There’s something apposite, I suppose, about the desecration of a crucifix. In this case, it was an Israeli soldier in southern Lebanon who took a sledgehammer to one on private property and smashed the Jesus figure on the cross. The original crucifixion, as anyone who heard the gospels over Easter will recall, was marked by the humiliation of Jesus; this attack on the figure of one who took on suffering willingly was another humiliation, through the image. Mind you, if the charmer with the sledgehammer had reflected that the Christ-figure is, in Christian belief, not just God-made-man but God-made-Jew, he might have eased off a bit.

It looks like the export of the attitudes of extremist Israeli nationalists to Lebanon from Israel

It looks like the export of the attitudes of extremist Israeli nationalists to Lebanon from Israel

The episode has caused outrage in the Middle East and has gone down as well as you might have expected with American Christians, who are the constituency which matters here. US evangelicals have been among the closest supporters of extreme Israeli nationalists (and these fundamentalists, in turn, are the bete noir of Christians actually living in the Holy Land).

Well, they didn’t care for President Trump’s whimsical depiction of himself as Christ any more than Catholics did. And while this Protestant constituency isn’t terribly keen on religious imagery, there is only one way to interpret the desecration of a statue of Christ by a soldier belonging to America’s ally in the war in Iran. Duly, Mike........

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