Israel, Gaza, and the Lies of Stonestreet

https://www.breakpoint.org/the-horrific-attacks-of-october-7-a-year-later/

Stonestreet never disappoints. If you're looking for distortion and Evangelical perversions of Biblical doctrine, ethics - and reality, look no further. This disciple of Charles Colson consistently labours to outdo the mendacity and deception of his mentor and this piece on the October 7 attacks is no exception.

Consider his opening:

One year ago, on October 7, 2023, thousands of Hamas terrorists entered Israel and attacked civilians, killing some 1,200 Jews, the largest massacre of Jewish people since the Holocaust. Among those killed were soldiers and civilians, men and women, children and adults. They were killed simply because they were Jews.

The idea that they were killed simply because they were Jews is utterly false. Stonestreet ignores the context of Hamas and Gaza and why such people would be driven to such desperation and rage that they would commit such an attack. They have been terrorized for decades by the state of Israel and they have been slaughtered in their thousands and subjected to generations of degradation and humiliation. To hide this by labelling Hamas as 'terrorists' does not take away from this reality. If they are terrorists, then Israel created them. If they are terrorists, then so are the Israelis. None of this excuses what they did - it was mass murder but to Israel's outrage, the response is as simple - just what did you expect?

So much has happened in the year since. Hamas has been largely devastated by Israeli attacks. Huge portions of the Gaza Strip have been reduced to rubble. Many Gazan noncombatants have been killed in the crossfire, though it’s impossible to know how many. Hamas is notorious for exaggerating civilian losses, and yet Western news agencies are quick to report their numbers. What we do know is that Hamas embeds its fighters among civilians, and so even with Israeli precision, thousands are dead. And still, Hamas is holding at least 97 hostages, including four Americans.

Stonestreet wants to downplay the deaths in Gaza and take a shot at the media for reporting 'Hamas' numbers. Well, the truth is the media has consistently covered up Israeli atrocities and downplayed the scope of what Israel has done. The truth is the exact opposite of what he presents.

The official death toll now stands at just over 40,000 dead and yet it is well known the real toll is far higher. There are thousands buried in the rubble and as the Lancet reported, the real death toll (all things considered) is likely four times the official tally. The scope of the Gaza slaughter is something really only comparable to the kind of destruction seen in World War II. Stonestreet is a scoundrel and liar and he's playing his part in covering up and sanctioning this episode of mass murder.

As far as embedding among civilians, has this knave ever bothered to look at a satellite map of Gaza? Does he know anything about it? Where else would they hide? Would he have them set up operations in the middle of football pitch so they can be taken out by a missile?

And yes, they took hostages. It's awful stuff to be sure but Stonestreet conveniently chooses to ignore the thousands of Palestinians (many totally innocent) already held in Israeli jails as well as the concentration camps and torture centres the Israeli's have employed over the course of the last year. The media has played a huge role in covering up what Israel has done and has also repeatedly promoted Tel Aviv's lies about decapitations, rapes, and much else including the fact that perhaps hundreds died on October 7 at the hand of the IDF. Many of these stories have (upon examination) fallen apart and even been retracted in Israeli media. Do you hear about that on CNN, CBS, or the BBC? Not a word. And you certainly won't hear about it from Evangelical media either. Even Israeli media openly discusses the Hannibal Directive, the IDF doctrine that mandates the killing of Israelis in order to prevent them being taken hostage.

There's also considerable evidence to suggest that Netanyahu knew this attack was coming. Given the way he's leveraged it, this suggests that he wanted it to happen in order to fulfill his goals and enable his political survival.

Max Blumenthal's 'Atrocity Inc.' is a must-see documentary that remains available on YouTube. How long it will stay there is another question. And while I cannot endorse all of Blumenthal's work or that of The Grayzone, this 45 minute production is spot on.

Even more has happened in the last few weeks. Clearly, the Israelis are intent on putting an end to the threats it faces from all sides. The amazingly coordinated pager attack, which incapacitated hundreds of Hezbollah operatives in Lebanon was followed by a series of “decapitation strikes” that wiped out the leadership of that Iran-backed terrorist group. There are now reports of an Israeli ground incursion into south Lebanon and plans for a massive Israeli retaliation against Iran for its extensive but largely ineffective missile attack.

Stonestreet praises the pager attack - which constitutes terrorism and was by international definitions a war crime. The Israelis frequently assassinate people - but Stonestreet is already on the record for supporting such actions as with Qasem Soleimani in 2020. Clearly Israel can do no wrong - which also indicates he knows nothing of the history of this nation and the events that led up to its creation in 1948 - as well as what happened in the years following.

The hypocrisy is palpable. Had Iran, Russia, China, or really any other nation apart from Israel or the United States carried out such an attack, there would be unprecedented outrage not only in the West but on a global level. The same is true of the assassination strike that killed Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah. Dozens and perhaps hundreds were killed in that strike with US-made Bunker Buster bombs. Can you even imagine the response if another nation had engaged in such an action?

To summarize all that has happened in that region over the past year is impossible. We’ve all seen again that, as one theologian has aptly said, this world is not the way it’s supposed to be, and humans have not evolved past the evil that plagues our hearts.

One enduring expression of that evil is the anti-Semitism that still plagues our world. Phrases taken from Mein Kampf or some medieval pogrom, with very little editing, could match the rhetoric we heard this year from protestors on college campuses and in Western streets. The very same voices have been silent about the hundreds of thousands killed by Syrian forces and their Russian patrons in the ongoing Syrian Civil War. They also have had very little to say about the concentration camps for Muslims in Communist China.

It is nevertheless more than a little troubling when supposed Christian leaders are promoting the evil and strengthening the hands of those who commit it. So it is with the deceived deceiver John Stonestreet.

And so we come to the real reason for this BreakPoint episode - he wants to take some shots at the campus protesters. Like others within the Christian Right he ignores the role the Israeli lobby plays on campuses and with state and federal legislation - as well as their provocateurs in some places that led to violence.

Does he want to talk about the Syrian Civil War? By all means! Should we discuss the role the United States played in unleashing that chaos that led to hundreds of thousands dead and refugees in the millions? The US still occupies portions of the country - Trump was the only one who (off script) dared to say what it's for - controlling the oil. And actually that's only part of the larger set of US concerns and interests.

And as far Uighur camps - well, those who pay attention to real news are a little sceptical of the Western campaigns and disinformation regarding Syria, Russia, and China. There's plenty of evil going on in the world and these are not nice regimes but I'm not certainly not going to listen to such charges from the likes of Stonestreet who frequently and regularly justifies Western evils.

The situation in Syria was complicated from the beginning, all the more given that the US was allied with elements of al Qaeda - something openly admitted by David Petraeus and others. The rise of ISIS was also fishy to say the least. The Ukraine story is also complicated and involves a lot of scheming and smoke and mirrors.

But in Gaza, students are witnessing a mass slaughter that would not be possible apart from the sanction, diplomatic cover, as well as the military and financial backing of the United States. It's an American war as much as it is Israel's. Biden is soaked in blood right alongside the Butcher of Gaza - Benjamin Netanyahu. And Stonestreet and Padgett (these esteemed theologians that apparently know nothing about Scripture and are classic blind guides guilty for misleading Christ's flock and supporting this slaughter) are evil and in some respects bear a greater guilt. Of all people they should know better. And since they mask their evil with the language of 'Christian Worldview' they stand especially condemned (Romans 1.32).

As a side note it continues to astonish me to consider how far the Anabaptist community has fallen and abandoned their principles. The fact that conservative Mennonites would invite this hack theologian and twisted thinker to speak at their conference and instruct their people only demonstrates just how badly they've lost their way and repudiated the Kingdom testimony of their forebears. What a travesty.

Even this piece that I wrote in 2020 is already outdated:

https://proto-protestantism.blogspot.com/2020/07/anabaptist-storm-clouds-on-horizon-part_86.html

These communities have since then drifted much farther afield. Their leaders are to blame as is their increasing embrace of mammonism, but so are the Evangelicals who have specifically targeted them and done all they can to stoke fear.

And so, another thing that has been revealed this past year is just how morally bankrupt Critical Theory is, both as an academic theory and as a cultural mood. The ideas of intersectionality, privilege, and liberation cannot accurately describe, much less address, the human condition. Despite all of the talk of justice and oppression, Critical Theory has failed to make sense of one of the grossest injustices in recent history.

After all, on this dark day a year ago, a religiously intolerant, misogynistic, anti-science, anti-democratic, and violently anti-LGBTQ group massacred men, women, and children. And yet, many progressive activists chose to champion this group because, according to some crooked intersectional hierarchy of virtue, Hamas spoke up for the oppressed and powerless against privileged Israelis. A moral framework that decides whether mass murder is wrong by who’s doing the murdering is no moral framework at all.

I'm not going to defend Critical Theory and frankly given the way the American Right has blown all of this out of proportion and created a caricature, a straw man to beat up, it's almost not worth engaging on this point. There are some ridiculous positions being put out to be sure, but you cannot simply blame all the anti-Israel protests on Critical Theory nor Anti-Semitism. Many of the protesters are Jews. Just recently at Muhlenberg College a tenured Jewish professor (Maura Finkelstein) was fired for criticising the Zionist War. Such Cancel Culture is lauded by the likes of Stonestreet and his Evangelical allies.

And let it be said - the treatment of the Palestinians is one of the grossest injustices in recent history. Israel was the darling of Western Liberalism until the Six Day War in 1967 when they captured Gaza, the West Bank, Jerusalem, and the Golan Heights. The nature of the Zionist state took on a different hue and this tension led to a reaction and after Munich and the surprise Yom Kippur attack, it led to the rise of Likud - a racialist-oriented fascist party that was peopled by terrorists from the pre-independence period. If you doubt this, ask the British.

Likud has dominated Israeli politics since the late 1970's and you don't need some avant garde theory to grasp that what's happening to the Palestinians is unjust. Israel became more aggressive, invading Lebanon, bombing PLO sites in Tunisia, attacking Iraq and so forth. I think it safe to say that people see the hypocrisy and it's sickening and given that Israel functions as an arm of the US Empire in the Middle East, they have a legitimate reason to be upset and to protest. This is all the more the case when one grasps how Israel and indeed the US military colossus infiltrates and in some cases dominates the institutions of US higher education. Whether they agree with what Hamas is or stands for is irrelevant as Israel proclaims it is a liberal democracy when in reality it is increasingly a fascist state - something even large swathes of the Israeli public have come to understand. This is why before the war there was talk of civil war in Israel and massive protests on the streets - a fact downplayed by American Right-wing media. It is in Netanyahu's interest to perpetuate and expand the war - and this is openly discussed, but Stonestreet's pseudo-Christian 'worldview' has blinded him to this fact and he provides cover for the butcher.

The brutality of the October 7 attacks revealed how real evil is. We may think notions of human wickedness are outdated, and that humanity has “evolved” beyond such archaic thinking and practice, but that’s the stuff of dreamworld. Like the similarly shocking events of 9/11, there is no way to square the idea of our “enlightened” age with that event.

They were brutal attacks but no more so than what Israel has done many times over. It's called Blowback. The same was true of 9/11, but Stonestreet like most leaders in the Evangelical movement are ignorant of what their country is and does, so they are blind to the kind of responses it can produce. They are ignorant of history and Scripture and so they mislead and sell their souls for access and fame - and mammon.

As French intellectual Bernard-Henri Lévy wrote:

All the strategies of avoidance and containment, all the tricks of conscience, all the conjuring rhetoric that we had been deploying for twenty, fifty, eighty years or more—all of it was pulverized by the Event. Evil was there. Pure evil, plain-faced, gratuitous, senseless. Evil for nothing and for no reason; evil raw and unadorned.

Western societies may have long ago abandoned the Christian vision of the human condition, but horrors like this cut through that naïveté. And yet, the Christian story also proclaims that evil like this will not have the last word. As the father of the Jewish people once proclaimed, there is a judge of all the earth, and He will do what is right. In Christ, He has.

Levy is wrong here as he is about many things. The October 7 attack was evil but it was evil responding in an evil way to evil. Gratuitous applies just as much to Israel and the Hamas attacks were not for nothing or for no reason. The statement is patently false.

Christ will judge the world and all this evil - Israel, Hamas, the United States and most of all false leaders in the Church like John Stonestreet who deceive God's people and teach lies as Biblical truth.

The great irony here is that this vile man who so desperately wants to promote the heresy of Christendom and the fiction of Christian culture and civilisation ends up promoting little more than barbarism and butchery. Truly he is the offspring of the degenerate theologians who justified evils such as the Crusades and Inquisition. That evil spirit is alive and well in our day and sits enthroned in the American Church.