Howard Rotberg, President of Mantua Books, publisher of Professor Merkley’s important new book
Ted Belman
As a child of a survivor of the Holocaust, I have always been interested in ideology, religion and the misuse of religion.
Alas, we live in an era where in many countries a world religion, Islam, has been hijacked to serve a totalitarian ideology, merging religion and totalitarian murder, into something called Islamism.
Moreover, we live in an era where substantial number of our most educated in the West claim to be “post-religious” and even “post-ideological”, not understanding that everyone worships something if not G-d, and everyone has some ideology even if that ideology is to claim that he alone has escaped a system of values and standards. Those values and standards are of course what ideology is based on and hence it is present in all places at all times. It is precisely the role of the intellectual to describe ideology, analyze it and critique it, rather than claim only his opponents have an ideology. When a substantial number of Christians and Jews have become so mired in an ideology of tolerance and appeasement of Evil that our very freedoms are at stake, we know we in the West are in deep trouble.
And so, it is such a pleasure for me, a former practicing lawyer who became a writer himself, and then a publisher, to be able to publish the important new book by Professor Paul C. Merkley.
For in a world that seems to grow madder by the moment, and censors that which is deemed either “politically incorrect”, “neocon”, “right wing” or other such epithets, our very best people, like Professor Merkley, have stepped forward to use their tremendous knowledge acquired over a life time of scholarship to explain some of our most urgent problems and differences of opinion.
For you see, most of our media, many of our universities and publishing houses have decided to censor certain topics in the misguided, even evil choice, to appease evil by raising the idea of “tolerance” over the Biblical concept of Justice, as the most important ideal of the West. They assert a non-existent right not to be offended to excuse the abrogation of their responsibility to critique our biggest threats today, which come from those who should and must be challenged on their misguided notions of what constitutes Justice and Human Rights in our tradition.
Of course, as someone who lost his grandparents and then 8 year old aunt to the gas chambers of Auschwitz, I have always known that “tolerance” was not a wise policy but only a measure to be applied to social differences rather than to those who represent political tyranny. Yet, everywhere around us the misguided idea that Christians and Jews must not “offend” the very forces that persecute us world wide has grown into an aggressive censorship of some of our most important topics and most important writers.
To the thinking Christian and Jew it is scary to see the President of the United States go to countries like Egypt and Indonesia, both of which continue to persecute both Christians and Jews, and then praise them for having the very same degree of tolerance and justice found in the West. The Jews have now been completely ethnically cleansed from the Arab world and now the same is happening to the Christians – from the Coptic Christians of Egypt to the dwindling Arab Christians of Bethlehem. Bethlehem’s administration was unwisely ceded by Israel to the so-called Palestinian Authority, under international pressure. Alas, as Hitler showed, Jew-hatred invariably leads to hatred of everything good and Christians themselves find themselves the next target of the Islamists and their “useful idiots” in the West. While someone like me finds Obama to be incompetent in the extreme, the liberal democratic media and academy praise him. We are in very dangerous days.
And so, we are proud that Professor Merkley tackles head on, one of the most puzzling disputes in Christianity today and one that can only be understood, as his subtitle makes clear, in “historical perspective”. The story of the relationship between Judaism and its offshoot, Christianity, is a story of cousins in a love-hate relationship. This family disarray, among people who claim to follow the very same “Judeo-Christian” ethic, is a sad sub-text to all modern history. This Judeo Christian ethic, based on individual responsibility and free will that goes back to the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, stands proudly in contrast to the group rights and individual persecutions and antipathy to liberal democracy and human rights in the Islamic world.
Professor Merkley applies his knowledge from an entire career as a distinguished academic to making the case for a reconciliation between Jews and Christians based on Christian Zionism, that recognizes the Biblical homeland of the Jews as outlined in the “Old Testament” and which denies the historical revisionism espoused by many Muslims and supposed Christians alike.
The fact that Christian anti-Zionism permeates the leadership of the old line Churches and the educators of the University seminaries is scary; but it is far less scary when this important book exposes their faulty arguments and ideological blinders within both a historical and theological context for all to see.
This is the exercise of freedom at its finest: a brave academic rises above the inherent political correctness and censorship of those very people who should be encouraging his scholarship, and fearlessly tells the truth, backed up by true facts.
It is one of the joys of my life to be associated with people like Paul C. Merkley.
Book order here
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