Alex Massie Alex Massie

Guatemala’s Secret War on Israel

Wackiest anti-immigration argument yet (US edition): Hamas wins when Hispanics are allowed into the United States. At least I think that’s what Mark Krikorian is claiming:

David Hazony at Contentions points to a new poll that incidentally illustrates an important result of assimilation. (Complete poll here, in pdf.) The survey found that 82 percent of American Christians felt they had a “moral and biblical” obligation to support Israel, including 89 percent of evangelicals, but also 76 percent of Catholics. It’s this last statistic that’s striking evidence of Americanization — I haven’t seen comparable polls elsewhere, but it seems exceedingly unlikely that even a majority of Catholics anywhere else would agree.Christian Zionism is essentially a Protestant phenomenon, and a statistic like this suggests how thorough was the cultural (though not necessarily theological) Protestantization of American Catholics… The policy point is this — does anyone think three-quarters of the grandchildren of today’s Hispanic Catholic immigrants will be similarly pro-Israel? It’s not that Latin immigrants are uniquely anti-Semitic (I suspect they’re more anti-Semitic than today’s Asians or yesterday’s Irish and Italians, but less so than Eastern European immigrants); rather, our ability to Protestantize them (in the sense I’m using it) has declined dramatically compared to a century ago.

I’d like to consider this astonishing but, of course, it isn’t really.

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