If Rick Perry makes it to the White House, what will American foreign policy in the Middle East look like? We got a clear indication of that, recently, when he stated:
“As a Christian I have a clear directive to support Israel, from my perspective its pretty easy both as an American and a Christian. I am going to stand with Israel.”
Earlier, in an interview with the Weekly Standard, he was even more emphatic, averring that “My faith requires me to support Israel.”
What kind of faith requires knee-jerk support for a foreign country? Apparently, Perry is a follower of a Protestant brand of Christianity known as “dispensationalism,” which holds that the End Times are approaching – and that one of the signs of the imminent apocalypse is the gathering of the Jews in the land of Israel, as supposedly foretold in the Bible. Some dispensationalists equate this with the founding of the Israeli state, in 1947, and the subsequent migration of many Jews to that country. According to dispensationalist theology, this phenomenon prefigures the start of an earth-shattering war, one that will pit Israel against the Forces of Darkness, herald the rise of the Anti-Christ, and ignite a battle that will take place on the field of Armageddon – after which Christ will return to earth and the faithful will be “raptured” up into Heaven.
However, the idea that a US President’s religious convictions will compel him to support a foreign government, regardless of whether that support serves specifically American interests, is appalling – and dangerous. And we can see how dangerous it is by looking at Governor Perry’s attacks on the Obama administration for supposedly not kowtowing to Tel Aviv with sufficient obeisance. At a press conference held in New York City, where he appeared with an Israeli government official, Perry declared:
