Anti-Semitism-Killing People -Killing Our Souls

 by Viola Larson

Around forty years ago my husband and I attended Warehouse Ministries a church which was part of the Jesus Movement. The arts, painting, poetry, acting, etc., was a part of that ministry and one of their events was a play about Dietrich Bonhoeffer a German theologian, who was part of the Confessing Church during the Nazi years. He was one of the Christian martyrs killed by the Nazis toward the end of the war.  This was on my mind as I heard one of our Christian radio stations advertise a speaker with a “great message”; so I listened.  His message was that the Jews were the evilest group of all races and religions. Surprised and angry I called the station to ask about him and they gladly gave me his phone number. That was my first introduction to someone who was a holocaust denier. Thankfully he never spoke on that station again.

Later, folding clothes and watching TV on the Sacramento interfaith station I found they had a speaker whose program went on all day because he was free. The two ladies, one a Science of Mind pastor, the other a Seven Day Adventist, were using his program (for free) and did not know that he was an anti-Semite. He hid it by referring to the Jews as Kenites.  With the help of a Jewish professor at Sacramento State University he was removed from the station.

 I went on to write about these supposedly conservative anti-Semites believing that such racism was simply tied to deceived and deceiving fundamentalist although many were also involved in occultic beliefs. But later, belonging to the Presbyterian Church USA I discovered that progressives could also be deeply anti-Semitic. One organization in that denomination, The Israel, Palestine Mission Network, is simply as anti-Semitic as any of the conservative groups I have written about—publishing slick booklets that tell lies about the Jewish people in Israel.

So I have seen all these pockets of anti-Semitic groups here and there in the United States and elsewhere. But never have I thought that whole sections of our country and other countries, on college campuses, in large cities, in newsrooms with their coverage, would hate the Jewish people so much that they would riot, send death threats, tear down posters of kidnapped Jewish children and praise the terrorist, Hamas, who tortured, murdered, raped women and burned families alive. This is the scourge of Nazism rising again, not in one country, but in the whole world and horribly in our own country.

This kind of hate is deeply evil, like the blackness of hell. It will turn our whole country sour and if we do not stand against it deaden our souls. C.S. Lewis had some dire words to say about how we are either becoming splendid beings or the monsters of nightmares.  Dante places the devil in his lowest circle of hell frozen in ice—and that is perhaps the gravest transformation—so frozen in time and place because we no longer care about any other being but self. I have seen videos of those tearing down posters of kidnapped children, and they are frozen unable to feel shame or sorrow, they can only smirk or sneer.  They are well on their way to finality in that condition. Lord have mercy on all of us.