America and the Restoration of Israel

By Alan Caruba

In Iran and throughout the Palestinian territories, Persians and Arabs poured into the streets on October 5th otherwise known as “Al-Quds” day. They shouted “death to Israel” and “death to the U.S.” The Arabic name for Jerusalem is Al-Quds.

At one point, that poisonous viper, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the president of Iran, speaking at Tehran University, said, “Europeans cannot tolerate the Zionists in their region and country, but they want to impose them on the people of the region”, meaning the nation of Israel. “Give these vast lands of Canada and Alaska to them to create a country for themselves,” he said.

Ahmadinejad, who fancies himself a scholar, is an ignorant fool who, if he knew anything of history would have to begin by acknowledging that more than two thousand years before Islam was invented by Mohammed, Israel had been home to the Jews and that, not once, but twice they had built the temple in Jerusalem, its capitol.

He would also know that the Temple Mount was and is the holiest site in Jerusalem for the Jews, but with the customary arrogance of Islam, it was where, having conquered the city they choose to build their mosque. Accept for conquest, Arabs, i.e., Muslims, have no claim whatever on Jerusalem, nor on Israel.

Not once in the Koran, Islam’s holy book, is Jerusalem ever mentioned!

Yet Muslims lay claim to Jerusalem with the absurd story that Mohammed flew there on his horse one evening and communed with the long dead prophets of Israel and Christianity. For a while, Mohammed commanded that early Muslims face Jerusalem when they prayed in the hope he could convert the Jewish tribes residing in Arabia. When that failed, he commanded that Muslims face Mecca. And he attacked and slaughtered the Jews.

Yet Ahmadinejad has the gall to suggest that Jerusalem and Israel does not rightfully belong to the Jewish people as a Jewish nation.

This ignorant fool does not know that one of the earliest religious movements in America was for the restoration of Israel to the Jews! On October 31, 1819, in Boston’s Old South Church, Levi Parsons took the pulpit to offer a sermon. “They who taught us the way to salvation were Jews,” he began. “Our God was their God. Our heaven is their heaven.” Parsons said that, were the Ottoman (Muslim) occupation of Palestine were to vanish, “nothing but a miracle would prevent their [the Jews] immediate return.”

An indelible part of American history are the Christian missionaries who went to the Middle East to perform deeds of righteousness so that the Jews would be enticed to return home and “receive Him”, that is to say, Jesus. As historian Michael B. Oren writes in his book, Power, Faith, and Fantasy, “The emergence of a Messianic Jewish polity in Palestine would fulfill the conditions necessary for the Second Coming, Parsons affirmed.”

The very earliest settlers of America, the Pilgrims, saw themselves as an extension of the Jewish faith. “Come let us declare in Zion the word of God,” proclaimed William Bradford, the future governor of the Plymouth Colony, as he stepped off the Mayflower in 1620. For him, the new land was a Zion in which the much-persecuted Pilgrims could worship freely, drawing their faith as much from the Old Testament as the New.

Many a missionary suffered and died for the belief that Jerusalem was and is the capitol of the Jewish State, Israel.

Long after Ahmadinejad is dead and freedom is restored to the Iranian people, there will be Jews in Israel and the long history of America’s belief in the rights of Jews to live there will continue.