Feeding Crocodiles

Stephen Spector, chairman of the English Department at Stony Brook University, is the author of Evangelicals and Israel: The Story of American Christian Zionism which delves into the Christian Zionist movement, mining information from original interviews, websites, publications, news reports, survey research, worship services, and interfaith conferences, to provide a surprising look at the sources of evangelical support for Israel. In the original post below Specter looks at the contrast between Bush and Obama’s views on Israel and Islamic extremists.

President Obama’s staff recently removed a stern-looking bust of Winston Churchill that George W. Bush had kept in the Oval Office, replacing it with a bust of Lincoln. There could hardly have been a more compelling symbolic gesture to mark the change in presidential worldviews.

As Obama notes in The Audacity of Hope, Lincoln believed that there are times when we must pursue our own absolute truths, even if there is a terrible price to pay. But Obama also knows that Lincoln had a complicated view of world affairs: Lincoln knew that we must reach for common understandings and resist the temptation to demonize, since we’re all imperfect and can’t know with certainty that God is on our side.

Bush’s impulse, by contrast, is to value moral clarity. As a result, he took Churchill as his model in advocating an unambiguous and aggressive response to Iranian and Arab extremists. He did take pains to note that the battle is not with the “great religion” of Islam, which he called a religion of peace, but with terrorists. Yet in describing the goals of radical Islamists, Bush repeatedly evoked the fascist aggression in World War II. In 2005, for example, he warned that militants practicing a clear and focused ideology of Islamofascism seek to establish “a radical Islamic empire that spans from Spain to Indonesia.” Today’s terrorists, he said in 2006, are “successors to Fascists, to Nazis, to Communists and other totalitarians of the twentieth century.” They have a common ideology and vision for the world, Bush said, and against such an enemy the West can never accept anything less than complete victory. That echoed Churchill’s words rallying the British people against Hitler: “You ask, what is our aim? I can answer in one word: It is victory, victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory, however long and hard the road may be; for without victory, there is no survival.”

Religious and political conservatives who made up much of Bush’s electoral base often view the world as he does. They particularly admire Churchill’s dogged determination in warning of the approaching Nazi danger in the 1930s. Like him, they name what they see as the coming fascist threat and they disdain attempts at appeasement. Many of them warn, as Bush did, that World War III has already begun.

Discussing a foiled terrorist plot in 2006, Gary Bauer, a leading conservative Christian, quoted one of Churchill’s classic lines: “An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile, hoping it will eat him last.” (A few days later, then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld used the same quip, which was surely more than a coincidence.) And Bauer is far from the only evangelical who reveres Churchill. The devotion of James Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family, is so great that the largest painting in his Colorado Springs office is not of Christ, but of Sir Winston. (According to Dan Gilgoff in The Jesus Machine, Dobson’s wife didn’t want him to buy it because she was afraid that he would put it in their bedroom!)

John Hagee, the founder of the pro-Zionist evangelical lobbying group Christians United for Israel, is one of those who considers the Islamist threat today to be equivalent to the danger posed by the Nazis in the 1930s, and equally impossible to appease through compromise. In 2007 he received standing ovations at AIPAC’s annual policy conference in Washington when he said, “It is 1938; Iran is Germany and Ahmadinejad is the new Hitler.” Hagee warned that the “misguided souls of Europe…the political brothel that is now the United Nations, and sadly even our own State Department will try once again to turn Israel into crocodile food.”

Some Israeli and American officials and commentators also evoke the Nazi threat in describing the present conflict with Islamic radicals. Benjamin Netanyahu, the new Israeli prime minister, says that, in Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Israel is confronted by an enemy of the sort that the Jewish people have not faced since Hitler. The conflict is not about territory, but about Islam’s goal of eradicating the Jewish state, Netanyahu says, a statement that agrees perfectly with the warnings of Michael Evans and other Christian Zionists.
Jihadist Muslims intend to perpetrate a second Holocaust, says Netanyahu. He adds that Ahmadinejad presents an even more serious threat than Hitler did: Hitler lost the war because he could not develop nuclear weapons, but Ahmadinejad is on the verge of accomplishing that. General Moshe Ya’alon, a former Israeli Defense Forces chief of staff, adds that when Ahmadinejad threatens to wipe Israel off of the map, he means to destroy the West, a charge that echoes those made by American Christian Zionists.

The Obama administration is hoping to achieve through diplomacy what confrontation against a supposed unified enemy did not. They’ve even dropped Bush’s signature phrase, the “War on Terror.” Meanwhile, Christian Zionist leaders are sending newsletters and prayer updates to hundreds of thousands of readers pointing out that Netanyahu called Iran’s leaders a messianic apocalyptic cult who must never be allowed to acquire nuclear weapons. For them and many other religious and political conservatives, negotiation with Islamic fundamentalists is nothing other than the folly of appeasement, the same catastrophic mistake that Neville Chamberlain made in 1938.