Psychotics fuel Trump’s Middle East policy
Yesterday, in remarks to the Security Council about Monday’s mass protests and deaths along the Gaza-Israel border, U.S. Ambassador Nikki Haley told many, many lies, but her biggest whopper was when she claimed that “a majority of Americans” support moving Israel’s capital from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, and the opening of a U.S. embassy there.
It might have been true seven years ago, when a poll found that 54% of Americans agreed with the statement: “Jerusalem is – and always will be – the capital of Israel – and they have every right to build housing in their nation’s capital.”
But it’s not true today, not by a long shot. Last December, “A [CNN] poll…indicated that fewer than half of Americans support US President Donald Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, with an even smaller number supporting moving the US embassy to the city from Tel Aviv.” Even among American Jews, there’s no great sentiment in favor of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. Last year, the American Jewish Congress, a liberal Jewish organization that lobbies for Jewish and Israeli rights, released a survey in which only 16% of American Jews favored the immediate move of the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, with 44% solidly against it. True, more than one-third of the respondents were unsure, or in favor of moving the embassy “at a later date,” but only “in conjunction with progress in Israeli-Palestinian peace talks.” Clearly, Trump’s one-man decision to move the embassy was not in conjunction with such talks, which is exactly what prompted the Gaza riots and massacre.
Why are fewer and fewer Americans in favor of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, and moving our embassy there? Historians will debate the causes, but clearly, Haley either was misinformed about American public opinion when she made her statement, or she lied.
Haley is a member of an administration that is the most pro-Israel ever, but there’s one thing that has to be kept in mind, if we’re to understand what’s going on vis a vis the Trump administration and the Israeli regime of Benjamin Netanyahu: both Trump’s Republican Party and Netanyahu’s Likud Party are captives of psychopathic religious extremists: evangelical Christians, in the case of Republicans, and ultra-orthodox Jews, in the case of Likud.
These two groups, evangelicals and ultra-orthodox Jews, have fashioned a very strange marriage of convenience: although they are diametrically opposed in their core beliefs, both have temporarily decided to become strange bedfellows in strongly supporting the State of Israel, and making Jerusalem its capital, and moving the U.S. embassy there. Both groups are using each other. Orthodox Jews understand that the evangelicals would forcibly convert them if they could; evangelicals understand that Jews think they’re insane for believing in stuff like the Virgin birth, the resurrection of Jesus Christ, and that God could possibly have a “son.”
But evangelicals think that their Messiah, Jesus, cannot return until Israel is reunited and its capital is in Jerusalem, and Orthodox Jews think that their Messiah hasn’t yet come to earth; and since neither of these things has yet occurred (and never will), this gives both plenty of time to work together before events force their hands. The two sides, therefore, have formed an alliance that has effectively seized control of the governments of both Israel and the U.S.
Evangelicals and ultra-orthodox Jews are insane, in the sense that they are delusional; in fact “delusional disorder,” which used to be called “paranoid disorder,” is their main diagnosis: “a type of serious mental illness called a ‘psychosis’ in which a person cannot tell what is real from what is imagined. The main feature of this disorder is the presence of delusions, unshakable beliefs in something untrue or not based on reality.”
Among the delusions and unshakable beliefs held by both sides is such nonsense as that the age of the Earth and Universe is roughly 5,779 years, as determined from the Hebrew Bible, and that Adam and Eve and little Cain and Abel played with dinosaurs in the Garden of Eden. Another, held only by the evangelicals, is that Mary was a virgin when she gave birth to Jesus, and that Jesus rose from the dead. Both sides, incidentally, claim to hear God, and to be instructed personally by him. Clearly, these beliefs are “psychotic,” in the sense that people who hold them have “lost touch with reality and see, hear, or believe things that aren’t real.”
One of the most articulate critics of evangelicals in this country is the Republican strategist and former McCain campaign manager, Steve Schmidt. Two days ago, on MSNBC, he made remarks concerning evangelicals that are worth quoting in detail:
”We don’t talk about who these people are, so let’s do it for a moment. Jerry Falwell, Franklin Graham, Mike Huckabee, all of them. They dress up as men of God but they are not. They are in business, and they are in politics. And the type of politics they advocate is an extreme and theocratically-tinged politics. One of the things that is true of this movement: wherever you look around the world, and you see the fusion of the state with religion…the ideology advanced…always veers towards the autocratic. It’s always less free. It’s always dominated by an extreme animus toward gays. There are people who would much rather tell you how to live and what birth control you’re allowed to take…than would ever dare to say what is so obviously true about conduct by this president [Trump] that is so obviously wrong. These are the modern day pharisees in the temple. They are hypocrites [and] we know who they are.”
Americans rightfully distrust countries, like Iran, where religious mullahs, ayatollahs and despots rule with iron fists, and yet evangelicals in this country seem to long for a similar system here—as long as the despot belongs to them.
Many Israelis, and most American Jews, including me, do not favor the expansionist policies of Netanyahu’s Likud Party. We are appalled by the land confiscations, the settlement building, the minority status Likud imposes upon Arab Jews. We support the right of the Palestinians to their own state, and while we do not support the threats by the likes of Iran and Hamas to wipe out the state of Israel, we do believe that Netanyahu and Likud are doing everything they can to stand in the way of a negotiated settlement, and to provoke the Palestinians to violence.
Evangelicals stand with Likud, for the reasons I cited above, and also because they hate and fear Islam, as their own ayatollahs (Franklin Graham chief among them) have taught. Donald Trump, who never in his life publicly expressed any religious views until he realized he had to cozy up to evangelicals in order to get—and stay—elected, is on the side of—not the angels, but psychotics. So, memo to Ms. Haley: a majority of Americans does not support your position. Please stop lying.
Great piece! I wish more people would call out evangelicals for what they are…delusional.
That said, let’s not forget the wine talk!