There is a reason why many people in the Jewish community found Jerry Falwell and his at-all-costs support for Israel to be deeply creepy and suspect: It was deeply creepy and suspect.
As most people know by now, Falwell blamed the 9/11 attacks on the “pagans, the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians … the ACLU, People for the American way — all of them who have tried to secularize America — I point the finger in their face and say, ‘you helped this happen.’”
His outlandish post 9/11 screed was, however, only the tip of the iceberg. Falwell hated pretty much everyone and everything (that includes you, Teletubbies!) that didn’t subscribe to his absurdly bigoted and narrow view of the world.
He claimed the AIDS virus was “the wrath of a just God against homosexuals” and he couldn’t wait until “we won’t have any public schools” because “the churches will have taken them over again and Christians will be running them.”
Oh, and those feminists? All they need is a “man to tell them what time of day it is and to lead them home.”
Falwell was even suspicious of the civil rights movement and condemned Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. for his “left wing associations.”
He branded Bishop Desmond Tutu a “phony” for his efforts to end apartheid in South Africa. Yes, you read that right: Falwell was pro-apartheid.
As columnist Frank Rich observed in the May 20 New York Times, “Mr. Falwell was always on the wrong, intolerant side of history.”
This was not a man, as Jonathan Tobin claims in his op-ed, who was committed to the “free flow of political debate.” Clearly, if it were up to Falwell, there would be no political debate. That’s what he spent his entire life trying to eliminate. He wanted a Christian country where literal biblical law ruled the land. Period.
Is it really believable, then, that Falwell’s support for Israel was anything other than thinly veiled excitement over the possibility of an eagerly awaited Armageddon scenario? You know, the one that ends with Christ coming back to earth and the Jews converting to Christianity or being sucked into the flames of hell?
I think not, and Falwell admitted as much. He spoke openly about his belief in the Rapture and in the Second Coming of Christ, and in March of last year, he told The Jerusalem Post that although he believed that “all people must accept Jesus to enter heaven” he still supported Israel “as required by scripture.”
So basically, Israel is a requirement for the Second Coming, which as even Falwell acknowledges, doesn’t end too well for the Jews.
And then, of course, there was that whole Antichrist thing.
“The Antichrist will, by necessity, be a Jewish male,” said Falwell in 1999. Seeing as those were the only requirements for the job, journalist and New Yorker correspondent Jeffrey Goldberg visited Falwell that year to see if perhaps he (Goldberg) might be the Antichrist.
The idea of the Antichrist, Goldberg explains, comes from the books of Daniel and Revelation. “The Antichrist, in this reading, will be a world leader who strikes a peace deal with Israel, only to betray the Jewish state and make war on it, until Jesus comes to the rescue…. These beliefs, held by tens of millions of Christians are, journalistically speaking, worthy of note.”
Goldberg writes that although Falwell is “smoother” than other more openly anti-Semitic evangelicals, [such as the immensely popular “Left Behind” series co-author Tim LaHaye, who tells Goldberg that “some of the greatest evil in the history of the world was concocted by the Jewish mind”], he nevertheless “shows no understanding of the role the myth of the Antichrist played in the history of anti-Semitism, and he refuses to back away from his opinion that somewhere in Great Neck or West L.A. or Shaker Heights is living Satan’s agent.”
As for Goldberg being the Antichrist, Falwell said this is impossible, since the true Antichrist will be a “world leader” with — wait for it! — “superpowers.”
Clearly, Falwell’s unpopularity in the Jewish world cannot simply be blamed on “liberals” who don’t like his politics and thus unfairly reject his support.
Falwell is unpopular because the Jewish people know a bit about discrimination and unjust persecution, and there is something profoundly unsettling about being “friends” with a man whose entire life was devoted to fostering even more hatred and intolerance in the world.
Have things really become so bad that support from a bigot like Falwell is the best that we — and Israel — can do?
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