Apocalyptic visions: Christianity under assault in US from right-wing fundamentalist Protestantism

While there is no quarrel between mainstream versions of Christianity and Islam, mainstream Christianity is under assault in the United States from right-wing fundamentalist Protestantism, such as that represented by Jerry Falwell, writes Azmi Bishara

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Typically, the media asked the wrong questions about Jerry Falwell and his recent racist remarks about Islam and the Prophet Mohamed. The issue at hand is not one of dialogue or conflict between Christianity and Islam, since neither religion is uniform and there are many versions of both. Christians in Jordan or Syria are different from those in Poland or Latin America, and both are different from American Protestants. Islam also changes from rural to urban areas, across social classes and over time.

Jerry Farwell's version of Christianity, however, is specific and peculiar, and it is closer, in both tone and substance, to extremist versions of other creeds than it is to Christianity's mainstream churches. The story of Falwell's brand of Christianity goes back to the 17th century, when a number of fundamentalist Protestant sects grew up in the United States, preaching "a return", in letter and spirit, to the Scriptures.

Since Christ and the Apostles did not outline a detailed way of life for their early Christian followers, this being something that was taken up later by St Paul, the New Testament of the Bible reads as a universal message of love and understanding. What the fundamentalist US Protestant sects did was to stress instead the moral code expressed in the Old Testament, extracting from it a detailed schedule of approval and disapproval. The result was an emphasis on austerity and strict morality and a denunciation of what was considered to be the hierarchy and theatricality of Roman Catholicism.

While early US Protestantism was mostly moderate in form, it gave rise to many sects promoting ever- harsher interpretations of Christianity, many of them based on the Old Testament. Some of these sects were anti-Semitic, while others propagated a form of Judeo-Christianity, sharing a common, apocalyptic vision of the future in which the arrival of the Messiah will end the suffering of believers and create a heavenly order on earth. This apocalyptic view of history has also crossed over to Islam, with fundamentalists seeking salvation on earth and not in heaven.

Much of this background is common knowledge, but what is of interest here is how contemporary American fundamentalist Protestants, among them Jerry Falwell, have used pop culture and the mass media in their preaching in a remarkable departure from the calm manners of mainstream Protestantism. Falwell and his fellow US television preachers treat Christianity as a consumer item, marketing it through spectacular staging and TV gimmickry.

Indeed, a new form of Christianity has appeared in America, one that exploits individual isolation and that has benefited from the disintegration of more mainstream Christian congregations. This new form of religion is the spiritual equivalent of self-help groups, offering spiritual guidance at a price that is both financial and political.

We are all familiar with how US television sit-coms cue the audience with recorded laughter in all the right places, producing the effect of shared enjoyment even at the end of a cathode-ray tube. Transfer this device to TV preaching, and the result is the staged histrionics of American fundamentalist Protestantism, a kind of emotional charlatanry that puts to shame the wildest teenage rock concert. Successful American preachers, such as those of Falwell's standing, have been rewarded with considerable money and power.

The US evangelist Billy Graham first took TV preaching to the heights of popular demagoguery in the 1950s, discovering that fire and brimstone sell well if they are aired live and backed with sufficient emotional display. Later, Graham's discoveries were adopted by others, and not just Christians, inside and outside the United States. His caricatural delivery and oversimplified message did much to further the cause of fundamentalists of all brands and creeds.

What could be more tempting to US-based fundamentalist preachers today than attacks on Muslims? The idea of an apocalyptic struggle between good and evil has always been central to the fundamentalist cause, in all such creeds the world being seen in terms of a struggle that will resolve itself in victory for the righteous. All the better if this apocalyptic vision of things can be overlaid with a political message.

The first European settlers in the United States were fond of biblical names, theirs being, at least in part, a search for the promised land and for the kingdom of God on earth. These early settlers were not fond of Judaism, and many of them were fervently anti-Semitic. However, in the 20th century Hollywood, particularly over the past few decades, has managed to twist the US obsession with the Bible into something akin to political Zionism and support for Israel.

While the mainstream Christian churches in the United States are aware of the perils of fundamentalism and demagogic popular preaching, respecting the country's secular tradition and steering a mostly non-political path, far-right Christian fundamentalists constantly lobby US congressmen and the White House to further their beliefs. The time has come for the mainstream churches to try to reverse this trend in the US of politicised Christian fundamentalism, such as that promoted by Graham, Falwell, and the rest. The Arabs, for their part, should be aware of the domestic means by which American Christian fundamentalists are seeking to influence US policy towards Israel.

However, the silence of liberal Jews concerning the determined attempts of the far right to stifle liberalism in America is also odd and worrying. Right- wing Christian fundamentalism is a threat, not just to Arab-Americans, but also to all democratic groups in the United States, and liberal Jews, by maintaining their silence, are allowing US Jewry too to slip into right-wing positions, losing touch with other minority groups in America.

What the Arabs should do to combat the kind of racism promoted by Falwell and other American TV evangelists is to seek closer bonds with other minorities within the United States. In order to do so, they should make further efforts to convince America's other minorities and mainstream Christian churches alike that they are similarly committed to democracy, religious tolerance and secularism in the face of the right-wing Christian fundamentalist threat.

The writer is a leading Palestinian political activist and member of the Knesset.

This guy is wrong historically and theologically in about every possible way he could be. Do you think it's just ignorance or is contrived?

Contrived, would be my guess.

Here is what Netanyahu.org says about Bishari's claims that the Arab leadership did not have any connection with the Nazis' attempts to exterminate Jews.

Liars Among Us
Azmi Bishara is an Israeli Arab intellectual. Unlike some Arab spokesmen, he does not deny that there was a Holocaust of the Jews, in Europe at least. But, he insists: "The Shoah and everything connected with it are a European phenomenon... We as Arabs have no connection to it."4
Of course, he knows about the Mufti of Jerusalem, Amin el-Husseini, the main leader of the Palestinian Arabs at the time, widely esteemed in pan-Arab circles. Yet in Bishara's best yeoman-like style of falsification he tries to disarm those who have vague memories of Husseini's Nazi ties. Bishara admits that "the Palestinian national movement at least once considered... making an alliance with Nazi Germany." (As if this were not enough to contradict his own words quoted previously). Then he goes on to falsely claim that "This alliance did not come to fruition."5 This is a lie.
Bishara conveniently overlooks the fact that the Mufti was active in the Nazi-fascist domain from November 1941 until the German defeat in May 1945. The Germans put considerable sums at his disposal to maintain himself and his entourage, which included other Palestinian Arabs from leading families, and to set up offices called "Buro der Grossmufti." In return, Husseini made propaganda broadcasts to the Arab world over Radio Berlin ("Kill Jews wherever you find them"), recruited Arab troops (among Allied prisoners of war) for an "Arab Legion," helped organize a Bosnian Muslim SS division (notorious for atrocities in its own right against Serbs, Jews and Gypsies), indoctrinated imams from the Soviet Union, and also broadcast in that direction, exhorting Soviet Muslims to support the Nazis, which some of them did by joining German-sponsored military units, and even the Einsatzgruppen. In his discourse, Husseini explicitly identified Nazism with Islam. All of this surely sounds like an alliance, despite Bishara's apologetics.
Significantly, Husseini urged the Germans to extend the Holocaust to Arab lands. Concretely, he intervened several times with German and Italian ministers and Axis satellite governments in Hungary, Bulgaria, and Rumania, to prevent Jews from leaving the Axis domain. He specifically described Jewish children as a danger and urged that they be sent to Poland, where, in his words, they would be under "active supervision." It is likely (if not certain) that he himself visited one or more murder camps, while documents demonstrate that members of his entourage did so, escorted by SS officers. So he was well aware of what happened to Jewish children sent to Poland. After the war, the Mufti was enabled to return to the Middle East where he was again acclaimed the leader of the Palestinian Arabs.6
This information has long been available in English and Hebrew, etc., for many years. Researchers who have written on the subject of Arab-Nazi relations and the Arab-Holocaust nexus include Bernard Lewis, Lukasz Hirszowicz, Elias Cooper, Daniel Carpi, Jenny Lebel, Joseph Schechtman, Bartley Crum, and others. Nevertheless, Bishara claims, "We Arabs have no connection to it" (the Holocaust), also ignoring the presence of other prominent Arab nationalists in Berlin during the war.
The Palestinian Arab political leadership constituted in the Arab Higher Committee for Palestine (led by Husseini) demanded throughout the 1930s an end to aliyah --Jewish immigration to Eretz Israel, which the international community had juridically erected as the Jewish National Home in 1920 at San Remo, mandating Britain to implement it (League of Nations ratification 1922). The British violated their mandate by satisfying this Arab demand with the 1939 White Paper severely restricting Jewish immigration to the internationally designated Jewish National Home on the eve of Holocaust, when no country wanted to take in more than a token number of Jewish refugees, if any. The White Paper effectively doomed hundreds of thousands if not millions of Jews to die in the Shoah. But Azmi Bishara sees no Arab connection to the Holocaust. He also overlooks the role of one George Antonius, a member of the Arab Higher Committee on Palestine, led by Husseini, and simultaneously the Middle East representative of the New York-based Institute of Current World Affairs, funded and run by a wealthy, fanatic Judeophobe, Charles R. Crane, who was, incidentally, an admirer of Hitler.
Bishara was formerly a senior lecturer in philosophy at Bir Zeit University near Jerusalem (supported by US taxpayer funds) and a senior researcher at the Van Leer Institute in Jerusalem, specializing in 19th century German philosophy, the nexus between philosophy and society, etc. He now earns the salubrious salary of an Israeli MK, using the Knesset as a platform for Arab nationalist demands, sometimes wrapped in liberal, democratic fig leaves, sometimes in Stalinist garb. His university studies in Communist East Germany must have helped him perfect his mastery of demo-Stalinist sloganeering. It may have been his moral standing which led the Van Leer to have him chair a symposium on Eugenics: Philosophical and Moral Aspects (1997). Zmanim, which published Bishara's inventions (Summer 1995), was financed by the Department for Culture and Art of the Cultural Administration of the Israel Education and Culture Ministry.

4. Zmanim, Summer 1995, v. 13, no. 53; p 56.
5. Ibid., p. 54.
6. See detailed documentation in my article "Arabs and Nazis -- Can It Be True?" Midstream (October 1994).

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