War: Anti-Hizbullah: Israel's effort to dismantle Hizbullah's war machine in Lebanon to continue on ground
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In a very important geostrategic move, Israel has announced it will continue, now with ground forces, to clear a buffer zone of Hisbullah enemies and prepare the way for an international force, and a ceasefire when they are in place. Jonathan Finer, Debbi Wilgoren, and Edward Cody reporting from Jerusualem for Washington Post (Aug1,2k6) under the WaPo headline, "No Cease-Fire Soon, Israeli Leader Says - Wider Ground War Approved; Airstrikes Resume," bring us up to date after the Qana fiasco in which many civilians lost their lives in southern Lebanon, because of Hizbullah missile launchings in close proximity which the Israeli fores were determined to take out. Now the Israelis increase infantry troops to ferret out terrorists more directly:
Ground fighting intensified Tuesday morning along the Israel-Lebanon border, hours after the Israeli cabinet approved a broadening of military operations that officials described as a precursor to the arrival of an international stabilization force.
"As of today, we've greatly expanded our front," said Marcus Sheff, a spokesman for the Israeli military forces stationed on the western half of the border. "We're trying to clear an area of Hezboll[ite terrorists] to make way for the international forces."
Clashes were concentrated in three areas along the border, military officials said: Taibe to the east, and Maroun al-Ras and Aita al-Shaab to the west. Senior Israeli officials said the campaign could eventually stretch to the Litani River, which at some points winds 18 miles north of the border, the Associated Press reported.
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The fighting, including air strikes on the border villages of Bayyda and Mansoureh early Tuesday, followed a vow by Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert that there "will be no cease-fire in the coming days."
In a Monday evening speech to Israeli mayors in Tel Aviv, Olmert said the three-week-long offensive, which began after Hezbollah seized two Israeli soldiers in a July 12 cross-border raid, would end only "when the threat over our heads is removed, when our kidnapped soldiers return to their homes and when we can live in security."
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Horowitz vs. Hermann
David Horowitz is a former leftwinger from the counter-cultural days when Marxist historical analysis of the American experience was a powerhouse among students who gravitated to activist politics without a clue. Horowitz was one of the young historians who tried to fill the vacuous minds of the activists all hot with slogans. Since then he's made quite an intellectual and spiritual journey. Recently, he sent out an email letter to a list I'm on. Here's part of what he said regarding the attempt to silence the majority of American Jews who support the State of Israel. Silence them along with a huge number of Americans of Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, and atheist religious ultimates -- persons who translate this stance of working for two coexisting states of Israel and Palestine into a political attitude of friendship for Israel in its resistance to terrorists like Hamas and Hizbullah. Here's Horowitz's email remarks:
Item one: As Israel came under attack last week, the producer of a talk show on a major Washington D.C. radio station declared that because the existence of Israel was bringing us to the brink of nuclear war, he could no longer support Israel's right to exist.That was David Horowitz of Frontpage Magazine online, ready to slug it out with the left's latterday pundits and minions. In the opposite corner is Kenn Hermann, a history prof at a US state university, and an anti-Zionist whose blog-entry in question is, "Contra the Heresies of Christian Zionism," Radix Perspectives (Jul22,2k6). I will intersperse some of my own thawts into the rhetorical flow of what Kenn offers:
This producer is a left-wing Jew.
Item two:Around the same time, the website Daily Kos, which is a power in the Democratic Party and is spearheading the campaign to unseat Joe Lieberman, posted an item headed, "Imagine a world without Israel." The subhead read, "Or is that not allowed?" This kind of hate-Israel sentiment is common on the left, and the left's influence is growing, especially in the Democratic Party.
That is why I have called Israel "the canary in the mine." The Islamic terror war against the United States mirrors its terror war against Israel, just as the left's attack on Israel mirrors its attack on America.
Just as Islamists accuse America of being the root cause of 9/11, so the left accuses Israel, a victim of fifty years of Arab wars to destroy it, of being the aggressor in the Middle East.
Item three: The cover of Washington Post's magazine last Sunday was headlined, "Is the Israel Lobby Too Powerful?" The idea that Bush-Cheney-Rice and Rumsfeld are manipulated by a bunch of second and third tier Jews in the Administration is a modern-day version of the notorious Protocols of the Elders of Zion which provided a text for Hitler and claimed that Jews ruled the world. But today it is entering the mainstream of liberal thought at an alarming speed.
Watching a CNN interview with the editor of Beliefnet on the evangelical infatuation with Israel,I'm hoping for a more balanced, historical, and political protestant- philosophical- ethical contribution from you, Kenn, in future.Politicarp: there is no "the" but only an "an" infatuation of s-o-m-e evangelicals with Israel; historian Kenn is overgeneralizing, so this is a sleight of hand rhetoric, regarding which a historian should know better than to employ.its visions of Armageddon and World War IIIPoliticarp: the mentioned view is not evangelical but fundamentalist by current terminology, so once again Kenn is breaking a cardinal methodological rule of historiography, which overgeneralizing tendency of his can be observed also in his pretentiously bloatedly-named blog, a bloated Jerry Falwell exhorting Christians to support God’s people in IsraelPoliticarp: Why does Kenn introduce a descriptor regarding JF's appearance, thus showing nothing to his readers at this rhetorical juncture of what there is to criticize in JF's exhortation ... perhaps Kenn would like to give an alternative exhoration, but doesn't have the means to do so, and is jealous of JF's making his own means by a life-time of work (however much, Kenn and I would have some serious problems with it in its details). But, as to the ethics of Kenn's rhetoric here it's hard to know just what his complaint is ... JF is fat? well, I'm obese too, it's no sin or moral failure and has to do with a lot of my medical factors ... by the way Kenn what are your glamourous measurements that we should feel lesser to you, according to the advertizing of the day? And what's wrong with "supporting God's people in Israel"?, — and the worst blasphemy of allPoliticarp: Now, suddenly, all this recitation of a fevered leftist sensiblity gone amok is magically transformed by Kenn into items of blasphemy - a charge broadcast in terms of overgeneralizing evangelicalism, not distinguishing evangelical from fundamentalist, introducing a pejorative descriptor of someone's girth which surely in only a few hermeneutics is "a blasphemy," but a charge dishonestly wielded in order to make l+t of a positive proposal of JF; and then imposing further on that very well-wishing of JF, an interpretation that the well-wishing too constitues blasphemy: this whole procedure of yours, Kenn, I find to be not only a professional flaw in a historian but in this case quite preposterous., video of Christians in church wearing and waving Israeli flagsPoliticarp: I don't like this either, but it's a different Christian subculture than mine, and it represents a different sensiblity regarding church-space and church-activity. Having said that, nevertheless, it hardly mounts to blasphemy -- unless "blasphemy" in Kenn's lexicon has his own special meanings regarding mores and decora., was just about all I could stand this morning.Politicarp: There you have it ... Kenn was watching a selective report on the topic at hand, and it concentrated selected facts of religiocultural behaviours of political consequence (to some degree) that figure in the sociological overview of American society at the moment. Did he think it could be otherwise?, given the concatenation of preceding factors over more than 50 years in the plethora and constantly permutating realities of various streams of American religion. He must have been well-cacooned to have thawt so. Kenn just wasn't prepared for the facts of the American situation and swallowed holus bolus Belief.net's selection of facts as tho that congealed selection represented a threat to him personally.Were these MY people? How many heresies could I count in this 5 minute segment?Politicarp: Now, Kenn and I have a point of contact. I do agree with him on the single and simple point that Christian Zionism is a heresy, but strictly from the standpoint of a Reformed hermeneutics: for my tradition and presumably for Kenn's the Church of Jesus Christ is the New Israel, and the Church is the body of Christ's presence in every sphere of life (not an institution, denomination, or Magisterium, and not the potentate to which other spheres of life are subsidiary. (The latter is a point concerned with social philosophy contested among Christians: protestant "sphere sovereignty" vs Roman Catholic "subsidiarty"). Kenn's view and mine here comes as a benefit of having been able to follow a classical Reformed doctrinal position, but also of having the benefit of what Stafleu calls "a protestant philosophical ethics," relevant too in politics. Or, what Kenn and I would usually call "reformational Christian philosophy."How many more such rallies will be held in churches across the country tomorrow?Others have not had these benefits, to the net effect that to them conscientiously, Kenn and I hold to a heresy. It's worth having specialists from the protestant-ethical perspective dialoguing with these heretics who would consider us heretics if they even knew we existed and that we had an alternative doctrinal viewpoint on the place of Israel in contemporary life and in our hearts (which Kenn apprently doesn't share with me, since all his ideas on the subject are formed by leftist propaganda with its assumed uniformatiarism to all foreign countries). And that's what I want to move to, but first: We all entertain some heresy or other, Kenn. Yes, even you. Don't make noting the heresy of Christian Zionism a self-aggrandizing statement of your own doctrinal or moral superiority here ... just because you watched a leftwing newscast one morning.
Now my larger point: George Washington wrote a letter to the New England Jews that stands as the historical marker of a special relation of friendship of a largely Christian nation (yes, there were heretical Deists around like Thomas Jefferson, and early atheists like Tom Paine who served the country well during its war for independence). Nevertheless, the historical precedent in the form of a letter from Washington, in due season, issued into a stream in American life where Christians and Jews created a special bond of inter-ethnic and inter-religious friendship (which in time included also the diversity of immigrants from Europe with its stream of European Jewish atheist demographics, a stream now making up some 40% of Israel's population, by the way).
The inter-ethnic and inter-religious communal friendship-bond of Christians and Jews in America (despite all powerful but non-determinative phenoms of anti-Semitism in American and regional history) in due course became, after the European Holocaust of Jews there, also an extended inter-state bond between the USA and the Jewish state of Israel.
The foregoing protestant philosophical-ethical analysis and ins+t (aka (reformational Christian political philosophy, as it addresses American issues from within the American context) is a strong and powerful alternative to Christian Zionism with its biblistic moralism (no ethics as such) and with its lack of a "biblical secularity" (Henk Hart) which affords ins+t into special friendship relations between two specific states. In American history there is no such relationship with any Arab or Muslim country, no matter what rhetoric has been used glibly in diplomatic-dinner speeches.
To miss this as a reformationally- philosophical historian, Kenn, is a sad moment. What's sadder still is the swill you've drunk from the leftist mindset, a swill thick in your industry and the mainstream media.
So far, none of the foregoing response to Kenn on Christian Zionism directly touches on another major differences in our thawt: I and refWrite are neo-constantian regarding war, and Christian-democratic in conjunction with that, not pacifist Christian-democratic. Further, I would guess that you, Kenn, probably follow James Skillen on US foreign policy; I don't. I don't think he has a good analysis of what has been going on in the emergence of Islamofacism of which Al Queada was the wake-up call but which much preceded the latter in Iran, Syria, Lebanon, even in Afghanistan. I can't endorse every counter-attack of Israel upon Hamasian terrorists or Hizbullite terrorists (or, in the American and allied case, Taliban terrorists). But, as a friend of Israel -- an individual friend along with the official stance of the USA, in response to the myriad cultural contributions of Jews of all varieties to America over the centuries, extended since 1948 in support for the Jewish state of Isreael; I do back that state and Jews in North America, like the "bloated" JF at that point of contact with him on this issue, and without indulgence in the heresy of Christian Zionism (of which I have no inkling of whether JF subscribes to that movement or heretical doctrine -- you just don't slow down enuff to say specifically one away or another).
On the other hand, I find you Kenn to be altogether too facile, too antihistorical, and too underdeveloped in your "protestant philsophical ethics" (Stafleu) when it comes to structural relations between states, relations that vary in principle (contra Skillen and leftwing uniformitarianist foreign policy).
Politicarp to Kenn: Is that momvementistic jealousy I hear?Perhaps the best source of information on the Middle East crisis, especially from the standpoint of Arab Christians caught in the cross-fire between the ‘Christian’ West vs. the ‘Muslim’ East, is Middle East Window.Politicarp: Kenn, a certain kind of Muslim and a certain climate of Islam has been driving Christians out of the MidEast since the beginning of the 20th century at least. More recently, these often moribund, isolated, and culturally stagnant Christian communities have lost their young people due to the constant implacable Muslinm pressure on them (pluse Western secularism plus pop culture). Israel is not the first cause of the problem of the expulsion and life-restriction on Arab Christians and also upon more open Muslims themselves in the MidEast and elsewhere. A certain segment of those Christians who have remained in the MidEast and in Palestine, especially, are Christian Marxist intellectuals; it's these alone who pick up Wahhabist, AlQuaedist, Baathist, Iranian, Alawite, and Hisbullite universal hatred of Jews. Most Arab Christians I know and have met along the years, support the state of Israel. Most of them detested Arafat and his mentor the exterminationist Imam of Jerusalem who was the formative influence upon Arafat. The Arab Christians I dialogued with over the years support the state of Israel and the special friendship of the USA with Israel, but some of them were also good witnesses for a free Palestinian Arab state which at the time they hoped would not be Islamicist (with the fading of the Christian Marxist Palestinian terrorist orgs, Islamofascist terrorism arose to take its place). But the Christian Marxists were a tiny minority of Arab Christians, an educated élite, not the church-goers of the various historic Arab Christian Churches or of the new churches of evangelical and pentecostal persuasion. I really question what you have offered regarding Arab Christianity and its centuries of dhimmi relation to their Muslim overlords, as even today in Egypt, thru Palestine, Syria, Iraq, and non-Arab Iran. Again, you're not exhibiting the historical scholarship which it is your vocational burden to represent.It will lead you to many others. Donald Wagner, professor at North Park College, has a very good overview of the history of Christian Zionism and its particularly strong influence on the NeoCons and the Republican party.Politicarp: So what? Are Christian Zionists somehow disallowed to participate in public discourse because you, and I and Wagner perhaps, find Christian Zionists to be heretical on a doctrine, while they find us to be so. They're part of the inter nos Christian dialogue, as Christian fundamentalism awakens from quietism (of my maternal grandmother, for instance); and that movement looks for the political relevance of (their understanding of) the Jewish state of Israel in God's scheme of things. Is that what they're to be faulted for?, sent back to quietism?, hounded from the public square to make secularist Humanism's hegemony more secure?John Mersheimer and Stephen Walt have stirred up a hornet’s nest of controversy over their expose of the powerful influence of the Israel lobby on US foreign policy. See their essay in a recent London Review of Books.In the process, Christian Zionists find us to be heretics, and you and apparently Wagner object to them being part of the public-square discourse because of a tiny fraction of dissident Arab Christians servile in a state of dhimmitude to the ever-increasing pressures of Islamofascism with which they have to come to terms in order to avoid their own assassination perhaps.
Politicarp: So what? They're not correct in their conclusions, as the hornets have decisively pointed out. Why drop this new voice of anti-Semitism on us in your discourse, without pointing out that anti-semitic factor in the very assumptions of their discourse. I feel sorry for the authors. They have no appreciation of the Washington Doctrine of special friendhip with Jews and its expansion to a state relationship centuries later, after so many Jews gave so much to America, that the Washington Doctrine was further expanded to an inter-state friendship that simply has never occured between the USA and any Muslim state or caliphate or whatever.The World Policy Institute['s}, Arms Trade Resource Center, is an excellent resource on the cozy relationship that the U.S. defense industry has with the Israeli defense establishment. Are you comforted to know that $3 billion (that’s Billion with a ‘B’) of your tax dollars (20% of Israel’s Defense budget) is going to supply the Israeli military with F-16s, tanks, Sidewinder and Tomahawk missles, and much else? Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, and Boeing are.Politicarp: Yes! Our friends are better able to defend themselves against terrorists - whether Hamas, Hisbullah, Syria, Iran, or Egypt (the latter unlikely because Egypt is the country of largest Arab population and it is also underwritten by American tax-dollars ... another factoid you selectively erase from a possible more-balanced record). I strongly favour tax-dollar underwriting of a free anti-terrorist democratic Palestine. For Israel's sake and the American tradition rooted in th Washington Doctrine, I'd favour making such a Palestine a priority for assistance, even above Iraq. Hamas has had its chance to effectuate that kind of development, but failed. It returned to the terrorist program. It blew Palestine's last chance for development, and without development there can be no return. Too bad! So sad! Their choice!Are these weapons sowing seeds of peace and justice that millions yearn for in Lebanon and the Middle East? Will they exterminate the threat of Hezbollah — really?Politicarp: They have the best chance of doing so, of any of the options otherwise historically possible and historically responsible. You want a short cut to peace and justice, but when the words for these hoped-for qualities of life are inflated into grandiose idealisms, the qualities of peace and justice recede further and further from the reality of the obtainable.And, lest we forget our own complicity in this evil,Politicarp: Speak for yourself, Kenn. You don't speak for America, or Israel, or Christianity, or Arab Christians. You've only got your own ideas to be responsible for, and to be historically accurate about.let’s not forget that you and IPoliticarp: Speak for yourself, Kenn. Like a reflex action (of long habit, I'd guess), you're trying to load your own false guilt-trip on others - so far, mostly Jews and the Jewish state of Israel.are also indirectly supporting Middle East terrorists — Hamas, Hezbollah, et al. — with every barrel of $75 oil we buy from the Middle East.Politicarp: Kenn, is this really the place to swing from an overload of anti-Semitic drama to guilt-tripping about the price of oil and the profits the sellers make on it by trafficking with Arab oil-producing states? Have you and yours really gotten an alternative-energy car on the road? Or is this more idealistic whining without any plan for that structurally- ominous withdrawal from what President Bush has aptly described as the American "addiction." It's not easy to shift from gas/oil to altneratives, and it won't happen without structural economic and industrial actions on such a massive scale that we'd conceivably come to the brink of civil war in the USA (I think the massive effort to switch to alternatives fuels is worth even that worst-scenario risk) -- and all the divisions between left and r+t would collapse in the face of the War for Junking the Oil Addiction. Tho I've here taken up the challenge hiding in your rhetorical gambit, for you to throw this additional little bit of guilt-tripping into your blog-entry's mix, at its tail-end, is quite unpersuasive, Kenn. And a disservice to your readers. You have gone on and on against Israel and Christians who support Israel, while erasing the protestant philosophical ethics that can clarify the historical inter-state friendship with Israel - which should be the outcome for a reformational historian worth his/her salt. I just don't see your program of vilification as helpful. And aside from that, I don't even see even-handedness in your approach -- erasing the friendship in the name, say, of "equality" of relations with all other nations. Rather, friends are friends -- individual to individual, family to family, and state to state -- every friendship has its own history and should not be levelled out into a general relationship among the nations. Friendship analogically can become a cross-sphere concept once you are clear of the ethically-qualified sphere of friendship in its originating meaning (Dooyeweerrd, Troost, Olthuis).You're final faulting of Hamas and Hizbullah is so paltry, so much an afterthawt, and so much wrapped in another huge issue regarding which we are left uninformed of your own oil-use praxis, which guilt you proceed then to project onto others. Take care of your own oil/car-driving guilt, Kenn; don't tack it onto your unacceptable unhistorical leftist-derived anti-normative analysis of American solidarity with Israel's self-defense. The truth of the matter is that Islam is in the midst of an epochal internal upheaval of its own; it all has very little to do with israel's self-defense or existence or with displaced refugees caused by Arab states on attack against Israel, both in the first war for Israel's Independence or now in south Lebanon. Lebanon failed to constrain Hizbullah, Irah's puppet terrorist org. On the oil/car-driving gambit, I use electically-powered public transit in Toronto, so don't guilt trip me or other readers about whom you so glibly once again generalize.
-- Politicarp
PS I have referred to Christian Zionism as a heresy in previous blog-entries on refWrite, so my principial position was well estblished before your off-the-cuff and fevered reaction to a news cast. I have an analysis based on what we presumably mutually share, but I don't see those shared intellectual values operative in your blog-entry. I can't fathom how far you are from our tradition's sources and how close you are to leftwing anti-Israel propaganda. I'd love to see a debate between you and David Horowitz, who can take on both first-degree lefties and the Christians who baptize that decrepit ideology. - P
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