Sectarianism for fun and profit

Crybaby asshole Glenn Beck has decided he hasn't been in the news enough lately:

The temperature may have dropped a little in Jerusalem on Wednesday night, but it was more than compensated for by the heat produced by Glenn Beck as he brought his "Restoring Courage" rally to the Old City.

The former Fox News presenter and devout Mormon stood at a podium beneath the gunmetal grey of the dome of the al-Aqsa mosque to direct a tirade of invective at governments, human rights organisations, the United Nations, Europe and Arab states – and sometimes just "them", whoever they are.

…

Dressed as though attending a funeral, Beck stood in sharp contrast to the casual attire of his overwhelmingly white American Christian audience, many of whose baseball caps and T-shirts denoted their state of origin, their church or their adherence to the US Tea Party movement.

But the surprising number of empty seats belied the organisers' claims that demand for tickets had outstripped availability at the 2,000-capacity Davidson Centre.

Beck, in a rare moment of honesty before his new fame, called himself a 'rodeo clown.' He's pulling these stunts to make sure his name is in the news, and suckers keep throwing money at his mini-empire of paranoid bullshit. American conservatism has its own ecosystem in a way that I haven't seen anywhere else. It's a collection of radio shows, TV pundits, books and personalities that create a whole alternate reality of FEMA camps and black helicopters. It's why the Republican field is full of candidates like Newt Gingrich, who are grifters strictly there for the money being a pretend candidate can bring in.

More interesting to me is how perfectly the rally captures the weirdness of Christian Zionism. A number of American Christians have come to Israel in the name of a Biblical prophecy its citizens do not share. Far right Israelis and their supporters in the West have tried for several years now to equate any opposition to government policy as anti-semitism. Christian Zionists are a strange mirror-image of this smear: they are resolutely behind Israel the nation (as long as it holds the West Bank) but are against Judaism:

But the accompanying belief that Jews must then convert to Christianity in order to be saved has prompted widespread opposition to Christian Zionism – and Beck's rally – within Israel. Some rabbis denounced the broadcaster and called on Jews to boycott the event.

For Christian Zionists, Jews are merely a means to an end.