Welcome to the Liberty Insider.
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This is your program
to bring some discussion,
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insight and immediacy
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to religious
liberty developments
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in the US and around the world.
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My name is Lincoln Steed,
editor of Liberty Magazine.
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And my special
guest on this program
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is Attorney Sonia DeWitt,
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and also, as I
keep proudly saying,
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a Liberty author.
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Let's talk about
something interesting.
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Israel, it's always in the news.
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Very interesting country. Yes.
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In the build up to this opening,
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I was remembering
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going twice with
the Holy Land tour
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that 3ABN organizes
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or I think now Jim Gilley
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does it a little bit separately.
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But it was in
association then with 3ABN.
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Fabulous experience.
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You and I are
Seventh-day Adventists.
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And I well remember
reading and it impressed me,
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that in the early days
of our church, Ellen White,
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who the visionary of
Seventh-day Adventism
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had to actively dissuade
many Adventists from going
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to Jerusalem.
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They wanted to be there
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to await the
second coming of Christ.
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And after being there, I
can see what stirred them.
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In fact, there's
often a comment made that,
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there's sort of Jerusalem
fever that can overtake people
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and goodness,
those the crusaders
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in the medieval
period bought into it.
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But people go a little
strange in this holy treatment,
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not holy, but you know,
the sense of a holy precinct.
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But that was then,
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now we're at
another analog to that
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where many
Christians in the United States,
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the so-called Christian
Right are very enamored
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with what happens in Israel.
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They see it as inextricably
tied up with final events.
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And
unfortunately, they don't always
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have a deep affinity for Jews.
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It's for the land, right?
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But what can you
and I make of that?
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Because like it or not,
some events and pronouncement,
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and actions are sort of
drawing Israel and the US
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close together and you
can't, you cannot ignore it.
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Yes, for the last few
decades, support for Israel
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has been pretty much mandatory
by the American government.
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And that's...
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It's kind of ironic,
though, because if you look
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at the history of
the Israeli state,
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originally, it was
founded by secular Jews,
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and it was opposed.
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Well, more than
secular, socialists.
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Right. It's a socialist state.
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They were...
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The religious Jews
were very much opposed
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to any state that happened
before the Messiah came.
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And now the
religious Jews have pretty much
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taken over the state
and it's their state.
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And it's kind of ironic to
me, considering the history,
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that, that's the
way it's worked out.
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But in America, we are very...
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We support Israel
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and that's not
questioned by anybody,
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because primarily
of the Christian Right
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eschatology.
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They believe
that the final events
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will center on Israel,
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that all the Jews
will be converted,
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and there'll be a big war and...
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And I do believe
that the Jewish society
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here and in Israel
find that vaguely offensive
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the idea that the religious
right see them as a target.
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Well, I think it more...
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That they have to be
changed into something else.
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More than vaguely offensive.
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Yes.
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But they also are
pragmatists, and they know
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how to use that to
their own advantage.
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They've gotten a lot
of political advantage
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out of that.
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But at the same time,
I'll give some credit.
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I think the Christians
and activists in the US
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as well as most
of the Western world
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has a deep seated
affinity for Israel,
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because they
remember the Holocaust,
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and the great injustice
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to a whole people
there under the Nazis.
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So there's a, you know,
a softness toward Israel,
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and unfortunately,
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I think at a
little dispensation,
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allowing them a few missteps.
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We don't
critique them very much.
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Right.
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And certainly that
plays into it and our guilt
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for how we didn't help
the Jews in World War II.
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I think it's a big factor,
which is a really despicable
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chapter of American history.
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I don't know.
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Do you think people...
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Who feels the guilt?
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Well, I think it's
an institutional guilt.
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It's not
necessarily, maybe a personal,
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kind of the same way
that Germans still feel
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some measure of
guilt for the Holocaust.
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I mean, there is...
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Oh, yes, the Germans
are doing the Japanese...
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I talked to some
Japanese, some of them,
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they'll clam up, they won't...
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I had a classmate in
at Andrews, Japanese.
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And I would often try to
talk about World War II to him,
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you know, some of the
things, bad things that went on.
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All I would get,
"We're so sorry, so sorry."
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It was shameful. And I...
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Yes, the Germans
have gotten to that point.
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I don't think in Australia,
or England, Canada, the US,
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I don't think
there's a sense of guilt
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because the average person
doesn't know what happened.
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If you know the history,
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there was a
great hardheartedness.
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The US refused entry, entry
to many Jews in the build up
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to World War II,
knowing full well,
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they had a standard policy.
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Roosevelt and Churchill
had a calculated policy
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to keep the Jews
bottled up in Germany,
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so Germany would
choke on the problem.
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It was very hardhearted.
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And then the US infamously
collected German citizenry
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from Latin America,
thinking they might be spars,
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work them over and
when they were done,
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sent them on a ship to Germany,
where they nearly all perished
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in the detention camps,
because most of them were Jews,
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not Nazis by any
stretch of the imagination.
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So there is reason to
have guilt, but I don't...
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I've never picked
up the American society
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has any sense
of lost opportunity
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or something they could
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have done
differently with the Jews.
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Well, I think...
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I think there's
an institutionalized
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sense of that, and that plays
into our support of Israel.
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But, in modern times,
certainly the Christian rights'
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influences are
little more influential.
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Absolutely, they're writing
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their prophetic fulfillment
into the State of Israel.
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And, you know, I guess
we'll have to wait and see
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exactly how it plays
out, but it's not that simple.
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This is a secular state.
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It involves people
who are descendants
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of the Old Testament people.
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And, of course,
their worst enemies
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try to question even that,
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but I think that's
barking up the wrong tree.
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But it's certainly disruptive
to American foreign policy
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to reflexly support any country,
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to the detriment
of other interests.
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And I think it's hampering
US's role in the Middle East.
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They're not seen
as anything close
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to an even, that they've broken.
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Well, I think it's a
more favored relationship
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than our other allies because...
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We have many other allies,
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but we feel free to criticize
any of our other allies.
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Somehow criticizing Israel
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is tantamount to
racism or something, I mean.
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Well, and again, I
play the devil's advocate
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or the alternate view.
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The stakes are
very high with Israel,
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because there's
surrounding group,
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less now than before,
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but who are clearly
dedicated to eradicating them
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from the face of the earth.
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So it wasn't just
they'd be at some disadvantage,
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they might cease to exist
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if we encourage
their opposition.
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So I think that's at
least encouraged the attitude
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we have now.
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Well, certainly that's true.
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And I am
sympathetic to Israel's plight
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in that sense.
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And I think, you know,
there, it is a difficult,
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very difficult situation.
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But to uncritically accept
everything an ally does...
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Well, we shouldn't do that, no.
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And not encourage
them to engage in behaviors
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that are more
human rights friendly.
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That it's...
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I mean, of course,
you know, we don't...
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We can't say that our
foreign policy is moral
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in any real sense.
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But at least we should
try as much as possible
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to encourage moral
behavior in our allies.
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I remember when I was in Israel,
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one day we went into the
Palestinian authority area,
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through the checkpoint,
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and it was not
far from Bethlehem.
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And they are in the
shadow of the security wall,
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which is quite
impressive when you see it,
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although it may be
what we'll eventually see
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on the southern
border here, I don't know.
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But it's a big,
high concrete wall,
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I'd say about 16-17
foot high with pillboxes.
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And you see the young
Israeli soldiers with the guns
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staring out,
was very formidable.
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So almost this close
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as we are to the
back wall of the studio.
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I stood there
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with a Palestinian
Christian businessman.
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And he had a great
burden to talk to me.
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I was just wandering
around looking at the wall,
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and then he came
out of a business
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and he called out to
me, "I need to talk to you,
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I need to talk to you."
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And he was very
happy when he found out
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I was originally from Australia,
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and he had some
friends that went there.
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But he said, "You know,
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I am the person
that's losing here."
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He said, "The Muslims
in the Palestinian areas
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are opposed to Israel.
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The Israelis marginalize
us living in this area."
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But he says, "Here in this area,
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the Muslims, I'm
treated as a stranger,
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myself, I'm threatened."
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And this is a story
that I've been meaning
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to have in
Liberty for a long time,
00:10:33.33\00:10:35.06
the plight of
Palestinian Christians
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both in Israel
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and in the
Palestinian territories,
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that it's not
always a, you know,
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it's not a persecution
where their life and limb
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is everyday threatened,
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but it's a very
tenuous existence.
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And they don't fit
into anyone's concern.
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The US doesn't
think about them much,
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Israel doesn't think about them,
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the Muslims'
states and societies,
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they're an irritant.
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Yeah, being a Christian in
the Middle East is different.
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Not really...
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Well, you know, we've had
comments in Liberty Magazine.
00:11:07.73\00:11:10.10
Right now, I think,
correctly, it's not fake news
00:11:10.13\00:11:14.17
to characterize what's happening
00:11:14.20\00:11:15.54
in the middle age,
Middle East, rather,
00:11:15.57\00:11:17.54
as the final
expulsion of Christians
00:11:17.57\00:11:19.54
from the Middle East.
00:11:19.57\00:11:21.64
It happened once
before, in the early days
00:11:21.68\00:11:23.65
of Christian
persecution, people forget.
00:11:23.68\00:11:26.28
You know, very well,
from studying history.
00:11:26.31\00:11:28.55
Egypt was majority
Christian at one point.
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Palestine, that's
where Christianity began.
00:11:32.39\00:11:35.56
You really got to shake in
and think about that reality,
00:11:35.59\00:11:38.19
because we're so used to
it being majority Muslim,
00:11:38.23\00:11:40.83
very few Christians,
the dispersed communities
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and the
Christians that are there,
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many of them belong to ancient
branches of Christianity,
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so we don't sort of see a
cultural connection to them.
00:11:51.41\00:11:55.01
But once that was,
that was Christianity.
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And I remember
with the Arab Spring
00:11:58.41\00:12:00.62
when it began, the
very first opening salvo
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of it was the
bombing of a couple
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of Christian
churches in Alexandria,
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or Egypt, where there's,
00:12:07.56\00:12:09.49
I think about 15-20%
Coptic Christians in Egypt.
00:12:09.52\00:12:15.86
But they're at threat
and they're moving away.
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So very, very
difficult situation.
00:12:18.97\00:12:21.34
But Israel is in the
center of the storm, isn't it?
00:12:21.37\00:12:23.77
And it's interesting to me,
00:12:23.81\00:12:25.14
and maybe we can
comment a bit on it.
00:12:25.17\00:12:29.41
What's going on in the US,
00:12:29.44\00:12:32.31
where with the
sensitive relationship,
00:12:32.35\00:12:35.38
and this present
administration have taken
00:12:35.42\00:12:37.92
two very big steps, I
think, to stir the pot,
00:12:37.95\00:12:41.42
not to calm things,
by recognizing Jerusalem
00:12:41.46\00:12:44.33
as the capital
which seems reasonable
00:12:44.36\00:12:46.56
on a logical level.
00:12:46.59\00:12:47.93
But when you know the history
was a UN mandate divided city.
00:12:47.96\00:12:51.17
It was taken by
conquest, never accepted.
00:12:51.20\00:12:55.34
And then the second
thing apart from the,
00:12:55.37\00:13:00.61
the status of
Jerusalem was accepting
00:13:00.64\00:13:02.91
the annexation of
the Golan Heights,
00:13:02.94\00:13:05.25
which was taken
in a war from Syria.
00:13:05.28\00:13:09.15
Yes.
00:13:09.18\00:13:10.52
These are provocations which,
00:13:10.55\00:13:13.02
you know, the US
has a right to do it,
00:13:13.05\00:13:14.56
but they seem
sort of nothing much
00:13:14.59\00:13:17.99
to be gained from it
00:13:18.03\00:13:19.36
and you just stir
people remind them
00:13:19.39\00:13:21.90
of their past events.
00:13:21.93\00:13:23.26
And my understanding
is that Trump's advisors
00:13:23.30\00:13:27.57
very much adamantly
counted him against...
00:13:27.60\00:13:30.91
We would hope so.
00:13:30.94\00:13:32.27
Declaring
Jerusalem to be the capital.
00:13:32.31\00:13:35.38
And it's pretty
much symbolic anyway,
00:13:35.41\00:13:38.01
because it's
going to be a long time
00:13:38.05\00:13:40.45
before they'll be able to
build an embassy there, if ever.
00:13:40.48\00:13:43.92
But it's, so it's not going
to happen for years, at least.
00:13:43.95\00:13:48.39
But the policy probably
will be overturned by then.
00:13:48.42\00:13:51.86
But it's the symbolic
value of it is, is disturbing.
00:13:51.89\00:13:56.36
I mean, when you're trying
to create peace in a region
00:13:56.40\00:14:01.10
that is so fraught with turmoil,
00:14:01.14\00:14:04.27
why would you do
something that is so
00:14:04.31\00:14:06.27
deliberately provocative?
00:14:06.31\00:14:07.64
I know, and so loaded
with not just political,
00:14:07.68\00:14:10.88
but religious ramifications.
00:14:10.91\00:14:13.62
Well, let's take
a short break here.
00:14:13.65\00:14:14.98
We'll be back.
00:14:15.02\00:14:16.35
Stay with us.
00:14:16.38\00:14:17.72
And we'll talk a little
bit about that hotspot area
00:14:17.75\00:14:19.89
in the Middle East,
00:14:19.92\00:14:21.26
but in the hottest
of the hot, Israel.
00:14:21.29\00:14:23.96