How a Westmont Scholar's Depiction of Jewish Settlers as the "Repugnant Other" Hinders Peace - by Dexter Van Zile

...In this anti-historical and demonizing frame, modern-day Jews are an amalgam of the evil Romans and corrupt Jewish leaders who conspired to murder Jesus in First Century Jerusalem. The Palestinians are marginal and innocent first century Jews living under Roman occupation. Israeli peace activists (whose credibility was destroyed by Arafat’s refusal to make peace when he had the chance) are stand-ins for Jesus who weeps over the inability of those stiff-necked Jews in Jerusalem to know and do the things that make for peace. Anyone who applies this frame to the Israel-Palestinian conflict is not a peacemaker, or even a hitchhiker, but a sleepwalker through the Holy Land

Maybe Bruce Fisk has done the world a favor

Dexter Van Zile..
CAMERA..
16 July '18..

Apparently, it’s an occupational hazard for Christian Bible scholars to think ill of Israel and its Jewish citizens. This tendency doesn’t afflict every Christian scholar of the Bible, but the fact is, some of the people who should be most committed to preaching a Biblical message of love and forbearance have a difficult — if not impossible — time offering much consideration to Israeli Jews. Some of these scholars say and write hateful falsehoods about Israeli Jews who attempt to defend themselves from hostile attacks from their Palestinian neighbors, many of whom are motivated by an virulent antisemitism rooted in the Koran and Islamic doctrine.

New Testament scholars in particular are vulnerable to the temptation of casting modern day Jews into the frame of Jewish and Roman villainy laid out in the Gospels. By using these frames to interpret the conflict, these Christian scholars do not promote love or peace, but instead broadcast a contemptuous and hateful commentary on the Israel-Palestinian conflict that demonizes Israelis and gives Palestinians a pass.

This scripturally-rooted narrative of Jewish villainy offered by Christian scholars like Naim Ateek, Walter Brueggeman and Gary Burge has helped pave the way for a resurgence of antisemitism in the Western church. This narrative has engendered indifference to the suffering Israelis have endured over the past several decades and given license to Palestinian violence and hostility against the Jewish people.

It is as if the early church fathers who sought to destroy the prestige of the Jewish people in order to promote the ascendancy of Christianity have come alive again in the 21st century to work their evil against the Jewish state.

Modern-day practitioners of these old/new polemics ignore the warnings offered by Jules Isaac in his book, The Teaching of Contempt. In this text published in 1962, Isaac laments how anti-Jewish hostility remained a persistent aspect of the Christian faith, despite numerous warnings about the evils of antisemitism from church leaders. “There is a Christian anti-Semitism,” he wrote. “Whether conscious or unconscious, it is perennial and virulent, of great scope and intensity.”

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