Saving Jews ... From Christians?

(National Review Online)  This column was written by David Klinghoffer.

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The Anti-Defamation League, devoted to fighting anti-Jewish bigotry, is America's most influential Jewish group. So what are we to make of the weird air of unreality in the ADL's public statements about Christians? Consider the recent address by national director Abraham Foxman to the group's annual meeting in which he called for a community-wide response to a growing threat.

Foxman spoke on November 3 in New York during a week when disturbing news stories were unfolding around the world. The riots across France by immigrant Muslim youths were building to a climax. These were the same youths who have been terrorizing French Jews for the past five years — assaulting individuals, firebombing synagogues, and desecrating Jewish cemeteries.

The same week, Iran's president was refusing to back down from his call to fellow Muslims to "wipe Israel off the map." Meanwhile in Egypt, TV viewers had just spent Ramadan enjoying a new drama series based on "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion," the notorious anti-Semitic hoax.

If there is one religion that poses a danger to Jewish interests, clearly it's radical Islam. How strange, then, that in his speech Abraham Foxman held up the terrifying specter of, um, American Christianity.

"Today," said Foxman, "we face a better financed, more sophisticated, coordinated, unified, energized, and organized coalition of groups in opposition to our policy positions on church-state separation than ever before. Their goal is to implement their Christian worldview. To save us!"

Foxman warned that mainstream evangelical groups have "built infrastructures throughout the country... intend[ing] to 'Christianize' all aspects of American life, from the halls of government to the libraries, to the movies, to recording studios, to the playing fields and locker rooms of professional, collegiate and amateur sports, from the military to SpongeBob SquarePants."

"'Christianize' all aspects of American life," he says? This must mean that evangelical leaders want to Christianize us either by legal coercion, or by inspiration and moral example.

If Foxman means by legal coercion, his accusation is ludicrous. To take a controversial illustration that's in the news, Intelligent Design has drawn support from Christians (as well as others) and condemnation from the ADL. One may disapprove of letting teachers acquaint public-school students with a scientific critique of Darwinism. But I.D. in the biology classroom is an entirely different thing from "Christianizing" American life — a phrase that conjures the Spanish Inquisition.

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