Pictured above, the soft-sell, upbeat marketing poster for Walid Shoebat's appearance in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. Shoebat claims (since discredited by Richard Bartholomew) that he is a former Muslim Palestinian terrorist turned born-again Christian who wants to educate the world about the evils of Islam. He is in fact a useful tool of the Christian Zionist branch of American extremism in their effort to stoke hatred against Muslims, which is the real reason he is Sioux Falls, and probably being trotted around to a lot of other small town/exurb places in America right now.
For another look at Shoebat's peaceful, loving ways, check out this video (marketing a book written by his son: hate-mongering is a family business apparently) from his website. I love the way they save the Pat Robertson quote about Allah being the deceiver until the last 10 seconds. They probably figured that anybody who was offended would have tuned out in disgust by then:
Chris Hedges writes: Sarah Palin may be a governor and a vice presidential candidate, but in the hyper-masculine world of the Christian right, she is subservient to a male hierarchy that claims to speak for God.
A cult of masculinity defines the Wasilla Assembly of God church and the Juneau Christian Centre where she worshipped. This cult propagates a vision of the world where believers are warriors. They are taught to ready themselves to engage in a final cataclysmic clash with the forces of Satan. This cosmic struggle, infused with the language of war, death and violence, leads inevitably to the slaughter by the righteous of all non-Christians. The photos of Palin hunched over dead animals she has shot are not simply images of a woman who is a member of the National Rifle Association. They are images of a woman who believes violence against nonbelievers is ultimately part of her religious life.
The cult of masculinity is used to banish ambiguity, especially sexual ambiguity. It fosters a world of binary opposites: God and man, the saved and the unsaved, the church and the world, Christianity and secular humanism, and male and female. All in life is rigidly defined. Disorder and chaos are banished. Reality, when it is defined in these absolutes, is predictable and understandable, something deeply comforting to believers who have often had trouble coping with the messiness of human existence.
All configurations of human life that do not conform to the rigid Christian model, such as homosexuality, are forms of disorder, tools of Satan, and must be abolished. This is why Palin opposes gay marriage and calls for gays to be cured. A world that can be predicted and understood, a world that has clear markers, can be made rational. It can be managed and controlled. The petrified, binary world of fixed, immutable and established roles is a world where people, many of them damaged by bouts with failure and despair, can bury their chaotic and fragmented personalities. They can live with the illusion that they are strong, whole and protected. Those who do not fit into these narrow definitions must be proselytized and converted.
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Palin enjoys the enthusiastic backing of the Christian right because she is blindly obedient to the male hierarchy. She does not question. She submits and obeys. Her views on abortion and marriage, on the Middle East, on gays and the war against Islam are precooked. They are handed to her by men who claim to speak for God. And in power she would be the perfect conduit for an ideology that seeks, in the end, to eradicate individual moral choice and replace it with subservience to a terrifying Christian fascism.
Meet Walid Shoebat, former "PLO terrorist" turned evangelical Christian:
When he was 16, says Walid Shoebat, he was recruited by a PLO operative by the name of Mahmoud al-Mughrabi to carry out an attack on a branch of Bank Leumi in Bethlehem.
At six in the evening he was supposed to detonate a bomb in the doorway of the bank. But when he saw a group of Arab children playing nearby, he says, his conscience was pricked and he threw the bomb onto the roof of the bank instead, where it exploded causing no fatalities.
This is the story that Shoebat, who converted from Islam to Christianity in 1993 and has lived in the United States since the late 1970s, has told on tours around the US and Europe since 9/11 opened the West's public consciousness to the dangers of Islamic extremism.
Shoebat's Web site says his is an assumed name, used to protect him from reprisal attacks by his former terror chiefs, whom he says have put a $10 million price on his head.
Shoebat is sometimes paid for his appearances, and he also solicits donations to a Walid Shoebat Foundation to help fund this work and to "fight for the Jewish people."
The BBC, Fox News and CNN have all presented Shoebat as a terrorist turned peacemaker, interviewing him as someone uniquely capable of providing insight into the terrorist mindset.
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The SF Chronice described Shoebat as a self-proclaimed "former Islamic terrorist" who said that Islam was a "satanic cult" and who told the crowd how he eventually accepted Jesus into his heart.
However, Shoebat's claim to have bombed Bank Leumi in Bethlehem is rejected by members of his family who still live in the area, and Bank Leumi says it has no record of such an attack ever taking place.
His relatives, members of the Shoebat family, are mystified by the notion of "Walid Shoebat" being an assumed name. And the Walid Shoebat Foundation's working process is less than transparent, with Shoebat's claim that it is registered as a charity in the state of Pennsylvania being denied by the Pennsylvania State Attorney's Office.
Shoebat's claim to have been a terrorist rests on his account of the purported bombing of Bank Leumi. But after checking its files, the bank said it had no record of an attack on its Bethlehem branch anywhere in the relevant 1977-79 period.
Shoebat told The Jerusalem Post that this could be because the bank building was robustly protected with steel and that the attack may have caused little damage.
Asked whether word of the bombing made the news at the time, he said, "I don't know. I didn't read the papers because I was in hiding for the next three days." (In 2004, he had told Britain's Sunday Telegraph: "I was terribly relieved when I heard on the news later that evening that no one had been hurt or killed by my bomb.")
Richard Bartholemew writes:
Shoebat's views have featured on this blog several times in the past few weeks. Having milked his alleged "I was a Palestinian terrorist" past, Shoebat is now roaming American churches with the preposterous claim that Book of Revelation contains the Arabic phrase "In the Name of Allah", but that this was misinterpreted as "666? (I deconstructed all that here). Joel Richardson, who is Shoebat's collaborator, crows that
Walid and I have put together a comprehensive Scriptural presentation as to why there is presently a revolution taking place within the world of Biblical prophecy. The revolution is away from the Roman End-Time Paradigm and towards the Islamic End Time Paradigm.
Rather than heading the revived Roman Empire based on the EU, apparently the Anti-Christ is now going to take control of the Muslim world. This is presented as some sort of advance in the understanding of Biblical prophecy, when in fact it is evidence that the whole approach is a farrago of nonsense: just like Hal Lindsey and all their other predecessors, the method employed is simply to approach the Bible without any real understanding of literary or historical context, and then to match prophecies to whichever nation or group is currently in conflict with USA.
Christian Zionists believe that Jews are the chosen people and that there must be an "ingathering" of Jews to the Holy Land to precipitate Armageddon and the second coming of Christ. Muslims are usually cast as the satanically influenced villians. As Glenn Greenwald writes:
...large numbers of [US] Christians -- 31% -- believe in "Christian Zionism." In the poll, that was "defined as a belief that Israel must have all of the promised land, including Jerusalem, to facilitate the second coming of the messiah." It thus seems fair -- even necessary -- to assume that at least some sizable support among Christians for the Bush administration's Middle Eastern militarism is due not to their loyalty to U.S. interests, but instead to their theological desire to strengthen Israel in order to bring about the return of the messiah.
Bruce Ivins, the US government biowar scientist who is now the prime suspect in the anthrax murders that came within a week of 9/11 and pumped up war hysteria against Muslims, wrote several letters to the editor that suggest he was a supporter of the rightwing political Christian movement in the US, and that he very much believed that the Jews were the "chosen."
Originally published August 24, 2006 Rabbi Morris Kosman is entirely correct in summarily rejecting the demands of the Frederick Imam for a "dialogue."
By blood and faith, Jews are God's chosen, and have no need for "dialogue" with any gentile. End of "dialogue."
Originally published November 09, 2004 I read Deborah Carter's column of Nov. 7, "Election blues," and I have three comments for the good woman, and for everybody else, as well.
First, it's clear that views like hers would put Jesus on that cross again. Second, thy loom and churn best be still, come the Sabbath. Third, you can get on board or get left behind, because that Christian Nation Express is pulling out of the station!
Taken together, these two letters are strong circumstantial evidence that Bruce Ivins was a Christian Zionist. For more on the threat of Christian Zionism, here is an excellent article from the National Catholic Reporter:
Religion and politics. It's an incendiary combination anywhere, and particularly in the Middle East where Christian fundamentalists, often working in tandem with Jewish Messianic settlers, promote the formation of a Greater Israel that they believe will usher in Armageddon itself. Many of this country's most ardent Christian supporters of Israel welcome that prospect. Others who don't subscribe to the end-of-time theology of "dispensational premillennialism" worry that the agenda pushed by the tactical alliance between Jewish and Christian fundamentalists will transform the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from a battle between two nationalities into a war of civilizations that will engulf the world.
"It's a very tragic situation in which Christian fundamentalists, certain groups of them that focus on Armageddon and the Rapture and the role of a war between Muslims and Jews in bringing about the Second Coming, are involved in a folie à deux with extremist Jews," said Ian Lustick, a professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania, a consultant on the Middle East to the last four presidential administrations and the author of the book For the Land and the Lord: Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel.
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The United States' current and exclusive focus on Islamic fundamentalism is a case of what some argue is selective blindness.
"We pay a lot of attention to Islamic extremism, but we don't pay a lot of attention to Christian extremism or the extremism in the Jewish religion that is being used to justify what is going on today," said James Zogby, founder and president of the Arab American Institute in Washington, speaking about the turmoil in the Middle East. Zogby argues that despite disclaimers to the contrary the United States is waging a war on Islam at home and abroad even as it tacitly supports extremist settlers in the occupied territories Israel controls.
This blog has no relation to the 'Cheerleaders' group who have referred to this blog on their website as their own. The claim is an attempt at identity theft, one of several unethical or illegal acts they have engaged in.
