Saturday, December 28, 2013

Why Jesus was a Zionist



by James Lewis


After the 1960s, the radical left conquered America's Organs of Propaganda, which now run robotically identical "news" stories every single day. Yet normal people don't all march to the same drummer. Big Media coordination of the "news" proves that we no longer have a free-thinking press; only the web is still free. 

Voltaire nailed it when he said that "To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize." There you have the open secret of our ruling class. If Obama can't be criticized for five whole years, you know who rules you. It's not you or me.

Now 'tis the season of Christmas, Hanukkah, and the New Year, a good time to wonder what Jesus would say about our political-media cult and its real beliefs.

What would Jesus say about the alphabet channels and the New York Times? What would he say about MSNBC and Chris Matthews? About Miley Cyrus? About the infiltration of our lives by radical Muslims pursuing jihad against the infidels -- AKA free Americans?

Theologically Jesus is viewed by different people in very different ways -- liberal Christians seem to see him as a "community organizer" like Obama. Others seem him as a spiritually ideal human being, a divinely inspired prophet, a messianic bringer of salvation, and as both human and divine in Christian orthodox theology.

A Georgetown professor just said on MSNBC that Christian men claiming to love Jesus more than they love women "sounds interestingly homoerotic." But that's just the usual provocation by spokesnoids for the left, who love to offend you and me by confusing Jesus with their own smelly little orthodoxies.

That's what sells in our brain-dead media today.

Here I simply want to point out that whatever else Jesus was, as a human being in his time and place, he must have been a Zionist, a lover of Israel. The reason is simply that Jewish patriotism was the cultural soil in which he grew and flourished. It was the cultural context of his life.

That is an important point these days, because the mass media have twisted our political vocabulary, including the word "Zionism." The left in its bottomless ignorance seems to believe that Zionism is a leftover from European imperialism of the 19th century, and that any black or brown folks who try to destroy it are well within their rights.

Last year, Benghazi revealed an American ambassador smuggling arms to Al Qaida in Syria, the same folks celebrated by John McCain on an infamous visit, and yes, the same people who keep spawning photos of decapitated Christian children in Maloula and Nairobi. Our media distinguished itself once again by keeping total silence about huge crimes against humanity committed by Muslims.

But contrary to the left, Zionism is not just a leftover of the British Empire in the Middle East. Neither are the persecuted Coptic Christians of Egypt, having lived there centuries before Mohammed. The same goes for the Orthodox Churches, the Zoroastrians, and any number of religious sects that are commonly persecuted by jihadist monsters.

Zionism goes back more than two and a half millennia, 2,500 years, even earlier than the Babylonian Exile. Mount Zion is the symbolic heart of Jerusalem.

You might remember Psalm 137:1:
"By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion." KJV
That verse dates to the sixth century BCE. Babylon was a great empire in Mesopotamia, the land between the Two Rivers, Tigris and Euphrates. We call it Iraq.

(Iraq is named after the ancient city of Uruk, related to Ur of the Chaldees, the legendary home of the patriarch Abraham).

Jewish nationalism has flowed continuously from those ancient times, just as Irish nationalism is one long stream starting about 1,200 years ago. Like the Jews, the Irish are a mix of ethnos (family and clan), language (Gaelic), and faith (the faith brought by St. Patrick, along with earlier beliefs). Unlike America, a nation of immigrants, most countries in the world come from that kind of fusion of ethnos, faith, and language.

Just as Irish Americans can love Ireland without abandoning the United States, Jews and Christians can love the Holy Land without abandoning America. America's freedom and sovereignty supports the freedom and sovereignty of other civilized, democratic nations. That is our whole history.

Still, the anti-Zionist left now makes common cause with ancient Islamic imperialism, in a clearly stated genocidal program to wipe out the nation of Israel. As we hear the usual river of lies and half-truths babbled by our politicians and media, that's basically all you really need to know. Check the facts at your fingertips.

Iran's mullahs have chanted their genocidal creed with their charming simplicity every single day since 1979:

Death to America!!! Death to Israel !!!

But since the New York Times never covers that fact, millions of Americans know nothing about it. Normal Americans faced the truth about Hitler and Japan, Stalin and a nuclear Soviet Union. But today we have turned into international know-nothings.

So -- during the Christmas and Hanukkah season it's worth wondering whether Jesus was a Jewish patriot, a Zionist.

Almost everything about the life of Jesus is hotly disputed, including his messianic preaching and his personal divinity. But if we step outside of theology for the moment, there are basic facts on which historians agree: His approximate year of birth, his origins in the Galilee, (many days of travel from the capital of Jerusalem), his role as a preacher of popular fame, his last pilgrimage to the city of Zion to celebrate the Passover holiday, commemorating the escape of the Hebrew slaves from Egypt to the land of Zion. Traditional American blacks took the Hebrew slaves' flight to freedom as a prophecy for their own lives, in spirituals and sermons, and in names like the Zion Baptist Church.

The facts suggest that Jesus was a Jewish patriot, just as Socrates was an Athenian patriot. A country child growing up among the bonds of ethnos (family and clan), of religion and group identity, cherished by a people who were viciously oppressed by one conqueror after another, cannot help but be a natural patriot. If you doubt it, ask any Irish child today if he or she feels Irish. Or ask your kids if they feel American.

(Things were different among the Hellenized urban upper classes in Judaea, who often followed Greco-Roman customs and beliefs. King Herod the Great lived with the imperial family in Rome for years before he was appointed king of Judaea.)

It was a time of endless political arguments between Jewish rebels like the Maccabees and others who either identified with Rome, or who lived in an uncomfortable middle ground. The Maccabee revolt celebrated by the Hanukkah holiday broke out 150 years before the birth of Jesus, and was put down with the usual murderous ferocity. Seventy years after the birth of Jesus, another rebellion, led by Bar Kochba, broke out -- ultimately leading to the annihilation of Jerusalem by the Roman general Titus, and yet another exile for the Jewish people. Today in Rome you can see the Arch of Titus, with its famous sculpture of Titus driving his Jewish war captives through a triumphal march, bearing the great Menorah of the Second Temple of Jerusalem.

Jesus died on the cross around 36 AD/CE. Pontius Pilate, the Roman prefect or procurator of Judaea, was recalled back to Rome in the year 36. Jesus must have been crucified before that time.

The death of Jesus is another source of endless debates, but there is no doubt why the Romans would crucify him. He was a suspected rebel against Rome, and the Romans killed such people on suspicion alone. The Pontius Pilate of the Gospels comes across as a perfectly practical Roman: when in doubt kill any suspected rebels.

For all we know there was a traitor among Jesus' disciples, like the Judas of the Gospels. For all we know the Sanhedrin plotted against him. Because Christianity became the official state religion of Rome in 330 AD/CE, the canonical Gospels were not allowed to blame Rome for the death of Jesus. Another scapegoat had to be found. The truth is that nobody knows all the ins and outs. There were no objective historians around, rooting through reams of original documents to tease out the truth.

Yet crucifixion was a Roman method of execution, combining inconceivable pain with certain death. Four decades after Jesus, in the year 72, Titus crucified a reported 70,000 Jewish rebels on the hills of Jerusalem, according to contemporary accounts. Titus didn't believe in the presumption of innocence. He killed any suspected rebel.

In sum, Jesus was a Zionist because normal Jewish children grew up that way -- with the exception of Hellenized Jews in strategic cities like Jerusalem and Caesarea, where Roman soldiers were present in force.

If Jesus was a Jewish patriot, a Zionist, why do millions of liberal Christians today support an anti-Zionist, genocide-threatening campaign mounted by a Muslim war theology that has conducted 1,500 years of genocidal war? A campaign that threatens genocide against Israel every single day? And which, in the case of the mullahs, is now only a month away from perfecting a nuclear bomb?

How can millions of liberal Christians claim to follow Jesus and still support the new, fashionable anti-Zionist genocidalism?

What would Jesus do today?

The best evidence gives a clear answer: that Jesus grew up in world pervaded with a love for Zion; that he knew the Psalms and their mourning over the Babylonian Exile from Zion; he was intimately familiar with Passover and its powerful theme of liberation by way of Zion; and that three times every day Jesus pronounced the Jewish credo, the Shemah, "Hear oh Israel, the Lord your God, the Lord is One." The Shemah is an expression of Jewish unity, calling on the people of Zion to worship one God.

This is not exactly news, though it seems to be news to our media and their millions of brainwashed followers. You can still hear those ideas expressed by Bach, Handel, Verdi, and Brahms. Or you can see it in glorious works by Michelangelo, Bernini, Leonardo, and Rembrandt. The identification of Jesus with the Holy Land has never been questioned -- not until our surpassingly ignorant time.

As George Orwell wrote, in a time of deceit, saying the obvious is a revolutionary act.

The obvious fact is that Jesus was a lover of Zion.

Pass on the truth, please.


James Lewis

Source: http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/12/why_jesus_was_a_zionist.html

Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.

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