Tom Delay's Pilgrimage

http://www.counterpunch.org/nimmo07292003.html

Tom DeLay, House Majority Leader and former bug exterminator from Sugar Land, Texas, wants you to know he stands "shoulder-to-shoulder" with accused war criminal Ariel Sharon and the Israeli occupation forces that killed Mohammed Kabha, 6 years of age, last week near Barta al-Sharqeyah, east of Ramallah. Mr. DeLay also wants you to know he supports Israeli settlers, even though on July 11 a settler ran over and killed Yazan al-Tal, a 13-year-old Palestinian child, south of Nablus.

Naturally, DeLay wouldn't admit he's in favor of gunning down or driving over children. No, for DeLay and millions of other Christian Zionists, slaughtered Palestinians are but a fleeting tick on their moral compasses, if that. In fact, for Christian Zionists the Palestinians are all but invisible, except when they strike out in desperation.

For Tom DeLay and the Christian Zionists, the systematic destruction of Palestinian culture by radical right wing Israeli Zionists is part of God's Master Plan for the Holy Land. "And I will make of thee a great nation," the Lord told Abraham, "And I will bless them that bless thee and curse them that curse thee."

Surely, there's no shortage of Palestinians who curse Israelis, especially when Israelis shoot their children, steal their land and water, and deny them access to medical care and food.

Obviously, for evangelical Christians of DeLay's sort, all of this misery and injustice directed at the Palestinians is biblically ordained. The Christian Zionist God, the same God worshipped by so many Jews in Israel, demands untold suffering. It's all there in the Old Testament.

(n/t)