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June 2021

Why are increasing numbers of young evangelicals moving away from Israel? David Isaac

https://www.jns.org/why-are-increasing-numbers-of-young-evangelicals-moving-aw

“We have a serious education problem in the evangelical church. Too many people just don’t know a lot about any given subject. They’re smart, but they’re starved for information because their pastor is hawking his latest book from the pulpit on Sunday morning, instead of explaining serious issues,” says researcher and writer Jim Fletcher.

Over the past few decades, evangelical Christians have emerged as one of Israel’s core bases of support both in the United States and many other countries as well. However, growing trends of secularization and liberal ideology, as well as the erosion of a pro-Israel theology, are threatening to undermine this support, particularly among young evangelicals.

A recent poll commissioned by two University of North Carolina at Pembroke professors—Mordechai Inbari and Kirill Bumin—showing a sharp drop in support for Israel among the younger set has raised some eyebrows.

It found that young evangelical support for Israel had plunged to 33.6 percent from 69 percent in a 2018 poll. Those supporting the Palestinian side rose to 24.3 percent, up from 6 percent in 2018. Those supporting neither side stood at 42.2 percent.

The poll focused on evangelicals ages 18 to 29, and was conducted between March 22 and April 2 by the Barna Group, a polling and research firm focusing on issues of faith and culture.

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It appears to be backed by earlier polls. Shibley Telhami, the Anwar Sadat Professor at the University of Maryland and director of the university’s Critical Issues Poll, tells JNS that two polls he conducted in 2015 and 2018 also exhibited a widening gap in support for Israel between younger and older evangelicals. In 2015, 40 percent of young evangelicals said the United States should lean towards Israel, a number that dropped to 21 percent in 2018.

Inbari and Bumin remain cautious in explaining the reasons, saying they’re in the “preliminary stages” of their analysis.

Still, they have their hypotheses, one of which is related to the racial makeup of evangelicals.

“We discovered that race matters,” says Bumin. “What we find is that African-Americans are about 34 or 36 percent less likely to support Israel than people from other ethnic groups.”

The west’s revolutionary chickens coming home to roost Melanie Phillips

https://melaniephillips.substack.com/
We need more people to fight back against coerced cultural conformity

Why is so much of the political, cultural and business establishment meekly going along with the onslaught against normative western values and the repudiation of rationality itself?

As I wrote in today’s Times (£), institutions are going down like ninepins in the face of this coerced cultural conformity.

Companies are turning their human resources departments into witch-hunts, imposing “unconscious bias” training and requiring Soviet-style confessions of thought and identity crime. Universities and schools are rewriting history and turning education into anti-British and anti-American propaganda.

Through “cancel culture,” people in Britain and America are being turned into social and professional pariahs for resisting any of these orthodoxies which are hijacking language itself and turning it inside out.  They find themselves demonised and delegitimised for the crime of pointing out demonstrable realities. Truth-telling has become “hate”, while hatred of those who dissent from this Newspeak is called “social justice’.

How can so many have buckled to this agenda for refashioning British and western culture through a process that, back in the 1950s, the historian Jacob Talmon dubbed “cultural totalitarianism”?

How can the storied Tavistock psychiatric clinic in London be subjecting children confused about their sexual identity — usually part of some wider psychological disorder — to irreversible changes when they are too immature to know what they are or what they imagine they want to be? Since when did doctors treat mental disorder by endorsing the fantasies of the disordered patient and — unconscionably worse still — by subjecting them to often irreversible alterations to their bodies in accordance with those fantasies?  

How can so many distinguished scholars running universities in America and Britain be acquiescing — whether actively or passively — in the transformation of these erstwhile crucibles of knowledge and open-minded inquiry into cauldrons of hateful propaganda and falsehoods designed to destroy their country and its culture and seal their students’ minds tightly shut?

The poisoned Pen by victor Sharpe

http://www.renewamerica.com/columns/sharpe/210623

Those of us who so deeply love America, with all that its glorious Constitution means, increasingly see how perilous the present and the future has become for the survival of the nation that is the “land of the free and the home of the brave.”

For long decades, in the face of unrelenting Marxist hostility and aggression, loyal and patriotic Americans were nevertheless still imbued with a deep conviction of the rightness and righteousness of their cause.

Many still are and fight against unremitting and hostile influences that would consign the United States to the abyss, but far too many today have fallen away and been seduced by an overwhelming onslaught – not of military might – but by a war of ideas, however false and twisted those ideas are. The success of those lies has sapped the will of many and confused many more. Their brains have truly been dulled and they have forgotten that their nation is in the right.

We have all heard of the Big Lie theory that was so successfully enunciated and practiced by Adolf Hitler’s propaganda minister, Josef Goebbels. The theory essentially posits that people will believe in a lie if it is big enough and repeated enough times.

Goebbels knew that most people had a scant understanding of a situation but when they heard the same lie repeated again and again they would begin to accept unquestionably what was being told to them. Goebbels put it this way:

“The rank and file is usually much more primitive than we imagine. Propaganda must therefore always be essentially simple and repetitious. The most brilliant propagandist technique will yield no success unless one fundamental principle is borne in mind constantly … it must confine itself to a few points and repeat them over and over.”

The Socialists and Marxists among us have learned this lesson all too well for they have succeeded in doing what the years of Communist warfare by the Soviet Union failed to do. But relentlessly and surreptitiously they have isolated and indoctrinated the young in state schools and colleges as never before. At the same time they have demonized American history with the Goebbelian technique of the Big Lie theory.

The Jewish Stake in the Battle Against Critical Race Theory Jonathan Tobin

https://www.algemeiner.com/2021/06/22/the-jewish-stake-in-the-battle-against-critical-race-theory/

What’s the latest racist threat to American democracy? According to a host of liberal publications, it’s the nationwide push to prevent the imposition of critical race theory doctrines on public education. Articles in publications like The New York Times, NBC and Axios claim grassroots efforts to stop local school boards from adopting curricula heavily influenced by radical ideas depicting America as an irredeemably racist nation are both racist in spirit and largely the work of right-wing conspiracy theorists who are being organized and funded by national conservative groups.

Outlets like the Times, where support for critical race theory is a constant theme for writers like Michelle Goldberg and Charles Blow, claim that this growing activist movement is a noxious form of Trumpism whose aim is to demonize an important idea and the righteous educators seeking to shed light on American racism. Critical race theory opponents are being likened to book burners, censorship advocates and McCarthyite witch-hunters persecuting free thinkers.

If that wasn’t bad enough, coverage of the issue is tilted so as to describe the controversy as a case of “astroturfing,” a term used to describe an orchestrated effort financed by “dark money” to fake grassroots activism.

In this way, public opinion is being mobilized not only to support race-training education but to regard those fighting it as either racists or fools being manipulated by forces opposed to democracy.

However, this spin on the controversy is not only false but a case of gaslighting. Which is to say that rather than being persecuted innocent free thinkers, the defenders of critical race theory themselves are advocates of censorship, cancel culture and opponents of free inquiry.