re: #98 CuriousLurker

Hmmm, I never thought of it like that before, in reverse.

I live in an area where apocalyptic, LaHaye-style Christianity is very strong. I just lost a friend over his conversion and subsequent, gleeful FB posts about the eminent death and destruction that would herald Jesus’s return.

“I support Israel” around here—which is something that comes up quite a bit and which people put money behind—is actually short for “I support a conservative super-hawkish Israel that not only refused a two-state solution but will expand out to it’s biblical borders…at least until the Jesus returns and kills all the Jews that didn’t convert.”

The two things that make me twitch and get that forehead strain-vein is that (1) Israel the modern state with its gay-positiveness and social liberality is not “real Israel” and those people don’t count and shouldn’t be cared about; and (2) it’s really important to encourage settlers because settler/Palestinian tensions could be the tinder that leads to an all-Jewish super-Israel..

When you scratch the thinking involved, it’s insane turtles all the way down.

There’s secular version, too—sort of the John Bolton-meets-80s-CIA idea of “supporting Israel” so that it can be the tip of the lance in the inevitable conflict with the Orientals Islamic world…which again has zero interest in what Israelis want their foreign policy to be.