Mike Pence and Mike Pompeo, who urged Trump
to kill Qassem Soleimani, are ardent
proponents of Christian Zionism.
By Sarah Posner
January 15, 2020 "Information
Clearing House" -
Last Friday, a day
after Iranian Maj. Gen. Qassem Soleimani and
nine others were killed in a U.S. drone
strike in Iraq, the Christian Zionist
advocacy group Christians United for Israel
emailed its millions of supporters to
praise President Trump’s move. “This
Decisive Action Will Save Countless Lives,”
read the subject line, echoing the
assessment delivered that morning by
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Fox and
Friends. The bombing showed that Trump
would take “swift and decisive” action to
protect Americans, Pompeo
had told the president’s favorite
morning news program. Vice President Mike
Pence later
claimed that Americans are “safer
today.”
Pompeo and Pence
reportedly were the top officials
pushing Trump to kill Soleimani. They’re
also devout evangelicals and
major allies of CUFI. This is not a
coincidence. While the organization is best
known for its unflagging “support” for
Israel—that is, for Israel’s expansion of
settlements in the occupied West Bank and
protracted erasure of the possibility of a
future Palestinian state—it has, since its
founding in 2006, depicted Iran as an
existential threat to Israel. The group
opposed President Obama’s nuclear deal with
Iran,
denouncing it as “dangerous for Israel,
the United States and the entire world,” and
in the Trump administration, CUFI has found
hope for a more bellicose posture.
Televangelist John Hagee
launched CUFI in 2006, calling for
military action against Iran, then led by
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, whom Hagee
compared to Hitler. At the time, Hagee had
been claiming that Iran would soon “have the
nuclear capability to make a bomb, a
suitcase bomb, a missile head, or anything
they want to do with it.” That was untrue,
given contemporaneous expert assessments of
Iran’s projected nuclear advances. But for
Hagee, a more militaristic approach was
necessary in order to avert “an American
Hiroshima.” He urged his supporters to take
a stand, as they were meant to “for a time
such as this,” a common evangelical
reference to Queen Esther, celebrated on the
Jewish holiday of Purim, who saved the Jews
from extermination at the hands of Haman,
the genocidal adviser to the Persian king.
