Salah Nasrawi, Pat Buchanan, and the Muslim Definition of American Idol
From the same article that I quoted in the last post:
In Iraq on Friday, radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr urged Sunnis and Shiites to unite so Muslims could defeat Israel — even without weapons. He predicted the Jewish state would collapse just as the World Trade Center did in the Sept. 11 attacks.
"We promise you all that we will not forget our people in Lebanon despite our suffering from the American occupation. I will continue defending my Shiite and Sunni brothers and I tell them that if we unite, we will defeat Israel without the use of weapons," he said.
"I want to remind you of a very important thing. The collapse of the World Trade Center towers in America" was almost five years ago, al-Sadr said. "The same way America's idol collapsed, another idol will fall, and it is called Israel."
Or if Israel isn't America's idol, then maybe America is the idol. Here's part of a transcript of something that reportedly aired on Iranian TV. The film, which was broadcast on Channel 1, Iranian TV, and on Al-'Alam TV, on January 9, 2006, shows Iranian pilgrims in Mecca.
[Speaker:] We, the pilgrims who have come to the house of God, condemn the plots and the measures taken by the international Zionism – the deceitful Satan who spreads heresy, polytheism, and idolatry, enslaving human beings with a new method. It abuses the divine religion of Moses. It takes Satanic measures, and arouses the world's hatred towards this divine religion, and its true followers. We denounce these criminal acts. We call upon the world of Islam and the free peoples to take significant measures to thwart the Satanic policy of this camp.
Crowd: Allah Akbar. Allah Akbar. Allah Akbar.
Speaker: We, the pilgrims who have come to the house of God, strongly condemn the aggressive measures of "the global arrogance," led by the idol and center of evil, the criminal America. We condemn it for its aggression, war-mongering, its murder, plundering, torture, espionage, its abductions and its secret jails. We strongly condemn it.
We emphasize that the occupation forces must leave the lands of Islam. We express our hatred and our disgust at the mother of all corruption of this century, the Great Satan, and at its illegitimate offspring, the plundering Israel.
Crowd: Allah Akbar. Allah Akbar. Allah Akbar.
But David Arthur Walters (religious beliefs unknown to me) returns to Israel as idol, but with a different slant:
Pursuant to a presumed correspondence between good works and divine rewards, bad works and divine punishments, the Hebrews made a deal for Israel with their god. Isreal is both ideal and real estate. Evidentally the Israelites violated the contract, for they lost physical possession of the Holy Land for centuries. Yet Zion was never forgotten, and provisions were made to remedy the breach of contract and to restore possession to the Jews. Today Israel is a political nation in that land dubbed Palestine by the Romans, but it seems that the good old days cannot be restored. Perhaps they were evil days, now being repeated. We are given sufficient cause to wonder whether or not the Holy Land itself or a certain sacred spot thereupon is being worshiped instead of Yahweh. But that would be the grossest form of adultery, idolatry, for which there very well might be hell to pay on Earth in our own time.
Alfred M. Lilienthal quotes Dr. Israel Shahak, who holds a similar view. (Note that the Lilienthal article was written in 1981.)
Professor of Organic Chemistry at the Hebrew University, Israel Shahak, himself a survivor of Bergen-Belsen, maintains that undeviating devotion to the State of Israel by Israeli and American Jews is "both immoral and against the mainstream of Jewish tradition and is nothing but Jewish apostasy."
Dr. Shahak added:
"Jews used to believe, and say it three times a day, that a Jew should be devoted to God, and God alone. A small minority still believe it. But it seems to me that the majority of my people has left God and substituted an idol in its place, exactly as happened when they were devoted to the golden calf in the desert and gave away their gold to make it. The name of this modern idol is the State of Israel."
It will be no simple task to detach Jews from such idolatrous worship. The blatant expansionism and racism, defiantly displayed by Prime Minister Begin did not awaken American Jews. They are unable to discern that the gravest danger to peace stems not so much from geographic expansionism, in the guise of security, or from the seizure of land belonging to Palestinian Arabs for centuries, but from ideological expansionism which views Palestine as belonging exclusively to the Jewish people as inchoate citizens of the state established in their name. It is extremely doubtful whether any successor to Menachem Begin, be he Shimon Peres or Ezer Weizman, will dare to attempt to cast Israel out of its Zionist mold or that there will be a Jewish American revolt.
For more thoughts on Christian support of Israel, see Rick Moore's musings on Pat Buchanan's column. Other musings are found here, this time from spfantina:
Former perennial presidential candidate -— turned over-thehill pacifist, populist pundit -- Pat Buchanan further eviscerated whatever shreds of credibility he may have still been clutching with his most recent column Where are the Christians? —an anti-Semitic, anti-Christian, anti American screed....
In his current essay he condemns Israel for the accidental deaths of innocent civilians in Lebanon but makes no mention of the intentionally slaughtered innocent citizens in Israel. Are Jewish lives not important to him.? With Buchanan’s disturbing track record is easy to surmise that sadly they are not. He then slanders Pope Benedict by saying that he has condemned Israel’s self-defense. While a few Vatican bureaucrats have made embarrassing and clueless statements, no public statements from the Pontiff are available on this issue.
Buchanan then claims that failure to denounce Israel is anti-Christian and anti-American. As a purported Christian and American Buchanan disgraces both categories with statements he knows to be false—unless he is so blinded by his own hatred. All true Americans and Christians worldwide need to condemn Buchanan’s bigotry and support Israel--our steadfast ally in the war on Terror.
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