eileen fleming

I admit I have not read more than a book jacket cover to any of Ann Coulter's books- nor more than a few sentences of anything she has written- but I could not miss how anti-Christ, her Christianity is.

While I write on a variety of topics, I have been pigeon-holed a "Pro-Palestinian Blogger" because I have been to the occupied Palestinian territories five times since June 2005, and never shut up about what I learned, saw, heard, and felt in my gut; but what I am is pro-equal human rights, pro-justice, pro-international law, pro-democracy and pro-what Jesus taught, and everything he taught was filtered through his world view as a Palestinian Jew who was born, lived and died under Roman Military Occupation.

Even a short stay in occupied territory, can irrevocably change one. One sees things one had never imagined and hears much that is unimaginable, and the oppression is visceral. When one learns of one's own culpability in the ongoing injustices Israel commits by virtue of being a USA tax payer, one should become righteously enraged.

In a 2004 column, Coulter summarized her view of Christianity: "Jesus' distinctive message was: People are sinful and need to be redeemed, and this is your lucky day because I'm here to redeem you even though you don't deserve it, and I have to get the crap kicked out of me to do it…I'm a Christian first and a mean-spirited, bigoted conservative second, and don't you ever forget it…Christianity fuels everything I write."[1]

Christianity fuels everything I write too.

There is nothing Christian about mean-spiritedness, bigotry or conservatism.

God created all beings and all things and said they were all good!

Christians agree that God is love, but many depart ways when it comes to comprehending that "Love is not the starving of whole populations. Love is not the bombardment of open cities. Love is not killing......Our manifesto is the Sermon on the Mount, which means that we will try to be peacemakers." -Dorothy Day

Coulter was raised with a silver spoon and by a Catholic father. I came of age in lower middle class Levittown, with two Catholic parents. Neither Ann nor I are members of any particular denomination, and we are poles apart on what Jesus was all about.

Jesus went around saying, that he only did what he saw the Father doing and he always quoted the Hebrew prophets for back up.

In the gospel [good news] told in Mark 3: 31-35, the mother of Jesus' and his brothers arrived at the house where he was teaching.

Standing outside, they sent word to Jesus and called him out. The crowd around Jesus told him, "Your mother, sisters and brothers are outside asking for you."

Jesus replied, "I am here with my mother, sisters and brothers. For whoever does the will of God is my brother, sister and mother."-Mark 3: 31-35

"What does God require? He has told you o'man! Be just, be merciful, and walk humbly with your Lord." -Micah 6:8

Being just means correct, true, accurate, right and fair. Merciful is to have, feel and show compassion, that sense of viscerally feeling the pain of another and then moved to help. Being humble is knowing yourself; the good and the bad, for both cut through every human heart.

All Christians-from the most fundamental to liberal and left-are connected to every other as a sister and brother in the mystical Body of Christ. While I rhetorically vehemently oppose Coulter's Christianity, we are in the same dysfunctional family. Believers are to provoke other believers onto good works and refrain from judging non-believers.

American Christianity has been derelict in adhering to what Jesus taught was non-negotiable for his followers: Remain NONVIOLENT-even if nailed to a cross and forgive all.

Jesus always was compassionate towards regular people, but his righteous anger flared up at the proud and arrogant teachers of the law.

When Jesus cracked the whip and chased the money changers out of The Temple, he was also over throwing the high priests livelihood. The Temple Priests made their living on the backs of the poorest of people, and the more 'sinful' or diseased the priests deemed one, the more ritual baths and livestock was required of them to purchase as the way to get clean with God.

Jesus taught there was no need to pay ones way to God, and that God already loved them, just as they were; poor, oppressed, widows, orphans, refugees, prisoners enduring under military occupation.

On October 8, 2007, Coulter was quoted as saying that Jews should be "perfected" into Christians…and that Christians considered themselves to be perfected Jews. [Ibid]

If ONLY Christians would follow the religion Jesus actually taught, and look within their own imperfect hearts, focus on the work needing to be done there; we would inhabit a very different world.

August 9, 2008 was the 63rd anniversary of America's targeted atomic bombing of Nagasaki. In the Hebrew calendar, it is the 9th of Av; Tisha B'av, the day that Jewish tradition assigns to mourn.

The mourning begins with recollecting the destruction of the 1st and 2nd Temple and then the exile imposed by Rome who conquered Palestine, the Crusaders who slaughtered Jews, the expulsion of Jews from Spain, the murders and rapes of Jews by 'Christians' through 1600 years, and onto the devastations of the 20th century.

From an August 8th email from Rabbi Michael Lerner:

…we lament how our behavior as a people keeps up from finding the fulfillment that a "Promised Land" and "The Temple" was supposed to bring. Jewish tradition unequivocally says that "because we sinned we were exiled from our land." The fate of the Jewish people, in other words, is a direct reflection of the level of our ethical behavior and our degree of holiness in the world.

In our own day we mourn the sad ethical state of the State of Israel. We can mourn the consciousness of the many within the Jewish people who have made worship of Israel their central religious doctrine. Go into any shul these days and you can deny God, the relevance of Torah, the value of observing mitzvot-and you'll find a benevolent response from the community, who will quietly and gently try to instruct you about the Jewish perspective on these questions. But question the validity of a secular state in the Middle East called The State of Israel, talk about its immoral behavior toward Palestinians, and you'll be labeled an anti-Semite or a self-hating Jew, and you'll find yourself surrounded by anger and hostility sufficient to drive you out of that community.

Why? Because Israel is the one thing that they believe in-it's their god, the center of their religious faith. The only close 2nd is the materialism and selfishness of the Western world which Jews have embraced with the same eagerness as most other people on the planet.

…because the form of our prayers and the way we are taught as children to think of God leads to this impossible outcome that God "should have, but didn't, intervene to save us, so therefore either there is no God or God is evil or at best irrelevant to us," the people grasped on to "being realistic" and becoming like all the other idolaters on the planet, worshipers of power and money.

The quintessence of that view became the dominant philosophy among Orthodox Jews after 1967-"because the Israeli Defense Forces" captured the West Bank, holding the West Bank is God's will and therefore it would be a violation of God's will to abandon it. In other words, whoever triumphs in the world reflects God's will.

…Sometimes the prophets are misunderstood as being filled with anger and rage at this people for abandoning God. Taken out of context, one can certainly read parts of Jeremiah and Isaiah that way, and some of the other prophets as well…these prophets were in agony over having to deliver hurtful and hard to hear messages…but they did so anyway because they saw so clearly how the behavior of the people was leading to its own future destruction. [end Rabbi Lerner]

Prophets are best understood as those who provoke us to think about God and they point out danger ahead so that the course will be changed and destruction avoided.

On a daily basis, since 2007, American tax payers have provided more than $6.8 million to Israel, and that is not including the $137.894 million for joint U.S.-Israeli missile defense projects or the $1.4 billion in loan guarantees.

"Since the October War in 1973, Washington has provided Israel with a level of support dwarfing the amounts provided to any other state. It has been the largest annual recipient of direct U.S. economic and military assistance since 1976 and the largest total recipient since World War ll. Total direct U.S. aid to Israel amounts to well over $140 billion in 2003 dollars. Israel receives about $3 billion in direct foreign assistance each year, which is roughly one-fifth of America's entire foreign aid budget. In per capita terms, the United States gives each Israeli a direct subsidy worth about $500 per year. This largesse is especially striking when one realizes that Israel is now a wealthy industrial state with a per capita income roughly equal to South Korea or Spain."- John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy"

"U.S. aid to Israel is the lowest it has been since 1981 due to the fact that we have slowly been phasing out economic aid to Israel and gradually replacing it with increased military aid. Within several years, military aid to Israel will have reached $3.1 billion each year (or an average of $8.49 million a day). Thus, U.S. tax dollars are subsidizing one of the most powerful foreign militaries…Contrary to ordinary U.S. policy, Israel has been and continues to be allowed to use 26% of this military aid to purchase equipment from Israeli manufacturers…By all accounts the United States has given more money to Israel than to any other country. The Congressional Research Service's conservative estimate of total cumulative US aid to Israel (not adjusted for inflation) from 1949 through 2007 is $101.1908 billion. A July 2006 Washington Report article "A Conservative Estimate of Total Direct U.S. Aid to Israel: $108 Billion," by Shirl McArthur, puts the cumulative total even higher. [2]

I do agree with Coulter in her claim that, "Being a Christian means that I am called upon to do battle against lies, injustice, cruelty, hypocrisy."

Jesus warned his followers that what ever we do or do not do unto the least-the poor, oppressed, widow, orphan, refugee, prisoner, diseased, outcast of all sorts- we do it or do not do it unto God.

When you are right you cannot be too radical; yet, the wrong are labeled right.

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ann_Coulter
2. http://www.ifamericansknew.org/stats/usaid.html

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August 15, 2008 By Eileen Fleming, Reporter and Editor http://www.wearewideawake.org/ Author Keep Hope Alive and Memoirs of a Nice Irish American Girl's' Life in Occupied Territory, Producer "30 Minutes With Vanunu." Permission is granted for reprint in print, email, blog, or web media if this credit is attached and the title remains unchanged. Only in Solidarity do "we have it in our power to begin the world again."-Tom Paine