by F. William Engdahl
Praying for Armageddon
It was impossible to grasp how such a drastic foreign policy shift could occur between the time of Eisenhower in the 1950’s and George W. Bush after 2001, without one little-known element: understanding the political power base that a faction of the US establishment created together with the Israeli right-wing Likud Zionist lobby that had built up around the American Christian Born-Again right-wing.
The most striking and paradoxical feature of the Likud-USA strategic alliance was the fanatical backing for the militant expansion of the State of Israel from the side of various nominally Christian denominations and organizations in the United States. Behind the religious façade, was a well-organized political machine directly tied to Tel Aviv and Washington power centers.
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| Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1882-1945), 32nd President of the USA (right) and Winston Churchill (1874-1965), British Prime Minister, meeting in Quebec in 1944. (Colorised black and white print). (Photo by Print Collector/Getty Images) |
In 1977, the Israeli intelligence services, under the direction of Dr. Jonah Malachy, quietly began to conduct a detailed profile of all the many different Christian organizations in the United States, and profiled them according to how they regarded the existence of Israel, in terms of their Christian belief.
The Israeli researchers found their most fertile soil in the Southern US states, which traditionally had been based on cotton or tobacco slavery, and whose white elites had been shaped over generations on a belief in white superiority over blacks, or other whites such as Catholics or Jews. These white protestants, whether Southern Baptist, Methodist or one of the growing number of Born Again charismatic sects proliferating in the South after World War II, were ripe for manipulation on the subject of Israel. All it needed was some fine adjustments of their theology.
Ironically, many of these Born-Again Christians were anti-semitic, anti-Jewish. Their new Israeli “friends” knew this well, and cynically proceeded to forge a strategic alliance in which the Israeli or pro-Israeli think-tanks they created in Washington would be supported in their Israel political agenda by the growing army of “Born Again” Christian voters.
Under ordinary conditions, the American Christian Zionists would have remained one of many tiny sects in America calling themselves Christian. The events surrounding the shocking terror attacks of September 11, 2001 and the demagogic manipulation of those events by a nominally Born-Again President George W. Bush, dramatically changed that and made Christian Zionism a far more serious political force within US politics, more so because most of its members were white, upper middle-class Republicans. They had built a highly organized national political machine and had leveraged their influence to an almost decisive factor, often deciding whether a given candidate for national office would win or lose.
As Jewish scholar Barbara Tuchman documented in her famous account of British Zionism, Bible and Sword, the roots of Christian Zionism went back to the British Imperial ideology, in which certain very prominent British establishment figures including Lord Palmerston, Lords Balfour and Shaftesbury saw support for a Jewish home in Palestine as part of a manufactured or synthetic ideology in which, bizarrely, they claimed the British people to be the ‘Chosen People’, to be the ‘Lost Tribe of Israel.’ It gave British Imperialism a powerful pseudo-religious justification.
The Roots of Christian Zionism
John Nelson Darby, a renegade Irish priest who died in 1881, had created the idea of ‘the Rapture” as he founded a new brand of Christian Zionism. In his vision, special people whom he called ‘Born-Again Christians” would be taken up to Heaven before the second coming of Christ—their ‘rapture.’ Darby also put Israel at the heart of his strange new theology, claiming that an actual Jewish state of Israel would become the ‘central instrument for God to fulfil his plans for a final Battle of Armageddon.’
Darby travelled widely in the United States and won adherents to his bizarre sect, creating the beginnings of American Christian Zionism, including the famous US Bible interpreters Cyrus Scofield, Dwight L. Moody, who founded the Moody Bible Institute in Chicago, and the 1930’s preacher, Billy Sunday. In 1909 Scofield published the Scofield Bible, with footnotes interpreting Bible passages according to the Darby Christian Zionist world. By the end of the 20th Century that Scofield Bible was the basis for all US Christian Zionist and Born Again teaching in what was becoming the fastest growing sector of the Christian faith in the USA.
Christian Zionists like Reverend Jerry Falwell and Rev. Pat Robertson could be traced back to a project of British Secret Intelligence services and the British establishment. That project was designed to use the Zion ideology to advance Empire and power in North America. American Christian Zionists in the period of American Empire in the 1950’s and later, merely adopted this ideology and gave it an American name. It was the religious counterpart of the Anglo-American “Special Relation” which had been built up between Winston Churchill and Roosevelt during World War II.
The peculiar Christians, who called themselves Christian Zionists, and who formed the core activist voter base of the Bush Presidency in 2000, preached a doctrine quite different from the traditional Christian Gospel of love for fellow men and tolerance. They preached hate and war, a militant brand of belief that had more similarity with the 12th Century bloody Crusades than with modern Christianity. The soil it bred in was the bitter race hatreds of the post-Civil War US South held by generations of whites against blacks and against Catholics and, ironically, against Jews as ‘inferior’ races. Their religion was the religion of a coming Final Battle of Armageddon, of a Rapture in which the elect would be swept up to Heaven while the ‘infidels’ would die in mutual slaughter.
A Palestinian Christian described them: “Christian Zionism, on the political level, is crassly simplistic and unabashedly biased. It is supportive of the most extreme political positions of right wing Israelis, and deliberately ignores political realities, and the interest, or even existence, of other groups, including Palestinian Christians. In its total bias, it also ignores the requirements of international law, ethical principles, violations of human rights, and the requirements of simple justice.”
In the months following the US September 11 attacks, Rev. Pat Robertson openly preached that Muslims were “worse than the Nazis.” On his Christian Broadcasting Network in November 2002, Robertson declared, “Adolf Hitler was bad, but what the Muslims want to do to the Jews is worse.” Robertson, claiming to be a man of God, refused to retract the hate speech despite much public outcry. In other comments, he compared the Qu’ran to Hitler’s Mein Kampf as a blueprint for world domination. They were hardly constructive words to heal the wounds of a nation still in shock after September 11, or to win friends abroad.
In an October 2002 CBS ‘Sixty Minutes’ TV broadcast, Robertson’s Christian Zion friend, Rev. Jerry Falwell declared, “I think Muhammed was a terrorist, a violent man, a man of war…” Bush’s War on Terror was being defined by his Christian Zionist base as a holy “Crusade” against Islam, Sir Bernard Lewis’s Clash of Civilization, adapted by Harvard Professor Samuel Huntington in a famous 1993 Foreign Affairs article as the “clash of civilizations.” It asserted that following the collapse of the Soviet Union the main conflict in the world would be between opposing cultural and religious identities.
In his 1993 article, Huntington had argued, “World politics is entering a new phase, in which the great divisions among humankind and the dominating source of international conflict will be cultural. Civilizations–the highest cultural groupings of people–are differentiated from each other by religion, history, language and tradition. These divisions are deep and increasing in importance. From Yugoslavia to the Middle East to Central Asia, the fault lines of civilizations are the battle lines of the future. In this emerging era of cultural conflict the United States must forge alliances with similar cultures and spread its values wherever possible. With alien civilizations the West must be accommodating if possible, but confrontational if necessary.”
The new “enemy image” was being defined by the US establishment as early as 1993, only months after the collapse of the Soviet Union, as Islam. It was the prelude to the 2001 War on Terrorism, a thinly-disguised War on Islam.
Echoing the anti-Islam fervor of Falwell and Robertson, Rev. Franklin Graham, son of the famous Christian evangelist and Bush family friend, Reverend Billy Graham, declared after September 11 that Islam was “a very evil and wicked religion.” The large US Southern Baptist Convention’s former President, Jerry Vines, called the Prophet Mohammed the most vile names imaginable. It was all about stirring Americans in a time of fear into hate against the Islamic world, in order to rev up Bush’s War on Terror.
Graham, who controlled an organization known as the Samaritan Purse, was a close religious adviser to George W. Bush. In 2003 Graham got permission from the US occupation authorities to bring his Evangelical anti-Islam form of Christianity into Iraq to win “converts” to his fanatical brand of Christianity.
According to author Grace Halsell, Christian Zionists believed that “every act taken by Israel is orchestrated by God, and should be condoned, supported, and even praised by the rest of us.” It was all beginning to sound far too much like a new Holy Crusade against more than one billion followers of the Islamic faith.
The Likud’s Christian Zionists in America
After the Likud government of Menachim Begin realized in 1977 that President Carter was intent on human rights for Palestinians, including statehood, Likud and their neo-conservative allies in the US began to look for support outside the liberal Democratic Party of Carter. The Israeli Labour Party had supported land-for-peace, but the Likud backed a Greater Israel, which would include the occupied Palestinian territories of West Bank and Gaza, which they call Judea and Samaria. The pro-Likud neo-conservatives around Irving Kristol, Richard Perle and others left the Democratic Party at that time to found what they later would call ‘Neo-conservativism’, and to build their base inside the Republican Party of Ronald Reagan, a man who was very much influenced by the Christian Right himself.
In 1978, Prof. Yona Malachy of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, published his major research profile on American evangelical Protestant groups, titled, ‘American Fundamentalism and Israel: The Relation of Fundamentalist Churches to Zionism and the State of Israel.’
Malachy discovered numerous American Protestant sects, most in the rural Southern states, who linked their theology to the State of Israel, through a strange, literal interpretation of the Bible. Their ministers were typically trained at the Moody Bible Institute or, often, the ultra-conservative Dallas Theological Seminary of John Walvoord in Texas. They diligently read the 1909 Scofield Reference Bible, whose footnotes ‘explain’ the Bible texts in their arcane prophecy terms.
Leaders of the Likud and select Israeli religious leaders, went to work after 1977 to bring the most charismatic, and often most corruptible, leaders of these US Christian groups to Israel, where they developed direct links between Likud leaders and the Christian Right in the US.
Menachim Begin began to attend Washington ‘prayer breakfasts for Israel’ with fundamentalist ministers including Rev. Jerry Falwell, then head of Moral Majority, and Rev. Pat Robertson, founder of the Christian Coalition and the Christian Broadcasting Network. When another Jew pointed out that these Christians were anti-semitic, Begin reportedly snapped back to the effect he did not care so long as they supported Israel in the US.
Conservative Christian support for Israel is based largely on various prophecies about the Jewish people during the ‘end-times’ which they believe are found throughout the Bible. They are viewed as playing a major role in ‘TEOTWAWKI’ (the end of the world as we know it).
Representative of some most often-cited Bible passages used by the Christian Zionists to support their end-times prophesy are the following passages taken from the King James Version of the Bible:
* Zechariah 12:3: ‘And in that day will I make Jerusalem a burdensome stone for all people: all that burden themselves with it shall be cut in pieces, though all the people of the earth be gathered together against it.’ The implication is that the Jewish people would return to Israel; this happened in 1948 with the creation of the State of Israel. Later, all the nations of the earth will gather against her. Some believe that we are near that point today. But God will make Jerusalem an immovable rock. This came to pass when the Camp David peace talks found that the future status of Jerusalem became a major stumbling block.
* Zechariah 12:9-10: ‘And it shall come to pass in that day, that I will seek to destroy all the nations that come against Jerusalem. And I will pour upon the house of David, and upon the inhabitants of Jerusalem, the spirit of grace and of supplications: and they shall look upon me whom they have pierced, and they shall mourn for him, as one mourneth for his only son, and shall be in bitterness for him, as one that is in bitterness for his firstborn.” Many conservative Christians interpret this as saying that Jews will be humbled, will accept Jesus as their Lord and Savior, and become Christians.
* Revelation 4:4: ‘And round about the throne were four and twenty seats: and upon the seats I saw four and twenty elders sitting, clothed in white raiment; and they had on their heads crowns of gold.” Conservative Christians view the 24 as being composed of the patriarchs of each of the twelve ancient tribes of Israel, along with the twelve apostles. To emphasize their unity, they are gathered in a circle around the throne of God. All are believed to be Christians at that time.
* Revelation 7:3-4: ‘Saying, Hurt not the earth, neither the sea, nor the trees, till we have sealed the servants of our God in their foreheads. And I heard the number of them which were sealed: and there were sealed an hundred and forty and four thousand of all the tribes of the children of Israel.’
* Revelation 14:1-4: ‘And I looked, and, lo, a Lamb stood on the mount Sion, and with him an hundred forty and four thousand, having his Father’s name written in their foreheads….These are they which were not defiled with women; for they are virgins. These are they which follow the Lamb whithersoever he goeth. These were redeemed from among men, being the first fruits unto God and to the Lamb.’
The passages seemed to imply that 144,000 Jewish virgins — their gender was not mentioned — would convert to Christianity and be ‘sealed.’ They would have God’s name written on their forehead, and be followers of the Lamb — i.e. of Christ. Some Christians interpreted these phrases as implying that 144,000 Jews will convert to Christianity and then attempt to convert the remaining Jews in Israel.
The vast majority of American and international Christian churches were highly critical of the theological claims of the Christian Zionists. The Middle East Council of Churches, representing Oriental and Eastern Christian churches in the Middle East, charged that the Christian Zionists, “aggressively imposed an aberrant expression of the Christian faith, and an erroneous interpretation of the Bible which is subservient to the political agenda of the modern State of Israel.” Christian Zionism, they said, “rejects the movement of Christian unity and inter-religious understanding.”
Rapture for God’s ‘Chosen People’
Christian Zionism existed even before Theodor Herzl founded modern Jewish Zionism in the late 1800’s. Certain Protestant dissenter sects during the English Civil War in the 1600’s believed themselves to be God’s Chosen People, the ‘lost tribe of Israel.’
A number of prominent British Imperialists were Christian Zionists, including Lord Palmerston, Lord Shaftesbury, Lloyd George and Lord Balfour, who issued the 1917 Balfour Declaration giving Jews a homeland in British-protected Palestine. For them, the ideology justified British Imperialism as a religious mission.
Christian Zionists argued that the Land of Israel had been given to the Jewish people by God, and that in order for the Second Coming of Christ to occur, all Jews must return to Israel for a Final Battle of Armageddon, a kind of a Manichean slug-out between the Forces of Good and the Forces of Evil.
They admitted it would destroy the Earth. They even called it the End Times. But the ‘good news’ for Christian Zionists was that they, the true believers, would be suddenly caught up into Heaven in a holy ‘Rapture.’ They would be spared the messy aspects of a nuclear holocaust at Armageddon.
Their theology was a dangerous brew of Manichean absolutist black and white—good versus evil—which saw the alliance of the USA, under their direction, of course, and Israel, battling the forces of ‘evil’, especially Islam and Muslims. It was reminiscent of the statements by George W. Bush in the wake of September 11, 2001 where he declared, “either you’re with America or you are against us,” as he spoke of a “new Crusade.”
Ironically, behind their pro-Israel facade Christian Zionists like Falwell and Robertson cynically used their links to Israeli Jews to push an anti-semitic agenda of their own.
Uri Avnery, leader of the Israeli peace group Gush Shalom, describing the theology of these supposed Christian friends of Israel, stated, ‘According to its theological beliefs the Jews must congregate in Palestine and establish a Jewish state on all its territory so as to make the Second Coming of Jesus Christ possible…The evangelists don’t like to dwell openly on what comes next: before the coming (of the Messiah), the Jews must convert to Christianity. Those who don’t will perish in a gigantic holocaust in the battle of Armageddon. This is basically an anti-semitic teaching…,’ namely that Jews who remain true to their Old Testament beliefs will all be killed.
This organized lobby of the Christian ‘Born Again’ ultra-conservative voters was credited with securing the re-election of George W. Bush in 2004 and Donald Trump in 2016. A study undertaken of American voting blocs in 2003 found that the Christian Right comprised the largest active social movement in the United States and the largest voting bloc within George Bush’s Republican Party.
On October 19, 2004 Dr. Daniel Akin, President of the Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary issued an Open Letter signed by 72 Evangelical leaders urging the American people to ‘use Biblical values in their selection of candidates.’ The letter cited gay marriage, stem-cell research, and Democrats’ alleged defense of ‘terrorists’ as reasons to vote Republican not Democrat. The letter was signed by the most prominent members of the Christian Zion right backing Bush and backing Sharon as, ‘fulfilment of Bible prophesy.’
The crucial new element in the emergence of the Christian Right in recent years in America was their focus on organized political influence, not merely on religious life-style and church piety.
In 1979, Reverend Jerry Falwell, a member of the Committee on National Policy and a Christian Zionist leading figure, launched an organisation known as the Moral Majority with the aim ‘to mobilize the Christian church on behalf of moral and social issues and to encourage participation by people of faith in the political process.’
The Moral Majority quickly became a household name. Through its charismatic public leader, Falwell, the organisation mobilised thousands of churches and millions of registered voters to form a Christian political bloc, and what came to be known as the Christian-Right.
Falwell was soon sought out by aspiring politicians hungry for his approval and potential votes. Falwell in turn, rated candidates on their acceptability on issues considered of priority to the Israeli Likud, with whom he had in the meantime become quite close. Falwell flew across the US in a luxurious private jet given him as a gift on a trip to Israel by Likud Prime Minister Menachim Begin.
It was also around this same time, in the late 1970’s that the formal Christian-Right was established and certain Israeli organisations began understanding that an alliance with the Christian Zionists in the US could bolster their image and prominence on the international level through a stronger influence in US politics.
The fervency of the Christian-Right towards support of the State of Israel, coupled with its strong American presence, captured the attention of Israeli interest groups. Though aware of their diametric opposite social and religious views, some Israeli political organisations saw an alliance with the Christian Zionists as a crucial element in promoting a positive image of Israel in US politics and among the American mainstream.
Jewish-American leaders were initially opposed to an alliance with the Christian-Right and perceived the movement as a possible adversary. However, when the formal establishment of the Christian-Right solidified this movement as an influential political bloc in the US, these feelings of trepidation were soon dissipated and various Israeli groups recognised that an alliance with this bloc would be advantageous to their political interests.
These US religious spokesmen claimed they had been told by God such things as whether the US should go to war against Iraq. In an article, ‘Should We Go To War With Iraq?’ Roy A. Reinhold on February 5, 2003 wrote of his discussion with his God: ‘Many people wonder whether this coming showdown with Iraq, by the USA and a coalition of nations, is worthwhile and whether it is the right thing to do.
‘On Saturday, February 1, 2003, I lifted my hands to begin praying and the Lord spoke to me… I wanted to know whether the God the Father’s direction was to go to war or not go to war. ..The Lord said, ‘I am saying to go to war with Iraq’.
Reinhold added, ‘I put the above on my message boards and what everyone wanted to know was, ‘what is God’s reason(s) for going to war with Iraq?’ That question hadn’t occurred to me, because I personally just accepted God’s direction.’
The raw hate ideology of the US Christian Zionists, claiming personal support from God, represented a dangerous shift in US politics to the extreme right. Some circles around Bush and his trusted political advisor, Karl Rove, sought to create out of American fears and uncertainty regarding such issues as gay marriage, a core theocratic state, just opposite what most Americans wished. Rove had been the architect of Bush’s relationship with the Christian Zionist fundamentalist Right when Bush was still Texas Governor.
Rebuilding the Temple of Salomon
The US Christian Zionists and their allies have a long-term agenda which well might trigger a new World War. Some neo-conservatives say that war began on September 11, 2001. They refer to it as World War IV, claiming that the Cold War was actually World War III.
These circles wanted to destroy the holy Islamic Al Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem and rebuild the Biblical Temple of Salomon on the site, where they would resume animal sacrifice. Michael Ledeen, a close adviser to the Bush White House, was at the heart of the dangerous lunacy.
During the 1970’s the face of Christian practice in the United States was transformed by new ‘television-evangelists’ with names such as Rev. Jerry Falwell with his organization, the Moral Majority or Rev. Pat Robertson with his tax-exempt TV ‘700 Club’ broadcasts, which bring his organization hundreds of millions dollars a year, or author Hal Lindsey, with his ‘Rapture’ series of fiction novels about the end of civilization around a final Battle of Armageddon in what is today’s Israel. These Born Again Christians, as they called themselves, began to dominate the US airwaves. It later emerged that many of these, including the anti-Islamic Falwell and Robertson, were intimately linked to the Israeli right-wing. Some also had ties to the CIA.
Grace Halsell, who died on 2000, grew up on the same Texas soil where the Christian fundamentalism that captured George W. Bush, was dominant. She went on to become a White House speech writer in the 1960’s, and later a courageous journalist who devoted her last years to exposing the dangerous ties of Falwell and other so-called born-again Christians to the Israeli right-wing.
During the 1980’s, to understand the Born-Again phenomenon then sweeping across the United States, Halsell went to Israel with a group led by Falwell. As she described it, ‘My inquiry led me to ask why does a Christian such as Jerry Falwell pray for the end of the world? Must we totally destroy this world in order to usher in a ‘new heaven and a new earth?’ Her conclusions were alarming.
She found that Falwell had become a close friend of the Israeli right, when she went on their joint Bible tour of Israel and the Holy Land in 1983. Halsell noted the curious fact that, rather than concentrate the tour on Christian sites in the Holy Land, Falwell’s tour was entirely run by Israeli guides and toured only Israeli sites of interest. Moreover, Falwell was given as a gift by the Israeli government his personal Lear private jet to make his US tours.
Falwell and other US Christian Born Again fundamentalists said they believed that it was ‘God’s Will’ that Israel move to establish its greater domination in the Mideast, as that will bring the world that much closer to the Biblical ‘Day of Final Judgment,’ when the ‘true-believers’ will be saved in a mystical ‘rapture,’ being swept up to Heaven, as the unsaved perish in the final Battle of Armageddon. That battle, according to Falwell and his friends, will pit Jews against Muslims.
Halsell interviewed a number of Americans actively involved in trying to ‘speed up’ the final Armageddon. One was Terry Risenhoover, an Oklahoma oilman and Born Again Christian Zionist, who was close to the Reagan White House. Risenhoover was open about his views. He financed people in Israel and elsewhere who would rebuild the destroyed Temple of Salomon, the so-called Third Temple, on one of Islam’s most holy sites, the Al-Aqsa Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem.
In 1985 Risenhoover was chairman of the American Forum for Jewish-Christian Cooperation, along with its director, Doug Krieger and American Rabbi David Ben-Ami, a close friend of Israel’s Ariel Sharon. Risenhoover was also, chairman of the Jerusalem Temple Foundation, ‘whose sole purpose is the rebuilding of a temple on the site of the present Muslim shrine.’
Risenhoover selected Stanley Goldfoot as his International Secretary of Temple Mount Foundation. Goldfoot was a former member of the terrorist Stern Gang, denounced by Ben-Gurion as Nazis. Goldfoot was the person, according to Israeli newspaper, Davar, who placed the bomb in Jerusalem’s King David Hotel in July 1946 which killed some 100 British citizens.
Risenhoover boasted to Halsell in an interview on Goldfoot that, ‘He’s a very solid, legitimate terrorist. He has the qualifications for clearing a site for the Temple.’ A Goldfoot deputy, Yisrael Meida, told Halsell, ‘He who controls the Temple Mount, controls Jerusalem. Who controls Jerusalem, controls the Land of Israel,’ a new twist on the famous dictum of geopolitics of Sir Halford MacKinder: “Who controls Central Europe controls the Heartland; who controls the Heartland (Russia etc) controls the World Island; who controls the World Island controls the world…”
In 1998, an Israeli newsletter posted on the Voice of Temple Mount website, announced that its goal is the ‘liberation’ of the Muslim shrines around Al Aqsa, and the building of a Jewish Temple on the site. ‘Now the time is ripe for the Temple to be rebuilt,’ they announced. They then called on the Israeli government to ‘end the pagan (sic) Islamic occupation’ of lands where the mosque stands. ‘The building of the Third Temple is near,’ they proclaimed in 1998.
Hal Lindsey, in The Late Great Planet Earth, wrote that ‘there remains but one more event to completely set the stage for Israel’s part in the last great act of her historical drama. This is to rebuild the ancient Temple of worship upon its old site. There is only one place that this Temple can be built, according to the Law of Moses. This is upon Mt. Moriah. It is there that the two previous Temples were built.’
Grace Halsell added, ‘Fanatics who belong to what the vast majority of Christians and Jews might term a crazy minority – and numbering no more than five percent of the total Israeli population – are nevertheless capable of destroying Islam’s most holy shrine in Jerusalem, an act that could easily trigger a worldwide war involving Russia and the United States.’
This fanatical Pre-millennial Dispensationalism had come to dominate American Evangelicalism and Fundamentalism, especially through the influence of Dallas Theological Seminary and the Moody Bible Institute. The movement had grown in popularity within evangelical circles, particularly in America and especially since 1967, coinciding with the Arab-Israel Six Day War and a few years later in 1970 with the publication of Hal Lindsey’s ‘The Late Great Planet Earth.’
Crucial to their reading of biblical prophecy, drawn principally from Daniel, Zechariah and the Book of Revelation, was the assertion that the Jewish Temple will be rebuilt on the Temple Mount as a precursor to the Lord returning to restore the Kingdom of Israel centred on Jerusalem. This pivotal event was also seen as the trigger for the start of the War of Armageddon.
These beliefs soured relations between Moslem Arabs and Christian Arabs perpetuating fears of a revived Western military adventurism dating back to the Crusades.
The 1967 watershed war
The 1967 Six Day War and its aftermath marked a watershed in Evangelical Christian interest in Israel and Zionism. Jerry Falwell did not begin to speak about modern-day Israel until after Israel’s 1967 military victory.
Falwell then changed completely. He entered into politics and became an avid supporter of the Zionist State. In 1967, the United States was mired in the Vietnam war. Many felt a sense of defeat, helplessness and discouragement. Many Americans, including Falwell, turned worshipful glances toward Israel, which they viewed as militarily strong and invincible.
The combination of the founding of the state of Israel in 1948, the capture of Jerusalem and the West Bank in 1967, and the defeat on both occasions of the combined Arab armies, increasingly came to be seen as significant fulfilment of biblical prophecy by a new generation of American and European dispensational pre-millennialists.
Rev. Billy Graham’s father-in-law, Nelson Bell, editor of the authoritative mouthpiece of conservative Evangelicalism, Christianity Today, wrote in an editorial in 1967, ‘That for the first time in more than 2,000 years Jerusalem is now completely in the hands of the Jews gives a student of the Bible a thrill and a renewed faith in the accuracy and validity of the Bible.’
Bush, Christian Zion and Freemasonry
A most difficult area to illuminate regarding American relations to right-wing Israeli Zionists and the ties between Israel and Christian Zionists such as Jerry Falwell, Rev. Franklin Graham, Pat Robertson, James Dobson, Gary Bauer and other US backers of the Right-wing Israeli Likud policies, was the role of international esoteric freemasonry.
Freemasonry has been defined as a secret or occult society which conceals its goals even from most of its own members, members who often are recruited naively as lower level members, unaware they are being steered from behind the curtains. The most powerful Freemasonic Order in the United States is believed to be the Supreme Council of the Scottish Rite, or the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite, with its world headquarters now in Washington, DC.
Key Bush family adviser, James Baker III, of the Texas law firm Baker & Botts and of the Carlyle Group, was a Scottish Rite high ranking mason. George Bush was known to be a high ranking mason as was his father, George Herbert Walker Bush.
Freemasonry was the secret network which allows manipulation of much behind the scenes. Were people openly known as masons, their power would vanish as others would see through their blatant schemes such as assassinations, wars, blackmail, fraud and above all, what seems to be a project to destroy real religious belief among ordinary people.
There was a special role played by one of the two major branches of Anglo-Saxon Freemasonry, that of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite. Its history goes back far, but in the late 1800’s its leader was a Confederate General, Albert Pike. Pike founded the racist Ku Klux Klan as a secret Scottish Rite project to control the South through race hate and fear, after the American Civil War.
The Scottish Rite enjoyed an active branch in Israel, even though it was nominally a Christian society. It spoke of its tradition going back to ‘the early masons who built King Salomon’s Temple.’ The fact that American Christian Zionists typically were concentrated in the South and came from the similar white racist strata as the Scottish Rite, and that they actively backed the Israeli fanatics who seek to rebuild the Third Temple of Salomon at the site of the sacred Al Aqsa Mosque and thereby ignite the Final Battle of Armageddon cannot be coincidence. All evidence suggested that the Jewish advocates of destroying Al Aqsa and rebuilding the Temple of Salomon there were being supported by the Scottish Rite masons in the United States and Britain.
Indeed, there was circumstantial evidence that much of the organized American Christian Right that backs Israeli right-wing policies was secretly backed by Scottish Rite masonry. The Southern Baptist Convention recently had a heated debate over allegations that some 500,000 of their members were also masons, reportedly most Scottish Rite. The Southern Baptist organization is well-known for its racial hatred of blacks. Cecil Rhodes, the man who was backed by Rothschild to create the mining empire of South Africa was a Scottish Rite member as was Lord Palmerston, also himself a British Israelite.
F. William Engdahl is an award-winning geopolitical analyst, strategic risk consultant, author, professor and lecturer. He has been researching and writing about the world political scene for more than thirty years. His various books on geopolitics—the interaction between international power politics, economics and geography—have been translated into 14 foreign languages from Chinese to French, from German to Japanese.
