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 nonprofit 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. On our last two shows, we discussed the roots and history of anti-Semitism and the emergence of a new anti-Semitism that is not only anti-Jewish but anti-Israel as well.

Today, we'll continue to explore the new anti-Semitism that has taken root in the church today. We see many mainline churches not only being neutral toward Israel but actually coming out against Israel in very anti-Semitic and completely unbiblical ways. As in the past, many churches are propelled by replacement theology, believing that because of their denial of Christ, the Jews have forfeited God's promises, and now those promises have been transferred to the church.

Along with churches, global Christian forums are also part of this theological demonology with the new anti-Semitism against the Jews of the state of Israel. The World Council of Churches, an ecumenical Christian body based in Geneva and boasting 590 million worshippers, includes Methodists, Lutherans, Catholics, and Protestants, Orthodox Christians, and Copts from Egypt. These groups have, in practice, declared war against Israel, calling the Jewish state a sin and occupying power and accused Israelis of dehumanizing the Palestinians and called for resistance as a Christian duty.

Today, most divestment campaigns against Israel are driven by Christian groups. There are many organizations that brand themselves Christian or moral but which condemn and vilify Israel, including not only the WCC but also the Ecumenical Accompaniment Program in Palestine and Israel, Christian Aid, the Amos Trust, World Vision, the Christian Socialists, and Pax Christi. Replacement theology has changed its language, yet it still marks a death sentence for the Jewish people as it states Israelis like Lucifer were God's chosen but were cast out for their rebellious and evil ways and now deserve to be obliterated from the so-called Holy Land.

I would like to share with you now a letter by Gerald Oberman to the General Secretary of the Methodist Church.

Guest (Male): Dear Sir: In your annual conference, you have passed a policy calling for a boycott of goods from illegal Israeli West Bank settlements. You claim this is not anti-Semitic, but how else do you explain this strange obsession with Israel? What about the Chinese occupation of Tibet or the Sudanese slaughter in Darfur, persecution in Zimbabwe and elsewhere? Politically, one could probably compile a case for a boycott against just about every country on the planet, but the only country in the world being subjected to a call for a boycott is Israel.

The so-called West Bank has been Jewish for more than 3,000 years. A large part was known as Judea. Jesus, a Jew, was born there. Who do you imagine lived in Judea if not the Jews? The name Bethlehem is Hebrew. Only the Jews of all the people in the world living in their own land are besmirched by being called illegal settlers. Your boycott of Israeli settlements is, of course, the prelude to a boycott of all Israel. I trust you are preparing a complete boycott of everything coming out of Israel.

Check all your medications. A researcher at Israel's Ben-Gurion University has succeeded in creating human monoclonal antibodies which can neutralize the highly contagious smallpox virus without including the dangerous side effects of the existing vaccine. Two Israelis received the 2004 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Most of the Windows operating systems were developed by Microsoft Israel, so throw away your computer. Computers should have a sign attached saying Israel inside.

The Pentium NMX chip technology was designed at Intel in Israel. Both the Pentium 4 microprocessor and the Centrino processor were entirely designed, developed, and produced in Israel. Voice mail technology was developed in Israel. The technology for the AOL Instant Messenger, ICQ, was developed in 1996 in Israel by four young Israeli whiz kids. Israel is making a massive contribution to the world, including the Palestinians and to you in science, medicine, communications, and security. Per person, Israel is making a greater contribution than any other nation on earth. And what is the Arab world doing? Buying rockets and missiles and threatening to wipe Israel off the face of the earth. The call by your church to boycott Israel, which is the intention, reeks of the stench of anti-Semitism. You should all hang your heads in shame.

Guest (Male): Today, Christian anti-Semitism still lives on in many leftist churches. In their condemnation of Israel, left-leaning churches and pastors have formed an unholy alliance with the left and radical Islam. This Christian coldness to Israel is part and parcel in the liberal churches in America.

Guest (Male): Is there a problem with Christian anti-Semitism? Absolutely. Is this a Jewish problem? I would say absolutely not. It's a Christian problem. Christian scholars, educators, teachers need to deal with the problem of Christian anti-Semitism, anti-Judaism, and try to deal with it through education, through study of scripture and tradition.

Guest (Male): One attitude prevalent in Christian churches is to show sympathy for the perceived underdog, the Palestinians. Often, Israel is portrayed as the sole villain of the Middle East. This has led to numerous church resolutions against Israel, including boycotts of Israeli academic and cultural institutions, a call for a global boycott against Israel similar to international sanctions against apartheid-era South Africa, divestment and sanctions until Israel acknowledges the Palestinian people's inalienable right to self-determination, economic measures to compel Israel to stop its killing, torture, imprisonment of Palestinians and halt its illegal wall on Palestinian land, and a boycott against products and companies supporting the Zionist policies.

The Presbyterian Church and other mainline Protestant churches recently warned U.S. companies to stop providing military equipment and technology to Israel or face a vote by the church to divest its stock in them. Such boycotts and sanctions are a dangerous push to disarm Israel. Another attitude of the Christian left is that the Jews have hidden behind the bloody veil of the Holocaust for too long. By turning Israel into a villain, leftist Christian churches can escape guilt over the Holocaust. Their failure to intervene to stop it and their complicity in it can be wiped away by accusing Israel of committing crimes like ethnic cleansing, genocide, brutal occupation, starvation, and human rights violations.

Guest (Male): Anti-Semitism still exists as well in the West. Nobody cares if Jews die. If Westerners die, now we must pay attention.

Guest (Male): Is there a cure for the disease called anti-Semitism? As pressure builds on Israel from the various anti-Semitic factions as well as world opinion, there has been an upsurge in Jew hatred. Anti-Semitism has increased significantly in Europe since 2000, with increases in verbal attacks against Jews and vandalism such as graffiti, firebombings of Jewish schools, desecration of synagogues and cemeteries. Physical assaults against Jews, including beatings, stabbings, and other violence increased markedly, in a number of cases resulting in serious injury and even death. Worldwide, an estimated 1,000 anti-Semitic incidents occurred in January 2009, including nearly 90 violent cases, three times more than in January 2008. As the political analogy of Jews as Nazis becomes more prevalent, then it follows that just as Nazism had no right to exist, neither does the Jewish state and its supporters.

Guest (Male): When we look at history today and we realize that there are even those foreign countries, people calling for the destruction of Israel, should we take this seriously or should we say this is just politics, someone saying this in a speech, they don't really mean it? If anyone is a true historian of the Jewish people, you'll have to say that when someone says they want to kill the Jewish people, they try, and they usually do it.

Guest (Male): The Jew, the victim of the Holocaust, is now accused of holocosting Arabs. But where is the world's outcry to the worldwide Islamic terrorism that continually maims and kills men, women, and children? The moral equivalence has become widespread, especially among youth, and was even a talking point in the president's recent speech in Cairo. The pressure on Israel today is twofold: anti-Semitism and land compromise until Israel is so reduced it can be easily defeated. In our tolerant and modern Western society, is there a place for the state of Israel and is there a cure for anti-Semitism? It's hard to imagine anti-Semitism going away entirely, but Christians should be leading the way to eliminate it.

Guest (Male): Anti-Semitism is a disease for which I have no cure, and I don't think anyone has invented the cure. The real fight against anti-Semitism is in the lives of good Jews and good Christians who adhere to God's word and the promises contained in scripture and who rise above the nonsense of the mystery that we will call anti-Semitism. And I use the word mystery advisably because there is no scientific way of curing this malaise. There is a quip that good living is the best revenge, and I suppose that if Jews remain true to Judaism and Christians take their Christianity seriously and understand that we both share in the promise, that Jews by divine election, Christians by their own choice to follow the Pauline example of root and branch, well then that is the best response to anti-Semitism. Proclaiming God's truth and living lives of virtue are the only real chance we have of defeating the anti-Semite.

Guest (Male): This is a time that Christians should say, if we really understand our theology, our rootedness to ancient Israel, then it's an imperative for us to join together with our friends in the Jewish community, our friends in the state of Israel, and to say we want peace, but we need peace through strength, we need peace with justice.

Guest (Male): When the world is being threatened by extremist Islam, the world is being threatened by terrorist murder squads in a global village where one madman can destroy the world with nuclear weaponry, it requires a return to the religion of morality, to a God of love. We're less than 13 million Jews, there are close to 2 billion Christians. Unless we join hands with the Christians who join us in belief in a God of love and morality and peace, there's no hope for the free world.

Guest (Male): Today, I think there's something about Israel that brings Christians and Jews together in a common cause and a common relationship, that they're strengthening one another and helping one another. If our friend you think loves us too much, accept it as a blessing and as a gift. There is so many in the world that hate us too much, that don't think we have any right to be in Israel at all. If there is an evangelical community that loves us a little too much for your liking, accept it as a very beautiful gift.

Guest (Male): The whole world is benefiting from the technology, the educational advances, so many vital contributions that Israel as a country is making to the world community today. We can't settle for what's politically expedient or what's economically expedient for our countries. We have to settle on the basis of what's right, what's moral, what we should do in relationship to the Jewish people based on what is social justice.

Standing for right always costs you, there's a price to pay, but you have to be prepared to do that. And you have to be prepared in your Christian conscience before events begin to unfold, or otherwise you can just be swept up in them and you just close your eyes and you hope for the best and you don't speak out and you don't do anything, and then in retrospect, you look back and you see the atrocity and evil and you say, if I had only. The Jewish people are our people. We're connected, we're related. The truth is that Israel is the land of the Bible. If we claim to be the people of the land of the Bible, then that land is our land as well. We don't own it, we don't have title to it, but we should view that land as being a part of our heritage, that we as Christians and our faith was birthed in that land among that people. So the question should not be why should Christians support Israel, but why should they not?

Laurie Cardoza-Moore: In Galatians 3:29, the Apostle Paul said, "If you are in Christ, you are Abraham's seed and heirs according to the promise." What most Christians have never been taught is that when God made that promise to Abraham, He made that promise to Abraham and his descendants forever. He also promised that He would make Abraham's descendants like the stars of the heavens and the sand on the seashore. And He said, "Abraham, all that land I'm showing you, I'm giving it to you and your descendants forever." Of all the people in the world who should understand who the Jewish people are and who Israel is, it should be the Christians. I want to introduce you to Dr. David Hudson, senior pastor of Riverside Apostolic Church in Morgantown, West Virginia, as he discusses the inaccuracy of replacement theology.

Dr. David Hudson: Laurie, replacement theology, simply put to me at least, is the fact that many people believe that the church is going to replace Israel as the position in the earth. I absolutely 100% unequivocally do not believe that. I do not believe it's Bible-based. Anybody that believes that is misinformed, don't know their Bible. We have the Presbyterian Church and even now the Methodist Church is leaning in that direction. Again, I would say that God does have a plan for the church, and it's not to replace Israel. Israel is God's chosen people. They have always been God's people, and they will remain so even until the very end. God will see them through.

The churches leaning in the direction of wanting to distance themselves from investing in Israel is a grave mistake. Churches such as the Presbyterian Church that year after year in their annual conferences, as well now the Methodist Church going in that direction and going online stating to their constituency to go in the different direction, not be supportive in a financial manner with Israel, accusing Israel of apartheid, that is absolutely incorrect. They don't know their stories. They need to get the facts. They need to be here and talk to the people that are directly involved. So in that respect, I don't think it's going to be successful. God has a way of meeting needs and making a way where there seems to be no way.

I believe as far as the church honoring Israel, I believe it's certainly a biblical mandate. I believe it goes back to the promise that God made to Abram, who became Abraham, in Genesis 12 when he told him, said, "Those that bless you, I will bless, and those that curse you, I will curse." I believe it's imperative that we take that very seriously. And for us to do anything less, for me to do anything less as an individual, I believe would be to incur the disfavor of God. Frankly, I don't want to be cursed. I want to be blessed. So I'm going to do everything I can to bless Israel. And I would encourage people to bless Israel because they will learn and find that it is a wonderful thing.

As far as Joel 3 is concerned and where the church is involved and people wanting to call for the dividing of the land, that is so anti-scripture and against the mandate of the Bible that again, I think people are uninformed and they're not really they just haven't read their Bible. To suggest that we're going to divide the land is against everything that God has promised spoken down through the ages by the prophets. And when we understand that God has charged that it's going to be their land, I believe that from the great river, the Nile, all the way to the Euphrates, it's going to belong to the Jews. How God chooses to bring all that about, certainly I know it's been discussed, debated, and I'm not here to give the complete analogy on that, but I can tell you it will happen because it has been mandated. And I think when the church leaders come on board with different organizations to lead the charge against that or even suggest a two-state solution, there is not a two-state solution. The fact of the matter is there's more support and a broad range support for Israel that basically is unknown to the media because they are silent. It is a silent majority. If that silent majority would begin to speak up, there's no telling where we would be at.

Laurie Cardoza-Moore: Ladies and gentlemen, we are dealing with a very difficult issue in the history of Christianity. And I have to tell you that I myself, being involved with this organization, have witnessed and heard some very disturbing and unsettling comments by Christians, even pastors and leaders who are studied in seminaries, who disagree with the biblical position that we state. It's because of this replacement theology and it's because of doctrines and traditions of men that have been taught for centuries.

As we've seen in this program, there is an ever-growing opposition within liberal and many mainline churches toward the state of Israel. Now this opposition is even taking hold in many evangelical churches as well. Of particular concern is how fast alliances have been forged with secular, political, and non-Christian religious groups in what can only be described as a mounting anti-Israel crusade. In Matthew, Jesus warned His disciples of the deception in the last days: "For false Christs and false prophets will arise and will show great signs and wonders as to deceive, if possible, even the elect." Yes, even the elect shall be deceived. We're seeing large populations of people deceived into thinking that Israel must give up the right to her God-given land. It's frightening to see that even more and more Christians and denominational networks are falling headlong into this treacherous heresy.

This is perplexing in light of the fact that the Bible is so very clear and straightforward regarding Israel's ownership of the land. One glaring example of dangerous anti-Israel heresy being propagated on a very large scale is the Christ at the Checkpoint conference held in Bethlehem at Bethlehem Bible College. On the surface, it sounds good, and their stated purpose is to bring reconciliation between Arabs and Jews, but their past record proves otherwise. As with so many of the fronts of the anti-Zionist and anti-Israel organizations, the rhetoric is a sophisticated double talk and it is smooth, enticing, and seductive. The propaganda machine focuses on themes like compassion for the Palestinians and so-called humanitarian causes. Is Christ at the Checkpoint really about reconciliation between Arabs and Jews, or is it about further delegitimizing Israel with the aim of reversing the fulfillment of biblical prophecy?

The Bethlehem call defines Israel as an illegal regime and a crime against humanity. It promotes international boycott, divestment, and sanction campaigns against Israel. It labels the more neutral churches as accomplices in crimes against humanity and attacks Christian Zionism as a crime and sin as defying the core of the Gospel. In an upcoming show, we'll look closer at this frightening trend in evangelical circles and show you excerpts from these conferences. But do know that at the same time we are witnessing something very exciting as well. I hear from Christians who are emailing me and thanking me. I had an older gentleman who was in World War II, a retired veteran, who wrote me in his broken handwriting how grateful he was that there were Christians who were speaking out. I've heard from Jewish people, Holocaust survivors, who've shared with me what it has meant to them as well as I've received emails from around the globe.

Our documentary, The Forgotten People: Christianity and the Holocaust, has been broadcast into 214 countries globally, and we hear from Christians who are thanking us for taking this stand, for taking this message. We must be aware and informed as to sound doctrine in regard to Israel and her God-given land so that we can build our lives on a firm foundation, one that can never be shaken. As we're careful to align ourselves with churches, ministers, and ministries that are blessing Israel, we can rejoice in knowing that we are on a solid footing and will be blessed in return. Well, that's our show for today, and I want to thank you for watching. Please join us next week as we look at the biblical evidence for Israel. The time to stand up is now. One person can make a difference. Get involved and support pro-Israel organizations such as PJTN. Visit our website, sign up to receive free action alerts, and order our films to share with others. Please encourage your family and friends to tune in and watch Focus on Israel. God bless you, and thank you for all you do on behalf of our Jewish brethren and all Israel. We'll see you next time on Focus on Israel.