The head spins — while the Zionist regime goes on a persecutorial rampage against Christians, its imperial sponsor enables it at every turn in the name of Christian righteousness.
President Donald Trump addressing the National Prayer Breakfast on Feb. 5, 2026, at the Washington Hilton in Washington, D.C. (White House / Molly Riley)
By Patrick Lawrence
Special to Consortium News
I cannot get past the recently published photograph of that Israeli soldier taking a sledgehammer to the crucified Jesus in southern Lebanon. And the thought that this was an isolated incident is too preposterous even to consider.
But, then, I cannot get past that altogether weird image of President Donald Trump dressed up as Jesus, laying a healing hand on a supine sufferer. Or, Trump having deleted this out of sheer embarrassment, a new one he posted depicting Jesus embracing him.
It has come to this in the 250th year of the American republic?
For that matter I cannot get out of my mind — this fascinates me to no end — Pete Hegseth’s daily preaching of Old Testament smiting and merciless killing “in the name of Jesus Christ.” Who is this man’s pastor?
And J.D. Vance telling Pope Leo with faux-authority he had better stay clear of theological questions because he, Pope Leo, is not qualified to comment on them. I will note this occasion without comment but to remind readers Leo is of the Order of St. Augustine.
The head spins. We have the Zionist regime on a persecutorial rampage against Christians, and we have its imperial sponsor enabling it at every turn in the name of Christian righteousness.
Say whaaa?
There is only one way to understand this heap of contradiction and hypocrisy. You have to view it, this tilt into the most profane sorts of religiosity, against the backdrop of U.S.–Israeli savagery in Gaza and the West Bank, U.S.–Israeli savagery in Lebanon and the savage attacks on Iran — all of this profoundly against any version of humanity, morality, decency and justice you can name.
And then you have to recognize that what is under attack in this single, unified assault on the human cause, apart from the Palestinians, Lebanese and Iranians who daily suffer these barbarities, is the individual conscience — that place in the human psyche wherein notions of morality, decency and justice reside, that place that gives rise to resistance in the face of depravity, atrocity and iniquity.
Zionist Pogrom on Christianity
To begin with, the spectacle of an I.D.F. soldier desecrating a crucifix was not an aberration by a rogue member of “the world’s most moral army,” as the Zionists like to advertise the Israel Defense Forces. Bibi Netanyahu professed to be “stunned and saddened.” Here is Gideon Sa`ar, his foreign minister, as quoted in The Times of Israel:
“I’m confident that the necessary strict measures will be taken against whoever carried out this ugly act. This shameful action is completely contrary to our values. Israel is a country that respects the different religions and their sacred symbols, and upholds tolerance and respect among faiths.”
Chutzpah, anyone?
The photo was taken in Debel, a Maronite community and one of the few Christian villages remaining in southern Lebanon. It appears to have been shot and circulated on social media on April 19. What it depicts is wholly in keeping with the pogrom — take it or leave it, I hold to the term — the Zionists now conduct against Christians.
Zionist fanatics (if the phrase is not redundant) have of late been aggressively and pointedly attacking Christians and their churches in Israel proper, in the West Bank and in Lebanon [and earlier in Gaza.]
Last month Israeli police blocked Pierbattista Pizzaballa and Father Francesco Ielpo, the Catholics’ senior clerics in the Holy Land, from celebrating Palm Sunday at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem.
A day after the incident at Debel was photographed, Almazidi Fatima, a Lebanese human rights activist, posted a video on “X” of a church I.D.F. soldiers turned into a latrine in the course of wrecking it.
An Israeli soldier smashing the head of a Jesus statue in southern Lebanon.
This is how much Israeli Jews love Christians. pic.twitter.com/EDgUJ8gfzN
— Noah’s Ark ? (@NoahsArk1000) April 19, 2026
Study the photograph of the soldier desecrating the crucified Jesus, just for a sec. He is sledgehammering the forehead, isn’t he? In Christian iconography this is where consciousness and the conscience reside.
Who knows what was going on in the mind of the barbarian wielding the hammer, but mine goes to why Zionists nurse so visceral a hatred toward Christians. It is precisely the privilege the man on the cross awarded the individual — his or her thoughts, judgments and certainly conscience. This is why, when Christians honor the spirit, it is “the Holy Spirit” and gets capitalized.
The Old Testament privileges not the individual or the individual spirit but external authority. In the Torah, the first five books — Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy — the Law of Moses is laid down and obedience to it is decreed the imperative.
This explains, to take a ready-to-hand case, why the Zionist leadership regularly cites the Amalekites, the hostile tribes (by the evidence probably mythical) that God commanded the Israelites to destroy, in order to explain their slaughter today of Palestinians: It is written, God commands it.
A Radical Misinterpretation
Israel Shahak, the late (and controversial) Israeli scholar explains the primacy of authority in the rabbinical tradition with brilliant clarity in Jewish History, Jewish Religion: The Weight of Three Thousand Years (Pluto, 1994). Independent thought, to say nothing of conscience, were not to be taught: Obedience to the law and the authority of the rabbi were to be taught.
[But Jesus said all of Moses’ Law can be reduced to two commandments: “Love God and your neighbor.” (Matthew 22:36-40, NIV)]
Do not wonder, I mean to say, how Zionists can in good conscience treat Palestinians and various others so abominably. As Christians mean this term, they have no conscience. They act in accordance with the law of the Torah, or — I must add this immediately — a radical misinterpretation of it.
It is not Judaism, any more than the Islam of al–Nusra is Islam or the Christianity of Christian Zionists is Christianity. It is “Israelism,” or Zionism, and I consider either term valid to name the phenomenon.
I come to Pete Hegseth and the beyond-belief buffoon who still — also beyond belief —resides in the White House. There is no selling obedience to higher authorities in the land of the free and home of the brave — not to hyper-individual Americans.
Hegseth delivering remarks to L3Harris employees as part of his “Arsenal of Freedom Tour,” Camden, Ark., in February. (DoW /Alexander Kubitza)
Equally, in these people’s minds (and in history), America is a Christian nation — a Christian nation complicit in the Zionists’ genocide, a Christian nation that has nothing to say as the Zionists attack Christians in the streets of Jerusalem and desecrate their churches and icons.
What these two and others in the Trump regime come out with therefore bears interpretation.
Here is the defense secretary holding one of his prayer meetings at the Pentagon on March 25, his first after the U.S.–Israeli attacks on Iran:
“Let every round find its mark against the enemies of righteousness and our great nation. Give them wisdom in every decision, endurance for the trial ahead, unbreakable unity, and overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy.”
The enemies of righteousness, overwhelming violence, those who deserve no mercy: Hegseth, who follows the Congregation of Reformed Evangelical Churches, passes off utterances such as this — of which many — as Christian. How this? Why?
And here is President Trump doing his bit for “America Reads the Bible,” a frightening exercise in over-the-top religious fervor extended, 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., over a week. Trump read last Tuesday — not from Matthew or Mark, not from the Acts, but from 2 Chronicles 7: 11–22, wherein God speaks to Solomon after the latter has completed the First Temple.
The passage in part:
“As for you, if you walk before me faithfully as David your father did, and do all I command, and observe my decrees and laws, I will establish your royal throne, as I covenanted with David your father when I said, ‘You shall never fail to have a successor to rule over Israel.’
But if you turn away and forsake the decrees and commands I have given you and go off to serve other gods and worship them, then I will uproot Israel from my land, which I have given them, and will reject this temple I have consecrated for my Name. I will make it a byword and an object of ridicule among all peoples. This temple will become a heap of rubble….”
Why don’t these two simply pledge allegiance to the Zionist state and have done with it? Why don’t they come out and condemn acts of conscience or judgments of the Iran war, the genocide in Gaza and all the rest — conscience itself, indeed — in the name of authority and obedience?
It is not “in the American grain” is the simple answer. And so the Trump regime resorts to implicit condemnations of the individual conscience, always in the name of Jesus, which is to say in the name of the individual conscience.
There can be no surprise here: These people have already led us into “an abyss of lawlessness” in the name of law.
And there can be no surrendering to these charlatans, no foregoing one’s conscience as the foundation stone of resistance, Christian or otherwise, no bowing to authority or obedience to it.
Footnote: Last Wednesday the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a Texas law requiring public schools to display the Ten Commandments in all classrooms, saying it does not violate the separation of church and state. The law mandates the size and typeface of these displays and requires they be visible from everywhere in each classroom.
Patrick Lawrence, a correspondent abroad for many years, chiefly for the International Herald Tribune, is a columnist, essayist, lecturer and author, most recently of Journalists and Their Shadows, available from Clarity Press or via Amazon. Other books include Time No Longer: Americans After the American Century. His Twitter account, @thefloutist, has been restored after years of being censored.
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