Why Death To America?

From the New York Post:

Anti-Israel activists were heard chanting “Death to America” and “Death to Israel” at a rally in a Michigan city recently dubbed the “jihad capital” of the US.

The sick chants erupted at a rally Friday in Dearborn marking Al Quds Day, in which Muslims around the world denounce Israel, according to a video posted by the Middle East Media Research Institute.

They came after Dearborn activist Tarek Bazzi ripped the US for supporting Israel — and told the crowd that “the chant ‘Death to Israel’ has become the most logical chant across the world today.

My reaction to this is just a follow-on to the issue that came up in Sunday's post -- the objective of the current wave of anti-Semitism isn't just to wipe out Israel, it's to "globalize the intifada", in other words, to wipe out all Jews. Why does this project seem to resonate so widely? After all, the speaker in Dearborn quoted by the post claims “the chant ‘Death to Israel’ has become the most logical chant across the world today".

Well, I don't find any sort of syllogistic logic in this chant, to start with, but I'll grant that it seems to have found some sort of appeal, and that goes beyond early 20th century theories of eugenics that the Nazis used to justify their own anti-Semitism. That alone says anti-Semitism has roots beyond what post-Holocaust conventional wisdom assigns. So the question returns, why the Jews, and why, by extension, the US, where Jews account for just 2.4% of the population?

I think the answer lies in another issue I raised in Sunday's post, the Old Testament, which has posed a problem even to Christians. For instance, the Marcion heresy was one of the first problems in the early Church:

Study of the Hebrew Bible, along with received writings circulating in the nascent Church, led Marcion to conclude that many of the teachings of Jesus were incompatible with the actions of Yahweh, characterized as the belligerent god of the Hebrew Bible. Marcion responded by developing a ditheistic system of belief around the year 144. This notion of two gods—a higher transcendent one and a lower world-creator and ruler—allowed Marcion to reconcile his perceived contradictions between Christian Covenant theology and the gospel proclaimed by the New Testament.

In contrast to other leaders of the nascent Christian Church, however, Marcion declared that Christianity was in complete discontinuity with Judaism and entirely opposed to the scriptures of Judaism. Marcion did not claim that these were false. Instead, he asserted that they were entirely true, but were to be read in an absolutely literalistic manner, one which led him to develop an understanding that Yahweh was not the same God spoken of by Jesus.

This in turn is based on the uncomfortably belligerent dialectic through which God gradually reveals himself in the Old Testament, which frequently involves wiping out the Philistines or other indigenous inhabitants of the Promised Land. We can interpret this metaphorically, but we still have to recognize the literal account for what it is and deal with it.

The uncomfortable truth is that this is the dialectic through which scripture reveals natural law, which is generally understood to have its most complete expression in the Ten Commandments. The history of the Old Testament Jewish state, warts and all, turns out especially to be a dialectic development of the first two commandments in particular, You shall have no other gods before Me, and You shall not make idols. In fact, though, the detailed individual failures of figures like Samson, Eli, David, Solomon, and many others illustrate how the other eight commandments are derived from the first two.

So in brief, the problem of the Old Testament is the whole uncomfortable problem of natural law, as well as the other tricky problems of God's nature illustrated in stories like Job. But St John Henry Newman adds another, derivative problem to natural law: consicience is an indisputable part of human nature, but it was created by God to operate on the principles of natural law. If there's natural law, it's also enforced in part by conscience and the principle of justice.

So to certain elements, Nazis, Communists, other totalitarians, Islamists, and so forth, the main obstacle to their programs is natural law and the derivative issues of conscience and justice. If you can get rid of those, you've got much more of a green light. A good program to do this is to get rid of the Old Testament, which isn't too far from Marcion's insight into the problem it raises. But the only good way way to do this is to get rid of the Jews. If you can do that, the Old Testament is just a recondite literary artifact of no greater import than, say, the Gilgamesh epic.

But then, why do we also need to chant Death to America? Isn't it enough just to wipe out the Jews, including the 30 or 40 million in the US? I think this is a more complex problem, and Bp Robert Barron has referred to it when he quotes Lincoln saying Americans are "God's almost chosen people". The highly underrated Catholic convert and former Episcopalian bishop Frederick Kinsman gets into a similar problem in his 1924 book Americanism and Catholicsm, which can be found on line here.

I'm still working on this problem myself, but it goes in part to the arguments of Jews like Alan Dershowitz and David Gelernter that the American project is deeply related to the Zionist project. At least for now, I'm highly uncomfortable with the idea that it's not, and the idea that anti-Semites and anti-Zionists seem to sense the same relationship reinforces my instinct.