At the same time, however, let us not forget that it is among those same Evangelicals that groups such as the Barnabas Fund - founded by ex-Muslim Anglican priest Patrick Sookhdeo - are steadily spreading a clear-headed awareness of Islam: of the jihad, of sharia, of the dhimma system.  As Evangelicals become more knowledgeable of - and wary about - Islam, and as they discover the writings of people like Bat Yeor, then they will gain a whole new understanding of the plight of the Jews of the Middle East, and they will understand why simple human decency calls for support of the Jewish state and its right to defend itself...just as simple human decency also calls for a willingness to support, for example, India, in *her* struggle against the Jihad.  

And those who have learned about taqiyya and kitman - and about the mental warping caused by dhimmitude - will become much more sceptical of all those elaborate, dramatic, detailed  - and in many cases, entirely false and fabricated - 'Palestinian' sob stories that purport to relate the sufferings of the 'poooor Palestinians' at the hands of da Evil Joooz.  (Or, for that matter, about other Muslim sob stories from other parts of the world where Muslims claim to be "oppressed"; which are usually places where the Ummah is assiduously and violently pursuing its goal of Total World Domination, and where Muslims fully intend to become ruthless oppressors the moment they gain control of territory and/ or the levers of power).

I would encourage Dexter Van Zile to try to find someone who can translate, out of French into English, as should have been done 30 years ago, Jacques Ellul's brilliant  and poignant tour de force, 'Un Chretien Pour Israel", which totally demolishes all of the Arab/ Muslim Big Lies, as thoroughly and clinically as only the man who wrote 'Propagandes' (English title: Propaganda: the Formation of Men's Attitudes) could do.  I read it in French and it immunised me, instantly and perfectly, against the sort of propaganda that 'with god on our side' represents (propaganda that, in other forms, I had already begun to encounter, and that I - from an Evangelical-type background - was beginning to be confused by.  Ellul unconfused me).  Ellul's book was the first place where I heard the name of Bat Yeor, and the word 'dhimma' and 'dhimmitude' (in one of the footnotes).  Ellul analyses the sly rhetoric of the supposedly secular charter of the PLO, which became Fatah, and concludes bluntly that it is "a perfect expression of the Jihad".  What he would have said of the much more brutally honest Hamas Charter, I do not know, but he would not have been surprised by it in the least.

And the other book by Ellul that should be put into good English as soon as possible is 'Ce Dieu Injuste? Theologie Chretienne Pour Le Peuple d'Israel', which carefully maps out the shape of what one might call a philojudaic Christianity.   At bottom, one requires a robust concept of Grace, and also an unswerving conviction that YHWH, the Holy One of Israel,  always, always, always keeps his promises, and that his glory is shown precisely in the fact that he keeps his promises no matter what.  Anger yes, judgement yes, but never, never, NEVER the end of love.

(Another item that every well-informed Christian should read, is Martha Gellhorn's eerily prescient "the Arabs of Palestine", written in 1961, when there was no 'occupied West Bank (sic)", and yet the Muslim world was already seething with hatred and spewing out murderous threats toward the tiny and almost indefensible state of the Jews.)

To me, a Christian, the rage of those who rail against the resurrection of a Jewish state is the rage of the powers of this world, for whom Death or Enslavement - whether national, or individual - must be final.

Peoples such as the native Americans should not side with the 'Palestinians' (the defeated Arab Muslims who invaded and occupied a homeland of Jews and Christians, and oppressed both for centuries), but rather should look with astonished joy  and hope at the restoration of the Jews, for it is a miraculous this-worldly example of the overturning of the principle of worldly Imperium, an affirmation that God is not on the side of the cruel, the violent, the greedy and the false.  

The local Arab Muslims in and around Israel masquerade as an oppressed people but they are in reality the advance troops of the vast Mohammedan Ummah, seething with rage at the fact that the heirs of the original inhabitants have taken from it a tiny part of its ill-gotten gains; the Arab Muslims (sometimes employing dhimmi Christians to further their agenda) are former slavemasters who are 'humiliated' because each day they have to watch those whom they regard as their allah-appointed serfs, living free in the sunlight.  The Muslims gnash their teeth and froth with rage and feel themselves tremendously 'oppressed' simply because  a large body of Jews - most particularly, that half of the Jewish population of Israel which comprise escaped ex-dhimmi Jews and their descendants - have gotten out of their clutches and can no longer be beaten, spat on, exploited, robbed, raped, humiliated and periodically murdered with impunity.

As a Christian, I have no sympathy whatever for a slavemaster who cries because his slave escaped (and who is busy plotting to re-enslave the escapee or to kill him, as soon as he can manage it), or a thief who rages because what he stole has been taken from him by the original owner, or that owner's heirs!  

I know it's just one small part of your overall argument, and that it is a part that is somewhat true but it still requires a little qualification. You wrote:

• All this talk about how the Jews fit into Christian theology and whether they are still the chosen people underscores just how much of a trauma the Jewish refusal to accept Jesus as the messiah is for the Christian mind. And given the persistent failure of Burge and Sizer (and many other Christians) to acknowledge Muslim hostility toward Jews, it becomes reasonable to ask if anger over the Jewish refusal to accept Jesus as the Son of God translates into indifference toward the genocidal hostility toward Jews in the Middle East. What Burge, Sizer and a number of other commentators do is deny modern day Jews the right to claim God’s blessing to the descendents of Abraham while at the same time ignoring the curses directed at them by their adversaries.

and in as far as it goes then that is true. However, I would posit that there are only two types of Christian whose minds are troubled by the Jews lack of acceptance of Christ as the Messiah - the staunchly evangelical, overly and superstitiously religious, biblical literalist Protestant type and the extremely conservative, highly reactionary, obsessively and superstitiously religious mainstream orthodox type (note 'orthodox' with a small 'o') for whom their Patriarch's word is law.

For most, if not all, the rest of Christianity the Jews non-acceptance of Christ as the Messiah is of little to no importance for they will have explored and thought about the foundational philosophy of their religion and realised that the message may transcend the messenger and that modern day Jews have probably got the message loud and clear from their own religious framework.

I, myself, belong to a group of Christians for whom the Jews non-acceptance of Christ as the Messiah is, not to put too fine a point on it, a complete and utter irrelevancy, and thinking about it is, for us, just a boring and pointless waste of time. I would venture to suggest that most mainstream Christians are pretty much of that persuasion.

Yes there is suffering in the middle east,and it is all caused by the brainwashed moslem fanatics who are not only suppressing their own people who show any degree of normality in the western tradition,but have also managed to play on the not so latent anti-semitism prevailing in much of europe and to a slightly lesser degree in the u.s. I am also suffering ,having to put up with so much garbage from these ignorant and stupid people day after day.