Looking for the End of the World
In this week’s Camino a Ítaca a look at the mad men (and women) who hope and pray for the end of the world. Religious zealots who pine for the apocalypse and who actively try to bring it about through genocide. Click over and read the originally published piece in Spanish in el HOY or read the English translation below. (pdf en castellano abajo)
The photo was devastating.
It was the complete and total opposite of what was normally expected, disorienting
and confusing the viewer while making you look twice to make sure what you had
seen was in fact real.
There, nestled amidst the rubble of what looked
like the aftermath of an explosion, lay a gleaming white baby.
However this one wasn’t real. It wasn’t one of the
thousands of horrifying images of children being dug out of the rubble that
have been shown on TV (depending on the channel you watch) since the beginning
of the current war in Gaza. It was less traumatizing yet more poignant,
something deeper than the senseless daily massacre taking place in the
so-called Holyland.
It was clearly a nativity scene, but one like
you’ve never seen before. There in the middle of all that destruction lie a
figurine of Christ wrapped in a Palestinian keffiyeh.
It was a message that the Evangelical Lutheran
Christmas Church in Bethlehem wanted to show the world. Orthodox Catholics,
Armenian Assyrians, Melkites and Lutherans have all come together and announced
that Christmas celebrations in the land where Jesus is said to have been born were
cancelled.
This cancellation had nothing to do with the fictitious
war on Christmas that the hysterical right claims takes place every year, nor
Soros inspired wokeism that they say is ruining the backbone of Judeo-Christian
society. This cancellation came about in protest against the ongoing genocidal
bombing campaign that has killed more than 15,000 civilians and displaced almost
2 million people taking place less than 100kms away in Gaza.
But while the churches in the Holyland denounce
this televised genocide, the religious right, and in particular their leaders
in the west, have shown nothing but blind support for the radical right Israeli
government’s non-proportional response and collective punishment to the war
crimes committed by Hamas on October 7th.
In fact, one of the few western leaders to call
for a permanent ceasefire has been Pedro Sanchez. But his bold move was
immediately criticized and branded anti-Semitic by the right for doing so.
Feijoo went against his own party’s electoral program and backtracked against a
two-state solution saying that his party could not support the President’s
stance.
The fascists have gone even further with Abascal
touring kibbutzes in Israel decrying “the
embarrassment that most Spaniards have felt at the statements made by Pedro Sanchez”. Even if the national Catholics
have anti-Semitism in their DNA, its seems their pro-Zionism and hatred against
Arabs is even stronger.
But bronze-aged biblical prophesy isn’t the most
effective foreign policy tool, especially when based on the Rapture. The strand
of evangelical theology which holds that the return of Jews to the region
starts the clock ticking on Armageddon, after which Christ will return. Their
interpretation of Scripture requires Israel, a war, and a Temple, before the
conversion or destruction of the Jewish people.
The push by evangelical Christian leaders to make
this part of their Apocalypse is not really about supporting Israel. What they
are trying to do is make their own religious desires real, desires that demand
violence, blood and sacrifice of others, so that they, from the comfort of
their homes, can achieve their deluded vision of a happy ending.
