Christian Attitudes

I hesitate to mention Jimmy Carter and Revd. Stephen Sizer in the same sentence. Well, no I don’t. Some worthy commentators have done so recently, and these two self-described ‘Christians’ do have certain features in common.

Jimmy Carter’s prejudice against Jews and the Jewish State have recently been spotlighted. Meanwhile, Stephen Sizer’s hatred for the Jewish State has been vomited forth in the form of many books and articles.

It has also emerged that Carter was sympathetic to a Nazi who had murdered many Jews. Stephen Sizer, on the other hand, is adored by Neo-Nazis and Holocaust deniers.

It appears to be an unrequited love, as Sizer has shown no affection for them in return, but there is something about him that is undeniably attractive to them. They love to quote him on their websites, so must feel he articulates their feelings about one particular group of people in a way they can normally only express by grunting noises, beating people up, smashing headstones and painting swastikas on synagogues.

In Was Israel a Mistake? Paul Merkley reviews books of interest to those who study Christian attitudes to Jews and Israel. He includes Carter’s Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid and a sample of Sizer’s verbal diarrhea – an unhappy, chronic condition caused by the very existence of the Jewish State.

In Christian Zionism: Road-Map to Armageddon?, Stephen Sizer advances the fantasy, previously elaborated by a host of anti-Zionist polemicists, that the long and honorable history of defense by Christians of Israel's right to be Israel is merely an epiphenomenon of the history of a singular, off-center school of theology called premillennial dispensationalism. According to this thesis, all Christian Zionists are mindless acolytes of a Sandhedrin of pamphleteers which carries on the teachings of John Nelson Darby.

Do read the whole review.