peace on earth -- a christian perspective

Christians everywhere associate their faith with peace.

Peace on earth, good will to men, goes the Christmas carol. And we associate this with the image of shepherds on a hillside in Israel.

Hence, the association of peace with Israel.

But that would be the Israel inhabited by Israelites, not by Israelis. The new US move to shift the capital of Israel to Jerusalem, based on a shameful distortion of the scriptures, is already igniting war sentiment in the Muslim world. We have shown previously how “Christians” with little knowledge of the scripture have been easily manipulated into supporting wars in the simplistic belief that they were “helping” God fulfil His prophecies. These same people are now cheering the shift of Israel’s capital in the steadfast conviction that Jesus would want them to support this apparently devout move. Yet what did Jesus say about Jerusalem?

As He was approaching Jerusalem in the last days before his crucifixion, he wept over the city and shouted, “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, which killest the prophets, and stonest them that are sent unto thee; how often would I have gathered thy children together, as a hen doth gather her brood under her wings, and ye would not!”

His words were not of worship but of condemnation. Jerusalem was His executioner.

And further:

For the days shall come upon thee, that thine enemies shall cast a trench about thee, and compass thee round, and keep thee in on every side, And shall lay thee even with the ground, and thy children within thee; and they shall not leave in thee one stone upon another; because thou knewest not the time of thy visitation” (Luke 19:42–44).

To Christians, the default interpretation of this is that Jerusalem – representing all of Israel – had rejected their Saviour and would be destroyed because of this.

The whole idea of “Christian” Zionism runs counter to this teaching of the condemnation and the teaching about the dispersal of Israel because of the Hebrews’ rejection of their own teachings and law.

Somehow Christians got caught up in the notion that the resurrection of Israel from the dead as described in Ezekiel 37 would require Christians’ intervention, as though God would be incapable of fulfilling his own prophecy. This notion is both arrogant and blasphemous. There can be no forgiveness without repentance. Christians cannot repent for the sins of others.
If God had banished Israelites from the Promised Land, then that was His decision and no one had the right to interfere in His plans. Likewise, if Jesus had prophesied that the city was to be destroyed because of their rejection of Him, then that was God’s decision. After Titus destroyed it in 70 AD, in fulfilment of Jesus’ prophecy, no one, Christian or other, had any role to play in rehabilitating it. Only the Jews themselves could make the decision to right their wrongs, repent of their sins.

Just as God was the avenger who caused the diaspora, and just as Jesus was the bearer of the prophecy that the Jews would pay for their rejection of Him, all the wrongs that were done could only be righted if the people who committed the sins underlying the banishment and the destruction of Jerusalem were to repent.

But arrogant Christians played God in the 30s and 40s when they took it upon themselves to banish the Palestinians from land that they had inhabited for centuries and now when they take it upon themselves to honour the city that God had cursed.

This reinstatement of Jerusalem is not a commission handed by God to Christians. It is an arrogation of duties that are in fact not theirs. They have been duped into accepting this foolish role by two groups that defy God while hiding behind false piety:

1. the Zionists who use them contemptuously, manipulating them into sending their sons to fight wars that are not theirs, and by
2. “Christian” Zionists who pledge allegiance to the unrepentant Israel – proudly proclaiming “I stand with Israel” – instead of to Jesus Christ.

​In a world constantly at war, in a country with an unpayable debt caused by perennial war, you’d think Americans and Europeans would value peace more than anything else. It would help their economies recover and would enable them to reconcile their governments’ policies with their own consciences.

Yet whenever the warmasters in Congress, the White House and/or the Pentagon and/or the State Department invent a new imaginary enemy, pretending that this or that nation hates the US people because Americans are supposedly freer and more democratic than they are – and not because the US government has wrecked their economy with sanctions, engineered coups d’état or bombed their villages to smithereens sometime in the past – the US public enthusiastically supports the war effort. War is patriotic. The national anthem sings its praises. It will not stop because of Americans learning their lesson. G.W. Bush was their lesson, but they never learned it. The wars will stop when the war machine is stopped. Not before. And it will be stopped in spite of Americans, not because of them.

The wars of America are not even its own, and the Defence Department is not for defence. It is purely for offense.

It is well documented, eg, in a detailed expose by Stephen J. Sniegoski, that the Israeli Likud leadership is fixated on the notion that Israel can live in peace only if its neighbours are at war and thereby weakened. This idée fixe has been successfully transplanted into the US State Department and Pentagon (as detailed here) and has been implemented thanks to a woefully ignorant US populace that somehow has taken the notion that they, and not God, are Israel’s keeper, and Israel is safer if it threatens and attacks the people that it desperately needs to get along with – because these neighbours are not going anywhere and will never forget.
The so-called Yinon Plan is based on this highly questionable proposition, though the plan is based only on a theory. Not an untested one either, but a theory that has reliably failed all the tests to which it has been put.

The logic behind this plan was that the boundaries of each country surrounding Israel – with the exception of Egypt – had been established by European powers, comprised separate and distinct peoples without a common history or culture and therefore did not enjoy a homogeneous society that could serve as a social binder. Therefore they could be induced to fight each other by sneaky outside political influences, such as the CIA-catalysed coup that took out President Mosaddeq in Iran in 1954 (as attested by declassified documents) or the made-in-the-West Arab Spring exported to unsuspecting Middle East populations that had been relatively peaceful until then. Not until small groups of radicals received generous funding and fine weaponry compliments of the US and allies like the Saudis, did the underlying fissures in the social structure open up and the artificially cultivated antipathies boil out onto the streets.

The basis of the Yinon Plan was a shaky theory at best, though, because Switzerland, for example, has always been a hodgepodge of cultures and identities but had survived as one of the strongest economies and militaries in Europe. Indeed, Russia is a blend of Orthodox and Muslim that has held together for centuries thanks to deft leadership. Besides, intuitively speaking, no system based on warfare can be expected to last indefinitely because the stability required for a lasting system ultimately depends on peace. The Israeli idea was designed for the short term. What could the world expect after the system had run its course? More importantly, decent society everywhere would find such a cynical plan unacceptable in the long run.

Iraq was one such failed test of this plan. As documented by Sniegorski, Neocons of the Project for a New American Century, citing the central idea of the Yinon Plan, urged GW Bush to attack Iraq, based on the idea that the country was made up of disparate groups such as the Sunnis, the Shia, the Christians and the Kurds, and would crack apart under stress, thereby benefitting Israel.

The scheme failed for a number of reasons, notably because after the war, the US decided to support Sunni tribes and groups in the fight against ISIS, donating arms and funds to these groups.

They forgot a detail: The Sunnis were only about a third of the Iraqi population and belonged to the same branch of Islam as the terrorists. And since the Shia in Iraq outnumbered these groups by a wide margin, these Sunnis were naturally leery of them and decided to overpower them by any means possible. So they shared these fine US-made arms with the terrorists. Many of them joined ISIS themselves. The US forgot a principle:  you can only make so many enemies before they eventually take you down. Thus the US unwittingly became a catalyst that helped unite a once-divided Muslim world.

Now, throughout the Middle East, the Shia have long been the whipping boys of the Sunnis, who have typically been more aggressive and intolerant. In Saudi Arabia, this aggression is still obvious in the near-genocide practiced by the Sunni Saudis against the Shiite Houthis in Yemen – so much so that Human Rights Watch and the UN are clamouring for an end to the killing (supported by the US’ silence).

Whenever you read about a mosque being burnt or destroyed or its occupants murdered, as in Egypt recently, a little research will reveal that the mosque was Shiite and was targeted by Sunnis. Which is not to say that all Sunnis are violent and intolerant. There are places like Indonesia and the Syria of a few years back where Sunnis and Shia got along fine. Even in the Middle East they can get along fine again, once enough of them discover that they have a common enemy.

The difference between a violent disposition and a peaceful one lies in the culture of the population in question. Assad the father and Assad the son cultivated a sort of oasis of tolerance in their country for many years. (They sometimes had to crack heads to achieve this of course, and this fact gave the West an excuse to attack Bashar al-Assad). And these tolerant policies were precisely why the US-Israel-Saudi axis hates Bashar al-Assad.
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The West has done what the Bible warned about, putting good for evil and evil for good. They need chaos to make the Yinon plan work. The diabolical scheme of Oded Yinon has become the guiding idea of the Western elites and has, predictably, failed. Peace is no longer an option for the US, and it doesn’t matter who is president. The US is stuck on stupid and evil – to such an extent that, by being the antithesis of the failed US, the Russians have inevitably won the hearts and minds that the US has alienated and will fill the vacuum left by a nation that has lost its appeal.

The US-Israel-Saudi “axis of goodness,” as it has been facetiously dubbed, will not come back.