Britannia Radio

The Arab Lobby

Prof. Paul Eidelberg

Today I am going to speak on two interrelated topics: the so-called the "Judeo-Christian" culture, and the Arab Lobby.

And for both topics I am going to rely on data quantitative data in Mitchell Bard's excellent book THE ARAB LOBBY, which was published just a few months ago by Harper-Collins—a book worth adding to your personal library.

I must point out at the outset, however, that to speak of a "Judeo-Christian" culture today, and even decades before the rebirth ofIsrael, is to obscure the anti-Semitism, often cloaked in anti-Zionism, that has flourished during this period.

To be sure, today some 75 million American evangelicals are called "Christian Zionists."

According to Mitchell Bard, however, "approximately 200 million American Christians are not evangelicals and, historically, the most active Christian organizations have been hostile to Israel and more sympathetic to the Arabs."

The World Council of Churches, which includes hundreds of churches in the East and West, and the National Council of Churcheshave consistently taken anti-Israel and pro-Arab stands.

Bard notes that on September 25, 2008, "the Mennonite Central Committee, the Quakers, the World Council of Churches, and the American Friends Service Committee sponsored a meeting withIranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

This occurred at the height of protests against his appearance at the UN and amid renewed efforts by the international committee to impose sanctions on Iran for its refusal to comply with previous Security Council resolutions and on-going pursuit of nuclear weapons."

Is it not remarkable that Christian organizations would stoop to dignify a Muslim tyrant who has repeatedly vowed to "wipe Israel off the map" and who brazenly intoned the malediction "death to America"?

As for the Catholic Church, the day before Israel proclaimed its independence in May 1948, the Vatican's semiofficial newspaper, L'Ovsservatorre Romana, announced that "the Holy Land and its sacred sites belong to Christianity, which [the paper said] is the true Israel."

More current as well as contradictory is the incomprehensible position of Pope Benedict XVI. Despite his friendly gestures toward the Jewish people and his bold criticism of Islam's use of violence to convert "infidels," this eminent leader of the Catholic faith has supported the establishment of a Palestinian—hence Islamic—state in the Holy Land which one of his predecessors called "Christian land."

Surely this very learned and saintly Pope is aware of Islam's 1,400-year culture of murderous hatred toward Jews and Christians alike, and of Islam's ceaseless commitment to Israel's annihilation?

Surely he is aware of eminent strategic experts who warn that the creation of an Arab state in Israel's heartland would lead to the annihilation of the Jewish State?

The position of the Holy See is thus bizarre as well as profoundly disheartening—and no doubt to many faithful Catholics.

Also troubling is the subtle and insidious attempt of various Protestant denominations to delegitimize the Jewish state by promoting the doctrine of "replacement theology," a doctrine that undermines Israel's biblical claim to the Holy Land.

The doctrine of replacement theology contradicts my argument that it was the ethical monotheism of the Judeo-Christian culture that spawned America's foundational documents—the Declaration of Independence and the Federal Constitution.

This argument no longer has any validity unless we exclude from that hyphenated Judeo-Christian term the many anti-Israel but really anti-Jewish Christian organizations that support Arab terrorist groups committed to Israel's destruction.

Of course, one may find many individual Protestants and Catholics who oppose the leadership of their respective Christian organizations. By so doing, they virtually reaffirm the Judeo-Christian culture prevailing during America's constitution-making period.

The disarray and decline of that culture has enabled the Arab lobby to penetrate many American anti-Zionist Christian groups as well as many sectors of American life. For example, Robert Baer, formerly of the CIA, reports that the names of many high officials of the State Department, appear on the Saudi payroll after leaving their government positions.

Mitchell Bard reports that the Arab lobby has devoted a great deal of money trying to shape the views of the next generation of Americans and future decision makers by creating centers and chairs at universities to propagate their views. "The principal agent of the Arab lobby among college students today is the Muslim Students Association (MSA) with close links to the Muslim World League, and I would dare say terrorist groups.

Although Mr. Bard reports that the Arab lobby may have only a limited impact on the campus, David Horowitz documents, in The Professors, that many academics, in prestigious universities, propagate anti-Israel as well as anti-American line propaganda. Bard remarks that the Jewish community more or less "accepts anti-Israel speakers and conferences as a matter of free speech and is afraid to do anything that might suggest an effort to stifle what is actually hate speech." Muslim groups exploit American freedom of speech and civil rights in an on-going conspiracy to destroy liberal America and replace it with a totalitarian Sharia state.

What I see in Bard's discussion of the Arab lobby is something I have been warning Americans about for decades, namely, that higher education in the United States is so permeated by moral and cultural relativism that Americans are losing their old patriotism, that even the instinct of national self-preservation has been eviscerated.

We see this in Europe where multicultural relativism is evaporating European culture and the concept of nation-state.

Aristotle warned some 2,400 years ago that excessive cultural diversity leads to revolution; that's where America is heading thanks to its permissive immigrations laws.

Stated another way, the U.S. is heading toward a civil war that will transform America into a garrison state. More than 100 years of American higher education has eroded the moral bonds articulated in America's foundational documents, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.

I have witnessed this degeneration in Israeli universities. Hence it is s no accident that one of my two latest books is entitled Toward a Renaissance of Israel and America, while the other is entitled An American Political Scientist in Israel which records talks I have had with Israeli leaders warning them, in vain, that they must tell the truth about Israel's mortal enemies.

Consistent therewith, I am currently engaged with colleagues in the United States to form an Israel-American Renaissance Institute (I-ARI).

This Institute will disseminate information about its program in the near future. We shall show that both Israel and America need to return political power to the people by means of various political and educational reforms.

Obviously, to speak of such reforms now obscures the sense of urgency regarding Iran's nuclear development program.

But Iran would never have had such a program were it not for the moral and political decadence of the United States. It was not only money or the leftwing media or the economic meltdown (etc.) that placed Barack Obama in the White House where that arrogant ignoramus is pursuing an anti-American domestic and foreign policy. Obama is the product of the cultural relativism, hence anti-Americanism, long rampant in academia.

And although Benjamin Netanyahu is not a conscious moral relativist, his hobnobbing with Mahmoud Abbas and endorsing a Palestinian state indicate that his soul has been tainted by the relativism prevalent among American opinion makers and decision makers.

I believe this pernicious influence must be factored into his lacking the courage and wisdom required of an Israeli prime ministers if he is to clearly and forcefully uphold the heritage of the Jewish people on the one hand, and resist Israel's enemies and false friends on the other.

The first step of such a prime minister is to rally the Jewish people around their abiding beliefs and values—to remind them of their great accomplishments as a nation, while warning them of the genocidal designs of their enemies.

It will not do to rally them around Zionism or even religious Zionism. Zionism is dead. Jews must be rallied around Judaism, which is alive and still possesses enormous creativity. Whatever adjective that precedes the noun, Zionism has died of spiritual shallowness and exhaustion.

The only creative force in Israel is the Torah, as more and more scientists are showing.

The secular democratic state is also moribund, buried by more than a century of Progressivism which has emasculated theAmerican people and produced the Nanny State.

The only living and creative force in America is the wisdom buried in the political theology of America's Declaration of Independence—the spiritual source of the American Constitution.

Therein the subject of my projected book: The Unknown Constitution: Its Biblical Roots and Statesmanship.

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*Edited transcript of the Eidelberg Report, Israel National Radio, 4 October 4, 2010.

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