Brickner’s explanation can be see at patently offensive – the idea that men, women and children might be blasted, shredded and burned to bloody, charred fragments for a theological decision allegedly made by their distant ancestors seems to fly in the face of Enlightenment values and the America ethic that we all enter life with a clean slate, that we can make of ourselves what we will and even reinvent our lives. And Brickner’s “divine suicide bomber” theory smacks of John Hagee’s proposed “God sent Hitler”/”Hunter” religious schema in which God is a real estate agent who re-lines Jews to Israel via anti-Semitism, persecution, pogroms and Holocausts.

 

Jews, suggested Brickner, are intractably rebellious and hence cursed, and the potential that this revelation will rub salt on bruised Jewish-American feelings or accentuate Jewish wariness of John McCain and GOP, Christian Zionism or the American Christian right at large (fairly or not), is greater for the fact that, in his sermon, Brickner talks at length about the efforts of Jews For Jesus to push its form of Christian fundamentalism within Israel. Christian proselytizing in Israel is, to put it mildly, a bit controversial.

 

There are some questions that one hopes will be resolved about the incident – was Alaska Governor Palin in attendance at the Wasilla Bible Church* while the current head of Jews For Jesus, David Brickner, asserted that the gruesome deaths, maiming and disfigurement of Israelis caught in Palestinian suicide bombing attacks should rightly be blamed on those victims themselves because of a collective Jewish refusal to accept Jesus en-masse, as a collective people ?

 

Pastor Larry Kroon’s introduction to David Brickner’s sermon may raise some eyebrows for Kroon’s declaration that it was an encounter with Jews For Jesus, back in the 1970’s, that first drew Kroon to Christianity. Kroon’s views, then, would seem quite entrenched. Did Sarah Palin fail to notice ? Or does she too feel that Jewish heritage carries an ancestral curse ? Such revelations, on the form of fundamentalist Christianity espoused at a church Rachel Palin has attended for between one two years, will probably go on for quite some time given that Palin has attended two other churches in Wasilla and another in Juneau, Alaska: thus far, neither mainstream media or bloggers have plumbed or mapped the theological views held at the four Alaska churches that Rachel Palin has attended (Wasilla Assemblies of God, The Juneau Christian Center, Church on The Rock and The Wasilla Bible Church). One of Palin’s former churches in particular arguably deserves far more scrutiny than her current church or the other – Palin was re-baptised, at twelve, at Wasilla Assemblies of God and attended that church far longer, for at least 2 and 1/2 decades, than she attended the other three collectively.

 

Early Wednesday morning the web page housing the archive of Wasilla Assemblies of God sermons vanished, to be replaced by a static web page explaining that server overload caused the outage and that might be true but, if so, the Wasilla Assemblies of God, which maintains an extremely modern and technically highly sophisticated website with a good deal of other high-bandwidth “rich media”, seems in no rush to restore access to the church sermon archive, with both video and audio sermons, and this suggests possible concern, either from the McCain campaign, the Wasilla church, or both, on possible media scrutiny.

 

The McCain campaign seems oddly unable to avoid such “religion catastrophes”: In May 2008 I created a 3:40 video, with an audio clip from a late 2005 John Hagee sermon (most media mis-sreported the sermon date as being in the “late 1990’s because that’s the date I gave in my video – but I was wrong) in which Texas megachurch pastor Hagee stated that Hitler and the Nazis were sent by God, to chase Europe’s Jews towards Palestine – because, claimed Hagee, God’s “top priority is to get the Jewish people to come BACK the the land of Israel”. Hagee said, “God sent a hunter… Hitler was a hunter.” About 48 hours after my video migrated from a Huffington post story to the Colbert Report John McCain renounced Hagee’s political endorsement… Now, we find similar views aired in a church Sarah Palin attends, and the theological claim put forth by David Brickner in his sermon The Jerusalem Dilemma, is really very similar to Hagee’s though less shocking, perhaps, because Brickner did not mention Hitler or claim Hitler worked for God.

 

Nonetheless, Brickner suggested that “The Jews” are collectively being punished, as part of a generational curse carried for several millennia, for rejecting Jesus. Further, if “The Jews” are cursed then Jewishness would seem to, in Brickner’s view, amount to a spiritual taint. But what of children of Jewish-gentile couples, “half Jews” ? Would they inherit 1/2 of the curse ? Or what about people with 1 Jewish grandparent, “1/4 Jews” – would they inherit a 25% curse ?