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THE CONTAGION SPREADSThe religious contagion, originating in the Middle East, in the ancient tribal rivalries of two fierce desert peoples, has invaded this country – and I don't mean the immigration of the Jews to American shores. The growth of the millennialist varieties of evangelical Christianity has meant the strengthening of the Israeli lobby in this country to such an extent that it has become a major force in the conservative movement – and a big factor in the activist base of the Republican party. The Christian Coalition, and its leader, Pat Robertson, adhere to this view of the Bible that gives Israel a special place as the harbinger of the Last Days. The Antichrist, whom many say will rise out of Russia, or perhaps the EU, will confront Israel on the plain known as Armageddon – and after that, the conversion of the Jews, the Rapture, and the Kingdom of God on Earth. HAL LINDSAY, FALSE PROPHETThe addition of Hal Lindsay, author of Late Great Planet Earth, the great popularizer of this line of Biblical bull, to the ranks of WorldNetDaily's columnists, and the constant pushing of his eccentric theories, is ominous evidence that this trend is growing. Lindsay's many columns on the Middle East are mindlessly pro-Israel, without the style or learning of a Krauthammer, but just as party-lining. According to this self-anointed Voice of the Prophets, nothing can be done about Palestinian casualties, which are never enumerated, and the Israelis were foolish to negotiate at all. It is hard to argue with the evangelical millennialist section of the Amen Corner – since religion is a matter of faith, not reason. If war is God's will, then that is it, and there's not a thing anybody can do about it. The only thing to do, according to this view, is to take the right side – and their watchword is that we must "stand by Israel." No matter what. GENEROSITYAccording to the Amen Corner, the Barak government offered the Palestinians the world – and it wasn't good enough. This, we are told, was the "most generous" offer to date: and Arafat, who wanted war, turned it down. It is a strange concept of generosity that defines a Palestinian state as little more than South Africa-style bantustans, none of them linked and all of them surrounded by . . . Israel. And while the Jews will be granted the "right of return" unto eternity, the millions of Palestinians who had their property stolen and their land confiscated, who were ethnically cleansed out of the region by armed Israeli force, will be left to wander the earth, forever dispossessed. Some "generosity"! MERE MORTALSTo the Christian evangelicals of the Amen Corner, it wouldn't matter what pictures were being shown of Israel's brutal response to the intifada. They don't give a damn how many Palestinian kids are cut down by Israeli bullets; they can calmly watch "retaliation" against whole villages by Israeli helicopter gunships and not even blink an eye. It's all the will of God, you see: "titanic forces" are at work Who are we mere mortals to intervene? Although this attitude doesn't exactly reflect the concept of Christian charity, it's an accurate reflection of the moral blindness that has afflicted American fifth columnists, from Gus Hall's Communist Party to what Pat Buchanan calls Israel's "amen corner." A GRAND TRADITIONUncle Joe Stalin's amen corner, for all the boring-from-within tactics, never really amounted to much in this country, except for a brief period during the wartime Popular Front era, when Communist Party cadre managed to infiltrate the highest reaches of FDR's administration: as a fifth column, their value to Moscow was negligible, an embarrassing shortcoming of which both they and their foreign paymasters were all too well aware of. The same cannot be said of Israel's amen corner, which has always been one of the most formidable of the foreign lobbies – and the most unabashed about achieving its goals, no matter what the price. In addition to their unswerving loyalty to the state of Israel, and their willing suspension of disbelief when it comes to Israel's abuses in the occupied territories, the Amen Corner shares another characteristic with the hoariest of Stalinist hacks and that is the savagery of their counterattack: when McCarthy exposed Communists in high places, the smear campaign that began had no rival. Before and during the war, when the Popular Front ruled not only in politics but in every aspect of American life, the Communists really went after their enemies with a vengeance, agitating for the prosecution and jailing of the hated "isolationists" who had opposed US entry into the war, hailing the imprisonment of their fellow leftists, the Trotskyists, for "sedition," and generally labeling anyone on the right as "fascists," "Nazis," "Coughlinites," and "anti-Semites." The same methods – and the same smears – are utilized by the Israel Firsters, in much the same language employed by the Russia-Firsters of yesteryear. Gore Vidal was subjected to this treatment by Podhoretz; Pat Buchanan, who made the same point, was smeared even more viciously and persistently – as is anyone who dares to question the loyalties of the lobbyists. POLLARD AND THE ROSENBERGSThe Amen Corner even has its own version of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg all rolled into one in the person of Jonathan Pollard, a man even his staunchest supporters admit is guilty as hell – but, they maintain, he should be released anyway. The implication is that his was a noble cause: that evil anti-Israel and even anti-Semitic elements in the US government were holding out on Israel, refusing to share intelligence vital to Israel's security, and so they had no choice but to spy on the US. It takes nerve to come right out and say that the national security of a foreign country must come first, over and above that of the United States, but believe it or not this is a big campaign issue in the state of New York, with Hillary Rodham and Rick Lazio both saying they would seriously consider releasing Pollard. This is more power than the American Communist Party ever wielded, even in the heyday of the Popular Front: all Americans, regardless of their religious beliefs, have to be appalled at such a brazen display of subordination to the policies and interests of a foreign power. THE NEW REPUBLIC WEIGHS INBut it isn't just the fringe groups that demonstrate the essential disloyalty of the Amen Corner by staking out an extreme position. Just listen to what The New Republic, the historical repository of American corporate liberalism – more mainstream you could not get – has to say: "The events in the Middle East have exposed a historical transformation in American policy in the Middle East, a change that the Oslo process kept hidden: Under cover of the great American peace, the United States went from being Israel's ally to being a broker, a facilitator, a neutral power that no longer wished to choose between its clients in the region. But all of a sudden its clients are divided against themselves, and there is war within the Pax Americana. A choice must be made. It is Clinton's, and Gore's, and Albright's, and Berger's, and Ross's nightmare; but it is here." GETTING REALThere is room for only one American client state in that part of the world, and that is Israel. Never mind all the sentimental tripe about the US being an "honest broker" for peace in the Middle East. Honesty is for suckers. Nice guys come in last. It's time to say of Barak, and/or Ariel Sharon, as FDR said of the Nicaraguan dictator Somoza: he may be an s.o.b., but he's our s.o.b.! Aside from that, it's the will of God – it says so right there in the Bible. DEVIL MAY CAREI am not an authority on the Bible: the Catholic tradition is to leave the question of God's will to the priests, just as we leave the electricity to the electricians and the plumbing to the plumbers: in short, we leave such matters as the correct interpretation of the Bible to the religious professionals, the same experts who taught us our Latin and heard our confessions. Of this stern crew, it is hard to imagine one of them declaring that a war is inevitable because it is God's will, no more than one can see them failing to break up a fight between brawling teenagers who were just learning the concept of self-responsibility. This vital concept, based as it is on the Catholic concept of free will – a vision of acting, choosing man – held us all young brawlers responsible for our actions from a very early age. From this developing moral sense would come, in time, respect for the rule of law and at least some rudimentary understanding of the importance of cultural traditions and social conventions. The mystic fulminations of the prophetic Hal Lindsay, and the hallucinatory fever-dreams of apocalypse that keep his frenzied followers in a constantly hopped-up state of perpetual expectation, come out of an entirely different tradition, and one that I must confess I find repulsive and even demonic. Are we automatons in thrall to some Gnostically malevolent deity, meat puppets on a string acting out some divinely preordained tragicomedy? The Puritan god is a cruel god, more Luciferian than Christlike. And that's what worries me about these people who are so sure God is on their side – because, as any of my Jesuit teachers could have told you, only the Devil would make such a claim. DIVERGING ROADSThe great problem of the Amen Corner – Israel's, and all the rest – is that the national interests of the US and those of the nation whose interests they serve must inevitably come into conflict. The greater the divergence, the greater the task facing the fifth columnist. During the Popular Front days, when Soviet and American interests converged, or seemed to, the Communists' job was relatively easy: as the postwar era led to a great divergence, and the cold war began to heat up, their task became almost impossible, and their influence began to wane. As the interests of the US and those of Israel begin to diverge in the post-cold war era, and the nationalistic upsurge of pan-Arabic sentiment threatens to sweep everything before it, the Amen Corner may face a similar prospect of marginalization. But the unpredictable element of religion adds an explosive ingredient to the mix, especially as millennial fever has so many in its grip. I'm no Biblical scholar, but I do know that the Good Book reveals yet another sign of the Last Days, the coming of false prophets – and that is one Biblical prediction that seems to have already come true. GARRETT THE PROPHETAs for the rest of the so-called "prophecies" of the millennialists, I wouldn't know anything about that. What I do know is that the prophecies of the old "isolationists" who predicted disaster if we took the road of Empire have already come to pass. Here is Garet Garrett, the old isolationist warhorse, on the purposeful spreading of fear by the War Party so that "the people will be prepared to furnish men and munitions without limit": "Fear at last assumes the phase of a patriotic obsession. It is stronger than any political party. Any candidate for office who trifles with its basic conviction will be scourged. The basic conviction is simple. We cannot stand alone. A capitalistic economy, though it possesses half the industrial power of the world, cannot defend its own hemisphere. It may be able to save the world; alone it cannot save itself. It must have allies. Fortunately, it is able to buy them, bribe them, arm them, feed and clothe them; it may cost us more than we can afford, yet we must have them or perish. . . . Thus the historic pattern complete itself. No Empire is secure in itself; its security is in the hands of its allies." THE ISRAELI ALBATROSSNow there is a prophecy for you, published in 1952, a description of the Israeli albatross that could have been written yesterday: Any candidate for office who trifles with its basic conviction will be scourged – and surely scourged is the right word. Our security – indeed, our fate – is in the hands of our Israeli allies, who are really calling the shots. One of the characteristics of an Empire is "a system of satellites," wrote Garrett, but "A time comes when the guard itself, that is, your system of satellites, is a source of fear. Satellites are often willful and the more you rely upon them the more willful and demanding they are. There is, therefore, the fear of offending them, as it might be only to disappoint their expectations." REALITY INTRUDESA time also comes when the price of fulfilling those expectations becomes so high that a reevaluation is in order, and that time is now. As the Arab world rises in rebellion, and turns massively against us, the spectacle of Israelis murdering children will prove too much for the Amen Corner. A dead child of twelve, felled by an Israeli bullet right between the eyes: I want to see and hear them explain that away with appeals to the historic Israeli-US relationship or obscure arcane theological justifications! The Israeli fifth column, from the Commentary crowd to those eagerly awaiting to be "Raptured" up into heaven at any moment, is working overtime to prettify the war against Palestinian teenagers. But their job is getting harder by the minute, as the divergence of US and Israeli national interests becomes all too obvious. In the end they too will wind up like the fifth columnists of yesterday, as irrelevant and powerless as the ghost of Gus Hall. Hopefully, that day is not too far. 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