It being the new year and all, I thought I’d introduce you to some new mentalists, just in case you’re getting bored with the old mentalists. These new ones are the people watching the disquieting events unfold in Gaza with what might properly be called rapture.
I use the word ‘rapture’ advisedly. As in ‘for yea, the rapture cometh’. And those shells landing on Gaza are to be welcomed, of course, for they are bringing the day ever closer.
There was a trip to Jerusalem last week undertaken by a bunch of British Christian evangelicals — by coincidence, just as the Israelis began lobbing rockets into Gaza. They hadn’t planned it like that, although retrospectively they may claim to have seen it. The whole shebang was described as a ‘New Year’s Prophetic Summons’ and the organisers were, in the main, American evangelical Christian Zionists, but there were plenty of Brits in attendance.
You may be familiar with this little by-way of religious fervour, this rather bizarre cul-de-sac of supernaturally imposed bigotry — partly because it has helped determine US government policy towards the Middle East for 30-odd years. These are the militant end-time Christians who are, indeed, yearning for the end. It was all foreseen — a final conflagration between the Antichrist in the blue corner (that’ll be the Muslims, then) and the forces of Christianity in the red, with the Jews looking a bit askance in the middle, unless they have returned to the fold, in which case they’re OK. The blurb for this latest trip — which involved conferences, walking the ramparts of Jerusalem and urging hellfire upon the recusant Mohammedans — reads as follows: ‘The days are shortening as Messiah’s coming approaches. Jesus’ identity with His own people is a progressive national revelation as Israelis increasingly realise that Yeshua was one of them, that he died in identification with them as Lamb of God...’ Then there’s some Bible stuff explaining how and why the apocalypse is coming.
You may well know all about these people, as I say: the Christians who, for their own reasons, are more Zionist than even the Zionists. The latest bunch, however, are even more mental and include growing numbers of British evangelicals among their howling throng. It is no longer just the backwoods denizens of the mid-Appalachians who believe this stuff. Britain is on-board too these days — hallelujah!
The latest trip to Jerusalem was organised by a woman called Christine Darg, who operates out of Richmond, Virginia. Christine’s a star turn. She created the excellent Elvis Gospel Ministries, which preaches the word of God to semi-sentient people using the music of His chosen son, Elvis Presley. Back in 1998 she set up a webcam overlooking Jerusalem’s Golden Gate, pointed directly at the spot at which she wholly expected Jesus Christ would materialise in the very near future. Or, given the passage of time which has elapsed since His unexpected and lamentable failure to turn up, the not-that-near future. The webcam has been taken down recently because people other than Jesus keep appearing on it, mooning, larking around and being rude and stuff.
So far, then, so whacko. But Christine — a big peroxide blonde with one of those scary Jesus-loves-you smiles — has her finger in a number of pies, not all of them quite so harmless. She is the chief sponsor and supporter of an organisation based in Texas called Battalion of Deborah, for example. This magnificently named organisation, which sounds more like a landfill indie band than a Christian campaigning group, is devoted to kicking the Palestinians out of something it refers to as ‘greater Israel’. Or, as they put it on their website, ‘resettle Palestinian refugees to the lands of their Arab kinsmen’. By refugees they mean all of them, except maybe the Christian ones, if they shut up and behave themselves. The Battalion of Deborah is opposed to all possible peace settlements with the Palestinians, regardless or not of whether the settlements are drawn up by Israeli politicians. Israel is for the Jews, all of it, even the bits which are not within Israeli boundaries today. ‘The land of Israel is promised by God to the Jewish people,’ they state, with the certitude of those whose frontal lobes have been unduly tampered with.
Debbie’s people are much more extreme than anyone you might find in Likud, for example. Indeed, they ally themselves to far-right members of the Knesset, and to the ultra-Zionist and quasi-fascist Jewish nationalist groups, some of which have ties with Zionist terrorist organisations. At a recent conference proudly attended by Battalion of Deborah, one speaker was the lawyer who represented the illegal terrorist group Gush Emunim Underground (that’s another bloody indie band, isn’t it, now I come to think about it?), which murdered Palestinians in Hebron.
There are also links with the even more extreme Kach Kahane (sounds more like electro-pop, that one), whose spiritual mentor, the late Rabbi Kahane, is spoken of approvingly by both Battalion of Deborah and its sister organisation, the majestically whacko ‘Covenant Alliances’, also based way down south in the USA. Kach Kahane murdered Palestinians and also American Jews whom it considered to be appeasers. In their book, Ariel Sharon was a bit of a lily-livered pinko appeaser, tearing down one or two of those illegal settlements.
These Battalion of Deborah monkeys also wish to build a new embassy in Jerusalem and indeed a ‘third temple’ to prepare for his coming. In the past these groups have been lauded and honoured by the Knesset for their unwavering support of Israel; however, of late, even the hawkish Israelis are beginning to find them ludicrous and dangerous. And, indeed, embarrassing — last year the Battalion of Deborah, the Covenant Alliance and others presented themselves to the Knesset with a letter offering repentance for Christian anti-Semitism and begging to kiss the feet of Jews. Most MKs shuffled off looking a bit sheepish and the evangelicals were left to strut their stuff before the usual loony-tune politicians.
This lot were expecting the rapture to occur on the stroke of midnight, 1 January 2000, but all they got was Andy Stewart and a concert at the Millennium Dome. They were even more hopeful a couple of years ago when Israel went to war with the Hezbollah in Lebanon. One allied website at the time contained the following posts: ‘I am excited beyond words that the struggle of my life may finally be over soon and I can finally be freeeeeeeeeee!’, and then there was this: ‘...let the enemy know the alarm has been sounded and Yeshua is stepping onto the battlefield...’.
You can read more of that kind of stuff at the Rapture Ready! website, along with an interesting piece suggesting that President-elect Barack Obama is the reincarnation of the Antichrist, as foretold in the Bible, what with him being a pinko black fella and all. As it happened, the Israeli invasion of the Lebanon left the rapture monkeys — and, uh, Israel — a little crestfallen, a little bit down in the mouth, just like on New Year’s Day 2000. But they’re sure it’s going to happen now, this rapture business. And they will do their little bit to help things along, supporting illegal settlements on the West Bank and so on, cheering from the ramparts of Jerusalem.
Does any of this matter? These people are clearly madder than a box of frogs and cannot possibly be of any resonance, any real consequence, in the wider geopolitical scene, can they? And it is good news, surely, that even the Israelis have had enough of their ministrations, their letters of apology, their support for a f orm of Zionism which even the Israeli government considers racist and extreme. And not all Christian Zionists oppose peace settlements with the Palestinians and yearn, without cessation, for Armageddon.
Well, they have had a lot of influence, both the extremists who returned home from their Jerusalem jaunt last week and the marginally more moderate of them. Douad Abdullah from the Muslim Council of Britain reckons that the evangelical Christian Zionists in the United States number something in the region of 25 million people. It was the Jimmy Carter presidency which saw them emerge from the woodwork with a powerful voice — Carter himself being a southern Baptist, of course. The Christian Zionists had their strongest advocate seven or eight years later in the form of Pat Robertson, whom you may remember with the slightly wistful fondness with which one recalls, say, Arthur Scargill or Oswald Mosley. Robertson’s speeches still litter the Christian Zionist websites, along with adverts for his ludicrous books.
But what worries me more, partly out of an undoubtedly misplaced sense of national pride, was my old belief that no matter how deranged our lower-than-lower church smiters and rapturers might be, they would never quite reach the level which you might find in the general area of the Tennessee River Valley. Gone, gone, I fear. Evangelical Christianity, in its ever more fabulously literal and authoritarian marque, is Britain’s fastest-growing repository for spiritual belief. And it follows that its mutant offshoot, Christian Zionism, is growing apace too. That should worry all of us, regardless of whether right now we’re cheering on Hamas or Israel.
