Lie down with dogs, wake up with Ann Coulter

Practice makes perfect: Right here, right now, every Jewish person in America owes Ann Coulter a debt of gratitude. This may not be immediately obvious to readers who happened to catch Coulter’s performance last week on CNBC’s The Big Idea with Donny Deutsch. Asked by Deutsch what her perfect dream world might look like, the right-wing pundit, in a rare moment of candor, admitted that in her perfect world, everyone would be Christian.

“We should all be Christians?” asked an exasperated Deutsch, who happens to be Jewish.

“Yes,” she confirmed, explaining that Christians consider themselves “perfected Jews.” Deutsch spent the remainder of the segment unsuccessfully attempting to regain his composure. Apparently he had no idea with whom he was dealing.

Coulter belongs to the utterly strange, cultish offshoot of evangelicalism known as Christian Zionism. It’s not well known that Zionism is a Christian invention dating to the early 19th century. Christian Zionists believe that the creation of Israel in 1948 fulfilled the biblical prophecy of returning Palestine to the Jewish people. So far, so good. But then Jesus returns, and man is he pissed. Apocalyptically pissed. Good Christians, including “perfected Jews” (i.e. Jews who convert to Christianity), are granted salvation. The remaining Jews are thrown into the lake of fire with the rest of the heathens.

Unholy alliance: What Coulter unintentionally revealed to Deutsch was the perplexing alliance between Jewish Zionists and anti-Semitic Christian Zionists that has become known as the neoconservative movement. In The Host and the Parasite, investigative journalist Greg Felton traces the beginnings of this alliance to the years immediately following Israeli statehood, when many American Jews remained ambivalent toward Israel and Zionism.

“Because Zionism violates basic tenets of Mosaic tradition, Jewish elites had difficulty expanding their power within their own community, and so were forced to seek support among Zionist Christians, even though the teleology of evangelical Christianity is decidedly anti-Jewish,” Felton writes.

During this same time period, Jewish Zionists first began lobbying the U.S. government, writes Grant Smith, director of the Washington, D.C.-based Institute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy and author of Foreign Agents: The American Israel Public Affairs Committee from the 1963 Fulbright Hearings to the 2005 Espionage Scandal.

As Smith documents, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, considered one of the most powerful lobbying organizations in Washington, has flouted U.S. laws from its inception, when it was investigated by a congressional committee headed by Sen. James Fulbright in 1963, to the present day, where two of its highest-ranking officials, Steven Rosen and Keith Weissman, await trial in January for espionage against the United States.

Crying Wolfowitz: Rosen and Weissman are accused of receiving classified documents from Col. Lawrence Franklin. Franklin, who already pleaded guilty to espionage, worked for Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith, who resigned under a cloud of suspicion. Feith, a Jewish Zionist, reported directly to another Jewish Zionist, neoconservative Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, who is considered the major architect of the Iraq war.

How does all this tie back in to Coulter and the Christian Zionists? As scholars John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt write in The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, “The lobby includes another important group of gentiles—the Christian Zionists, a subset of the broader politically orientated Christian Right.” Notable members include Pat Robertson, former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay and the late Jerry Falwell.

Mearsheimer and Walt, of course, have been branded anti-Semites, along with former President Jimmy Carter, who dared to publicly equate the Palestinian crisis with apartheid. The scholars reject the charge, noting that “the lobby’s impact has been unintentionally harmful to Israel as well.” Lord knows if biblical prophecy ever comes to pass, the unholy alliance between Christian Zionists and Jewish Zionists will be even more harmful to all Jews.

At least those who haven’t converted.