Scapegoats and bloodlust

[Ian David]

Scapegoats and bloodlust
By Mel Seesholtz, Ph.D.
Online Journal Contributing Writer
Aug 23, 2006, 01:24

Blaming gays for Armageddon and the Hezbollah-Israeli conflict, as absurd as it sounds, is just what Rabbi Yehuda Levin did and implied: “The homosexualization of the Middle East, beginning with God’s backyard, is one of the end-day struggles that could literally lead to a spiritual and physical Armageddon in both Israel and spread back to America.”

According to Agape Press, a Christian Right “news service” and propaganda organ for Don Wildmon’s American Family Association, Rabbi Levin was convinced that Jerusalem’s hosting of World Pride would “bring on severe judgment from God.” He based his “reasoning” on the fact that “24 hours before the hostilities began, an effort to get the government to rescind the permits for the week of pro-homosexual activities was rejected.”

Never mind that the religious-political forces warring in the Middle East have been at each other for millennia, once again gays provide a convenient scapegoat. The origin of that term explains much. The following is from Bishop John Shelby Spong’s response to a reader who was seeking to justify “God’s” vengeful nature and the need for bloody sacrifices to fulfill “His” will:

I believe what you need to do is to free yourself of the theistic God who lives above the sky and who guides human history to accomplish the divine will. That mentality forces us to find purpose in everything. Locked into this view of God, the early Christians sought to find purpose in the cross. That is how we got substitutionary theories of the atonement and began to view the cross through the lens of the sacrificial Day of Atonement that the Jews called Yom Kippur.

In the liturgy of Yom Kippur a perfect Lamb of God was slain. Its blood spread on the mercy seat of the Holy of Holies that was thought of as God’s place of occupation. Therefore, to come to God, people had to come through the blood of the lamb.

Then a second animal was brought out and the priest began to confess the sins of the people. As the priest confessed, the sins of the people were thought to leave the people and land on the back and head of this animal. Then burdened with the sins of the people, this animal was driven into the wilderness. The sin bearer (called ‘the scapegoat’) thus carried the sins of the people away. Both the sacrificial lamb and the sin-bearing goat became symbols by which Jesus was understood.”

<snip>

t’s not surprising that Rabbi Levin’s initial comments were featured in Don Wildmon’s propaganda machine, Agape Press. Wildmon and his American Family Association (AFA) are in the Schadenfreude business of hurting gays and their families. That they hurt or destroy other people and their families in the process is of no concern to them: collateral damage, acceptable losses, economic bloodlust in the so-called “culture war,” a hackneyed term the belligerent Christian Right loves to use.

More:
http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/article_1132.shtml

See also:


Queer allies
By Evan Gahr
The little-noticed alliance between gay marriage opponents and alleged terrorist sympathizers

<snip>

But they sounded not like religious figures but rather crass politicians who lack any kind of moral compass. Rabbi Barry Freundel, of the Rabbinical Council of America, who wouldn't say much publicly, remained on the board. Father Richard John Neuhaus, editor of First Things magazine and head of the Institute on Religion and Public Life, simply dismissed the AMC connection as the nature of alliances. So did Rabbi Daniel Lapin of Toward Tradition, which seeks to unite Jews and Christians.

"What I see is that I am supporting an idea and if others with whom I don't agree on a variety of other topics also support the idea," Rabbi Lapin told the Forward after the original expose was published on JewishWorldReview.com, "then they are supporting my idea. I'm not supporting theirs . . . When America allied itself with Russia to defeat Nazi Germany in no way was America endorsing the contemptible politics of the Soviet Union."

About six weeks later, a bunch of young men killed 3000 innocent civilians when they plowed highjacked planes into the Pentagon and the World Trade Center.

The cliche is that everything changed after September 11. But it doesn't seem that much changed with the Alliance for Marriage. Although the American Muslim Council was apparently kicked off — it is no longer among the board of advisor members posted on AFM's website — the Islamic Society for North America remains.

More:
http://www.jewishworldreview.com/1203/marriage_terrorists.php3



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