The stunning and ominous rise in antisemitism in the United States cannot be disputed, but can be resisted. It is particularly the obligation of genuine Christians to participate in the repression through education of the ancient evil. It is the particular obligation of Christian institutions — churches, colleges, publishers and more — to do their part in making this sin once again an obvious source of shame and to help cure those who suffer from it and, where it cannot be cured, to force it back by shaming and shunning into the deepest shadows where it belongs.
Christianity didn’t invent antisemitism. It existed before Christ and the empires of the ancient world would target Jews for many reasons. But, once Christianity rose to dominate Europe, antisemitism spread alongside and within a vast portion of the Church.
Some, but not enough, of the Church always spoke out against antisemitism and its costumed version of today — anti-Zionism — and continues to do so. Saint John Paul the Great and Pope Benedict were the most visible and outspoken opponents of antisemitism from within the Catholic Church of my lifetime, but many others have noted the obvious intractable hostility of real Christianity to the sin of hatred embedded in hatred of Jews or their country.
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When Colorado Christian University — originally founded in 1914 as Denver Bible College, but now a flourishing university in Lakewood, Colorado — invited me to a day of teaching, feasting and lectures, I chose as my topic the reasons why Americans of all faiths, or none at all, ought to support Israel. I included in those remarks the obvious: It is sinful for Christians to hate Jews or Israel.
That’s hardly a lightning bolt for even the “slightly churched.” But. I wanted primarily to stress that America is an ally of Israel for non-theological reasons — reasons with which Christians ought to be familiar. It is bad writing to reproduce speeches and brand them columns, but here in condensed form is the argument I made.
First, in a dangerous world, even the dominant superpower — the United States — needs allies, especially as the People’s Republic of China stretches to become a peer in military and intelligence matters as well as economic influence.
The State of Israel is, objectively, the most important ally of the United States. It is a nuclear power. It is the equal of any military on the globe in its ability to strike far and hard and to dominate its region. It’s an intelligence superpower and an engine of technological excellence and ever-increasing breakthroughs. If any country had to pick one strong ally not named the United States, it would pick Israel.
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Israel is also a reliable and fully-integrated-into-our-military ally. Israel takes what the United States makes and improves on it, as had been the case with the F-35 fighter. It sometimes takes the rudiments of a technology and develops them to scale and deploys them, as with Iron Dome and soon Iron Beam. Those advancements will return to America as the Golden Dome and the Golden Beam. Would that Israel got into the ship building business at scale, but we have allies in South Korea and Japan that are doing just that.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, Israel shares America’s founding values of individual liberty and democratic governance. Israel is as politically fractious as the U.S., but freedom of speech is as robust there as it is here. Human rights are respected there as they are here. It is a “Western nation” in every respect, despite having to have fought for its very life since the state’s modern founding in 1948.
I also reminded the audience in quick fashion that, as a matter of American law, both constitutional, statutory and treaty-based law, that the United States recognizes Israel as a nation state with all the rights and responsibilities of a nation state.
“Zionism” — the term that originated in the late 19th century movement to re-establish the Jewish homeland in the ancestral lands of the Jews — is not some ideological outlier, but very much a historical movement that culminated in the United Nations’ recognition of Israel as a nation state via actions of both that body’s General Assembly and Security Council. The United States participated in that process and voted for it. While theology might underlay some Americans’ support for Israel, belief in the rule of law is the best and enduring case for most Americans to stand by and with Israel because American law is pledged to respect Israeli nationhood.
After the invasion of Israel by Hamas from Gaza on October 7, 2023, and the massacre and kidnapping that followed, one would have predicted the death of much of antisemitism in the West, so awful was the cruelty of that day and so evil and hideous the unmasked face of Jew-hatred.
Instead, and to the shock of many, Israel’s just war to recover its captives and destroy the threat to the state posed by Hamas triggered not just more attacks on it from Hezbollah nested in Lebanon, the Houthis embedded in Yemen and the “head of the snake” in the Islamic Republic of Iran, but also a geyser of Jew-hatred in the United States.
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What had been marginal and a marginalized, weird, cultish and conspiracist belief system suddenly went mainstream and apparently became a much larger phenomenon than most Americans believed possible (or at least seemed that world in the fun house mirrors of the web.) Antisemitism and the subset of the ancient evil under the name of anti-Zionism is still very much an outlier in American public opinion, but the damage this loathsome ideology has wrought post 10/7 to the collective American psyche is significant as those possessed by this repugnant hatred feel free to express it in public.
So it is long past time for Americans, and especially mainstream Christian Americans, to make the theological case against antisemitism — it is a grave sin, indeed, for Catholics, a “mortal sin” — and just as importantly if not more so, the secular case for being pro-Zionist laid out in brief above.
America needs a healthy polity, one free of all racial and religion-based hatred, and it needs allies as strong and reliable as Israel. The two arguments cannot be made often enough in too many places, but both ought to be made especially on and within any institution identifying itself as “Christian.” I thank Colorado Christian University for giving me the opportunity to do so.
Hugh Hewitt is a Fox News contributor and host of “The Hugh Hewitt Show” heard weekday afternoons from 3 PM to 6 PM ET on the Salem Radio Network, and simulcast on Salem News Channel. Hugh drives Americans home on the East Coast and to lunch on the West Coast on over 400 affiliates nationwide, and on all the streaming platforms where SNC can be seen. He is a frequent guest on the Fox News Channel’s news roundtable, hosted by Bret Baier weekdays at 6pm ET. A son of Ohio and a graduate of Harvard College and the University of Michigan Law School, Hewitt has been a Professor of Law at Chapman University’s Fowler School of Law since 1996 where he teaches Constitutional Law. Hewitt launched his eponymous radio show from Los Angeles in 1990. Hewitt has frequently appeared on every major national news television network, hosted television shows for PBS and MSNBC, written for every major American paper, has authored a dozen books and moderated a score of Republican candidate debates, most recently the November 2023 Republican presidential debate in Miami and four Republican presidential debates in the 2015-16 cycle. Hewitt focuses his radio show and his column on the Constitution, national security, American politics and the Cleveland Browns and Guardians. Hewitt has interviewed tens of thousands of guests from Democrats Hillary Clinton and John Kerry to Republican Presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump over his 40 years in broadcasting. This column previews the lead story that will drive his radio/ TV show today.
