The Evangelical's Mindset: The "Virtuous Jews" versus The "Evil Arabs"

[Agnapostate]

I've concluded that the consistent evangelical Christian, while perhaps not stooping to judgments about individual Jews and Arabs, is likely to have the "virtuous Jews versus evil Arabs" perception in his mind because of the Old Testament's depiction of the Jews as God's chosen people as opposed to the Angel of the LORD's prediction to Hagar that Ishmael, father of the Arab nations, "shall be a wild man; His hand shall be against every man, And every man's hand against him. And he shall dwell in the presence of all his brethren." Combined with the fact that the majority of Arabs have adopted Islam, a religion regarded as a perversion of the Judeo-Christian monotheistic tradition by the large majority of evangelicals, some bias is likely to exist, I suspect, which obviously complicates the standard evangelical perception of the Israel-Palestine conflict. What are your thoughts?

[chloe]

I think they dislike Jews & Arabs equally. I was reading about how in 1492 Spain kicked the jews out and some arab adopted them.

In the spring of 1492, shortly after the Moors were driven out of Granada, Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain expelled all the Jews from their lands and thus, by a stroke of the pen, put an end to the largest and most distinguished Jewish settlement in Europe. The expulsion of this intelligent, cultured, and industrious class was prompted only in part by the greed of the king and the intensified nationalism of the people who had just brought the crusade against the Muslim Moors to a glorious close. The real motive was the religious zeal of the Church, the Queen, and the masses. The official reason given for driving out the Jews was that they encouraged the Marranos to persist in their Jewishness and thus would not allow them to become good Christians.

The most fortunate of the expelled Jews succeeded in escaping to Turkey. Sultan Bajazet welcomed them warmly. "How can you call Ferdinand of Aragon a wise king," he was fond of asking, "the same Ferdinand who impoverished his own land and enriched ours?"

http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Judaism/expulsion.html

http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/jewish/1492-jews-spain1.html

[avatar4321]

I wouldnt begin to evaluate on the mindest up an entire group of people. The exercise would be futile because no two people are the same, even in a homogenus group.

Personally though, I think everyone needs to repent. Muslim. Christian, Jew, etc.

[PostmodernProphet]

how do you measure bias......given the events of the last thirty years, it's likely a given that the average person, religious or not, has a more sympathetic view of Israel than it would have of the Palestinians......how much of that is from some religious connotation and how much from seeing the violence of repeated suicide bombings and rocket launchings?.........I think the latter is sufficient to explain the result......