From yesterday’s Guardian UK:
Some people think George W. Bush did as much as he could to bring about Armageddon with his earlier interventions in the Middle East. But not the man himself, apparently. He has signed up for a fundraising event for the Messianic Jewish Bible Institute, an organisation which aims to promote the second coming by converting Jews to Christianity, and will speak today at their fundraiser in Irving, Texas.
The idea is that Jews must be converted in order to trigger Jesus Christ’s return to the Holy Land for the Last Judgment. So it is written, somewhere. It’s deep stuff and Christian fundamentalists wouldn’t expect us heathens to understand.
Laugh if you will, but Christians have made great strides toward tolerance over the centuries. Sure, there were the pogroms and the Inquisition and they were not nice people during the Holocaust, but that’s ancient history. The new pope is cool and even the Christian primitives — the Baptists and such — are much better behaved, especially when the end is nigh.
Yes, support for Israel is conveniently in tune with the foreign policy goals of American right-wingers, but the fact that a great Christian thinker like Dubya is eager to convert Jews rather than slaughter them is progress, don’t you think?
Anyone who can be converted by the Shrub is at the end of his days indeed.
I still can’t figure Dubya out after all these years.
How much of his motivation is due to boastful ignorance, how much to cynicism, how much to intellectual laziness, how much to a sense of entitlement, how much to vanity, how much to hypocrisy, and how much to pure malevolence?
I noticed that recent articles about this in the “Times of India” and an Irish newspaper both referred back to an article in “Mother Jones”. FYI – here is the link to the “Mother Jones” account on this topic:
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/11/george-w-bush-jews-for-jesus-messianic-jewish-bible-institute
And a few excerpts I thought were interesting –
“…And ‘Commentary’ magazine, which bills itself as a “conservative American journal of politics, Judaism, social and cultural issues,” noted, “it must be understood that the visceral distaste that the overwhelming majority of Jews have for the Messianics is not to be taken lightly.” …”
(Hmmm… I don’t know; this could be a tougher sell than W thought)
“…Based in Dallas, the MJBI claims that it acts like the Apostle Paul in helping to “educate Christians in their role to provoke the Jewish people to jealousy and thus save some of them..”
(What if we just did kind acts back and forth to each other, and treated others as we would like to be treated, instead of treating Christianity as the shiny new car in the driveway that all our non-Christian neighbors are ‘jealous of’?)
“[Last years’s speaker, Glenn Beck] …”One of the reasons why I love Israel so much is I’m a guy who’s for the underdog,” Beck told the audience. “I’m a Mormon, which is kind of the Jew of the Christian world.”…”
(If anybody understands that remark, please let me know what it means. Thank you.)
“…At last year’s event, members of the MJBI’s board of directors explained the organization’s mission of converting Jews to an audience of hundreds who were seated on a professional football field, wearing formal clothes, and eating pork barbecue…”
(Is that how you know the conversion was successful – that suddenly the former Jew bites into some pork barbeque, and everybody cheers?)
“…Money, he explained, is needed to hasten the return of Jesus. With the funds it collects, Waldman said, MJBI trains “people to preach the good news of the Messiah to the Jewish people.” That’s important, Waldman noted, because when there are “enough” Jewish people who call Jesus their savior, “some sort of a trigger will go off in heaven, and our father in heaven will say, ‘Okay, son, it’s time to get your bride.'”…”
(Oooohhhh – so that’s how it works. Does that mean we get a big electronic scoreboard, so that as the $$$ rolls in and Jews here and there around the world call in to let us know they converted ****, a big pointer/needle gets closer and closer to the hallowed “Trigger Goes Off in Heaven” box? Kind of combines a Jerry Lewis telethon with the ball dropping down on New Year’s Eve, huh? Wow, this could really be exciting!!)
(**** – They have to hold up that pork barbeque sandwich they just took a bite of, to let us know the conversion is official.)
Also, one commenter on one of these articles pointed out that Jesus was a Jew, and that for all this to happen, He might have to convert. Otherwise, none of the rest of this counts. Killjoy. ***
*** – They left signs and graffiti all over the place in WWII saying just that, didn’t they? You know, “Killjoy was here”.
All well and good, but I think Dubya may have taken on a task too big even for his superpowers. I mean, this isn’t science we’re talking about here, where some measly 95% confidence level is good enough. Every last Jew must be converted before the Heavenly Trigger goes off. And there’s new ones being born every minute! I guess, so long as they’re baptized it doesn’t matter if they have a clue, Christianity is broadminded that way, so all he has to do is get a complete global up-to-the-minute census and a supply of holy water. But still, it’s a big job.
And even then he’s not done. There’s something about a red heifer being essential, too. That’d be easy enough to get with a bit of genetic engineering, but that’s a no-no, so there’s a lot of searching and counting white hairs on heifers ahead of him.
Maybe he should think about going back to watercolors.
The Messianic Jews are really Southern Baptists.