Christmas is a time to celebrate the coming of the Prince of Peace, Jesus Christ. Sadly, the very ground where Christ once lived and taught and died to redeem mankind knows no peace today. The little town of Bethlehem, which witnessed the birth of the divine Prince of Peace, lies at the heart of the besieged West Bank of Palestine, held hostage to a twisted plot of diabolic sophistication which has enlisted even Christians and Western nations into its confused web of intrigue. The sudden fall of Syria to a Zionist-globalist funded and armed cabal of ‘good’ terrorists should hardly be a cause for celebration but for deep concern among Christians.

If recent history means anything it will be our Christian brothers and sisters, nearly a million strong in Syria, who will be targeted, killed, and driven out just as happened to Iraq’s Chaldean Christians after 20004. Christians in fact are the most vulnerable group in the Middle East, invariably caught in any crossfire between between Muslim and Zionist factions. Unsurprisingly, Israel has wasted no time in opportunistically moving their tanks even as far as the outskirts of Damascus to expand the Zionist influence and power. Nothing new there.

Here at home, for millions of so-called Christian Zionists, the sweeping away of one more Israeli enemy represents a victory, and yet they fail to understand that their pro-Zionism stems from a Christian heresy, wholly based on a literalist and selective interpretation of Sacred Scriptures as found in the Scofield Reference Bible, a mainstay of millions of Evangelical Christians. For example, the Scofield commentary (italicized) on Genesis 12:3: “I will bless them that bless thee. and curse them that curse thee” reads: “Wonderfully fulfilled in the history of the dispersion. It has invariably fared ill with the people who have persecuted the Jew—well with those who have protected him. The future will still more remarkably prove this principle.”

The 1984 edition of the Scofield goes even further by adding, “For a nation to commit the sin of anti-Semitism brings inevitable judgment.” But missing from this subjective interpretation of Scripture is any honest consideration of who are the true Semites. As far back as 1947, before the State of Israel came to exist, a Jewish New York industrialist named Benjamin Freedman observed, “Political Zionism is almost exclusively a movement by the Jews of Europe. But these Eastern European Jews have neither a racial nor a historic connection with Palestine. Their ancestors were not inhabitants of the Promised Land. They are the direct descendants of the Khazar Kingdom, which existed until the 12th century. The Khazars were a non-Semitic, Turko-Finn, Mongolian tribal people who, about the 1st century A.D., emigrated from Middle Asia to Eastern Europe… About the 7th century the king of the Khazars adopted Judaism as the state religion, and the majority of inhabitants joined him in the new allegiance. Before that there was no such thing as a Khazar whose ancestors had come from the Holy Land.” (Douglas Reed, Somewhere South of Suez)

Those Eastern European Jews eventually became known as the ‘Ashkenazi.’ as opposed to the Sephardic Jews of western Europe who are true Semites, as are their Palestinian Arab cousins, both Christian and Muslim. That being the case, the semantics of ‘anti-Semitism’ show how preposterous the term itself has become. In a historical context it has lost any true meaning. Truth is, if any nation is currently engaging in anti-Semitism it would be Zionist Israel, culpably assisted by those other nations which are arming and supporting it. Yet shortly after World War II, even high profile American Jews such as Jacob Schiff and Henry Morgenthau Sr. were warning of the dangers that Zionism posed.

Mr. Morgenthau did not mince words on the subject. “Zionism is the most stupendous fallacy in Jewish history…. The very fervor of my feeling for the oppressed of every race and every land, especially for the Jews of my own blood and faith… impels me to fight with all the greatest force against this scheme, which my intelligence tells me can only lead them deeper into the mire of the past, while it professes to be leading them to the heights. Zionism is a surrender, not a solution. It is a retrogression into the blackest error and not progress towards the light. I will go further and say that it is a betrayal; it is an Eastern European proposal.”

So why do so many Christian Evangelicals insist on the rightness, and even the holiness, of the Zionist project which so many influential Jews have long opposed? Credit the American tradition of religious eclecticism which too often propels any crazy novelty into the mainstream. The Evangelical’s Zionist attitude can be traced back to the original Scofield Reference Bible, first published in 1909, at the very moment that Theodore Herzl was busy promoting his Zionist project among wealthy Anglo and American Jews. Cyrus I. Scofield was no Biblical scholar but a Kansas attorney with a shady past. After being ‘born again’ in 1879 he developed a theory called dispensationalism which, among other things, promised that worthy Christians would be ‘raptured’ directly up into heaven with the commencement of the Battle of Armageddon. The key to this ‘prophetic’ fulfillment was a Jewish return to Jerusalem and rebuilding of the Temple. So Zionism became central to the hastening of Armageddon which would then invoke the anticipated ‘rapture.’

But how reliable or impartial are Scofield’s assumptions? A Washington Report on Middle East Affairs article from October, 2015 reported how, “Others have been even more explicit about the nature of Scofield’s service to the Zionist agenda. In “Unjust War Theory: Christian Zionism and the Road to Jerusalem,” Prof. David W. Lutz notes how a Wall Street attorney and early Zionist named Samuel Untermeyer “used Scofield, a Kansas City lawyer with no formal training in theology, to inject Zionist ideas into American Protestantism. Untermeyer and other wealthy and influential Zionists whom he introduced to Scofield promoted and funded the latter’s career, including travel in Europe.” (Recall that it was the prestigious Oxford University Press that published the Scofield Reference Bible, even to this day.)

In that same article, “author Stephen Sizer points out in his definitive critique, Christian Zionism: Road-map to Armageddon? “The promise, when referring to Abraham’s descendants, speaks of God blessing them, not of entire nations ‘blessing’ the Hebrew nation, still less the contemporary and secular State of Israel.” Sustained by a dubious exegesis of selective biblical texts Sizer concludes, “Christian Zionism’s particular reading of history and contemporary events…sets Israel and the Jewish people apart from other peoples in the Middle East…it justifies the endemic racism intrinsic to Zionism, exacerbates tensions between Jews and Palestinians and undermines attempts to find a peaceful resolution of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, all because ‘the Bible tells them so.’”

Ironically Islam, itself descended from Abrahamic stock, sees itself as the fulfillment of the Old Testament prophesies. Precisely because the Jews had already rejected Jesus Christ as the Messiah, Mohamed was able to claim that distinction for himself some six centuries later. He is thereby regarded by over a billion Muslims today as the Messiah to which the Old Testament prophesies refer. But geography also plays a key role in the ensuing conflict. Mohamed ostensibly ascended into heaven, with a mosque subsequently erected there, on the very same spot, coincidentally, where the Jewish temple had once stood ~ the Temple Mount. Consequently, control of this holy citadel is at the very heart of Muslim / Jewish strife.

The irony only deepens from here. Christian Zionists claim that the Jews alone have an inherent, God given right to this particular piece of real estate called Palestine. But a careful reading of the Old Testament makes it explicit that God’s promise of this land to Israel is conditional upon fidelity to His covenant with Israel. (See Deut. 30:17-19; Josh. 23:15; 20:24 among countless other passages.) But Israel in fact has been perennially unfaithful throughout its history, and so God exiled them from this land time and again, most notably in 587 B.C., 70 A.D., and finally in 135 A.D. So ask yourself, was the basis of the modern Zionist State of Israel founded in 1948 a humble return in fidelity to God’s Covenant? The facts seem to suggest just the opposite.

Today’s Israel is a modern, secular neo-liberal state in which over 75% of its Hebrew denizens identify as either atheist, agnostic, or non-practicing Jews. Abortion is unrestricted and funded by the state and Tel Aviv is considered the gay-sex capital of the Middle East. Besides allowing illegal settlements into the West Bank and the blanket theft of Palestinian land and property at gunpoint, the government enforces a virtual apartheid state in the occupied territories where civil liberties are callously ignored. During the Covid crisis Israel prided itself as one of the most locked down nations on the planet while mandatory Covid injections were forced on the population, no questions asked. More recently, a horrified world has watched over a year’s worth of indiscriminate bombings, murder, and mayhem inflicted by this same state on the people of Gaza while some high profile ‘Christian’ (?) Zionists in this country advocate total carpet bombing of the Strip. Is this what fidelity to God’s covenant really looks like?

In the spring of 2019 Benjamin Netanyahu was recorded cynically advising his Likud party advisors that “we must support Hamas because they are strategically useful to our cause.” Would that be the cause of annihilating the people of Gaza under the pretext of a surprise attack? How much did the Israeli government know about the impending October 7th attack to which the IDF was uncharacteristically tardy in its immediate response? News organizations in Israel are now asking these probing questions and others, but in the West there seems to be little curiosity about the topic.

Zionism is the quest for a political Messiah, not a spiritual one. Many faithful orthodox Jews see it as a ploy to force God’s hand and that is why they reject it. The Zionist state also seems to ally itself far too closely with the globalist New World Order which assumes it has a natural right to dispose of local petty tyrants like Hussein or Assad at will, leaders who may have been corrupt yet somehow managed to protect Christian minorities within their jurisdictions. What replaces these ‘tyrants’ after the inevitable period of chaos and bloodletting (much of it Christian) is a regime often far worse, less democratic, and more brutal than what existed before. But such is acceptable to Anglo-American neo-cons provided that the new regime bends the knee to the Globalist World Order.

And so tyrants of Saudi or Zionist persuasion will always get a free pass because they subscribe to the Globalist Order. Meanwhile little towns like Bethlehem and even big ones like Beirut and Damascus will find little peace this Christmas nor likely for many more to come. The only recourse for their besieged citizens seems to be joining the Evangelicals in praying for the quick coming of Armageddon in the hope that, just maybe, they can hitch a ride on the ‘Rapture Express.’ But don’t bet your prayer beads on it!

A blessed Christmas to all, and pray for all those souls in the Middle East who are true peacemakers, “for they will be called children of God.” (Mt 5:9)

Francis J. Pierson + a.m.d.g.