Lenni Brenner: Catch-up on the sociology of American Zionism

Christopher Rhoades Dÿkema crdbronx at erols.com
Tue Apr 23 06:41:22 PDT 2002


A comment from Lenni Brenner --

"These stats have the additional value of highlighting the depravity of the generality of American polls. They hand over $3 billion/year to Israel, when the majority of US Jews don't give a penny to Zionism in their lives. Proverbially, a fanatic is 'more Catholic than the Pope.' Lets update that: An American fanatic is a politician running for office - anyone, Jewish, white, black, cat, dog, rat or snake - anywhere, even in the Aleutians - hustling Jewish campaign contributions, by yelling for Sharon, is more Zionist than the Jews."

It bears repeating that the core mass base of support for Zionism in the United States lies in evangelical and fundamentalist Protestantism. These groups once were anti-Jewish, at a time when Jews symbolized, for them, a number of bad things. The founding of Israel, however, altered the terms of their symbolic thinking. Now they see it as the fulfillment of prophecy, and think it is a step towards Christ's second coming.

Jews as people remain an abstraction for this body of opinion, just as they were when they were scapegoats. And if, for some reason, they got the idea in their heads that Jesus really had come back, and if, as seems probable, the majority of Jews weren't impressed with him ... why then, evangelicals would become anti-Semites again.

Imagine what would happen if some convincing semblance of Jesus appeared in, let us say, Atlanta. Let us imagine this person to be an insane person of Jewish origin who believed himself to be the messiah. And imagine if his relatives tried to have him institutionalized .... The wise Reverend Jerry Fallwell reminded us a few years ago that the Antichrist will be a Jew. What else would he be, in that scheme of thinking? Imagine having to be the Jewish psychiatrist signing Jesus into the proper hospital ...

Christopher Rhoades Dÿkema



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