U.S. Rep. Allen West returned yesterday from his whirlwind tour of Israel, and it's clear the Holy Land had a profound impact on him. I mean, they had a really, really deep connection. Like, soul mates, dude.
"Israel... is my spiritual homeland," West wrote in his weekly note to constituents. "It is a place about which I have read and studied my entire life. It is the place where my Judeo-Christian faith heritage was born. Israel is the place that completes me as a person."
Clearly, Israel had him at hello.
Which is not surprising, because West is the kind of Christian conservative who gets all
weepy talking about the Jewish homeland, framing the modern nation in
Biblical terms while conveniently ignoring the country's many liberal,
secular Jews who favor peace with the Palestinians.
Interestingly, in his summary of his trip, West did not entirely rule out the possibility of peace -- as he did in an interview earlier this year. Instead, he argued about the borders of a possible Palestinian state. He wrote:
"Let me be clear, I do not see a credible peace partner in the
Palestinian Authority. While we were in Israel, the PA never denounced
the most recent heinous terrorist attack. There is no unity between
Fatah and Hamas and therefore, no two-state solution exists. At best it
would have to be a three-state solution; Israel, the West Bank, and
Gaza."
West also made sure to continue his ongoing rant about the popular uprisings in Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, and the rest of the Arab world -- casting the democratic revolutions as something sinister and foreboding, the rise of a new Islamic empire.
"This
so-called 'Arab Spring' is less about a democratic movement, than it is
about the early phase of the restoration of an Islamic Caliphate, the
last being the Ottoman Empire."
Ah, fear-mongering. That's exactly the lesson the Holy Land is designed to teach, isn't it?
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