Graham: Got a Problem with Jerusalem as Israel's Capital? 'Take It Up With God'
Talk about appeals to a higher authority.
South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham has rarely been one of President Donald Trump’s strongest supporters in the Republican Party, but when it comes to questions about Israel, the two men are definitely on the same page.
In an interview with Fox News to mark the opening of the United States Embassy in Jerusalem on Monday, Graham didn’t mince any words at all.
While Palestinian protesters launched deadly, futile attacks on Israeli border positions on the Gaza Strip to get the attention of the world’s media, Israeli officials and a high-powered American delegation marked a new turning point in the 70-year relationship between the U.S. and Israel.
As the first country to recognize Israel when it declared independence in 1948 under Democrat President Harry Truman, the United States has been Israel’s primary supporter in military and international affairs.
In return, as Graham told Fox News’ Harris Faulkner, Israel has provided invaluable support to the U.S. in one of the world’s toughest neighborhoods.
“There is no nation on Earth that provides us with better intelligence about radical Islam than Israel,” Graham told Faulkner. “There is nobody that tells us more about Iran than Israel.”
Then he lowered the boom:
“So Israel makes us safer and the least we can do is recognize their capital. If you got a problem with Jerusalem being the capital of Israel, take it up with God,” he said.
Liberals, of course, howled that Graham was inserting religion into a fundamentally political question (that’s a polite way of summing up some of the social media responses to Graham’s remarks).
But there’s no doubt among any honest person about Israel’s theological and historic claim to Jerusalem. And there’s plenty of doubt about Muslim claims that Jerusalem is anything more than a political chip that’s been played over and over again since Islam conquered the city by the sword during its murderous rise from the Arabian Peninsula.
As Daniel Pipes, a scholar, commentator and former professor at the University of Chicago, Harvard, Pepperdine and the U.S. Naval War College, noted in a Middle East Forum column in 2001:
“Jerusalem appears in the Jewish Bible 669 times and Zion (which usually means Jerusalem, sometimes the Land of Israel) 154 times, or 823 times in all. The Christian Bible mentions Jerusalem 154 times and Zion 7 times.”
That’s a total of 984 between the Christian and Hebrew Bibles.
And how often is Jerusalem mentioned in the Quran? Exactly zero. Could that be because the current Muslim fixation on the city is a fraud? (It doesn’t take a literal belief in the Bible to get that idea. The human evidence alone is pretty clear.)
As Pipes wrote:
“An historical survey shows that the stature of the city, and the emotions surrounding it, inevitably rises for Muslims when Jerusalem has political significance. Conversely, when the utility of Jerusalem expires, so does its status and the passions about it. This pattern first emerged during the lifetime of the Prophet Muhammad in the early seventh century. Since then, it has been repeated on five occasions: in the late seventh century, in the twelfth century Countercrusade, in the thirteenth century Crusades, during the era of British rule (1917-48), and since Israel took the city in 1967.”
Now, Trump’s decisions to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital — and move the U.S. Embassy there accordingly — has made Jerusalem an even-hotter-than-usual flashpoint for anti-American feeling — and American liberal nonsense.
But it was cynical political calculation more than divine guidance that led Hamas to send more than 50 Palestinians to their deaths in an inane effort to derail or smear the embassy opening. And it’s Trump Derangement Syndrome on the American left that’s pushing their inane responses.
Fortunately, Trump and Israel can handle both. And Graham’s response was timeless — just like the authority he appealed to.
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