Suffer the little children

and how too many Christians have twisted that into pure evil

Why do so many Christians, particularly Americans, but not just Americans, get this quote from Jesus so wrong that they think it means little children should be made to suffer and to die?

Matthew 19:14

But Jesus said, “Suffer little children, and forbid them not to come unto Me, for of such is the Kingdom of Heaven.”

Well, only Arab or Muslim children and any Christian Palestinian children who happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, like the end of an Israeli sniper’s rifle. I mean, they all look alike those Pally kids, how can the poor sniper know he is putting a bullet into the head or heart of a Christian kid and not one of those evil Muslim ones who have to be killed or they will grow up and dammit, want our country which they think is theirs. (Psst, it is theirs but Israelis and their supporters, are brainwashed from birth and incapable of reason or facts).

If it even mattered. A kid is a kid when it comes to occupation, colonisation, genocide and ethnic cleansing and those sicko soldiers are brainwashed from birth to hate and kill regardless of age. Kids killing kids really. Schoolyard violence from the end of a gun.

But back to Christians, forever having the word Jesus, roll off their slippery lips, and yet promoting, aiding, abetting, even cheering the murder and maiming of children by the Israelis in the name of their occupation of Palestine. Jesus did not mean children to suffer. He meant they were closer to the kingdom of heaven because of their innocence. He meant they were to be protected not left drowning in their own blood or amputees for whatever life they had left after operations to remove one, two, three, four limbs without anaesthetics.

Think about it. If the Israelis had an ounce of humanity they would take every wounded child into their hospitals and treat them. Or at least allow hospitals, doctors and medications to do it in Gaza instead of destroying hospitals and murdering doctors. And Christians should be on the bandwagon, demanding the Israelis have compassion toward the little children who are suffering because of them. Actually, it doesn’t even have to be because of them, the children are suffering and that is enough.

Even some of the Catholics are prepared to misinterpret Suffer the little children to mean that if they are Palestinian they should be made to suffer and the Catholics like to consider they sit on the top shelf of Christianity, so it is even worse when they do it. Fortunately their Pope does not agree but he is easily ignored on many issues.

And what sane human does not think that murdering a child is worse than murdering an adult? Israel is the greatest INTENTIONAL mass murderer of children in history. Never before in a colonial genocide or a war have children been intentionally targeted as they have been and are in Occupied Palestine. We have that on record from international doctors who spent time in Gaza and who, when they left, took with them X-rays, showing children shot perfectly through the head and heart. American Jewish doctor, Mark Perlmutter, clearly horrified at what he encountered said:

'No child gets shot twice by mistake'

That is about as intentional as it gets even if the mistake made was killing a Christian kid and not a Muslim one. Does not every sane human shake their head at such an atrocity? Seems not. The images of toddlers missing one, two, three, four limbs, hopping around in the filth of Gaza haunts me as it should haunt everyone. But it doesn’t, not even many Christians are horrified enough to bother to find out the truth about Israel’s sadistically cruel and bestially savage military colonial occupation of Palestine for 76 years. Truth is clearly a dirty word.

But what can be expected of a society brainwashed from birth to hate the Palestinians because they are non-Jews and which has no problem arresting and abusing children and imprisoning them without charge, mostly for throwing stones. You will no doubt be comforted to know, as one assumes Christians are, that children under the age of seven are allowed ten minutes physical contact with a relative after a visit. Well, holding hands through a window pretty much if the guards allow it. Sometimes they do and sometimes they don’t and sometimes they don’t allow visits, which are meant to be fortnightly and mostly they don’t allow fathers to visit.

Each year approximately 500-700 Palestinian children are detained and prosecuted in the Israeli military court system. The most common charge is stone throwing, for which the maximum sentence is 20 years. Source: Save The Children.

You can understand why the Israelis have created the most moral army in the world. Sarcasm.

Israeli Border Police officers were filmed dragging very young Palestinian children into their jeep in a West Bank refugee camp on Tuesday. The footage, provided by Israeli human rights group B’Tselem and shot by one of its volunteers in Bethlehem, shows the officers detaining the three boys, aged seven and eight.

According to the Israeli human rights organization, the children were playing at the time near their home in Aida Refugee Camp in the occupied West Bank city of Bethlehem. Protests were presumably taking place in the area.

The video, shot by B’Tselem volunteer Jamal Abu S’ifan, becomes clear from minute 0:44, at which point the Israeli troops are dragging the young boys by their clothes as they are screaming. Several local residents managed to intervene and free the children from the officers.

The incident came just days after a different video, also released by B’Tselem, which documented a large group of Israeli soldiers taking turns assaulting a handcuffed Palestinian minor in the West Bank city of Hebron. The video shows the soldiers repeatedly kicking, punching, slapping, and manhandling the boy before blindfolding him and leading him away.

Arrests, detentions, and physical assaults of Palestinian minors by Israeli security forces are not unique. An average of 700 Palestinian children are arrested and prosecuted by Israeli forces each year, according to Defense for Children International-Palestine, and around 10,000 Palestinians between the ages of 12 and 17 in the West Bank have been subject to arrest, detention, interrogation, and imprisonment under the in Israeli military courts since 2000.

In July 2013, for example, (we) reported on the detention of a five-year-old Palestinian boy who allegedly threw stones in Hebron. Five. Years. Old.

While there seems to have been an increase in such incidents over the past week during unarmed Palestinian protests against Donald Trump’s declaration recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, such violence is part and parcel of the routine of the occupation and the system of state violence Israel imposes on the Palestinian population, from the river to the sea.

The age of criminal culpability in Israel — and under Israeli military law, which applies to Palestinians in the West Bank — is 12. The arrest of a minor under the age of 12 is illegal. https://www.972mag.com/watch-israeli-troops-taking-away-7-and-8-year-old-palestinian-boys/

But how can Christians support such atrocities at worst and resort to denial at best in the face of them? Wasn’t Jesus all about loving and caring and looking after the little children? Did Jesus even expect a time would come when anyone would promote the murder of children?

Or is any price worth paying if your dreamteam of Israelis create Armageddon and the situation which allows Jesus H. Christ (as my father called him when he swore) to return? But hang on, if Jesus did return, why would he be playing ice-cream van man to all those Christians supporting genocide and the intentional murder and maiming of children? Would he not consign the whole bunch of them to eternal hellfire?

Or is there a level of stupid in fundamental religious of any kind which prevents rational thinking where their eternal damnation or eternal glory is concerned? Probably.

Weirder still is that a lot of those so-called Christians would be pro-lifers, out there on the hustings fighting the noble fight to save babies from being killed. Life is sacred they would say and it is so from conception. So, moving into head-shaking realms, how in the name of God can any Christian, ever, for any reason, support the murder of children in any war, let alone a colonial genocide done to maintain occupation? I mean, we know, they know, the Israelis know that nearly half of those in Gaza are children, so bombs, bullets, White Phosphorus, starvation, denial of clean water and medical aid is going to kill kids first.

Image: Incredibly brave Israeli soldier taking on a small boy with a broken arm.

As someone once said to me, you will only go mad trying to be rational about the irrational. And there is nothing more irrational to me than a Christian supporting genocide, let alone the intentional murder of children.

On the plus side, and it is only one article but an interesting one, it seems there are grumblings and challenges emerging in the great Christian coat of many colours which blankets the United States. Given the influence and power of the Christian mob in the United States, one would hope and even pray, that it can make a difference.

The article, from New Lines magazine, also offers insights into why too many Christians are on the side of Israel, the State of Hate and its policy of child murder, whether targeting kids with their snipers; dropping White Phosphorus and bombs on civilians where they know nearly half of them are children, and arresting and torturing children in their prisons.

Some of the disagreement about Israel among America’s 200 Christian denominations comes down to interpretation of biblical prophecy. Some fundamentalist and evangelical communities, including certain Pentecostalists and Baptists, see the survival of the state of Israel as a precondition for the return of Jesus, and therefore a foundation for their own salvation. Others — such as Roman Catholics, Eastern Orthodox and mainline Protestant denominations like Lutherans and Methodists — do not.

In the Book of Genesis, the first book in the Jewish Torah and Christian Old Testament, the Prophet Jacob — grandson of Abraham — wrestles overnight with a divine entity interpreted as being either an angel or God. He pleads with the figure to bless him before he finally releases his grip. Jacob is renamed as Israel — or “one who struggles with God” — and his descendants, the Israelites, are thereafter given the promised land by God. During the successive reigns of David and Solomon this territory was later ruled as a united kingdom from Jerusalem.

Over the 19th and 20th centuries in the U.S., Christians came to frame God’s covenant with Israel in a new and specific way. Their position is based nearly completely on a single verse regarding Abraham — Genesis 12:3 — that reads: “I will bless those who bless you, and I will curse those who curse you; and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.” In the Christian Zionist interpretation, all are commanded to bless Abraham’s lineage and the nation it will produce — in this case assumed to be modern-day Israel — or else be cursed. “It’s a transactional view of how God treats humanity,” the religious historian Daniel Hummel told New Lines. Hummel is the author of the books “Covenant Brothers: Evangelicals, Jews and U.S.-Israeli Relations” (2019) and “The Rise and Fall of Dispensationalism: How the Evangelical Battle Over the End Times Shaped a Nation” (2023).

Other passages referencing the Israelites and the Judaic Messiah in Genesis, Deuteronomy, Isaiah, Daniel and Jeremiah are also interpreted to fit a narrative about Israel’s role in the return of the Christian Messiah, the crucified and risen Jesus of the New Testament. A “premillennial dispensationalist” reading of these texts and the prophecy in Revelation rests on the idea that the history of the world is made up of a series of dispensations, or distinct periods in God’s dealings with humanity, and that Christ will return before the millennium, or thousand-year binding of Satan. For Christian Zionists, after a period of tribulation, the return of the Jewish diaspora and the restoration of Judea and Samaria, Jesus will return to Jerusalem to reign for a thousand years with Christian believers, including converted Jews. Unrepentant and unconverted Jews will either be thrown into the Lake of Fire upon the second coming or face a final day of judgment at the end of the millennial kingdom, a position either unknown to or ignored by modern Israelis.

An important boost to this reading and to Christian Zionism came from Cyrus I. Scofield’s annotated Scofield Reference Bible, first published in 1909, which called for the formation of a Jewish state for the purpose of setting that stage. The desire to precipitate Christ’s return has driven the position of most American Christians on modern-day Israel above all else. And although the idea of a final end-time reckoning was promoted by evangelicals, “it seeped into [the] American psyche and popular culture,” Hummel told New Lines.

It eventually became accepted among the more conservative strains within other denominations, which “set up a very apocalyptic perspective of the Middle East.” This philosophy is coupled with the dispensationalist conviction in the creative reading of Scripture that God will exact vengeance upon those who fail to bless the modern nation of Israel. And it has played a major role in the history of American Christian support for a pro-Israel U.S. policy since 1948.

It makes sense that those who tie their own individual and communal salvation to the survival of the state of Israel would seek to defend it from any threat of annihilation, real or perceived. The Christian believer’s solidarity with Israel is thus seen as a moral duty as well as an existential one. It would also make sense that successive Israeli governments have eagerly received support from a global superpower with a sizable and influential segment of the population that adheres to that belief. Above all, the political and military backing facilitates an assumed divine right to settle the biblical land. And although accepting this support conveniently ignores the assured damnation of unconverted Jews as outlined in the prevailing American Christian interpretation of prophecy, that religious position is simply dismissed as anathema to Judaic Scripture. For Jews, Jesus is not the Messiah and Christian prophecy is false — a position that is similarly either unknown to or ignored by American Zionist Christians.

This situation thus involves opposing biblical expectations between American Christians and Jewish Israelis. Yet despite this paradox, understanding the dispensationalist narrative helps to explain why so many American Christians — specifically Christian Zionists — have supported Israel even as their Christian brethren in Lebanon, Palestine and within Israel proper have been killed and victimized.

Eastern Christians like John Munayer, a theologian and director of international engagement at a Jerusalem-based interfaith peacebuilding organization called the Rossing Center for Education and Dialogue, have a difficult time understanding this way of thinking. “There’s a denial that the oppression of Christians in Palestine is happening, and then they [Christian Zionists] just say, ‘Oh well, it’s part of God’s plan,’” he told New Lines.

Some American Christian denominations, like Catholic and mainline Protestant branches, may be politically conservative and supportive of Israel, but do not adhere to the cataclysmic dispensationalist idea. Yet Hummel says that for those who do not buy into the apocalyptic narrative, support for the Jewish community out of which Jesus was born makes sense, “even if the end-of-times stuff doesn’t.” The popularized cultural affinity of Jesus with Judaism across denominations “translates into sustaining a foreign policy for Israel that supports both the religious and strategic-geopolitical reasons.”

Even among American Christian Zionists, a split is apparent. Fundamentalist conservatives typically associated with evangelical Christianity back Israel to facilitate the second coming of Jesus. There are also many Christians whose denominations might formally adhere to the dispensationalist doctrine, yet are unmarried to the ideological fervor. This grouping might nevertheless express support for Israel based more on the belief that it is a victim of Arab Muslim violence, a vital security partner and a government that shares political and institutional values like the rule of law and democracy.

There is another subgroup among Christian supporters of Trump who possess a thinly veiled disdain for Jews, yet remain pro-Israel because of the promise of Christ’s millennial kingdom. Pulpit influencers with public platforms like nondenominational evangelist John Hagee, the founder of Christians United for Israel, who once claimed that God sent Hitler to force Jews back to the Holy Land, fall into this category. This threading of antisemitic signals is commingled with support for Israel against its Arab Muslim opponents, all to accommodate the redemption narrative. It is a suite of attitudes that appears to be most common among older Americans and evangelical Christians (demographics that intersect with one another). Douglas Wilson, a septuagenarian pastor and podcaster out of Idaho, is a popular faith leader who also treads these fine lines.

https://newlinesmag.com/reportage/maga-zionism-and-its-discontents/

In the meantime, if you are a Christian, or have Christian friends and relatives, put together a brief, they prefer brief, bullet-point list of why Jesus would whack any Christian who supports Israel if he did come back. If they don’t get it, print out photos of the Israeli Occupation Forces manhandling little kids and post them on their fence. Or pop one into every Bible in your local church along with the bullet-point list.

One thing is certain, Christians should not be allowed to get away with supporting what amounts to one of the worst holocausts and genocides in history.