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(JTA) — Pat Robertson was attempting to pay Jews a praise.
“They’d moderately be sharpening diamonds than fixing vehicles,” he stated in 2014 on his present on the Christian Broadcasting Community, the station the Southern Baptist minister based in 1960 that had grown into an evangelical Protestant powerhouse.
Robertson made his remark — whereas chuckling — in a dialog with a rabbi who was sympathetic to his conservative beliefs, Daniel Lapin. He clearly thought that diamond sharpening was a very good factor, and someway rooted in biblical precepts.
“What’s it about Jewish people who make them prosper financially?” Robertson had stated, introducing his rabbi buddy. “You virtually by no means discover Jews tinkering with their vehicles on the weekends or mowing their lawns. That’s what Daniel Lapin says, and there’s an excellent cause for that, and it lies throughout the enterprise secrets and techniques of the Bible.”
These remarks had been sharply emblematic of a dilemma that has for years dogged the American Jewish institution and that was personified by Robertson, who died Thursday at 93. Like many evangelicals with an unlimited tv viewers and political affect, Robertson was stuffed with admiration for Jews and deeply supportive of Israel.
On the similar time, Robertson’s message carried with it the bags of age-old stereotypes that induced Jews discomfort. These got here alongside a historical past of statements denigrating feminism, LGBTQ folks and Muslims.
“ADL genuinely values the help of Israel these leaders have demonstrated,” an Anti-Defamation League assertion stated in 1994 after a 60-page report it printed on Robertson’s Christian Coalition drew pushback from Jewish political conservatives, led by Lapin. “However this help can’t be used as a protect from reputable criticism.”
Robertson broadcast his massively standard “700 Membership” present a number of occasions from Israel, and articulated the argument that biblical prophecy necessitated Christian help for the Jewish state. That view has since permeated the Republican Get together.
“The survival of the Jewish folks is a miracle of God,” he stated in an undated speech posted on his web site. “The return of the Jewish folks to the land promised to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob is a miracle of God. The exceptional victories of Jewish armies in opposition to overwhelming odds in successive battles in 1948, and 1967, and 1973 are clearly miracles of God. The technological marvels of Israeli trade, the navy prowess, the bounty of Israeli agriculture, the fruits and flowers and abundance of the land are an affidavit to God’s watchful care over this new nation and the genius of this folks.”
Following his loss of life, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee known as Robertson “a terrific buddy of Israel and a pioneer within the fashionable Christian Zionist motion.”
“I used to be deeply saddened to study of the passing of Pat Robertson, a superb orator and religion chief and a rare buddy of Israel and the Jewish Individuals,” David Friedman, former President Donald Trump’s ambassador to Israel, tweeted on Thursday. “Deepest condolences to Gordon and your complete Robertson household. Could you derive a lot consolation from his unimaginable legacy.”
But this “genius” folks stored irking Robertson. In 2014, he known as the director of the Army Non secular Freedom Basis, which advocates in opposition to proselytizing within the navy, a “little Jewish radical.” The topic of that epithet, Mikey Weinstein, was not mourning Robertson on Tuesday.
“I do know fairly nicely what it felt prefer to be savaged by him only for being a Jewish one who fights for civil rights in our armed forces,” he stated in an announcement.
In 1988, when the ADL requested Robertson to sentence the antisemitism that was rising in protests in opposition to Martin Scorcese’s film, “The Final Temptation of Christ,” Robertson demanded a quid professional quo: that Jewish teams condemn the film’s Jewish producers.
In 1995, Robertson acquired into hassle when he tried to get out of hassle for his 1991 guide, “The New World Order,” during which he blamed a lot of the world’s woes on “European bankers” who occurred to be Jewish.
Robertson’s protection was a well-known one. The guide, he informed The New York Occasions, was “pro-Israel and pro-Jewish” as a result of amongst its targets was the United Nations. He added that he had “many, many associates within the Jewish group.”
Robertson was so assured of these associates that he thought they’d assist propel him to the presidency in 1988. “I might anticipate, particularly amongst Conservative and Orthodox Jews, I might have an amazing physique of help,” Robertson stated then. “I’m relying on it from the whole lot I’ve seen.”
The help by no means materialized; Robertson dropped out of the race early. However he consolidated a mode of campaigning that combined Christian piety with politicking, which Jimmy Carter had pioneered a dozen years earlier and that has now develop into ubiquitous, at the least amongst Republicans. Mike Pence, the previous vice chairman, has made his evangelical religion inseparable from his politics as he launches a marketing campaign for the 2024 GOP political nomination.
Not like Pence and different Christians working for workplace, Robertson was by no means in a position — or maybe keen — to obscure the foreboding manifestations of his beliefs, preaching about an apocalypse in Israel and blaming a stroke that struck the late Israeli prime minister, Ariel Sharon, on his withdrawal from the Gaza Strip (a view which made him persona non grata with the Israeli authorities for a brief interval).
In 2002, the ADL’s then-national director, Abraham Foxman, summed up the ambivalence many Jews felt when Christian Evangelicals had been planning a Washington rally for Israel at a time when it was beset by the second intifada. Jewish teams had been neither discouraging nor encouraging the occasion, he stated.
“There isn’t a alliance,” Foxman stated. “The connection relies on this one, particular subject.”
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