what preparations are being made for peace on the side of the Palestinians. What are they telling their young people about history and about Jews? There is certainly no process of pacification.

There is only incitement to further mayhem. All of this because the Nazis are now the darlings of Islamo-fascism, and Islamo-fascism is alive and well in the Palestinian territories. And until Arab-Muslim Palestinian children are denied their dose of Nazi fantasy, there can be no peace either in the Middle East or anywhere else in the Western world where Islamo-fascism seeks to wreak havoc.

Guest (Male): The political perspective of the Left has grown extremely anti-Israel, and by extension, anti-Jew. Israel has become a glaring example of Western colonialism, Western values, and Western religion.

David Horowitz labeled the establishment Left as a fifth column within America, both anti-American and anti-Israeli in its rhetoric and action. After 1967, the Arab world proved better in the war of ideas than in the war of guns and bombs.

They ceased telling the world that they wanted to destroy Israel and redefined their struggle as the search for a homeland for the homeless Palestinian Arabs. This change in opposition to Israel was a shrewd appeal to the Left's liberal thinking. With the Jews and Israel no longer the victim, the Left moved to support the perceived underdog, the Palestinians.

Guest (Male): The problem with the Left antisemitism is that it is born not only of antisemitism but of self-hate and anti-Americanism. It doesn't occur in a vacuum, and it's not theologically motivated. It goes to the hostility toward values that Jews share with believing Americans and American Christians.

There was a time when the Left was very pro-Jew and pro-Israel because the Left saw in Jews and in Israel a victim. Nevertheless, since Jews are no longer the victim—although the opposition would like us to remain so—the Left has decided that Jews who are not victims are not true Jews and betray the prejudice and the pre-assumptions that have been held about Jews.

After all, if we're not victims, why are we here? Their form of hostility toward Israel and anti-Zionism, which is the new antisemitism, will simply not fly. It is illegitimate and it is intellectually dishonest.

Guest (Male): This movement represents the greatest threat to Israel because it is more mainstream than the far right or Islam. Its power and reach includes the Western press, American institutions, universities, the media, and the old-line Protestant high churches, as well as leaders in many Western European countries.

At universities, leftist antisemitism has joined Arab racism to become a growing problem. Jewish students often face anti-Israel venom with little support from faculty or Christian students. The debate on the Middle East conflict on American campuses increasingly features the threat of real violence.

Jews who don't agree with the Left's position on the Middle East are treated with hatred and intimidation. Over the past few years, the Muslim Students Association, with chapters sponsored in nearly 600 universities across North America, has promoted a series of vile expressions of Jew-hatred on numerous campuses.

In October 2000, the president of UCLA's MSA led a crowd of demonstrators at the Israeli consulate in chants of "Death to Israel" and "Death to the Jews." In May 2006, Malik Ali, a frequent guest lecturer at MSA events, accused the apartheid state of Israel of carrying out a Holocaust against the Palestinian people.

Referring to Jews as "new Nazis," he told Jews directly, "The truth of the matter is your days are numbered. We will fight you. We will fight you until we are either martyred or until we are victorious."

Guest (Male): Is there a cure for the disease called antisemitism? In the case of Islam, the text of the Quran is explicit and cannot be altered or interpreted away. The only way of change depends on the possibility of reform.

Unfortunately, in the Muslim world, an academic or a reform-minded cleric takes his life in his hands if he so much as suggests a small change to Quran-based law or traditional thought.

Guest (Male): When one of their moderate imams speaks up and says from a mosque in Cairo or a publication in Beirut that we really have to work with the Christians and Jews, we have to all live together, we're all children of Abraham, we need to go at this sensibly, within days you'll have several fatwas come out from radical clerics, several in Saudi Arabia usually and one or two elsewhere, saying this man is an apostate and must be killed.

Laurie Cardoza-Moore: The new antisemitism is a threat today that we cannot ignore as it continues to grow and spread. This new antisemitism also uses new technology. The internet has taken the media war against Israel to even new levels.

With the introduction of viral media such as YouTube, the virtual communities of Facebook and MySpace, and the information portal of Wikipedia, very little censorship and much twisted truth can now flow instantly around the world. This leaves the door open for antisemites across the globe to spread messages of hate, often failing to distinguish between Jews and Israel when comparing Jews to Nazis and Israel to apartheid South Africa.

Through the web, the social acceptability of antisemitism can be spread, public resistance lowered, and hate networks rapidly established. In some circles, it's even become hip to be anti-Israel. On April 3rd, 2006, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights announced its findings that incidents of antisemitism are a serious problem on college campuses throughout the United States.

These young people did not learn antisemitism from the old church; they learned from today's church—the media. It is PJTN's goal through our media to educate hundreds of millions of Christians around the world, and one of the most important targets we must reach is our young people. University campuses today have become a hotbed of antisemitism and a propagator of pro-Islamic teachings and organizations.

PJTN plans to take the battle to educate our children at these schools of higher learning. In Genesis 12:3, the Lord says, "I will bless those who bless thee and curse those who curse thee." World War II and the Holocaust—the genocide that exterminated 78 percent of Jewish men, women, and children. Today, there are less than 14 million Jewish people on the earth.

This time it is on our watch. Antisemitism and anti-Israel activities are at the highest rate globally since the days of the Nazis. Many of us are used to thinking that Israel cannot survive without the help of the United States. Maybe we should start wondering whether we can survive if we allow the terrorists to succeed in Israel.

We make a terrible mistake if we deceive ourselves into thinking this is not our fight. In the end, the Israeli people are fighting the same enemy we are: cold-blooded killers who reject peace, who reject freedom, and who rule by the suicide vest, the car bomb, and the human shield. The mission of Proclaiming Justice to the Nations is to reach Christians around the world with our message to stand against the antisemitism and anti-Israel threats that continue to rise.

We believe that if the leaders of this nation were contacted by millions of Christians, they would not continue to put pressure on Israel to give up more land and negotiate with leaders who are bent on their destruction. Of all the people in the world who should understand who the Jewish people are and who Israel is, it should be the Christians.

Of all the people groups around the world, Christians should be standing up crying out against the atrocities that are being perpetrated against the Jewish people on a daily basis. God told the prophet Joel in chapter three that in the latter days He was going to pour out His wrath on the nations because they were dividing up His land. 300 million Americans, 80 percent profess to be Christians.

But year after year, administration after administration, we allow our government to implement policies that are diametrically opposed to the Word of God. The reason why we do it is we don't know the truth. To guarantee the security of Jews anywhere is to guarantee the freedom of people everywhere. Our prayers matter. Our pleas to Almighty God for mercy are important.

But so is our decision as Christians to act, to do more this time. You must decide that you won't be silent again. We cannot let our Jewish brethren fight this battle alone. They have fought this battle alone for years with no one standing with them. Now it's time for the Christians to rise up. Now it's time for us to take a stand. Now it's time for us to say, "Never again."

To support this program, send your tax-deductible gift to: Proclaiming Justice to the Nations, P.O. Box 682711, Franklin, Tennessee, 37068. You can also support PJTN online. Visit pjtn.org or call 1-877-873-9020.

Antisemitism has reached epic proportions, and Israel is now surrounded by nations who seek its destruction. For Israel to lose just one battle would mean losing everything. As Christians, it is our biblical responsibility to stand with our Jewish brethren and Israel.

PJTN needs your help to reach more Christians with this urgent message. Please visit our website to become a member today and order our award-winning documentaries. You must decide that you won't be silent. Sign up now at pjtn.org. God bless you and thank you for your support and prayers.