What evangelicals get wrong about Israel and the Palestinians
Instead of making peace, American evangelicals have mostly picked sides and offered unquestioning, blind loyalty to Israel, with little to no regard for the plight of the Palestinian people…
During the GOP primary, many evangelicals expressed support for Newt Gingrich, who called Palestinians “invented people.” Someone from a country that is a few hundred years old complaining about “invented” national identities would be comical if the crux of his message weren’t so offensive. Such despicable nonsense is spouted for one reason: to dehumanize Palestinians. After all, if they are just invented, pretend people, then who cares what happens to them?
Since when is dehumanizing people—God’s creation—an acceptable Christian view?…
We need a new paradigm. It is possible to be at once pro-Israel, pro-Palestinian, pro-American, and pro-peace. No matter what people may claim, the game doesn’t have to be zero-sum. Christians are inclined to see everything as a battle between good and evil. This is a familiar place, an easier paradigm to navigate. But even where evil exists—and it does—basic Christian theology says there is no space in this world that can’t be redeemed by God.
Blowback
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Misapplication of scripture from the first line. Didn’t need to read the rest.
tom daschle concerned on November 23, 2012 at 12:38 PM
Bless her heart!
L
letget on November 23, 2012 at 12:38 PM
Kirsten, if you go to the PLO mission at the UN, you will see a map of “Palestine.” It borders Lebanon on the north, Syria on the east and south, Egypt on the southwest, and the Mediterranean Sea on the west.
There is no country of “Israel” on the map.
That it what the Palestinians want, and say so in the Arab media. They feed bleeding hearts, liberals and anti-semites the “two-state solution” in English because they know you’re so gullible.
Wethal on November 23, 2012 at 12:39 PM
But what do you do when Palestinian leaders and teachers keep saying that Israel and Jews should be annihilated off the planet?
vcferlita on November 23, 2012 at 12:40 PM
The only thing stopping peace from blooming across the middle east are Muslims. They don’t want peace, they want Jews and Israel destroyed.
Until people understand that the situation will never improve.
darwin on November 23, 2012 at 12:46 PM
Kirsten, unless you’re one of those ultra-rare pro-life Democrats who don’t support the homosexual agenda, I’d rather listen to a Christian define what Christians should believe.
itsnotaboutme on November 23, 2012 at 12:48 PM
Im more pro-Palestinian than most of them are; I want their leaders dead and their culture changed to something more positive.
thebrokenrattle on November 23, 2012 at 12:49 PM
Hey Blondie, How about ya make a case for dragging the bullet riddled bodies of (suspected) jews through the streets behind a motorcycle for us , huh?
Lotta grey area in that action for ya Kirsten?
Tim Zank on November 23, 2012 at 12:50 PM
I am so sick of people saying I am not Christian because I hate evil and if you don’t think those sub-humans aren’t evil, there in NO HOPE FOR YOU!
I will let God deal with me on if I am wrong for my views of evil and my hate as such!
OUR home supports Israel and the citizens! WE do not support those devils spawn!
God be with you Israel.
L
letget on November 23, 2012 at 12:54 PM
Do Palestinians view Israelis as people? Or animals that need to be exterminated?
portlandon on November 23, 2012 at 12:55 PM
Unrelenting stupidity, which is normal for the left of course.
rightwingyahooo on November 23, 2012 at 12:55 PM
Misstate both the situation and Evangelicals views on the situation. Then attaaaaaaack!
Classic.
29Victor on November 23, 2012 at 12:58 PM
Just go away
Sams88 on November 23, 2012 at 12:58 PM
Exactly. Shades of Hitler. I suppose we “dehumanized” the Nazis too.
Bad Americans! Bad! Bad!
29Victor on November 23, 2012 at 1:00 PM
Gee, KP, why not ask your lib pals and some muslims why it’s OK to demonize and kill fellow human beings. That seems more to the point, imo.
Then again, you’re a lib of the worst kind. Whenever you show a moment of intellectual honesty it’s ruse. Suddenly you snap out of it and revert to true form.
Stupid is as stupid does. KP does it all the time.
Cody1991 on November 23, 2012 at 1:01 PM
Kristen thinks Israel should stick flowers in their gun barrels and chant for peace while the cut throat Palestinians slaughter innocents.
Of course she uses our Christianity as a chain to bind our hands and mask our eyes to the injustice.
portlandon on November 23, 2012 at 1:01 PM
Gingrich was absolutely right
tommyboy on November 23, 2012 at 1:01 PM
Sure, I am “pro-Palestinian”. What is best for the Palestinians is to turn away from their evil attacks on the Israelis, embrace peace and embrace God. If they succeed in overwhelming Israel, the likely outcome is continued suffering under an Islamist tyranny.
Fenris on November 23, 2012 at 1:04 PM
It’s clear Ms Powers will believe anything, which is why she is a democrat obviously.
rightwingyahooo on November 23, 2012 at 1:04 PM
Kirsten, you are really stupid, and thats a kind term. I’ve worked and lived 20 years of my life in the ME (and that includes Israel). I know ground realities, you don’t. Forget me, most of the arab countries hate their local palestinian population. They are forced to support the palis cos they are muslims fighting against the evil Jews. If the Palestinians really wanted a 2 state solution, they would have acceded to the Bill Clinton way. They didn’t. As you sow, so shall you reap. Period.
tommy71 on November 23, 2012 at 1:05 PM
Yeah you need to worry more about your side of the aisle there KP. I sympathize with the non violent people in Gaza, but its their leadership that’s at fault not evangelicals or Newt Gingrich. Or Israel for that matter.
Dash on November 23, 2012 at 1:06 PM
It’s kind of hard to side with a group of people who indiscriminately kill people. Hamas is an evil group and I have no regard for them or those who support them.
BigGator5 on November 23, 2012 at 1:07 PM
Then she whines when her husband’s family is terrorized…
Blake on November 23, 2012 at 1:07 PM
Like all religions outside Judaism and Christianity, which teach that human nature is flawed and must be redeemed by God to be acceptable, Islam is merely a religious justification for Arab culture.
The non-arab Muslim adherents are simply the weakminded who lack the courage to defend their native religions, which are also culture-props, any longer….
rightwingyahooo on November 23, 2012 at 1:08 PM
The Gazans belong in Egypt. The West Back arabs belong in Jordan.
rightwingyahooo on November 23, 2012 at 1:09 PM
There are no such people as “Palestinians”, they are Egyptians and Jordanians….
They have not lived in Israel any longer than the returning Jews have, (120 years or so) and followed the early Zionist settlers there to take jobs…
rightwingyahooo on November 23, 2012 at 1:11 PM
Palestinians dehumanize themselves — no help necessary.
Blake on November 23, 2012 at 1:11 PM
No one mentions the fact that NO Middle Eastern country has offered to take the so-called “refugees”.
darwin on November 23, 2012 at 1:11 PM
What a failure of an article. You call this analysis, Kirsten? All you did was state what Christians wrongly support Israel and then you CLAIM that Israel is “deuhumaninzing” the Palis. Yet you never actually bother to offer proof, just your opinion! You ended up proving Christians right. You and your kind (Old Media liars), Kirsten, are Jew haters. You DID NOT PROVE that Christians are “getting anything wrong” in the region. You just stated your opinions unsupported by any facts.
Warner Todd Huston on November 23, 2012 at 1:14 PM
or that Jordan killed up to 20,000 of them in the ’70s, and that no one seems to really have minded too much
29Victor on November 23, 2012 at 1:14 PM
The original 1923 partition of the Palestinian land mass gave the area now known as the nation of Jordan to the Arab people, and the nation now known as Israel, INCLUDING THE WEST BANK AND GAZA, to the Jewish settlers.
The British folded under relentless Arab pressure over the next 25 years, indeed the irgun was founded to get the Brits gone before the Jews lost ALL their land, not just 75% of it they lost in the 1948 founding.
The arabs have plenty of land. It’s only due to their skill as liars that the world believes otherwise.
rightwingyahooo on November 23, 2012 at 1:16 PM
The “plight of the Palestinian people” is one entirely of their own making, one which can easily be fixed by their moving back to their real countries – Egypt and Jordan.
Rebar on November 23, 2012 at 1:18 PM
They do lie, and it’s the press … including our own media that helps them lie and get away with it.
darwin on November 23, 2012 at 1:19 PM
I would like to see Israel re-take, annex, and settle Gaza, the West Bank, and the Golan, and a good portion of the Sinai. I would also like to see them settle the East Bank of the Jordan for a few miles, as a permanent buffer against Arab aggression.
rightwingyahooo on November 23, 2012 at 1:19 PM
And the Israelis should establish a rule: Any attack on the Jewish state, no matter how small, will result in the destruction of 30% of the armed forces of the nation in which the attack originated….
rightwingyahooo on November 23, 2012 at 1:22 PM
The fakestinians have been on the losing side of umpteen wars against Israel. They should have lost everything and been ejected from the territories, already. That’s what happens when you support the wrong side in an aggressive war. You lose the war and you lose what you have and where you live – since you insisted on making a serious threat of yourself. That’s why people need to think three times before they go to war … because they can lose lots of sh#t.
Luckily, for the fakestinians, Israel has been too stupid to do what needs to be done to end the fakestinian threat. Of course, arabs don’t understand this sort of Western gift-giving and interpret it as nothing but weakness and license to continue to wage war on Israel. One day, Israel will learn that it has to take land won in war, annex it, and NEVER even think of negotiating its return. NEVER. That’s how war goes.
Powers is, of course, biased by her marriage to an Egyptian (though I’m sure she has little to say about Egypt having taken and held the gaza strip after the war it started in 1948 until it lost it in 1967). I haven’t read her whole piece. Maybe she does talk about this. I would be surprised if she did as she would be one of the very few.
The PLO was started in 1964, before Israel held the West Bank – back when Jordan was controlling it (after Jordan took it in the war Jordan started in 1948 and held until it lost it in 1967). Funny how there was no anit-occupation fakestinian attacks on Jordan holding the West Bank all those years – though the fakestinians have certainly tried to take over Jordan (which is how Black September came to be and how the fakestinian takeover of southern Lebanon happened, waging war on Israel from there until Israel responded and got the PLO ejected from there, too).
The fact is that the fakestinians (like the rest of the arab world) has been 100% wrong in this whole sad, pathetic war against Israel and they have refused to stop, no matter how many times they lost (because, again, Israel keeps giving sh@t back to them). Enough is enough. The arabs either have to learn how not bother civilized people or truly suffer the consequences of their actions.
ThePrimordialOrderedPair on November 23, 2012 at 1:30 PM
Let’s see: Support the only true democracy in the region, or support the b@stards that danced in the street after 9/11?
Decisions, decisions…
RoadRunner on November 23, 2012 at 1:32 PM
I’m shocked.
And I’m not even an evangelical.
Ladysmith CulchaVulcha on November 23, 2012 at 1:33 PM
Most Fakestinian Christians have been pushed out of the area by the fakestinian muslims – same as happened in Lebanon, which used to be 60%+ Christian and is now less than 40% Christian. Arab Christians suffer more from arab muslims than from anyone else.
ThePrimordialOrderedPair on November 23, 2012 at 1:37 PM
The term “Palestinian” was not used to describe the Arabs of that region until long after Israel was established. It was invented to posit a plausible equivalence between Jews and another ostensibly wronged people, inasmuch as the word “Arabs” failed sufficiently to connote an underdog, and also presumably because the Palestinians were so poorly treated by other Arabs that they began to think of themselves as a discrete subculture.
I don’t know exactly when the term “Americans” came into wide application, but it was not employed to game the international victimology sweepstakes.
Seth Halpern on November 23, 2012 at 1:43 PM
If you watch “Exodus”, Paul Newman plays a “Palestinian”. It’s funny how memories are so short in this world and we allow the primitives to redefine our own language. One would think that as access to old information is so easy and cheap the world would have a longer memory, but we seem to have moved in the opposite direction. So odd … and dangerous, which is the sort of insanity that allowed Barky to claim that he and his whole adminsitration had not been trying to blame a Youtube video (a well-done, funny, biting commentary on islam, BTW) for the Benghazi terrorist attack.
ThePrimordialOrderedPair on November 23, 2012 at 1:43 PM
Seth … like minds
ThePrimordialOrderedPair on November 23, 2012 at 1:44 PM
Good and evil is like, so, passe people. M’kay? Look, I know you Christians get all worked up about it but it’s like dope and gay marriage – the world has MOVED ON.
So you know guys, just like totally get over yourselves. Sometimes it is appropriate to strap a bomb to your toddler and blow it up in a marketplace. And, you know, genocide is totally part of their culture and if you don’t accept that you’re so racist.
/KP
/Mega-Mac
CorporatePiggy on November 23, 2012 at 1:54 PM
In all the Middle East, there is only ONE country where the number of Christians has increased in the past 50 years. ONE. Bet ya can’t guess which one either, huh?
CJ on November 23, 2012 at 1:58 PM
The GOP navel gazers asking what went wrong in the recent election need look no further than the Hot Air comments to this thoughtful and altogether reasonable piece. The extremist, close-minded, and ultra-regressive views of these commenters and the Teavangelical base have no place in 2012 and will continue to be the doom of the Republican party. Here’s hoping for a rational, reasonable alternative to the Democrats.
http://www.npr.org/blogs/itsallpolitics/2012/07/05/156319272/federal-judge-richard-posner-the-gop-has-made-me-less-conservative
Alpha_Male on November 23, 2012 at 2:15 PM
Akzed on November 23, 2012 at 2:26 PM
Posner never was a conservative, so how can he become less of one?
Russell Kirk’s classic canons of conservative thought include six elements: (1) belief in a transcendent order and natural law; (2) rejection of egalitarianism and utilitarianism; (3) support for class and order; (4) belief in the linkage between freedom and private property; (5) faith in prescription and custom; and (6) recognition that change is not necessarily salutary reform.
As I read his body of work, Posner clearly fails #s 1 and 2, and likely fails #s 3 and 5. The only one I’m sure he passes is #4. I’m not going to bother defending those claims in detail, largely because Posner himself long has rejected the conservative label, calling himself a pragmatic classical liberal. Richard A. Posner, Overcoming Law 23 (1995).
Akzed on November 23, 2012 at 2:31 PM
There will be peace when one of them is defeated militarily and not one minute before.
Big Orange on November 23, 2012 at 2:46 PM
Comrade, aren’t you late for reeducation class?
darwin on November 23, 2012 at 2:53 PM
It’s funny. I used to be a die-hard moderate before Obama. Now, because of Obama, I have become a die-hard conservative.
BigGator5 on November 23, 2012 at 2:59 PM
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