Wheaton College Applauds Marxist-Islamist Palestinian Nationalism

Is Marxist-Islamist Palestinian Nationalism finding safe refuge on Evangelical college campuses in America? Pastor Munther Isaac of the Bethlehem Evangelical Lutheran Christmas Church in Bethlehem of Judea was given a speaking platform a few weeks ago on March 25 at Wheaton College outside of Chicago to promote his new book, Christ in the Rubble. Wheaton has been known as the flagship of Evangelical higher education. At the end of Pastor Isaac’s speech in the Cliff Barrows Auditorium in the Billy Graham Center, he received an enthusiastic standing ovation from a standing room only crowd of over 500 students and faculty. Isaac, whom the Pittsburgh Jewish Chronicle has headlined as the “High priest of Antisemitic Christianity,” is a messenger of Palestinian Nationalism, also known as Palestinianism—an ideology of the Muslim Brotherhood, Fatah, PLO, Islamic Jihad, and Hamas.

The ideological narrative of Palestinianism was created by Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem who colaborated with the Nazis during WWII with the hopes of anhilating thouands of indiginous Jews in Palestine at the time. The Soviets were also instrumental in developing the narrative of Palestinianism in the 1950s and ’60s, equating Zionism with racism and beginning the propaganda campaign to falsely paint Jews who had lived in Palestine for generations as white European settler-colonialists. This lie has been repeated so frequently over the last 65 years that it is now the acceptable norm for many anti-Zionists and Antisemites. Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s deranged propaganda minister, once said: “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.” In the pro-Hamas demonstrations on campuses like Columbia and Harvard, we saw the banners repeating this lie: “Israel is a white settler-colonial state!” Zionism is Racism!” “End Settler Colonialism Now!” “Stop Illegal Occupation, Genocide, Colonialism, and Displacement! Free Palestine!”

The Marxist mantra “Settler-Colonialism” created to evict indigenous Jews from their home in Palestine, evokes images of white European armies invading the Middle East, Asia, and Africa and then suppressing their populations and forcing them to harvest their natural resources for the empire. The notion that Jews are white European settlers colonizing Arabs on Arab land is laughable because the majority of Israelis are Mizrahi Jews, many of whom were evicted by Arabs from their homes in North Africa and the Middle East in 1948. The number of Jewish refugees who fled with only the clothes on their backs was 850,000. Many of these Mizrahi Jews immigrated to Israel. As well, there are several hundred thousand black African and Ethiopian Jews who call Israel home. There are also one million Arabs who live in Israel. To accuse Israel of settler-colonialism as if its citizens are white European empire builders illegally occupying the land of Palestinians is false.

Distinguished History Professor of modern Europe (Emeritus, University of Maryland) Jeffrey Herf, in an article in Tablet Magazine entitled Nazi Antisemitism and Islamist Hate, traces the false charge of Israel as a settler-colonial state to the Islamists collaboration with the Nazis in World War II to annihilate the Jews. Herf writes:

“From 1949 to 1989, the Soviet Union engaged in a depressingly successful propaganda campaign that suppressed public memory of the brief era of Soviet-bloc support for the Zionist project, the UN Partition Plan, and Israel, as well as abundant evidence of the Arab Higher Committee’s Nazi collaborationist era. In place of the actual linkages between leaders of the Palestinian Arabs and the Nazi regime, the Soviet Union and the PLO claimed that the real Nazis and racists in the Middle East were the Jews and the Israelis. This campaign of lies has proven to be among the most successful in world politics. Yet following the Soviet turn against Israel during the antisemitic “anti-cosmopolitan” purges of 1949-56, the Soviet bloc and then the Palestine Liberation Organization succeeded in convincing much of international leftist opinion that these connections never existed or were insignificant. Hence the PLO, having obscured the Nazi connections of its founding father, was able to reinvent itself as an icon of leftist anti-imperialism. While some Arab states have themselves moved away from the toxic mixture of Islamism, anti-Jewish hatred, and Palestinian nationalist rejectionism that al-Banna and Husseini implanted, their campaigns have had a continuing impact in Western universities, where they serve as the ideological foundation of academic anti-Zionism and the resulting BDS (the boycott, divestment, and sanction movement against Israel) campaigns of recent decades, which have aligned the Western left with the afterlife of Hitler’s Nazi Party and its larger designs for the Middle East.”

Victor Rosenthal reveals the roots of Isaac’s settler/colonial accusation against Israel in an article in White Rose Magazine entitled Palestinianism: An ideology and an identity:

“Palestinianism had its origin in the 1960s, when the cognitive warriors of the Soviet KGB created it. The Soviets had been interested in opposing US and British influence in the Middle East, which they did by supporting Arab nationalists like Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser. With the decline of pan-Arabism, Palestinianism provided a cause that the Soviets could use to unite all the Arabs of the Middle East against the West. It also provided a reason to oppose Israel. This was a time of worldwide decolonization, and the KGB promoted the idea that the conflict between the Jews and Arabs for sovereignty in Palestine (or Eretz Yisrael, depending on your point of view), was a struggle of national liberation by an indigenous Palestinian people against European colonialists (the Jews!), even though about half of all Israelis came from the Middle Eastern and African diasporas.”

Munther Isaac presents himself as a theological scholar. Still, his book Christ in the Rubble is more like a Communist manifesto than a Christian theological text, and he spends an exorbitant amount of time building his anti-Israel message on the false Marxist-Islamist (Islam is a religion and Islamism is a radical interpretation of Islam) narrative that Israel is a settler-colonial and racist state. He weaves this lie throughout the book and dedicates a complete chapter, “Coloniality, Racism, and Empire Theology,” to build upon the deception. On page 41, Isaac states, “A clear and honest reading of the past and the present will clearly show that what we are dealing with is settler colonialism. This statement should not be controversial; the identification of Israel as a settler-colonial state is well established among contemporary historians and scholars.” The “contemporary historians and scholars” Isaac cites are, of course, Marxist-leaning anti-Israel activists.

Munther Isaac’s book, Christ in the Rubble, which he came to Wheaton College to promote, is an angry rant against the Western world and American Evangelicalism. In fact, he opens his second chapter with a confusing and furious assault against Billy Graham’s daughter, Ann Graham Lotz, by calling her “outrageous and hateful”, an allegation that makes him seem misogynistic and small. Munther Isaac’s anti-Western message comes from the same Marxist playbook as the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas. It is stunning that his speech at Wheaton College was not challenged but applauded, which has deeply concerning similarities to German Christians during the Holocaust, who were silent as Antisemitic hate was preached from their church pulpits. At my Alma Mater, Wheaton College, the mix of Marxist and Islamist Palestinianism with Evangelical Christianity seems to have sadly found a place of refuge.