Baptist News Global Equivocates on Hamas Terrorist Attacks
In the wake of the recent Hamas terrorist attacks on Israel, nearly all mainstream media coverage has condemned the attacks as barbarism. The general expectation is that the Israeli military will respond with unrelenting force, treating the terrorists who murdered, raped, and kidnapped in the same manner that the Western world summarily extinguished the scourge of ISIS in the Middle East following their reign of terror.
A Christian response toward terrorist organizations such as ISIS or Hamas should be a prayer that God would bring their members to immediate repentance, coupled with an imprecation that if his will is not to bring them to repentance, he would swiftly and decisively bring about their demise in a way that demonstrates his justice, for his glory.
Leftist media and so-called progressive Christians have found it difficult, however, to make direct and unequivocal statements that condemn terrorism and recognize the validity of Israel’s right to defend itself as a nation. Baptist News Global, the faux journalistic outlet that is neither Baptist, Global, or a reliable source of news, has spent a significant amount of time equivocating for the terrorism of Hamas against Israel.
BNG has been known for its increasingly mind-numbingly heretical and downright brain-dead takes, including recent deconstructionist gems “Nature is Queer” and “Why I don’t Invite Would-Be Friends to Church”. Since the recent large-scale attack on Israel by Hamas, BNG has published several pieces that attempt to cast blame on the nation of Israel, painting the attacks by Hamas as merely another cycle in the violence of the Middle East.
BNG’s initial response by executive director Mark Wingfield, In This War, There Are No ‘Good Guys’ posits that everyone in the Hamas-Israel war has the same moral standing.
To hear most American media tell it, Israel is the “good guy” in this conflict and the Palestinians — particularly Hamas — are the “bad guys.” We long for easy dichotomies, but that’s simply not possible here despite what the U.S. State Department says. What Hamas has done is despicable, but what Israel has done and continues to do also is despicable.
Imagine a journalist in the midst of the West’s war against ISIS declaring in the wake of ISIS terrorists raping women and murdering children that while what ISIS has done is despicable, the victims of ISIS are not innocent. Such whataboutism flies in the face of common human decency and the standard of God’s law. A Christian doesn’t have to adopt a dispensationalist view of Israel to see the kidnapping, rape, and murder by Hamas terrorists as unequivocally evil. Wingfield quotes numerous leftist activists who support his claim that Hamas and the Israeli state are morally equivalent, including liberation theologian and former Southern Baptist chaplain at Harvard University Ashlee Wiest-Laird:
“What is happening now in Palestine/Israel is a natural outcome of 75 years of colonization and oppression.”
Rodney Kennedy, in his recent BNG piece, My Heart and Mind are in Conflict About Israel and Hamas, compares the 9/11 hijackers to the members of Hamas who attacked Israeli citizens.
“The unexpected Hamas incursion into Israel, and the resultant deaths that are yet occurring, bring to mind our own experience of 9/11. The rhetorical choices made after 9/11 included labeling the attackers as “terrorists” rather than “criminals,” designating 9/11 as a singular metonymy, implicating all “Muslims” as terrorists as well as other rhetorical tropes that felt like errors in our judgment…..I hear the same universal tendencies to label Hamas as a bunch of “terrorists” and all Muslims as terrorists as if a label solves the problem.”
Like many leftist journalists, Kennedy wants to play word games instead of plainly reporting on the fact that Hamas members, like the 9/11 hijackers, are clearly terrorists. Kennedy argues that we must attempt to understand the motivations behind what Hamas has done. According to Kennedy, Hamas attacked Israel because they themselves were victims.
“….words like “evil” and “terrorists” serve only “to shut down thought.” The hardening of the categories causes us to cede our agency to a military solution. There is, in this case, only one option: a clarion call to preemptive arms….Don’t look for a political explanation. It is a wonderfully time-saving device. If terrorists are simply Satanic, then you do not need to investigate what lies behind their atrocious acts of violence. You can ignore the plight of the Palestinian people, or of those Arabs who have suffered under squalid right-wing autocracies supported by the West for its own selfish, oil-hungry purposes . … You cannot acknowledge that the terrible crimes which terrorists commit have a purpose behind them, since to ascribe purposes to such people is to recognize them as rational creatures, however desperately wrongheaded.”
Kennedy compares the trajectory of Christian Nationalists in the United States to Hamas, equating Hamas’ genocidal attitudes and actions toward Israel to antisemitism in the United States, going even so far as to say that in the United States, “We have our own Nazi problem”. He then proceeds to make a comparison between the actions of Hamas toward modern Israel and those of the nation of Israel towards the surrounding pagan nations in the Promised Land.
“The condemnation of Hamas fails to accept that Hamas did not invent the notion of genocide. That has been with us from the beginning of human existence…. For instance, there is the reality that the ancient Hebrews felt commanded by “God” to destroy the Canaanites. The Deuteronomic party line: “The only good Canaanite is a dead Canaanite” can be clearly seen in Deuteronomy 7: “The Lord your God brings you into the land that you are about to enter and occupy, and he clears away many nations before you — the Hittites, the Girgashites, the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites, seven nations mightier and more numerous than you — and when the Lord your God gives them over to you and you defeat them, then you must utterly destroy them.”
In his piece, Here Are Some Ways to Listen to Palestinian Christians, BNG faux journalist and stay-at-home dad Rick Pidcock makes the same tired leftist argument that both Hamas and Israel are at fault, and criticizes evangelical Christians for making the statement “we stand with Israel.” Pidcock argues that because more Hamas terrorists have been killed in the past 15 years than Israelis, the anger of Palestinians against Israel is legitimate.
“According to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in the occupied Palestinian territory, during the time of 2008 through September 2023, there have been 6,407 Palestinians killed compared to 308 Israelis. Given the disparity in the numbers of deaths, it seems reasonable to wonder if there is some legitimacy to Palestinian anger even if one does not condone violence.”
Clearly, the Overton Window has shifted in Christian discourse. On September 11, 2001, I remember seeing the twin towers fall, live on television. I was sitting in a public-school American history class taught by a Marxist former University Professor. In the days that followed, the professor spent numerous hours explaining the mentality behind the terrorism that extinguished nearly 3,000 lives. He believed that America deserved what it received, and he reviled the use of the word terrorist to describe those who took planes and used them to murder civilians. The same tired old arguments persist to this day. Now, instead of merely occupying the minds of Marxists and Secularists in academia, they occupy the lecture halls of left-leaning seminaries, the pulpits of liberation theology spewing churches, and the vacuous thoughts of those at Baptist News Global who claim the title of Progressive Christian Journalists.
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The “overton window” isn’t shifting. People are waking up to the fact that endless wars in the middle east don’t do anything except create more problems then they solve (i.e. blowback) and probably much to your chagrin, it’s not just faux journalists or Marxists and Secularists in academia that believe terrorist organizations like Hamas, ISIS, and Al-Qaeda don’t just pop out of the ground one day for no reason and start murdering civilians. Israel sowed the wind by creating Hamas to politically upset Gaza and is now reaping the whirlwind.
There are other “Christian” organizations like the ERLC and Christianity Today, who have penned articles the last few days pledging alliance to Israel. It is no secret what your opinion is of these organizations, why don’t you use them to poison the pro-Israel well by writing thinly-veiled opinion pieces under the pretext of “cataloging theological mischief makers”?
You’re absolutely right that a Christian doesn’t have to adopt a dispensationalist view of Israel to see that kidnapping, rape, and murder is unequivocally evil, but why is it that the unavoidable fruit of dispensationalism is a superstitious interpretation of Genesis 12:3 that would make the people who misuse Jeremiah 29:11, 3 John 1:2, Malachi 3:10, and James 4:2 blush?
Why should a Christian “stand” with either of these political contrivances? It’s destructive to the church to make Christians feel they have to choose between two groups who hate and publicly denounce Christ. Why should a Christian want to yoke themselves to Israel or Palestine? I would sooner support a crusade to Christianize the holy land.
The seeds of this neverending conflict were sown thousands of years ago. Anyone making a statement of moral equivalence between groups like Hamas and Israel is either shockingly ignorant of history or brainwashed by decades of leftist propaganda.
NOTHING Israel has ever done justifies the torture and mass slaughter of its innocent men, women, and children. Nothing.
Dispensational futurism remains nothing less than junk theology. If I read one more article breathlessly anticipating the “Third Temple” and “Antichrist,” I’m gonna puke.
The arabs have been trying to destroy Israel since day one. Literally.