Author: J. Arthur Bloom

J. Arthur Bloom is the blog's editor, opinion editor of the Daily Caller, and an occasional contributor to the Umlaut. He was formerly associate editor of the American Conservative and a music reviewer at Tiny Mix Tapes, and graduated from William and Mary in 2011. He lives in Washington, DC, and can be found, far too often, on Twitter.

Are the 21 Coptic martyrs pro-Israel enough for Ted Cruz?

Amen, senator.

Ted Cruz apparently said at CPAC this week that “the president needs to stand up and defend the beheaded Coptic Christians in Egypt,” and he’s been mentioning them frequently for the last week or so.

At the In Defense of Christians Summit he trolled last September, one of his last lines was, “If you will not stand with Israel and the Jews, then I will not stand with you.”

It’s no secret that the Copts have some issues with Israel, and representative of the Coptic Patriarch was in the room that night. Was he one of the ones Cruz believes was “consumed with hate”?

At the very least, the junior senator from Texas has contradicted himself. Which one is it? Does he stand with the Coptic Church, regardless of its politically inconvenient relationship with Israel, or are the 21 Coptic martyrs simply a useful prop to criticize the administration and call for ever more aggressive military action in the Middle East?

I think we all know the answer, but let us hope we are wrong. Cruz’s IDC line is basically straight out of the John Hagee playbook, who’s said before in interviews that “if you are not for Israel and the Jewish people, you either are biblically ignorant or you’re not a Christian.” They are both Baptists, and as we were reminded last week by a blog post at some Montana hate preacher’s website that went viral, Baptists have significant differences with Coptic Christianity.

There’s some evidence Hagee and Cruz are close; not long after the IDC provocation, Ted Cruz’s father, a twice-divorced former Catholic-turned-Baptist preacher, headlined at the San Antonio-based church of John Hagee, chairman of Christians United for Israel. He also has some odd beliefs about Jesus and the end of the world:

In Hagee’s latest, Four Blood Moons, he advances the theory that a series of lunar events that started on April 2014 means that “in these next two years, we’re going to see something dramatic happen in the Middle East involving Israel that will change the course of history in the Middle East and impact the whole world.”

Hagee keeps saying this stuff; CUFI keeps separating itself from the rapture-ready bestsellers. On Monday I asked David Brog, the Jewish executive director of CUFI, whether Four Blood Moons was informing any of Hagee’s or the activists’ thinking about the crisis in Israel or Russia.

“Absolutely not,” said Brog. “Outside observers don’t give evangelicals credit for being able to hold two different ideas in their heads. There’s often confusion, when it comes to evangelical support for Israel, because evangelicals, like a lot of Jews, believe that we may be living in a messianic time. Of course, in the Jewish case, no one ever says—‘Ah, that’s why you support Israel, you think you’re going to bring the messiah.’ It’s black letter Christian theology that the date of the second coming was set eons ago.”

A politically necessary dodge, to be sure, but frankly it strikes me as complete nonsense given how politically active these people are; ‘We’re not trying to bring about the end times, we just want to bomb Iran.’ Later in November Hagee, and the younger Cruz appeared together at the Zionist Organization of America dinner, where the former called the president “one of the most anti-Semitic presidents in the history of the United States of America.”

Obama can’t be worse than Nixon on that score, but at any rate, it’s far from the worst thing Hagee has said:

Now, before we go any further, let me note that I consider myself a supporter of Israel and believe my record bears that out. I was the first to publish this expose by Edwin Black on the Palestinian Authority vetting acts of terrorism for whether they qualified as martyrdom operations, and had the author on the radio when I was subbing for Mike Church to talk about it afterward. I brought on an Orthodox Jew and Israeli citizen to help edit my section at the Daily Caller, and have published a founder of the Wiesenthal Center. It would be difficult for me to run a more pro-Israel opinion page. Maybe Robert Spencer would say I should stop publishing moderate Muslims too, that would be one way I guess — he goes after me whenever I publish one — but I refuse to do that.

However, I also hew to George Washington’s warning about entangling alliances, and sure am put off by the creepy theopolitics and political litmus tests of Christian Zionists like Hagee and Cruz. What seems beyond question to me is that it is going too far for a professed Christian to claim, in political apologias for the state of Israel, that “Jesus did not come to earth to be the Messiah.” It really says something about the state of the Christian right that a man like Hagee can state what seems to me a clearly heretical idea such as this and still be treated with respect.

As for Cruz, we should insist that he clarifies his position. Does he think the 21 martyrs had it coming, being part of a church that fails to recognize Israel as the hope of Middle Eastern Christians, as he has suggested they should?

Some may object to my bringing this up, that I’m politicizing the murders, or gainsaying both Israel and Ted Cruz at an important time, or that unity and deference are called for in the face of tragedy. Indeed, one could interpret the U.K.-based Coptic Bishop Angaelos’s worries that way, as expressed to TheDC’s own Ivan Plis:

While touched by the “immense amount of concern” he had received for his slain brethren, he said he was “very wary of them being used to make a political point” by those unfamiliar with the Copts and their church.

What Ted Cruz is doing here is trying to make a political point, and the most charitable spin one could put on his IDC provocation is that he was “unfamiliar with the Copts and their church.” To my mind, asking these questions is very much in the spirit of Bishop Angaelos’s concerns.

(Image source)

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Sacred Harp 117: ‘Babylon is Fallen’

Hail the day so long expected,
Hail the year of full release.
Zion’s walls are now erected,
And her watchmen publish peace.
Through our Shiloh’s wide dominion,
Hear the trumpet loudly roar,
Babylon is fallen to rise no more.

All her merchants stand with wonder,
What is this that comes to pass:
Murm’ring like the distant thunder,
Crying, “Oh alas, alas.”
Swell the sound, ye kings and nobles,
Priest and people, rich and poor;
Babylon is fallen to rise no more.

Blow the trumpet in Mount Zion,
Christ shall come a second time;
Ruling with a rod of iron
All who now as foes combine.
Babel’s garments we’ve rejected,
And our fellowship is o’er,
Babylon is fallen to rise no more.

The brown scare goes after libertarians, endorses throwing rocks at Pope Benedict

                                             Once more
My quondam dean in University Hall
Stands in the breach of peace, whence he will call
Down fire on the bald, woolly heads of all
Professors of the other point of view,
Who, flanked and enfiladed and too few,
Will soon throw down their dated arms of course,
And yield themselves to a superior force
Of well-drilled intellectual police,
Sworn on honor to enforce the peace.

— L.E. Sissman, “Peace Comes to Still River, Mass.”

I got in trouble on Twitter the other day, for quoting a post by Henry Dampier. Jesse Spafford, a writer who has contributed to the flagship magazine of Brooklyn leftism, the New Inquiry, says I shared “an essay lamenting that the Nazis lost WWII.” Readers can decide whether the following passage “laments” that:

Imagining that the Nazis won World War II is a popular jumping-off point for a lot of speculative fiction. The reader is supposed to feel glad that the Nazis did not in fact, win. Unfortunately, a more brutal, cruel, and anti-human government won World War II — the Soviet Union.

This is a heterodox version of the story, maybe, but not that controversial, and certainly not the exclusive domain of Nazi apologists.’Yalta could have gone better’ is a fairly well-accepted point of view. That Dampier quote is straight out of Pat Buchanan, though by no means confined to the populist corner of the right. Or even just the right. The independent left Tribune, of which George Orwell was literary editor, objected to the Yalta agreement. And here’s Dwight MacDonald in the 1952 debate with Norman Mailer at Mount Holyoke:

… the only historically real alternatives in 1939 were to back Hitler’s armies, to back the Allies’ armies, or to do nothing. But none of these alternatives promised any great benefit for mankind, and the one that finally triumphed has led simply to the replacing of the Nazi threat by the Communist threat, with the whole ghastly newsreel flickering through once more in a second showing.

Who knew MacDonald was a Nazi apologist? I’m sympathetic to Christopher Lasch’s criticism of him famously, and grudgingly, “choosing” the West, which he lodges in The New Radicalism in America, that “to “choose” between the two, however, was to assume that conflict between Russia and the West could not be avoided. If one assumed such a conflict, one had to choose — as most people had felt obliged to choose between Hitler and the West.”

At this point, I suppose it’s worth noting that by the standards of the anti-colonial style that dominates the left today, to “choose” the West at all is to side with a kind of fascism. You’d have to ask Spafford about that one, but it is at least clear that, to our Pomona philosophy graduate, it is impossible to think both that Nazis are bad and the post-World War II peace conceded far too much to the Soviet Union; the only person who could possibly think that is a Nazi apologist. It went on like this for a while before I blocked him and he tweeted about it.

I’d go so far as to say there’s one thing about about all of this that resembles the way the Stalinist left in America behaved after Operation Barbarossa, insinuating pacifists and Trotskyites were on Hitler’s payroll. In his tweet, Spafford cc’d Michael Goldfarb, the registered foreign agent and chairman of the Free Beacon, a neoconservative website that publishes unverified, fake propaganda from Senate offices intended to gin up the case for war in Ukraine. Spafford, a committed leftist, is not only aping Debbie Wasserman Schultz, but making common cause with neoconservatives to do so. This is interesting not just because the Free Beacon is staunchly pro-Israel (Spafford thinks Israel is fascist too). It also speaks to the idea that the neoconservative and left-wing narratives about World War II are roughly the same.

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William Tyler: ‘Cadillac Desert’

From Riboflavin at TMT:

I have no idea what the Carter years were like; I was born in 1985, the year after 1984. The year after we got over/past 1984. 2013 is that year in some regards: the year we got over 2012. Either you were a practitioner of pseudo-scientific, misplaced Mayan anxieties or you were a concerned person in a t-shirt on a northwestern February day. Anxieties can and will occur, and for good reason. But what happens when the spaces in time that breed reactionaries subside into anxiety loss? Does the severed dread lead back to the multi-lane freeway? Some are still anxious for good reason; time doesn’t solve problems for us, either going forward or moving backward. …

But life is often like a science fiction film, a good science fiction film, where remnants of the past (often our own present) remain, even just as set pieces. People still drive 20- to 30-year-old cars, live in old buildings, etc., etc. This is the case in music — especially in music. Sure, keep it new, be new, blah blah new blah blah… but don’t actually. A creative condition is set more in the execution of aspects that support an idea, and to what ends make something “creative” rest more on every aspect about the art in question.

In this context, Impossible Truth makes sense to me as a very good album about nostalgia, and not in the way where I feel compelled to criticize it on a “sound-contemporary” basis or on the critical level where I knock people down for fucking with my childhood.

The teaser video is pretty good too:

Sacred Harp 288: ‘White’

Ye fleeting charms of earth farewell,
Your springs of joy are dry;
My soul seeks another home.
A brighter world on high.

I’m a long time trav’ling here below,
I’m a long time trav’ling away from home,
I’m a long time trav’ling here below,
To lay this body down.

Farewell, my friends, whose tender care
Has long engaged my love;
Your fond embrace I now exchange
For better friends above.

Guest hosting the Mike Church Show Tuesday morning

The King Dude has been kind enough to have me back again tomorrow, so if you’re a Sirius XM listener, consider making it a part of your morning commute. The show runs from 6-9 AM on Patriot 125.

So far the guests I’ve got lined up are Edwin Black (author, IBM and the Holocaust), Roger Stone (you should know him), Jack Hunter (editor of Rare), and Jay Cost (writer at the Weekly Standard and author of the new book, A Republic No More), plus a mystery person I haven’t nailed down yet.

Update: The fifth guest will be Breitbart’s Milo Yiannopoulos.

Update II: Someone’s put my interview with Milo online re: Gamergate, Law & Order, Brianna Wu