Roger Waters on the Israel lobby's attempt to cancel him in Chile

My heart and my brain are so full of all the political as well as humanitarian machinations of the Gaza question and the Palestine question right now that I find it difficult to escape from it.  And all the bullshit that I've been experiencing in South America with them trying to - they just tried to cancel my show here in Santiago in Chile where I know I'm enormously popular, not just because the shows are sold out.  They were in Buenos Aires as well.  And yet the Israeli lobby still tried to get my shows in Buenos Aires cancelled on the grounds that I'm an anti-Semite, which I'm not, obviously.  It's such arrogant nonsense, and yet they make up stories and then amplify them and then print them again and again and again and again and again and again.  And I know we're not allowed to say it, but it's right out of Goebbels' playbook, and Goering.  This is exactly what they said and what they absolutely did.  They said "we have to lie and lie and lie and the bigger the lie, the more likely people are to believe."  That's what these stupid assholes have been doing against me...  These are very very dim people and they are completely attached to the idea of the illegal settler colonialism of the Zionist movement in Palestine.  

And the other crazy people who've attached themselves to this are Christian evangelicals in the United States who support Israel, like Biden.  And why? Because they want to see the Jews all burn in hell when Jesus comes down in the Second Coming and they all go to heaven holding hands with Jesus.  And they believe this bullshit!  And they're prepared to sacrifice this entire beautiful planet that we live on...  They're sacrificing the whole thing.  They should believe what they want, but they should not hold positions of political power because this is crazy.

~ Roger Waters, 18:40 mark, December 5, 2023

Shibley Telhami: "younger evangelicals are much less supportive of Israel than older evangelicals"

[A] new survey commissioned by University for North Carolina at Pembroke researchers, carried out by Barna Group, has exposed what we have been finding for some time: younger evangelicals are much less supportive of Israel than older evangelicals, by a widening margin.  The poll found a dramatic shift in attitudes between 2018 and 2021: support for Israel among young evangelicals dropped from 75% to 34%.  This raises questions about the sustainability of the strong evangelical support for Israel that the Israeli right has cultivated for years and that proved reliable during the Trump administration.

[...]

The bottom line is that there is evidence of a substantial and unusual shift.  If the Israeli right is pinning its hopes on solid support from evangelicals as the backbone of U.S. patronage of the Jewish state, anchored in a biblical narrative that sidesteps international law and norms — as witnessed during the Trump administration — the trends among young evangelicals raise questions about the trajectory of strong religiously-driven evangelical support for Israel.

~ Shibley Telhami, "As Israel increasingly relies on US evangelicals for support, younger ones are walking away: What polls show," Brookings Institute, May 26, 2021

Noam Chomsky on Christian evangelical support of Israel

Let's start with what's called conservative support [of] Israel.  At first I think some kind of semantic hygiene is useful.  There's really no conservative in the United States.  The people who are called conservatives are radical statists for the most part.  And there are few genuine conservatives - which means something like classical liberals - but not many.

If you take a look at the Republican Party today, which is the strongest extreme support for Israeli policies, they have a popular base.  A large part of the popular base is Christian evangelicals.  They are passionate supporters of Israeli policies and they're also extreme anti-Semites.  They don't say it, but take a look at the doctrines like the dispensationalist doctrines.  They're looking forward to a battle and Armageddon where everybody gets murdered and the saved souls rise to heaven.  What happens to the Jews?  Well, according to some of these versions, 160,000 of them find Christ in time and they're saved.  The rest are condemned to eternal damnation.  How can you be any more antisemitic than that?

Their support for Israel is because partly interpretation of the Bible, interpretation of the Book of Revelation and son on and so forth, which leads them to strongly support Israeli crimes.  Israel welcomes the support, but it also tries to control them.  Like when they try to blow up the Temple Mount, Israel doesn't think that's a good idea so they block them.

~ Noam Chomsky, "Noam Chomsky: Why America Holds Israel as a Sacred Cow?," Free Will, 0:40 mark, October 26, 2023