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The Dome of the Rock mosque in Jerusalem

Comment: Given that many conservatives today, including Donald Trump, support Israel, we thought it time to republish this article, first posted 19 years ago.

The article explores the explosive intersection of Christian Zionism, dispensationalist eschatology (often called Armageddon theology), and the long-standing push for a Third Temple on Jerusalem's Temple Mount. Drawing from the works of Gershom Gorenberg (The End of Days) and Grace Halsell (Forcing God's Hand), it examines how certain evangelical Christian groups — along with allied militant Zionist elements — view the modern State of Israel, the regathering of Jews, and preparations like the breeding of unblemished red heifers as literal fulfillments of biblical prophecy signaling the approach of Christ's Second Coming, the Rapture, Tribulation, and ultimate apocalyptic battle.

These beliefs, rooted in 19th-century teachings from figures like John Darby, portray support for Israel's expansion and control over contested holy sites not merely as political solidarity, but as a divine imperative to hasten end-times events — even if that means endorsing conflict over the Temple Mount, where the Dome of the Rock and Al-Aqsa Mosque stand. The piece critiques this alliance as cynical and dangerous: one side anticipates Jewish conversion or destruction in the process, while the other pursues messianic restoration, with Palestinians caught in the crossfire of prophetic literalism.

As of early 2026, preparations continue: The Temple Institute reports four red heifer candidates still under observation at Shiloh (following disqualifications and practice rituals in 2025), with ongoing monitoring for ritual purity that could enable Temple service resumption. Record numbers of Jewish ascents to the Temple Mount in 2025, combined with persistent evangelical advocacy, underscore how these ancient rituals and modern geopolitics remain intertwined in a volatile mix that many see as a "sacred blasting cap" for regional — and potentially global — conflagration.

This is the story of a theology that doesn't just predict the end of the world... but actively works to bring it about.


July 30, 2005
During the Reformation era, the Biblical Hebrews came to be associated with their modern co-religionists. At the same time it became popular belief among Protestant adherents that the Jews scattered in their present dispersion would be regathered in Palestine in order to prepare for the Second Coming of Christ... The Old Testament not only became the most popular literature for the Protestant laity, but also the source book for general historical knowledge. This is the moment when a process of historical manipulation began. — Regina Sharif, Non-Jewish Zionism
Who will the Antichrist be? ... Of course he will be Jewish. — Jerry Falwell
Prophetically, the only thing that could prevent it (a Jewish holocaust) is Israel's repentance. — Dwight Pentecost in an interview with Paul Boyer
The creation of Israel in 1948 means "a return at last, to the biblical land from which the Jews were driven so many hundreds of years ago... The establishment of the nation of Israel is the fulfillment of biblical prophecy and the very essence of its fulfillment." — Former president Jimmy Carter
As a Christian, I see the return of Jews to the Holy Land but one sign of the coming of the messianic age in which all humans will enjoy the benefits of an ideal society. — Former Senator Mark Hatfield
For the first time in more than 2,000 years, Jerusalem, being in the hands of the Jews, gives the student of the Bible a thrill and a renewed faith in the accuracy and validity of the Bible. — L. Nelson Bell, editor, Christianity Today
The Rev. Clyde Lott, Canton, Miss., a Pentecostal minister, interprets passages of the Bible to say that a third Jewish temple must rise in Jerusalem before the Second Coming can happen... Lott is producing perfect red heifers, virginal cows "without spot" that could be sacrificed to produce ashes for ritual use in the future temple. For that to happen, Muslim shrines like the Dome of the Rock would have to be knocked down... Lott is convinced that God will attend to this in due time. — The New York Times, December 27, 1998
The reader may want to pick up copies of Gershom Gorenberg's book The End of Days: Fundamentalism and the Struggle for the Temple Mount, and Forcing God's Hand: Why Millions Pray for a Quick Rapture and Destruction of Planet Earth. by Grace Halsell. These two books have provided much of the material reviewed in this article.

Gershom Gorenberg is an associate editor and columnist for The Jerusalem Report, a regular contributor to The New Republic, and an associate of the Center for Millennial Studies at Boston University. He lives in Jerusalem, where he has spent years covering the dangerous mix of religion and politics.

Grace Halsell served President Lyndon Johnson as his speech writer for three years. She covered both Korea and Vietnam as a journalist. She was the author of 14 books, including "Prophecy and Politics: Militant Evangelists on the Road to Nuclear War."

The facts that these two authors, one Christian and one Jewish, bring forward, are that the Armageddon theology of the New Christian Right is being propagated by numerous TV evangelists, including Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell, along with Hal Lindsey's widely read The Late Great Planet Earth, and Tim LaHaye's "Left Behind" series, and that this theology is influencing millions of human beings worldwide to not only believe that the world is going to end soon, but that it is their duty to hasten the event in any way they can. It is in this context that we gain greater understanding of the politics of George W. Bush, though both of these books were written long before Bush effected a coup d'état in 2000.

Halsell interviewed fundamentalists, all of whom believed that it is their duty to fulfill the biblical prophecy of fighting World War III preparatory to Christ's Second Coming. Most disquieting is her discussion of an alliance of the New Christian Right and militant Zionists who share a common belief and enthusiasm for a global holocaust. Alarming, too, is the extent of the political influence of the above-mentioned tele-evangelists, the Israeli lobby, and the fact that the policies of George W. Bush are largely subject to his alleged belief in the inevitability of a God-willed nuclear war. I suspect that Bush, behind the scenes, is not truly Christian, even in his own mind, but rather follows the ideas of Machiavelli which posit that a leader must appear to be religious in order to induce the masses who are believers to follow him. On the other hand, Bush and much of Congress may very well believe in this Armageddon Theology.

Both Gorenberg and Halsell detail and document the history of the alliance between militant Zionism and Christian fundamentalism and expose the purpose of the alliance which is the return to Israeli control of all of Palestine and the rebuilding of the Temple in Jerusalem on the site where the Al-Aqsa mosque and the Dome of the Rock now stand. For the religious Zionist, these actions are the prerequisite to the Messiah's FIRST coming. For the Christian fundamentalists, it is prerequisite to Armageddon and Messiah's SECOND coming. Reclamation of Israel from the Palestinians who have lived there for over 5000 years, and establishing Jewish hegemony, including the use of nuclear weapons (Armageddon) are seen as events to be earnestly desired and supported.

Armageddon is seen by Christian fundamentalists as "nuclear and imminent", waiting only for proper orchestration from American political leaders. The Zionists, naturally, do NOT include Armageddon in their messianic aspirations. This conflict of interests at a higher level is exposed in Gorenberg's book.

The Red Heifer and Temple Preparations

Gorenberg's book was written before 9-11 and, in this sense, was extremely prescient. The reader who wishes to understand what is at the root of the current conflict that threatens to engulf our planet will find his history of those 35 disputed acres of the Temple Mount to be crucial. Gorenberg makes clear what is at the root of the volatile relationships between Arabs, Jews, and Christians in Israel. He pays special attention to carefully documenting and analyzing the actions and beliefs of fundamentalist groups in all three religions.

Jewish messianists and Christian millennialists both believe that building the Third Temple on the site where both Solomon's and Herod's temples are alleged to have stood is essential for their respective prophetic scenarios to take place (never mind that they seem to both be using each other and each believe that the other is just a dumb tool), while the Muslim believers fear that efforts to destroy Al-Aqsa mosque to make way for the Third Temple will prevent fulfillment of the prophecy about Islam's Meccan shrine migrating to Jerusalem at the end of time.

Gorenberg calls Temple Mount "a sacred blasting cap".

The problem is, of course, as I show in Who Wrote the Bible, there probably never was a FIRST "Temple of Solomon," and the Old Testament is NOT a true "history of the Jews." So, the problem is: if Islam is predicated on two "manufactured" religions, what does that say about the faith of the Islamic fundamentalists?

The fact is: There is an alliance between America and Israel in the war on Islam. They are both determined to establish Israeli control over Jerusalem and rebuild the Temple where the Dome of the Rock now stands and the Palestinians are in the way. This is the core issue behind the current "War on Islam" disguised as a "War on Islamic Terrorists" and more recently, "War on those who hate our civilization." And just as Christians and Jews are quite willing to sacrifice their own people for this monstrous agenda, so are Muslims undoubtedly raising up terrorists to do as much damage to the "infidels" as possible so as to save their holy site. But to really get a grip on the explosive situation, we have to lay the major share of the blame for Islamic terrorism in the current day where the power has resided for a very long time: in the West, the Christian West.
There's a new religious cult in America. It's not composed of so-called "crazies" so much as mainstream, middle to upper-middle class Americans. They listen - and give millions of dollars each week - to the TV evangelists who expound the fundamentals of the cult. They read Hal Lindsey and Tim LaHaye. They have one goal: to facilitate God's hand to waft them up to heaven free from all trouble, from where they will watch Armageddon and the destruction of Planet Earth. This doctrine pervades Assemblies of God, Pentecostal, and other charismatic churches, as well as Southern Baptist, independent Baptist, and countless so-called Bible churches and mega-churches. At least one out of every 10 Americans is a devotee of this cult. It is the fastest growing religious movement in Christianity today. — Dale Crowley Jr., religious broadcaster, Washington D.C.
The "Rapture of the Church" is an idea popularized by John Darby, a nineteenth-century British preacher. The word "Rapture" describes the joy of the believers while the rest of humanity is facing apocalyptic terror, seven years' worth, before God's kingdom on earth is established.

Tim LaHaye - with his ghost-writer Jerry B. Jenkins - has produced a series of books that seek to make that terror real, to depict the "Rapture" in the world of jumbo jets and iMacs.

LaHaye's books are REAL to people living in frightening times. For the true believer, LaHaye's books are not just accurate descriptions of how it is all going to actually happen, they provide satisfyingly delicious scenarios of being proven RIGHT. The non-believers are treated to long and drawn-out descriptions of what is going to happen to them on earth after the Rapture.

One of the key elements of the "Rapture" theory is the Antichrist. This individual signs a seven-year peace treaty with Israel - which includes rebuilding the Temple. Jews are expected to unanimously support this project and Muslims also will agree to move the Dome of the Rock to "New Babylon."

The rebuilding of the Temple in Jerusalem is required in the scenario because the Antichrist must desecrate it half way through the Tribulation which is supposed to include war, earthquakes, and locusts. All of this is to be hoped for as a necessary preliminary to establishing God's kingdom on Earth.

The theory demands something else: that Jews will convert to Christianity in masses so that they can then become "witnesses" or converters of more gentiles. Darby's theory insists that God's promises to the people of Israel must be read literally as applying to literal Jews. Therefore, the Jews WILL convert (because it is in the eschatological screenplay).
At the "End of the World," the believers of three faiths will watch the same drama, but with different programs in their hands. In one, Jesus is Son of God; in another he is Muslim prophet. The Jews messiah is cast in the Muslim script as the dajjal - another name for the Antichrist, the deceiver predicted by Christian tradition. The infidels in one script are the true believers of another. If your neighbor announces that the End has come, you can believe him, even if he utterly misunderstands what is happening. [Gorenberg]
Thus, we see that, for those Christians who believe in Armageddon Theology, the only thing to do is to promote the well-being of Israel with money, arms, and other kinds of support, so that the Temple can be rebuilt; never mind that it is going to be desecrated and that Israel is supposed, in the scenario, to be utterly destroyed in the process of establishing God's kingdom!

What a double-cross!
I've listened to Muslim sheikhs explain how verses in the Koran foretell Israel's destruction, and to American evangelical ministers who insist on their deep love for Israel and nevertheless eagerly await apocalyptic battles on Israel's soil so terrible that the dry river beds will, they predict, fill with rivers of blood. I also came to realize that the center of my story had to be the Temple Mount. What happens at that one spot, more than anywhere else, quickens expectations of the End in three religions. And at that spot, the danger of provoking catastrophe is greatest. [...]

Melody, the cow that could have brought God's kingdom on earth, or set the entire Middle East ablaze, or both, depending on who you ask, has her head stuck between the gray bars of the cowshed and is munching hay and corncobs. [...]

Melody's birth in August 1996 seemed to defy nature: Her mother was a black and white Holstein. In fact, [Gilad Jubi, dairyman of the Kfar Hasidim agricultural school] says he'd had trouble breeding the dairy cow, and finally imported semen, from Switzerland, he thinks, from a red breed of beef cattle. But "red" cows are normally splotched. An entirely crimson one is extraordinary: The Mishneh Torah, Moses Maimonides twelfth-century code of Jewish law, records that just nine cows in history have fit the Book of Numbers' requirements for sacrificing as a "red heifer." Yet the rare offering was essential to maintaining worship in the Temple in Jerusalem. The tenth cow, Maimonides asserts, will arrive in the time of the messiah. That's when Jewish tradition foresees the Third Temple being built on the Temple Mount. [...]

Finding a red heifer is one precondition to building the Temple. Another, it's generally assumed, is removing the Dome of the Rock from the Temple Mount. [...]

The next day, a newspaper broke the story. [Adir Zik, an announcer on the settlers pirate radio station known for his fiery rhetoric] spoke about the red heifer on his radio show. The madness about Melody had begun. [...] Press photographers arrived. The rabbi, sans calf, appeared on national TV. The Boston Globe's man did a story, and other American correspondents followed. ... A CNN crew made a pilgrimage to the red heifer, as did crews from ABC and CBS, and from Japan, Holland, France.

If much of the world's media reported on Melody in a bemused tone, as a story about the strange things people believe, not everyone saw the cow as a joke. On the opinion page of the influential Israeli daily Ha'aretz, columnist David Landau argued that the security services should see the red heifer as a "four-legged bomb" potentially more dangerous than any terrorist. Landau... understood the expectations of building the Temple that the cow could inspire among Jewish religious nationalists, and its potential for inciting war with the Muslim world. "A bullet in the head," he wrote, "is, according to the best traditions, the solution of security services in such cases..."

Too shrill? As Landau alluded, the nameless agents of Israel's Shin Bet domestic security force, caught off guard by the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in November 1995, had underestimated the power of faith in the past. At Kfar Hasidim, Melody was moved from the cowshed to "solitary confinement" in the school's petting zoo, where she could be kept slightly safer from the visitors arriving daily. A dog was posted to guard her. It couldn't guard against sprouting white hairs. [Which Melody did, disqualifying her and saving her from being turned into cow toast.]

Unquestionably, the reactions to Melody seem bizarre. But there are three very solid reasons for the fears and hopes she engendered: the past, the present, and most of all the future.

Numbers 19 is one of the most opaque sections in scripture. A red heifer, "faultless, wherein is no blemish, and upon which never came a yoke," is to be slaughtered, and its body burned entirely to ash. Paradoxically, this sacrifice must be performed outside the Temple, yet the heifer's ash becomes the key to the sanctuary: It alone can cleanse a man or woman tainted by contact with human death.

For, says the biblical text, anyone who touches a corpse, or bone, or grave, anyone who even enters the same room as a dead body, is rendered impure, and must not enter the Temple. Yet proximity to death is an unavoidable part of life, and sacrifice was how Israelites served God. So to free a person of impurity, says Numbers, mix the heifer's cinder with water, and sprinkle the mixture on him. As Jewish tradition read those verses, the heifer really had to be faultless. Two white hairs would disqualify it. The rarest possible beast was essential to purify a priest who'd attended his own father's burial, or to allow any Israelite who'd been in the presence of a corpse to share in the sacrificial cult. [...]

The last ashes of the last red heifer ran out sometime after the Romans razed the Temple in Jerusalem in the year 70. Every Jew became impure by reason of presumed contact with death which, practically speaking, didn't matter much because there was no sanctuary to enter and sacrifice had ceased being the center of Judaism. The tenth heifer logically belonged to the imagined time of the messiah because a rebuilt temple also did.

Except that today, the absent ashes of the red heifer have a new function. They are a crucial factor in the political and strategic balance of the Middle East.

Over nineteen hundred years have passed since the Temple's destruction, but its location - give or take a few crucial meters - is still a hard physical reality. [...] In principle, Temple Mount remains the most sacred site in Judaism. [...]

But the Mount itself isn't in ruins. As Al-Haram al-Sharif, the Noble Sanctuary, it is the third-holiest site in Islam. [...] A glance at the Mount testifies that any effort to build the Temple where it once stood - the one place where Jewish tradition says it can be built again - would mean removing shrines sacred to hundreds of millions of Muslims, from Morocco to Indonesia. An attempt to dedicate even a piece of the enclosure to Jewish prayer would mean slicing that piece out of the Islamic precincts.

On June 7, 1967, the third day of the Six-Day War, Israeli troops took East Jerusalem, bringing the Temple Mount under Jewish rule for the first time in almost 2,000 years. Israel's leaders decided to leave the Mount, Al-Haram al-Sharif, in Muslim hands. The decision kept the ingredients for holy war apart, just barely. [...]

Yet a separation made by the civil government would not have worked without a hand from Jewish religious authorities. From the Six-Day War on, Israel's leading rabbis have overwhelmingly ruled that Jews should not enter the gates of the Mount. One of the most commonly cited reasons ... is that under religious law, every Jew is presumed to have had contact with the dead. For lack of a red heifer's ashes, there is simply nothing to be done about it: no way for Jews to purify themselves to enter the sacred square, no way for Judaism to reclaim the Mount, no way to rebuild the Temple. Government officials and military leaders could only regard the requirement for the missing heifer as a stroke of sheer good fortune preventing conflict over the Mount. [...]

In 1984, the Shin Bet stumbled onto the Jewish settler underground's plot to blow up the Dome of the Rock. One of the group's leaders explained that among the "spiritual difficulties" that kept them from carrying out the attack was that it is forbidden to enter the Temple Mount because of impurity caused by contact with the dead - that is, they lacked the ash of a red heifer. In a verdict in the case, one judge wrote that if the plan had been carried out, it would have "exposed the State of Israel and the entire Jewish people to a new Holocaust."

The danger hasn't gone away: The Temple Mount is potentially a detonator of full-scale war, and a few people trying to rush the End could set it off. [Gorenberg]
According to Gorenberg, between a fifth and a quarter of all Americans are evangelicals. In Latin America, the number of Protestants subscribing to these beliefs has climbed from 5 million in the late sixties to 40 million in the mid-nineties. "One reason for the rise [was] the campaign of John Paul II against the leftist faith of liberation theology. Denied a tie between religion and hope for a better world, Latin American Catholics have been more open to the catastrophic hopes of premillennialism."

South Korea's apocalyptically oriented Protestants have gone from 15 percent of the total population to 40 percent during the seventies and eighties.

The old stereotypical image of the apocalyptic believers as tramps on street corners carrying signs saying "The End is Nigh" no longer stands. Today's adherents of the Rapture theory wear suits in boardrooms and stride the corridors of power.

Reverend Irvin Baxter, a Pentecostal minister from Richmond, Indiana, made Melody the cover story in his "Endtime" magazine, which provides "World Events from a Biblical Perspective," then published a follow-up article when he was able to come and visit himself. To his 40,000 Christian subscribers, he explained Maimonides' view that the tenth red heifer would be offered in the messiah's time - and then noted that under the diplomatic schedule then in effect for the Oslo accords, "the final status of Jerusalem and the Temple Mount is to be settled by May of 1999. It's in 1999 that Melody will be three years of age..."

In other words, the calf, the medieval Jewish sage, and the Israel-PLO peace agreement all proved that the Temple would be in place for the End Times to begin by the millennium's end.

Televangelist Jack Van Impe likewise noted that "scripture requires the red heifer be sacrificed at the age of three," and asked breathlessly, "Could Melody's ashes be used for Temple purification ceremonies as early as 2000?"[...]

The Temple Mount as Flashpoint

A pamphlet for tourists tells us: The beauty and tranquility of Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem attracts thousands of visitors every year. Some believe it was the site of the Temple of Solomon, peace be upon him ... or the site of the Second Temple ... although no documented historical or archaeological evidence exists to support this.

There is something to be said for this as the reader will know from reading Who Wrote the Bible. Archaeologists have been digging up the "Holy Land" since the nineteenth century and, so far, there has been not a shred of evidence to support the "Temple of Solomon" story, nor much of anything else in the Bible "as history."

Nevertheless, Temple Mount IS standing there, taking up nearly a sixth of the walled Old City of Jerusalem. It is certainly true that Herod built a Temple in the vicinity that replaced the earlier temple built by Jews returning from exile in the fifth century BC. Those, in turn, claimed that they were building the Temple on the spot where the former "Temple of Solomon" had stood. As we discover in Who Wrote the Bible, the so-called "Temple of Solomon" was very likely a pagan Temple that had existed for some time in Jerusalem and had fallen into disrepair and was restored by King Hezekiah as part of his religious reform project.

But, even the Temple Mount is a matter of stories and not facts. Medieval philosopher, Moses Maimonides says that not only was Adam born where the altar stood, but Cain and Abel made their sacrifices there and Noah did the same after the flood (never mind that he supposedly landed on Mt. Ararat in Turkey). Abraham was told to go to "Mount Moriah" to sacrifice his son Isaac and Mount Moriah is where the Second Book of Chronicles informs us Solomon built the Temple. As noted in Who Wrote the Bible, Second Chronicles is a late rewrite of Jewish royal history and it is altogether likely that the redactor took the name "Moriah" and assigned it to where the Temple that was refurbished stood in order to affirm its sanctity.

Another curious point that Gorenberg makes is the fact that the word "Jerusalem" occurs hundreds of times in the Bible, but NOT in the Torah. The closest is "Salem", possibly an early, pagan name for the city. Archaeologists tell us that Jerusalem was a sacred center long before the alleged time of David and Solomon. The Temple was supposedly built on a "threshing floor," which may indicate that the religion practiced in the region, and the temple that actually stood there already, was devoted to fertility gods and goddesses.

In our own more recent history, Christian Spaniards who conquered Cordoba turned its Great Mosque into a cathedral and the Ottoman sultan who vanquished Constantinople in 1453 converted the church of Hagia Sophia to a mosque. Central Asia's oldest standing mosque in Bukhara, north of Afghanistan, stands on layers that archaeologists have shown reveal the prior existence of both a Zoroastrian temple and a Buddhist temple.

The temple that was in Jerusalem - which was NOT Solomon's - was destroyed in 586 BC by the Babylonians. Seventy years later, the returning exiles were tasked with building a new Temple "on the site" of the old one. The big question is: after so many years, did they actually build on the right spot? Did they even know what was the place where the former temple in Jerusalem stood? For that matter, is what is now known as Jerusalem really the place that was known as Jerusalem before the exile? Gorenberg points out that it's hard to understand why any city stood there at all. "It's on the edge of a desert; the soil is rocky; the sole spring is grade C; the trade routes cross to the north."

It seems that the temple built by the returning exiles from Babylon was little more than a human-built platform on top of the mountain, achieved by moving a lot of earth to accommodate the crowds that came to witness the sacrifices. It was on this earthwork platform that Herod built the temple that remains in the memory of the Jews.

Josephus described Herod as "brutish and a stranger to all humanity. He married the last princess of the Hasmonean dynasty and murdered her and her sons and another of his sons by a different wife. But he certainly did build the most magnificent temple that Jerusalem had ever seen. The purpose of the temple, according to various sources, was to make money. The building project attracted pilgrims by the thousands - "customers for faith, the only product Jerusalem has ever had to sell."

Herod's temple didn't last long. It was razed in the summer of 70 AD by Titus and sixty years later, the emperor Hadrian rebuilt the city as "Aelia Capitolina, dedicated to Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva. It is very likely that the "Wailing Wall" so revered by Jews as the last remnant of Herod's Temple, is actually part of the Temple of Jupiter built by Hadrian. [see Tuvia Sagiv]

Nevertheless, the troops of the caliph Umar, second commander of the faithful after Mohammed, conquered Aelia Capitolina in 638. At that time, the city's Christian patriarch, Sophronius was asked to show him where the Temple had formerly stood. A Byzantine account tells us that, when the patriarch saw Umar there, he knew the world was ending (but remember, at that time the idea of rebuilding the temple was not part of the Christian theology), and so he pointed out the mount which had become a heap of rubbish.

Umar cleared away the rubbish and built a mosque that was the forerunner of the Dome of the Rock which was built by Caliph Abd al-Malik ibn Marwan in 691, and stands nearby. The problem is, historians can't really explain why the Caliph wanted to create a "holy site" there since Mecca was already "The Holy Site" of Islam. Gorenberg suggests that the Byzantine building indicates strong Christian influence in its design. It does, in fact, somewhat resembles the later Templar style of church and one might be justified in thinking that there was a strong Islamic influence on the Templars both in terms of architecture as well as esotericism. A clue to this esoteric stream is revealed inside where a mosaic inscription from the Koran addresses "The People of the Book," an Islamic designation for Christians, saying: Do not say things about God but the truth! The messiah Jesus, son of Mary, is indeed a messenger of God ... So believe in God and all the messengers, and stop talking about a trinity... Verily God is the God of unity. Lord Almighty! That God would beget a child? Either in the Heavens or on the Earth?

And, for the Jews, there was also a message in the structure itself: The Dome stands where everyone knew the Temple did, and therefore, it can be seen that Islam is the culmination of Judaism and Christianity.

Historical and Political Context

August 16, 1929, the day that the Palestine Mandate burst into flames, predictably, as Gorenberg notes. The day before, on the anniversary of the destruction of the Temple, hundreds of Jews had demonstrated along the Western Wall, demanding rights to the spot. A surviving photograph of the demonstrators is interesting because it shows some of them in shorts and regular shoes. Why is this interesting? Because as a sign of mourning on such days, religious Jews do not wear leather shoes on a fast day. This means that the protesters were not demanding rights to the Western Wall for religious reasons, but for nationalistic and territorial reasons. They raised the Zionist flag and sang the Zionist anthem.

So, the next day, Muslim protesters came and beat up the pious Jewish worshippers who had nothing to do with the demonstration of the day before. The following Friday, tensions had increased to such an extent that Arabs began assaulting Jews in the old city, armed with clubs and knives. Within an hour, the attacks had spread to other areas of the city and the British police force was so undermanned it could do nothing.

The violence spread and on the second day (24 August), in Hebron, rioters moved from house to house murdering and looting. Sixty-seven Jews were killed, including a dozen women and three children. Most of the town's Jews were saved by their Arab neighbors.

One historian records that Jews went well beyond self defense. In one instance, in retaliation, Jews broke into a Mosque and destroyed holy books. A Palestinian version of the events tells us that the people of Palestine reacted to the provocation of Jewish religious extremists at the holy site, which seems to be what actually happened.

In a week and a half of terror, 133 Jews and 116 Arabs were killed. From any point of view, the event was a turning point in the struggle for control of Palestine. The fact is that there was, at this early stage, a great opposition of Palestinians to the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine, and it's easy to understand. Palestine was basically "given to the Jews" by Britain. But, many in Britain began to think that the Balfour Declaration's promise of a "national home" for the Jews had been a mistake.

The facts are: two national groups were struggling for one piece of land. One of the groups had been there for a very, very long time, and the other group intended to come and take over what they were convinced was theirs either by right of the British mandate, or by right of their god. The British plan to settle the Jews in Palestine was a disaster and they ran with their tails between their legs, leaving the Palestinians and the Jews to duke it out on their own.

But the fight was not equal. The desire among the Christian West for the Jews to remain in Palestine, to re-create Israel, to re-build the Temple, and to fulfill prophecy was behind the Jewish presence. The Palestinians didn't have a chance from the beginning.

Alliance and Motivations

An anti-Semite "is someone who hates Jews more than he's supposed to." — TV Evangelist James Robison.

The Christian Church, throughout most of its history, has been anti-Semitic. With the reformation, however, many Christians turned from anti-Semitism to a new kind of discrimination rampant in the world today: philo-Semitism. This is a stance which views the Jews as practically necessary AS Jews, because they have a role to play in the salvation of Christians! This "love of Jews" includes in its parameters the complacent sureness that the Jews ARE different and are destined for extinction once they have performed their assigned task.

Certainly, there are personal and political differences among Christians which make a generalization inaccurate and perhaps even dangerous, but the fact remains that many fundamentalists who are leading the "let's help Israel every way we can" and "let's go after the Muslims" charge of the present day have an established history of having taught their followers that Jews were behind all of the world's troubles.

It was after the full horrors of Nazi Germany had been "revealed" that Western Christianity realized that promoting anti-Semitism a la The Protocols of the Elders of Zion could be seen as sympathizing with the Nazis. So, those fundamentalists who were blatantly anti-Semitic backed up and regrouped.

With the birth of Israel in 1948, the anti-Semitic Christians changed their tactics. They were still anti-Semitic (still ARE), but they acted differently on the outside; they became "loving" and "grateful", benign and patronizing toward Jews. Thank goodness the Jews were NOW doing what they were supposed to do: regather in Israel so Jesus could return and blast them all to smithereens!

As this new appreciation of the Jewish role merged with dispensationalist beliefs, Western Christians became fiercely supportive of the new Jewish state. Nothing must come between Israel and its destiny! Anybody could criticize any other nation in the world, but NOT Israel. Criticizing France, Germany or even the U.S. was just "political." Criticizing Israel was criticizing God Almighty.

At the same time that millennialists proclaim their love for Israel, they frequently reveal that they have no liking for Jews at all.
Standing, overlooking the Megiddo valley, Clyde, a traveling companion, explained to me that this was the site where Christ would lead the forces of good against evil. "Two-thirds of all the Jews will be killed," Clyde said, citing Zechariah 13:8-9. Pausing for some math, he comes up with nine million dead Jews. "For two hundred miles, the blood will reach to the horses' bridles."

When I express concern over this scenario, Clyde explains, "God is doing it mainly for his ancient people, the Jews. He's devised a seven-year Tribulation period mainly to purge the Jews, to get them to see the light and recognize Christ as their savior."

But why, I ask, would God have chosen a people = "God's favorite" as Clyde says - only to exterminate most of them?

"As I said, God must purge them," Clyde says. "He wants them to bow down before His only son, our Lord Jesus Christ."

But a few will be left? To bury their dead?

"Yes," Clyde tells me. "There'll be 144,000 who are spared. Then they will convert to Christ." [Halsell]
Only 144,000 Jews will remain alive after the battle of Armageddon. These remaining Jews - every man, woman and child among them - will bow down to Jesus. As converted Christians, all the adults will at once begin preaching the gospel of Christ. Imagine! They will be like 144,000 Billy Grahams turned loose at once! — Hal Lindsey
As long as they don't convert, Jews are "spiritually blind." — Jerry Falwell
Traditionally, Jews have been liberal and supportive of liberal agendas. Having known discrimination and racism, they were allied with liberal agendas. However, in 1967, after Israel seized Arab lands that it did not want to relinquish, the Jewish state moved rapidly to the conservative right. American Jews, formerly liberal supporters of the rights of others were persuaded that their number one priority was to support Israel. Under this influence, they also moved rapidly to the right.

The Israeli Right and The Christian Right became strange bedfellows, each with a doctrine centered around Israel and a cult of land. Nathan Perlmutter of the ADL explained why American Jews support the Christian Right in America: First he says, he feels himself a somewhat typical American Jew in that he weighs every issue in life by one measure: "Is it good for the Jews? This question satisfied, I proceed to the secondary issues."

American Jews support Jerry Falwell because he supports the expansionist aims of Israel. Perlmutter knows that evangelical-fundamentalists interpret Scripture as saying all Jews eventually must accept Jesus or be killed. But, meanwhile, he says, "We need all the friends we have to support Israel... If the Messiah comes, on that day we'll consider our options. Meanwhile, let's praise the Lord and pass the ammunition."

Irving Kristol urges American Jews to support such as Falwell telling them that "in the real world" Jews are better off to back the Right, those that are strongly pro-Israel. To be sure, he adds, yes fundamentalists preachers will say that God does not hear the prayer of a Jew. But "after all, why should Jews care about the theology of a fundamentalist preacher when they do not for a moment believe that he speaks with any authority on the question of God's attentiveness to human prayer? And what do such theological abstractions matter as against the mundane fact that the same preacher is vigorously pro-Israel?"

Douglas Krieger, an evangelical lay leader of Denver, Colorado, closely connected with Terry Reisenhoover in raising money to eradicate the Al-Aqsa mosque and the Dome of the Rock to rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem, early on urged Israel to work with and totally embrace evangelical-fundamentalist issues in exchange for their support of Israel.

In a lengthy analysis paper prepared for Israeli and American Jewish leaders, Krieger points out that as a consequence of its wars of aggression, Israel faced two choices: to seek peace by withdrawing from "territory acquired by war," or to continue reliance upon even greater military strength, i.e. the Christian Right controlled U.S.

If the Israelis took the second choice, which Krieger urged them to do (as a millennialist he very much wants them to re-take all of Palestine and re-build the Temple), then the Israelis and American Jews would face the danger of an outbreak of anti-Semitism.

Because of Israel's military seizure of Arab lands, "a rise of anti-Semitism could possibly surge in the West." This could be prevented, however, Krieger said, through its alliance with the New Christian Right. He pointed out that Israel could use the evangelical-fundamentalists to project through their (the Jews') vast radio and television networks an image of Israel that Americans would like, accept and support.

Moreover, Krieger said, "The Religious Right could sell the Americans on the idea that God wanted a militant, militarized Israel. And that the more militant Israel became, the more supportive and ecstatic in its support the U.S. Right would become.

Militant Zionist Jews and fundamentalist Christians have therefore formed an alliance that embraces the same dogma. This dogma has nothing to do with spiritual values or living a good life as either a Christian or a Jew. The alliance is about political power and worldly possessions. It's about one group of people physically taking sole possession of land holy to three faiths, occupied for two thousand years by a people that certainly resist their lands, their rights, and their lives being taken from them. It is a dogma centered on a small political entity - Israel. Both Israeli leaders and the Christian Right make ownership of land the highest priority in their lives, creating a cult religion - and each group is doing so cynically, for their own selfish reasons, expecting the other to be destroyed by their own hubris.
Dispensational beliefs reduce "the complex and diverse societies of Africa, Asia and the Middle East to walk-on roles as allies of Gog in God's great end-time drama... the consensus was clear: prophetic imperatives required the elimination of Arabs not only from (Jerusalem) but from most of the Middle East... They stood in the way of God's promises to the Jews." — Paul Boyer, When Time Shall Be No More
The Evangelical New Right ... systematically seized control of the leadership of the southern Baptist Convention, the largest Protestant denomination ... altering long-held theological positions for political advantage. — Sidney Blumenthal in The New Republic
I do not know how many future generations we can count on before the Lord returns. — James Watt, U.S. secretary of the interior speaking before the House Interior Committee, in an apparent refutation to arguments for conserving natural resources.

President Reagan represented a dispensationalist view that since "Christ is at the door," spending on domestic issues should not be taken too seriously. "Most of Reagan's policy decisions," said James Mills, a former California state official, were based on his "literal interpretation of biblical prophecies." This led to Reagan's idea that there was "no reason to get wrought up about the national debt if God is soon going to foreclose on the whole world."

George W. Bush apparently has the same view.

Reagan's support of gung-ho neo-conservatives can only be understood in the light of the president's millennialist thinking. "Why waste time and money preserving things for the future? Why be concerned about conservation? It follows that all domestic programs, especially those that entail capital outlay, can and should be curtailed to free up money to wage the War of Armageddon.

The Dispensationalists who preach Armageddon Theology are a relatively new cult - less than 200 years old.

There are four main aspects of their belief system:
1) They are anti-Semitic. They profess a fervent love for Israel. Their support of Israel does not, however, arise out of a true love for the Jews and their sufferings. Rather, their "love and support" is based on their wanting Israel "in place" for the "Second Coming of Christ," when they expect most Jews to be destroyed.

2) The Dispensationalists have a very narrow view of God and the six billion people on the planet. They worship a tribal god who is only concerned with two peoples: Jews and Christians, who said tribal God intends to pit against one another for His favor. The other five billion people on the planet are just not on this God's radar except to be killed in the final battle.

3) The Dispensationalists are certain right down to their bones that they understand the Mind of God. They provide a scenario, like a movie script, theat unfolds with time sequences, epochs or "dispensations" all ending happily with an end-time escapism called the Rapture - for a chosen few like themselves. They appeal to those who want to feel that they are on the "inside" of a "special group" with secret, profound knowledge. This desire for certitude causes millions of the followers of Dispensationalism to trust their leaders to an extraordinary degree.

4) Fatalism is the fourth aspect of Dispensationalists. The world, they say, is getting steadily worse and we can do nothing, so there is no point in doing anything. The teachers teach about the wrath of a vengeful god and declare that God does not want us to work for peace, that God demands that we wage a nuclear war: Armageddon that will destroy the planet.
The frightening by-product of these beliefs is that, since the Cult is in Power in the United States, it is so easy to create the very situations which are described, thus ensuring the fulfillment of the ideas of the Dispensationalists: the Cult that wants to Create Armageddon and needs 5 billion people on the planet to go willingly to the sacrificial altar, and the Muslims have been chosen to be first.

This is the Most Dangerous Cult in the World.