Anti-hate legislation is introduced and reintroduced

As “anti-hate” legislation is introduced, and reintroduced, into Congress, the media are focusing as never before on the problem of racial violence, holding up the Aryan Nations, the Klan, and the Skinheads, as examples of what society should outlaw. Yet it is you and I, thinking Christians of a conservative bent of mind, who are in danger of being silenced

While gays, communists, abortionists, radical feminists, etc. are not seen as those who “hate,” every kind of “right-winger” from Jerry Falwell to “The Order” is increasing, perceived as a source of “hurtful words.” In fact, Christianity itself is coming under scrutiny. A widely distributed book called “Armed and Dangerous: The Rise of the Survivalist Right” by James Coates3 accuses fundamentalist Christianity of providing an unwholesome seedbed out of which intolerance emerges. This reflects the common Jewish belief that Christianity, by its charge that the Jews and their leaders were behind the crucifixion of Christ, has caused more “mental anguish” to the Jews than anything else in the history of the world. Although an extremist in Israeli politics, Rabbi Meir Kahane’s view of Christianity was similar to Coates’:

“I have not the slightest sympathy for Christianity or Jesus. As a believing Jew, not only is Jesus not “God” but also he is neither Messiah nor prophet. For the Jew, he was a blasphemer, one who attacked the Torah as unchanging divine law and who was a false prophet and heretic.

“As for Christianity, this is the faith that, in the name of Jesus, has made life for the Jewish people a living hell for 19 centuries. In its name, and in the name of Jesus, millions of Jews were massacred and the agony of life under Christians can never be sufficiently described in all its horror.”4

Coates maintains that a literal interpretation of the criticism of the New Testament pits the fundamentalist Christian against the Jew. Thus, there is no real substance to the claim of televangelists such as Robertson and Falwell that the church wants to “bless” Israel. Coates:

“The resulting “Pro-Semitism” voiced by so much of the liberal right is not much more comforting than the Anti-Semitism spewing from the mouths of the survivalist right… Rabbi Alexander Schindler, president of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, told an audience in San Francisco in late 1980 that it was “no coincidence that the rise of right-wing Christian fundamentalism has been accompanied by the most serious outbreak of Anti-Semitism in America since the outbreak of World War II.”5

At this stage in time, the Jewish ADL tells us we need anti-hate laws to protect the Blacks from whites, the gays from straights, the Jews from Nazis. Many fear that what they really want is a law that will silence forever the historic Christian claim that Jews were behind the crucifixion of Christ, and that Jews must now accept him as Savior to escape damnation (Acts 2:23, 36, 3:13-15, 4:10). Once broad anti-hate legislation is in place, forbidding criticism of “identifiable groups,” it will be a small matter to convince humanity (and Congress) that this ultimate “group libel” should be forbidden. The New Testament, the authority behind that charge, would of course also be censored.