On a related note, it’s amusing how there’s a bit of a civil war they’re having over blaming Brandon for enabling Israel’s genocide, and blaming him for “funding” Hamas and not helping them enough. Going by the comments.
On a related note, it’s amusing how there’s a bit of a civil war they’re having over blaming Brandon for enabling Israel’s genocide, and blaming him for “funding” Hamas and not helping them enough. Going by the comments.
Good take. I think you also can't underestimate the evangelical love for Isn'trael as a vehicle for Armageddon either. Even though the material motivation (for the petty boug) for the stance may have passed, it's got its own momentum.
There might even be an angle about proletarianization breeding doomsday cults/beliefs which have fueled that Israel support but I'm not smart enough to fully connect that dot.
As a former evangelical, I want to add that I don’t think (and this is all anecdotal supposition) the motivation to bring about Armageddon is really the driving motivator outside of some Pentecostal circles.
IMO the bigger driver is that - as weird as this sounds - the existence of Israel somehow in their minds validates the historicity of the Old Testament. Israel belongs to the Jews because God says so and they conquered it. So the present existence of Israel is sort of “proof” of all these historical claims.
Biblical inerrancy (and thus, the idea that the Old Testament is real history) is suuuuper important to evangelicals. It’s a core tenet, and it’s why so many of them cling to Young Earth Creationism and a literal flood, despite those things being as likely as a flat earth.
Oh and a lot of it is just your standard racism against brown people. Racism is just so pervasive in the evangelical church it’s hard to separate that out as an independent factor.
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totally. that's where i am at. trying to make the narrative of "look, this is a western european political project to maintain a settler-colonial presence in the middle east. we're backing one outsider ethnic group and letting it run wild on the indigenous peoples, in an effort to prevent any sort of pan-regional multi-ethnic project from emerging and challenging the western hegemony. the religious conflict is the tactic, the beachhead is the strategy" is way too complicated and looks morally repugnant. so instead, it's been decades of fomenting the most unhinged religious zealotry among evangelicals. that is always america's move: find the religious wackos, wind them up, and set them loose. because they will heel turn against any socialist/communist formation at the blink of an eye.
so after 50 years of arming some religious nuts and winding up others, the boiler is full of fuel and the pressure release valve has snapped off. the stage is set for both political parties to tear themselves apart over this shit. in the lead up to the iraq war, the pressure against anti-war protests and to deplatform them was near universal. empire didn't need threats and laws from lawmakers to be silenced. this one, it's like this constant stream of explicit threats (like the BDS bans, the slander against DSA) and obvious lies (hamas rocketed their own hospital, trust us) from the mouths of newsreaders.
like they are pulling all the levers to manufacture consent but struggling to get traction, meanwhile the right-wingers can't figure out if they're supposed to be pro-israel, anti-semites, or wait until JFK jr. reappears and tells them what to do.