Is Marci McDonald on drugs????

Gee, I thought there was a massive Jewish conspiracy....McDonald corrects me, it's a massive Christian conspiracy...

It’s silly, in other words. But, unfortunately, The Armageddon Factor is not merely silly. Despite its subtitle (The Rise of Christian Nationalism in Canada), Christians are not Marci McDonald’s most detested target. That target is the state of Israel, and those who support Israel.

“So unflinching has Harper’s backing of Israel been that some have questioned ... to what extent is this country’s role in the Middle East being influenced by ... the idea that the end of the world is at hand?” (p. 312)

Okay, I’ll bite: Zero?

Not so, says McDonald. Why, just look at the sinister chain of causation: The Prime Minister’s Office has sent Rosh Hashanah greeting cards to Jewish supporters (p. 321). Conservative party campaign literature attacked Michael Ignatieff for having accused Israel of war crimes in the 2006 campaign in Lebanon (p 322). B’Nai Brith’s Frank Dimant has had meetings with pro-Israel Christians. It all adds up to one inescapable conclusion: “At a time when Left Behind followers can check the proximity of the end times on the Rapture Index at raptureready.com, the worry is that a government that has aligned itself with the most belligerent voices in Israel -- and is riddled with biblical literalists certain of the inevitiability [sic] of an end-times conflagration in the Middle East -- could, wittingly or not, hasten that apocalyptic scenario” (p. 336).

The “wittingly or not” is a nice touch: It leaves open the possibility that Stephen Harper’s contribution to the imminent destruction of life on earth is at least unintentional.

It especially enrages McDonald that “opponents of [the Harper government’s] pro-Israel policy are routinely branded as anti-Semites” (pp. 358-359). But if this branding occurs (and McDonald offers no instances or examples), it certainly has not deterred those opponents, very much including McDonald herself. She endorses the allegation that Israel committed war crimes in Lebanon and Gaza in 2006 and 2009. She disdainfully dismisses the idea that an Iranian nuclear weapon presents any threat worth worrying about. She suggests on page 321 that the government pays too much attention to anti-Jewish hate crimes and on page 304 that human rights tribunals are biased in favour of Jews.

To deploy the accusation through the sort of speculation that is a McDonald speciality: It’s hard to avoid the suspicion that McDonald’s real grievance against the Harper government is not that it is too pro-Christian, but that it is insufficiently anti-Jewish.