Pat the jackal

Imagine if Marion Gordon 'Pat' Robertson were Muslim.

Mullah Robertson--host of a TV show watched daily by a million Muslims, founder of major Muslim organizations, sought out regularly for comment by newspapers and broadcasters, a visible and prominent pillar of the Muslim community.

What would the reaction of the country be if Mullah Robertson said Ariel Sharon's massive stroke was punishment from God?

If Mullah Robertson warned the citizens of a small town that God may forsake them and hit the with a disaster after they decided not to proselytize for Islam in public schools.

If Mullah Robertson called for the assassination of the leader of a country to our south?

I wonder if Pat thanks God ever day for being born white and Christian.

I personally don't care too much about Pat; like his peer Pat Buchanan (what's Pat Sajak like? Pat Benatar?) he serves as a canary in a mine--his open words reveal what his followers and bedfellows try to keep hidden.

But I wonder about people like Daniel Ayalon, Israel's ambassador to the U.S., who called Robertson "a great friend of Israel".

Are you kidding? Robertson's a friend of Israel the same way a farmer's a friend of his slowly-fattening hog.

Pat, like many evangelicals, believes in order for the Rapture to come, Israel must be united--he sees Israel's entire existence as merely a stepping stone to what really matters... and once the Rapture comes, of course, Israelis as well as the rest of the non-evangelical world will be wiped out as God separates the wheat from the chaff and brings his chosen people home.

So I guess if you think a friend is someone who values you as a stepping stone to their eternal life, yeah, Pat Robertson is a friend of Israel (and all Americans).

Photo of Pat Robertson in Jerusalem by Brennan Linsley for the AP, via mentalblog.com.

There's an interesting Slate article, Supersede Me: Evangelicals rethink how to convert Jews that discusses Robertson, evangelicals and Jews that includes these lines:

The shift away from supersessionism is best articulated in the influential 2001 essay "Salvation Is From the Jews" (a quotation from John 4:22), by Richard John Neuhaus, the Catholic priest who edits the journal First Things. Neuhaus argued that American Christians needed to relate to Jews in a new spirit not of proselytism but of mutual edification. Jews in America aren't just potential Christians, he argued. They are unique conversation partners with insights that may help Christians better understand their own faith. "The salvation that is from the Jews cannot be proclaimed or lived apart from the Jews," Neuhaus writes. And elsewhere: "[W]e can and must say that friendship between Jew and Christian can be secured in shared love for the God of Israel." In other words, the continuing existence of Jews is not a failure of evangelism.

But Neuhaus does not mean that Christians should give up on converting Jews. Evangelicals are evangelicals, after all, not Unitarians. Rather, Neuhaus writes, "[W]e can and must say that we reject proselytizing, which is best defined as evangelizing in a way that demeans the other." ...

Most traditional evangelicals would agree with the Jewish literary critic Stanley Fish, who has argued that evangelicals are obligated, if they're intellectually honest, to proclaim frankly that theirs is the universal truth. Any hemming and hawing is just caving in to liberal sensibilities."