LEE SMITH: The Choice: Trump or Obama.
Bannon is zeroing in on the strategic aspect of the U.S.-Israel relationship by claiming that Netanyahu is corrupt and Israel is weak and worthless as an ally. Israel is a protectorate, says Bannon. The Jews needed Trump to finish the job in Iran, and now they’re trying to drag America into a regime-change war. To help sell his case, Bannon draws on Obama partners such as Iran lobbyist Trita Parsi, a chief spokesman for the Iran nuclear deal.
Carlson, on the other hand, is focused on the American majority. Obama went after the Jews, but for Carlson, it’s Christians, in particular evangelicals, the bedrock of pro-Israel America. It seems that his slate of shows on religious or spiritual topics is purposed to build an evangelical audience—a potentially self-defeating endeavor, since selling despair, sowing confusion, and peddling lies about the Jews while comforting their hunters may give evidence to believers that a man who claims to have been attacked by demons lost that skirmish.
The more practical problem is that evangelicals understand not only scripture but also American history better than Carlson and his guests do. Americans’ love of Israel didn’t start at the dawn of the 20th century, thanks to a best-selling Bible commentary; rather, it’s contemporaneous with our founding. That is, the small upstate New York town founded in 1714, for instance, was named Goshen not because of the 1902 Scofield Bible, but because our forefathers believed that the American project is rooted in the history, faith, and trials of the Jews.
Replacing Israel and the Jews with the negation of Israel and the Jews means not only undermining our historical and cultural foundations but also exposing our constitutional republic to extinction-level danger. A Palestinian Youth Movement conference last week in Dearborn, Michigan, gave evidence of what happens when the enemies of the Jews are raised to pride of place: threats of assassinating pro-Israel officials and disrupting American supply lines and commerce, all in the name of anti-Zionist resistance.
Even before Biden collapsed our borders, we lost thousands of miles from our eastern-most frontier, Europe; the continent is on the verge of collapse under the weight of foreign populations whose values and ideas are incommensurate with the civilization the West built on the foundations laid long ago in Jerusalem. Our flank is increasingly exposed because we have no other ally who can or wants to fight to preserve our past and ensure our future. It’s the United States and Israel alone. Thus, the choice for us is stark: America or the hellfire, Trump or Obama.
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