The War against God by D. THOMAS LANCASTER
Why the world hates Israel, Zionism, and you.
Yeshua says, “You will be hated by everyone because of me, but the one who stands firm to the end will be saved” (Matthew 10:22). When Yeshua says, “You will be hated by everyone because of me,” that includes “because of Israel,” because the Messiah of Israel, the King of the Jews, is inseparable from his people. It’s fair to say, “You will be hated by all people because of Israel.”
A December 2023 survey called the Harvard-Harris Poll indicates that 60 percent of American adults ages 18–24 consider the October 7 attack on Israel as justified, 67 percent consider Jews to be oppressors, and 51 percent believe the long-term answer to the Israel-Palestinian conflict is for “Israel to be ended and given to Hamas and the Palestinians.” It’s an alarming demographic shift. If the trend continues, imagine what will happen when Gen Z takes over the political landscape. The balance of power in the United States will shift from support for Israel to condemnation of Israel and from support for the Jewish people to baseline anti-Semitism. How did this happen?
The Moral Inversion
That anti-Israel dogma is only one symptom of a larger inversion of morality that our secular culture has experienced over the last several decades. I do not say that the secular culture is immoral. Instead, the culture today is more concerned with morality than ever before, but it’s an inverted morality that calls good evil and evil good. One of the most fundamental, unquestioned social norms and self-evident truths of this new morality holds that the State of Israel is the embodiment of evil and must be condemned by every thinking, rational, moral person. This new tenet of morality has spread unchecked among progressive opinion-makers and celebrity voices until it shamelessly dominates media coverage of the Middle East.
The rhetoric comes not just from the universities but also from the United Nations, which has consistently condemned Israel for alleged human rights violations while belligerently giving a pass to the actual violators of human rights, such as Russia, China, Turkey, and corrupt pariah governments in Africa and the Middle East. Iran and Pakistan laugh into their sleeves. All these bad actors agree on two common themes: hatred for the West and condemnation for Israel.
It’s not difficult to understand the Muslim perspective on Israel. Like us, they have an apocalyptic and messianic worldview. They are looking forward to a future utopian world order. Islam believes that only a Jihad against Israel and the West can usher in that future utopia.
Moreover, it’s well-known that, during World War II, Hitler saturated the Arab world with anti-Jewish propaganda, which still circulates in Arabic today.
But that’s not why students on Harvard’s campus are chanting, with reference to Hitler’s Final Solution, “There is no other solution. Intifada revolution. Intifada, intifada. Globalize the Intifada.” How did we get to this point where young Americans openly glorify Hitler’s attempt to eradicate Jews from the world and praise communist revolutionary heroes of the past while fawning over the likes of Osama bin Laden, just twenty-two years after 9/11?
Social Justice and the New Moral Order
To understand today’s social justice movement, we need to understand what is meant by “justice” in the term “social justice.” It’s a definition of “justice” derived directly from a Marxist ideology originally engineered to create class warfare by dividing the world into two groups: the oppressor and the oppressed. According to the Marxist worldview, disparities between cultures or segments of a society occur when an oppressor victimizes another group: the oppressed.
The call for social justice sounds similar to biblical sentiments that always adjure us to show compassion for the downtrodden, the disenfranchised, the stranger, the poor, the widow, and the orphan—to identify with the lowly and the needy, to uphold the cause of the poor and champion the weak. Who isn’t against racism, bigotry, and sexism? Who isn’t for helping the poor, the downtrodden, and the disenfranchised? It sounds like our Master’s teachings, “Love your neighbor as yourself,” but that’s not what’s being espoused by the social justice movement now championing Hamas and calling for the dismantling of the Jewish state.
Instead, it’s an ideology that erases distinction, penalizes excellence, and punishes progress as tools of oppression. It also erases moral absolutes because objective standards of right and wrong do not correlate well with an ideology that weighs right and wrong solely on the basis of victimhood, materialism, and social empowerment. In the new moral order, the successful are always wrong and need to be disempowered and toppled from power. The cause of the “underprivileged” is always right (regardless of how those scales tipped out of balance in the first place), and they need to be empowered.
According to this worldview, justice happens when the oppressed revolt against the oppressor and disempower them. For example, the social movements to defund the police and decriminalize crime are based on the same paradigm where law enforcement is seen as the oppressor, and criminals are the victims of that oppression. Objective standards of justice become irrelevant because every conflict and relationship is viewed through this dualism.
Objective standards of right and wrong do not correlate well with an ideology that weighs right and wrong solely on the basis of victimhood, materialism, and social empowerment.
Soviet Propaganda and Yasser Arafat
Israel’s success in the Middle East as a Western power threatened Russia’s regional ambitions. They inspired the formation of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) in 1964 as one among similar liberation organizations in the global revolution against “Western imperialism.” After its proxies suffered embarrassing losses in the Six-Day War, the Soviet propaganda machine went to work against Israel and Zionism in the UN. The USSR inculcated the United Nations with anti-Zionist sentiment, exploiting the already existing animosities.
In the early 1970s, PLO leader and internationally condemned terrorist, Yasser Arafat, was busy hijacking airplanes, sponsoring violent revolutions, and leading an unpopular terrorist war for the elimination of Israel. The Soviet Union’s KGB took him under their wing, put him on the payroll, and re-educated him under the world’s worst communist dictator, Nicolae Ceaușescu. (Yes, that Ceaușescu: the same tyrant who exterminated the last Sabbatarian community of Transylvania by building a dam and flooding it off the map; and, yes, that Romania: the same godless Communist state where Jewish believers Richard and Sabina Wurmbrand suffered incarceration and torture for their Christian faith.)
Ceaușescu tutored Arafat with lessons learned from the Vietnam War protest movement in America, where students from our most prestigious schools and academic institutions demonstrated against the war on the basis of sympathy for an oppressed liberation movement (the Communist North Vietnamese).
Arafat took note. He rebranded himself as a statesman and representative of a displaced and oppressed nation seeking to live in peace. He fooled the world. He fooled Israel. He fooled Bill Clinton. They gave him the Nobel Peace Prize and put him in charge of the Palestinian Authority. They offered him a two-state solution. (He declined.) All the while, he secretly supported terrorism against Israel, generously funding it while simultaneously enriching himself on the world’s donations to the plight of Palestinian refugees.
Arafat is long gone, but his legacy lives on in the anti-Israel fervor that now grips the world. Likewise, the USSR’s 1970-era anti-Israel propaganda has outlived the USSR. The Soviet propaganda machine falsely redefined Zionism to imply colonialism under Western imperialists, oppressing and victimizing an innocent indigenous population.
Go Woke or Go Broke
Young leftists today are still repeating propaganda slogans invented by the KGB at the height of the Cold War, utterly unaware of the origin of their rhetoric. That’s because it was deliberately seeded into academic institutions and social movements, wrapped in the same package along with other seemingly innocuous, arcane, politically correct newspeak of diversity, equity, inclusion, reparations, empowerment, privilege, affirmative action, race, indigeneity, colonialism, decolonization, and so forth.
That new morality has been baked into every university, school, curriculum, textbook, and administrative organization at every level of government. It has fomented a new ethical system that uses intimidation, censorship, and intolerance to champion ever-more remote and fringe pockets of “oppressed” and socially victimized minorities against ever-widening spheres of the so-called oppressors and victimizers.
That is why the same people campaigning for Hamas also champion extreme fringes of anti-establishment social causes, such as their emblematic support for LGBTQ+ (LGBTTTQQIAA) sexual expression and rights. That’s how we end up with transgender and queer activists marching for Gaza and supporting Hamas.
That also explains why the ideological battle has become a war against Western culture and Judeo-Christian values. The Bible’s values of justice, fairness, and spiritual transcendence contradict the materialist and inverted Marxist philosophies of justice and morality. It’s no coincidence that every regime to have embraced Marxism has also made atheism into the state religion and made both Jews and Christians subjects of state-sponsored persecution.
Young leftists today are still repeating propaganda slogans invented by the KGB at the height of the Cold War.
For years now, it has been costly to speak against this trend in universities, schools, media, workplaces, and online. People get cancelled. They lose their jobs. They find themselves shunned as racists, bigots, homophobes, or worse yet, Bible believers. On social media, they lose their followers and find themselves banned by the platforms.
The pressure has spawned a generation of moral cowardice in which no one dares say the obvious thing. Our experts, leaders, and opinion-makers occupy their positions of authority only because they are moral cowards who are careful not to step outside the lines. This overarching ideology, now combined with the don’t-confuse-me-with-the-facts belligerence of today’s culture, is further fueled by the agitation of social media platforms, which serve as direct portals for fresh Russian and Chinese propaganda. That toxic stew explains how we got to this point where educated Western youth call for the dismantling of the only free, democratic Western nation in the Middle East where liberal ideals are tolerated.
War against God
Behind the scenes, a powerful spiritual malice is at work, orchestrating these disparate players and moving them like pieces on a chess board.
The real spiritual agenda behind the world’s irrational hatred for Israel, for Zion, and for the Jewish people reduces very quickly to a war against God.
The Jewish people are the priestly nation, a priesthood among the nations (whether they want to be or not), and as such, their existence testifies to the existence of God and the truth of the Scriptures. So long as the Jewish people languish in exile outside the land of Israel, God’s promises appear broken, and his name is profaned among the nations (Ezekiel 20). But when God’s people live in the land of Israel, as promised in the Torah and predicted by the prophets, then God’s name is sanctified among the nations (Ezekiel 36). It indicates that the redemption and the kingdom draws near.
If you want to profane God’s name, destroy his reputation, deny his existence, deny his power, thwart his promises, and subvert his kingdom, you need to get the Jewish people out of the land of Israel and hopefully eliminate the Jewish people altogether. That’s how you fight a war against God.
And that’s why you will be hated by everyone because of Israel. But take courage. “The one who stands firm to the end will be saved” (Matthew 10:22).