I think Zmirak, disappointingly, is smearing C. Owens using Twits that seems to me to mislead what her point which I don't always agree with, but he needs to use her direct twits not others apparent smears. I know his employers are Israel first Protestants, but almost always he is totally honest and there some valid points.
How Should Americans Think About Israel?
How Should Americans Think About Israel?
AHMAD GHARABLI/AFP/Getty ImagesAn ugly division has emerged among patriots and Christians over the proper extent of American support for the State of Israel. Leave aside people who see an Israeli conspiracy behind every hailstorm in Ohio — like online provocatrix Candace Owens. Here she is online spinning wild theories about the death of her one-time associate and friend, Charlie Kirk. Seriously, watch the clip. It is … lit.
Here Candace implies that Turning Point USA as an organization might have something to hide in Charlie’s killing:
Owens ought to retire from public life, raise her kids, and enjoy the hundreds of millions of dollars her British aristocrat husband will inherit. Or else she should join soon-to-be ex-Congressman Jasmine Crockett for a CBS buddy-cop show potentially titled Ghetto and Psycho, which I would absolutely watch. (Come on, you know you would, too.)
And let’s ignore likely federal agents such as Nick Fuentes, who splash around in the gutters of real, live racial hatred. If someone hints to you that Mossad was likely behind Kirk’s murder because he was allegedly “going soft” on support for Israel, it’s probably time to hit the “block” button on your phone.
No, You Don’t Have to Back Every Decision Netanyahu Makes without Being a “Nazi”
Kirk engaged in an interesting, verifiable back-and-forth concerning Israel. While he strongly and rightly supported Israel’s right to exist in security and peace, he was concerned that Americans retained the right to criticize individual decisions the current Israeli government makes without being falsely labeled “antisemites.” Surely conservatives in, say, England or Australia could criticize Joe Biden without being “anti-American,” he reasoned. Here’s Kirk’s close aide Andrew Kolvet explaining his balanced, rational stand:
No, Israel Didn’t Force Us Into the Iraq War. That Was 100% American-Made Idiocy
People we’ve long taken seriously are taking harsh stands today and polarizing a movement that should have united even more tightly after Kirk’s murder. Tucker Carlson, who has long been a force for good in our bleak media landscape, is currently claiming that the State of Israel is responsible for America’s stumbling into the Iraq War.
Unlike former neocon Tucker Carlson, I was one of the loudest opponents of the Iraq war back in 2002-3. I pretty much ruined my career as a conservative commentator by standing against that folly, and ended up having to work at relatively obscure Catholic venues for a decade. And I can say with some authority who was to blame for that reckless adventure: American neoconservatives, the vast majority of them Gentiles, who bought into a fantasy ideology of American world empire. “Invade the world, invite the world” was their slogan, as they pushed both open borders and open-ended occupations of multiple Muslim countries.
In a 2003 piece “America the Abstraction,” I warned against the explosion of hubris that was deranging American conservatives and starting reckless, stupid wars. It got me falsely labeled a “ruthless anti-Semite” by no less than Christopher Hitchens, even though I didn’t pin blame on either Israel or Jews. In fact, they were barely mentioned. So you can see why I understand Kirk’s concern.
Israel Opposed the Iraq War
In fact, the Iraq war’s architects didn’t have a real principled concern for either American or Israeli interests. Yeah, they’d mention Israel as one of the possible beneficiaries, but here’s the thing: The State of Israel openly opposed the Iraq war at the time. Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was viciously anti-Israeli, but that didn’t set it apart from virtually every other Arab country. But Iraq was a key counterweight to the much more dangerous Iran — which Israel presciently saw would be the only real winner of the Iraq War:
Why is all of this worth focusing on? Because the real war we’re in is a spiritual one, and the enemy has many snares in his bag of tricks. Jew-hatred is one of his old reliables.
The Demons of Canaan Are Still With Us Today
Real antisemitism really is demonic, in the absolutely literal sense of every one of those words. The demons who LARPed as “gods” in ancient Canaan, demanding human sacrifice, hated God’s chosen people — and tried to lure them to destruction via idolatry or get them massacred by villains like Haman (who was foiled by Esther).
Those same spirits stirred up hatred in Christians’ hearts through the Middle Ages and the Reformation, urging on pogroms and persecution that made the name of their own Messiah hateful in the ears of the Jewish people. The neopagan idolatry of nation and race that emerged in the nineteenth century gave birth to modern antisemitism, which culminated in the Holocaust. Shamefully, Christian ministers and priests were complicit in that slaughter, with clergy blessing death squads in places like Slovakia, Romania, and Croatia. Screwtape’s bloody fingerprints are all too obvious there.
The principalities and powers that loathe both the Church and the Jewish people tempted many Jews to embrace radical politics, including Communist movements that would go on to persecute both Christians and Jews. That fact drove too many Christians to blame the race instead of the party, inaugurating antisemitism as anti-Communism for the stupid. Today Jews of a radical stripe embrace jihadis and open borders, either of which would cause the destruction of both America and Israel.
I think Screwtape’s latest gambit is obvious: Hijack the exploding revival of patriotism and faith in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s martyrdom, and divert it down rabbit holes of ethnic resentment, reckless conspiracy-mongering, and paranoid fantasies about foreign masters pulling our strings.
There’s a reason it’s hard to get people to think straight, in a rational and balanced fashion, about Jews and Israel: the constant patter of preternatural interference by the same dark spirits who drove Herod to slaughter in Bethlehem and Hamas on October 7. Banish them the old-fashioned way, via prayer and fasting.
John Zmirak is a senior editor at The Stream and author or coauthor of 14 books, including The Politically Incorrect Guide to Immigration and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Catholicism. His newest book is No Second Amendment, No First.
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