The David Knight Show - How Evangelical Zionism Betrayed the Gospel

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July 26, 2025 - The David Knight Show

01:10:05

How Evangelical Zionism Betrayed the Gospel

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	I wanted to come on and talk a little bit about what's going on with the wars with Israel because I've had a lot of people writing, asking, sending books, and I appreciate that.
	And I will get to some of the emails that have been sent in.
	But I want to take this from a larger picture.
	My intention with this program, we cover a lot of bad news because I want to warn people about things I see coming that are bad.
	But I don't want to leave people without hope.
	But there isn't any hope in politics or Washington.
	And the hope is in Christ.
	And so I want to point people to that.
	You know, it was before I had the strokes.
	I talked about Caitlin Johnston, who is an Australian writer.
	And she was just astounded that Christians would support war the way they were supporting it.
	It's a real stumbling block to people, and rightfully so.
	How in the world can we talk about a loving Christ, sacrificial love?
	How can we talk and speak against abortion and then applaud the targeting of civilians, especially children?
	It is hypocrisy and cognitive dissonance that cannot be helped but be seen.
	And it is something that gets in the way of people being able to see Christ.
	And we don't want to do that as Christians, do we?
	And so I think it's important for us to look at that.
	You know, we look at CDC talking about how the fertility rate fell from 1.6 in 2023 to 1.5 in 2024.
	And, you know, a population is crashing everywhere in the Western world because people become lovers of themselves.
	They don't care about their family.
	They don't care about having children.
	They don't want to look at the future with that.
	And it's right for us to oppose that.
	But how can we oppose that and then cheer unending war and a war conducted against a civilian population?
	Unceasing.
	And so, as they point out, you've got to have 2.1 kids just to maintain a level population.
	When we get down to 1.6 or 1.5, we're looking at a declining population.
	And this is something that's been happening everywhere.
	Japan, South Korea, European countries as well.
	This article from Ground News says the Trump administration has taken steps to increase falling birth rates.
	Have they?
	They won't stop the mRNA injections.
	So, you know, they're still cheering.
	As a matter of fact, they don't recommend them.
	Great.
	But Trump is actively pushing with his technocrat pals like Larry Ellison.
	The very first thing he did was to have Larry Ellison come in and talk about how he wanted to use AI to make custom mRNA injections for individuals.
	What a nightmare scenario this is.
	And of course it won't be tested.
	Just like Trump won't test artificial intelligence.
	He's got to race with it, right?
	We've got to race with Chinese.
	No time to test anything to see what it's going to do.
	Let's just run with it.
	And I don't know.
	Maybe he's going to explain that he was doing his bit to stop the falling birth rates by hanging out with Jeffrey Epstein.
	I don't know.
	That's one way he gets rid of, I guess.
	But as we look at this, we see Palestinians being starved to death, especially children and the ill.
	And I have to say, when I look at people cheering this, and there are people who cheer it, who cheer it as Christians.
	What an abomination that is, to say that we're going to withhold food.
	Did they ever read, I was hungry and you fed me, I was naked and you clothed me, I was in prison and you visited me?
	And how does that jive with this?
	Well, as I pointed out, a total of 111 people, mainly children, have been starved to death in this genocidal war.
	One of the top starvation deaths.
	On top of it, rather, more than 1,000 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli forces while attempting to get food aid.
	That's not counting the people they dropped bombs on.
	111 international organizations.
	This is according to anti-war.com.
	111 international organizations said the mass starvation occurring in Gaza was due to Israel's restrictions and the killing of people seeking food.
	The government of Israel's restrictions, delays, and fragmentation under its total siege have created chaos, starvation, and death, said the organization.
	So 100 Palestinians in Gaza killed over 24 hours.
	If you go to antiwar.com, you'll see this every day.
	One day it's 75, another it's 100.
	Sometimes it's over 100.
	Every 24 hours they're killing that many people.
	And as one article here from J.D. Hall, bombshell expose, he says he's about to come out with, showing how APAC, the Israeli lobbying organization that doesn't have to register as a foreign agent, is buying influence in American churches.
	They've already bought influence in the halls of Congress.
	And this is not just handing out free Schofield Bibles.
	APAC is using its financial resources to influence evangelical churches and seminaries, funding educational materials and programs that promote Christian Zionism.
	He says, if you thought source money was bad, you haven't seen anything yet.
	Would you like to find out that Talmudic Jews are spending millions of dollars to influence your church and your Bible curriculum and to give to have paying to have editorial oversight over Sunday school literature?
	This is the worst case scenario of injecting politics into religion.
	As I've said many times, you do that, you wind up with politics once you mix the two together.
	And you wind up with politics as religion.
	And that's what we're talking about here.
	We're talking about politics.
	Don't mix your religion in with what's happening in Israel.
	This is one political party That not even half the people voted for.
	There's a lot of Jewish people who don't like Netanyahu.
	And so, you know, when you want to talk about prophecy events and what's going to happen with Israel, what is Israel?
	Who is Israel?
	Is it one man?
	Is it Netanyahu?
	Is it a political party?
	Is it a political entity, Israel?
	Or maybe it's an ethnic group.
	Or maybe, if you want to look at it, maybe it's people who have some kind of relationship with God.
	So is that going to be Orthodox Jews, ultra-Orthodox Jews?
	Is it going to be Messianic Jews?
	You know, we're not doing Jews a favor.
	I think it's one of the most anti-Semitic things that I've heard from some of these Christian Zionists who mix politics with religion to say that don't talk to them about Jesus.
	They're Jews.
	They don't need to know about this.
	There's one way.
	There's one way.
	Jesus said, I am the way, the truth, and the life.
	No one comes to the Father but by me.
	So why would we hide that from anybody?
	I mean, that's one of the most unloving things you could do.
	As a matter of fact, when MacArthur died, he went on several times with Ben Shapiro.
	And MacArthur was heavily into Zionism.
	And Ben Shapiro, of course, had nice things to say about him.
	But he said he was not offended by the fact that MacArthur would spend a half hour talking to him about Christ.
	He said he did it out of concern for him.
	And I have to look at this and say, Paula White and other people like that don't have that same kind of concern.
	They just want the politics.
	They want the grandstanding.
	They want the crowds.
	And it's truly amazing.
	So he said, APAC is largely unreported, but they're pouring a lot of money in.
	He said, it's not just about political lobbying.
	They have a campaign to shape the theology, the curricula, and the Sunday sermons of a lot of churches.
	And that's where this base is coming from.
	And he said, surprisingly, it's coming from some Reformed institutions who teach covenant theology as opposed to dispensationalism.
	And for those of you who are not a part of that dispute, I'm not going to get into the minutiae of it.
	That's one of the reasons why I don't talk about the prophecy aspect of it, because I don't want to divide people into factions.
	I want people united with Christ.
	I want them to see Christ in faith, and I want them to not see a hypocritical picture of Christ as we fight over these things.
	And so I think it's very important to understand that.
	So the evidence I'm uncovering, he says, is staggering, but not ready to go out.
	Yeah, he's got a sub stack.
	And he says he knows he's going to be attacked for it.
	So he wants to get everything squared away and documented to the nth degree before he releases it.
	But he's kind of giving a tease of it here.
	He says, of course, I didn't know this.
	APAC is the largest political action committee in U.S. history.
	You know, they give tens of millions of dollars to congressional candidates.
	And guess what?
	They get back billions of dollars every year.
	And this is what you see.
	It's not just Israel.
	It's not just one thing.
	It's every special interest group.
	Politicians are the best return on investment you can get for your money.
	You give them millions and you get back billions.
	Or you give them thousands and you get back millions, thousand times what you gave these people.
	How could you?
	Maybe we're going about this the wrong way, right?
	But truly it is.
	I mean, you can get massive amount of money from politicians.
	And so he points out that they $60 million in revenue for an educational foundation that they have.
	And that educational foundation is bankrolling congressional junkets and educational programs.
	So kind of the same type of thing that we saw with the Fatala Gulen Muslim group in Turkey.
	They would, through their schools, you know, they could not get state money as a charter school if they taught that.
	So what they did, they positioned themselves out there as, quote, schools of science and math, quote unquote.
	And they would look at some of their best and brightest, and they would give them a junket, a trip to go to Turkey, and they would do a lot of nice things for them, show them the very best side of Turkey and that type of thing.
	And of course, they would do it not just for students, but they would do it for state politicians who are making sure they were getting money.
	And there was a lot of money.
	They got nearly a billion dollars in Texas several years ago when I talked to Mark Hall about it.
	He has an excellent documentary, Killing Ed.
	And if you haven't seen that, you really should see that and understand the worst case scenario for charter schools.
	That is the Fatale Gulen cult.
	He died just recently, but his institution lives.
	So, you know, when you look at what APAC is doing, they're like everybody else.
	He says APAC, through their Educational Foundation, isn't just buying influence in Washington, though.
	It's buying influence with American evangelicalism, churches, seminaries, even small group Bible studies, Christian Zionism, the belief that Israel's modern state fulfills biblical prophecy and demands unwavering Christian support of Israel.
	And of course, it is a hot-button issue.
	People will break fellowship with you over this.
	And that's not why I avoid it and don't want to talk about it.
	I just, when I look at the complicated prophecy charts and everything else like that, it's like the first thing is, okay, it's just cut through this.
	Christ says, come to him as a little child if you want to really have that kind of childlike faith.
	That's what's required.
	Not this complicated prophecy charts and theological arguments and everything.
	That is working against that kind of childlike faith and Relationship that is there.
	And that is not the good news.
	That's what everybody wants to talk about.
	Everybody, it's very sensational.
	And, you know, I just tell a lot of people: if you want to know the future, go get a Ouija board or call the Witch of Endor, but let's not make this a Bible study.
	He said, this is also not about moral alignment.
	It's about foreign money shaping what is being taught in Sunday school, preached from pulpits, and studied in seminaries.
	And he said, and it's happening across all denominations, from the 14 million Southern Baptist Conference to, he said, shockingly, reformed institutions that traditionally reject Zionism's dispensationalist roots in favor of covenant theology.
	And just for those of you who are not part of this, what we're talking about is the idea basically that God, dispensationalist God, is working at different times in very different ways, whereas the covenant theology is really more like a series of covenants that continually expand out.
	That's my understanding of it anyway.
	I'm sure people would have a disagreement with that even.
	Southern Baptists, with its 2018 resolution affirming Israel's right to exist, is an obvious target.
	Megachurch pastors like Jack Graham of Prestonwood Baptist with 45,000 members or Ed Young of the Second Baptist in Houston with 70,000 members attended APAC's Friends of the Faith sessions at its annual conferences where they're armed with pro-Israel talking points and materials.
	These pastors weave Zionist narratives into sermons and curricula that frame Israel as God's chosen nation.
	Did God come to save an ethnic group or political group?
	I don't think so.
	I don't think so at all.
	As a matter of fact, whatever you think about eschatology, I've talked about this before, they have a Hagar issue.
	And that is, you know, when Abraham had a promise from God, rather than wait for God to do it in God's way, in God's timing, he and Sarah decided that they were going to have a child with her slave, Hagar.
	And the result of that is what we see playing out in the Mideast right now, the fight between the Ishmaelites and the Israelites.
	But the point is, wait for God's timing.
	Wait.
	If you think you've got a promise from God, wait for him to do it in the way he said he's going to do it.
	And be patient in his timing.
	If you take it into your own hands, and if you violate his clear principles, bad things are going to come out of that.
	He said, the real jawdropper, however, is the Reformed world.
	Covenant theology, which dominates Reformed churches, teaches that the church, not modern Israel, inherits God's promise to Abraham.
	Zionism, with its focus on literal Jewish return to the land, is anathema to this view.
	He says, yet I'm uncovering evidence that APAC's money is reaching to reformed influencers because money speaks louder than their theology.
	They may disagree with the theology, but they'll take the money and they'll teach it for that.
	He says, our reformed influencers, pastors, theologians, even podcasters, are quietly incorporating pro-Israel messaging into their teaching.
	This is a scandal of seismic proportions, a foreign lobby influencing the theology of churches that should, by their own doctrine, reject it.
	Israel is funding Sunday school lessons that your kids are learning, small group studies that your neighbor attends, and the sermons that are shaping evangelical politics, and no one is talking about it.
	It's kind of like the rabbi that went on record not too long ago saying, the problem with you Christians is you're only a worship onechu.
	You should be worshiping us all.
	And that's evidently what APAC is determined to accomplish.
	The story is bigger than a single column can contain, he says.
	He's looking through financial trials, conference agendas.
	So, you know, stay tuned.
	Well, I'll give you this information when he gets to it.
	But you've already got what we've seen APAC doing is giving money to congressmen, to state legislators, to essentially shut down free speech, to enforce censorship.
	I mean, it truly is they want to tell you what to believe in churches.
	They want to tell you what you can or cannot say on social media.
	And you've got one Democrat and a Republican.
	Democrat is Josh Gottheimer from New Jersey.
	The Republican is Don Bacon from Nebraska, I think it is.
	And they have taken a lot of money from APAC, and they've got a bill where if a social media, if you say something that APAC doesn't like, if you criticize their political entity of Israel, they will call you anti-Semitic, play the race card, and demand that social media take you down.
	And if they don't do it, then they get a $5 million a day fine for failing to censor people that APAC wants censored.
	So, you know, don't criticize this political entity here.
	They call it Stop Hate Act.
	No, it's Stop Free Speech Act is what it really is.
	That's what we get in return.
	They bless us with censorship.
	They bless us by attacking our Bill of Rights, our Constitution, our God-given rights, by the way.
	That's what they do when you help them.
	But if you criticize Netanyahu, we'll call you racist and hateful.
	It's about a politician.
	It's about a political party.
	And just remember, I think Netanyahu hates Israelis.
	Look at what he did during the pandemic.
	He was one of the worst politicians in terms of vaccine mandates and restrictions on movements and other things.
	And of course, when they attacked Iran, they knew that there was going to be a massive wave of counterattacks.
	So it's like, you know, well, I'm going to attack them, and a lot of Israelis are going to die, and buildings are going to be destroyed.
	But hey, you know, we have to do that.
	So much for his concern about Israel.
	We're announcing a new tool in our online arsenal to protect our nation against terrorist organizations, he said.
	Well, I think they're terrorizing America, and they're terrorizing the Constitution.
	There's no reason why anyone, especially terrorists or anyone online, should access social media platforms to promote radical, hate-filled violence.
	And this is saying that speech is violence.
	Well, I think we should remove APAC and the Israeli government by that same token.
	That would apply to them as well.
	Greenblatt, head of APAC, said, anti-Semitism has gone viral, in large part because of social media, adding that bigots and extremists exploit social media to recruit, to radicalize.
	I think he doesn't understand what's going on.
	What is recruiting and radicalizing people to criticize Israel is their starvation of children and their focusing on civilians.
	They've got them in a walled camp and they're killing them, picking them off incessantly.
	So you don't fight Nazis by becoming a Nazi.
	And that's what AIPAC is doing.
	That's what Netanyahu is doing.
	They're becoming the monsters that they fight.
	So anti-Semitism is criticism of a political party in Israel, in case you didn't know by their definition.
	So Representative Gottheimer also co-sponsored a bill to transfer American B-2 stealth bombers and bunker busters to Israel as well.
	As Chris Manahan said, this is a blatant attack on free speech and the First Amendment rights of Americans.
	But these representatives have shown they're more than willing to put the interests of Israel over the rights of the American people.
	That truly is it.
	But I want to talk more broadly about the attitude of Christians in terms of just supporting war.
	Because I think being pro-war is being antichrist.
	You know, it's not just the antichrist.
	The spirit of antichrist, of opposition to Christ, of being diametrically opposed, antithetical to him, has been around for 2,000 years.
	And of course, I think when we support mass killing, for what reason, right?
	I mean, I think we have a right to defend innocent life.
	And that's really what the just war understanding is about.
	What is it that justifies conducting war?
	Well, self-defense is what it is.
	And once that, the goal should be to try to limit it to combatants, to try to end it as soon as possible.
	And the goal of a war is to stop war.
	It's not to perpetuate it forever.
	But that unfortunately has been the goal of American policy, and it's the goal of Israeli policy as well.
	And aid groups are blaming Israel's Gaza restrictions for mass starvation.
	Like I said before, 111 organizations, Doctors Without Borders is one of them, save the children.
	They are adding calls for aid restrictions to be eased and for the war to end.
	We've had the doctors who are there as volunteers talk about the fact they've never seen anything like it before.
	Children shot by snipers in the chest and then a second shot to the head just to make sure.
	And this is what is happening there.
	The joint statement is the latest attempt to draw attention to a growing hunger crisis in Gaza.
	It was released after the European Union and at least 28 governments, including Israeli allies like Britain, France, and Canada, on Monday condemned the drip feeding of aid, quote unquote, said that civilian suffering had, quote, reached new depths.
	Doctors Without Borders in Gaza has reported a sharp and unprecedented rise in acute malnutrition.
	Adults frequently collapse from hunger, the aid group said in their statement, adding that stockpiles of food and other supplies warehoused outside of the territory were being prevented from reaching people in need.
	Hospitals had registered 10 deaths because of famine or malnutrition in the previous 24 hours, bringing the total of deaths from hunger since Saturday to 43.
	And on the other side of this, there's an editorial here from John Spencer, and he says, I'm a war scholar, and he says that there is no genocide in Gaza.
	He said he's an experienced soldier, and he was invited by the Israeli government to observe what was there, and he said he didn't see anything, so therefore it's not happening.
	Well, I guess we have his testimony of what the Israeli government wanted him to see, allowed him to see, versus the testimony of 111 organizations as well as 28 countries, including several that have been friendly to Israel, who are not opposed to Israel or to its existence.
	It was a New York Times op-ed piece.
	I'm a genocide scholar, and I know it when I see it, he said.
	And so he's rebutting that.
	That New York Times op-ed was by someone named Omar Bartov.
	He accused Israel of committing genocide in Gaza.
	And this guy, John Spencer, says genocide is defined as a specific intent to destroy a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group in whole or in part.
	I would say this qualifies, wouldn't you?
	By that definition.
	What we see there.
	Genocide is a term that was coined by a Jewish scholar in terms of talking about what the Turks did to the Armenians in Armenia.
	And that's exactly what they were doing.
	They were killing them in order to drive them off of an area of land completely to take it over.
	And that's what we see happening in Gaza.
	There's no question about it.
	It's been made very clear by both Netanyahu and Trump, as well as statements by the Israeli government, that that is their policy, their purpose.
	He says, I'm a war expert.
	I've led soldiers in combat.
	I've trained military units in urban warfare.
	I've taught military history.
	Since October the 7th, I've been to Gaza four times, embedded with Israeli Defense Forces.
	In other words, seeing what they want him to see.
	He says, I've interviewed the Prime Minister of Israel, the Defense Minister, the IDF chief of staff, etc.
	And he said, in reaction to this New York Times op-ed piece by Bartov, he said, it presents Netanyahu's reference to, quote, remember Amalek.
	And he's not the only one to do that.
	I've seen Christian pastors do that.
	And I think it's reprehensible.
	Clearly, when you talk about Amalek in the Bible, it was always talking about genocide.
	You know, when it is something that is very much in the mind of the Jewish people when they celebrate Purim, which is the story of Esther.
	In that story, you had a guy who was an Amalekite, and he nearly gets the king while they are being held captive in another country.
	He nearly gets the king to kill every Jew that is in captivity, but it doesn't happen.
	But he's an Amalekite, and this is something that's really hammered home to them.
	So when you say an Amalekite, and remember Amalek, that is what it's talking about.
	He said, Bartov said that that phrase is a smoking gun, and it is.
	This guy doesn't know anything about Jewish history.
	He claims that he does.
	He said, it serves as a warning to remain vigilant against threats, not as a call to mass killing.
	No, go back and read your Bible.
	You know, you'll see that that's what they're calling for.
	They're calling for genocide.
	And it grieves me to see Christian pastors using that kind of language against people today.
	They have no call to do that.
	None whatsoever.
	Destroy every last person of an ethnic group is what they're talking about.
	And when he says that it's not a call to genocide, that is a massive red flag for this guy.
	Unable to find intent among those actually directing the war, the op-ed on New York Times, he said, turns to far-right politicians like Bezalel Smotrik and Nissim Vaturi.
	These individuals do not command troops, issue orders, or shape battlefield decisions.
	No, they just call as politicians who are shaping the policy.
	They call for genocide.
	And so that's what he doesn't want to look at.
	He says, Israel has taken extraordinary steps to limit civilian harm.
	Again, that is not what the 111 different groups say.
	He said, Israel has delivered more humanitarian aid to Gaza than any military in history.
	And it's provided to an enemy population during wartime.
	We have covered the fact that they were restricting that.
	As a matter of fact, if you go back and look at the massive disaster of Biden, where they had that ridiculous pier and all of the logistical things that were forced upon them that made absolutely no sense.
	They had to put it on a boat and then take it to the end of this long pier that was out there, which eventually fell apart.
	All of that was done because Israel refused to open up roads to let food be brought in.
	And so that was a way that the Biden administration was trying to straddle the fence and to say to critics of the starvation plan, oh, we're getting food in there to them.
	At the same time, you know, walking on eggshells with Israel.
	That right there shows that they've done everything they can to keep food from civilians.
	He said, the New York Times editorial cites death tolls from Amos health authorities without question.
	This is a game we can always play, especially during, as a war is going on.
	I don't believe any figures from either side in the middle of a war.
	But when we have this many different organizations and this many different countries that have gone in and documented this, I think we can get, we may not have the ability to come up with exact numbers, but we certainly can get an idea of what is happening.
	And just in case you can't, it was Donald Trump who gave us the clarity on what all this stuff was with his clumsy, ham-fisted lusting over the property and how he's going to build luxury properties there.
	War is evaluated based on the actions of commanders, the goals set by leaders, and how well the military follows the laws of war, not by taking statistics out of context.
	I would agree.
	And by that standard, I would say it is clearly genocide.
	He said, war is hell, it's inhumane, it's destructive, it's ugly, but it's not automatically a crime.
	Nations must not target civilians, he said.
	Israel is doing that, he said, and I have seen it.
	No, you saw what the Israeli government wanted you to see when you were embedded with their army.
	Other people have seen exactly the opposite.
	He said, genocide requires clear, provable intent to destroy a people and remove them from an area through sustained, deliberate actions.
	Trump even admitted this.
	He and Netanyahu both did.
	So he says, the laws of war do not prohibit war itself.
	What are the laws of war?
	Well, he doesn't name it, but the laws of war are basically what Western civilization has used for a long time, but now rejected as of the 20th century, which is a just war.
	And I think by these different measures that he has here, Israel fails on all these measures.
	He says, requires that operations distinguish between combatants and non-combatants, that force be proportional to the objective, that commanders take all flexible precautions to protect civilian life.
	I think on all of these, we have seen that they get a failing grade.
	And so NBC and others have reported, you know, again, we can talk about statistics, but, you know, as Stalin said, you know, a million people Dying is a statistic, one death is a tragedy.
	So they will talk about individual stories.
	This is a story of a baby boy dying of starvation.
	It's many, many tragedies.
	That's why it is such a tragedy.
	These people like Trump and Netanyahu will let people die, entire families be wiped out, so they can build some kind of a luxury vacation resort or whatever use they have for that land that they're lusting over.
	Israel lifted its blockade in late May, but has since allowed only limited aid into the enclave, and Gaza's population continues to face dire shortages.
	The UN said Tuesday that more than a thousand Palestinians have now been killed by Israeli forces while seeking food since the start of new aid distribution system.
	Israel did not immediately respond to NBC News' request for comment on the children's reported death from malnutrition in recent days and all.
	But doctors inside Gaza say the mounting hunger crisis has overwhelmingly affected children and pregnant women.
	They said, one doctor said, American critical care nurse, rather, not a doctor, who is volunteering in Gaza, told NBC News, her name is Elidolis Burgos, that she had witnessed an entire population suffering from starvation because of the Israeli blockade.
	She said the signs are evident, not just in the patients in the ICU, but also with the health workers themselves who are showing severe malnutrition, temporal wasting, muscle waste, and frailty.
	There's just no food, she said.
	There's just nothing getting in and hasn't been getting in for months.
	Crowds gathered Tuesday at the gates of a small charity kitchen in Gaza, one of the few still operating in the enclave.
	They said children were clamoring on top of one another, holding out pots and pans to the fence.
	They said all they have to offer them is lentil soup, no vegetables, no rice, nothing else.
	It's nowhere near enough either for the massive crowds that come here, she said.
	So as Free Thought Project, and it's actually Caitlin Johnstone again, she said, famine as a tool of genocide, Gaza isn't starving, it is being starved.
	She said, and this is the thing, again, it is amazing to see more moral clarity from an atheist liberal like Caitlin Johnstone than it is from pastors of large churches.
	Does that bother you?
	It bothers me, and it bothers her as well, and many other people.
	Not only are they supporting this, but they're cutting these people off from being open to hearing about the gospel.
	She said, malnutrition-related deaths in Gaza are beginning to climb.
	The health ministry reported 18 in just one 24-hour period.
	Doctors report that people are collapsing in the street.
	A Gaza journalist is warning that the world not to be surprised if the remaining reporters in the enclave were soon silenced by starvation.
	She said, meanwhile, Israeli forces are setting new records with massacres of starving civilians seeking aid.
	85 killed in a single day on Sunday.
	She said, if this isn't evil, then nothing is evil.
	She says, so what's the plan here?
	Do we just sit and watch Israel starve Gaza to death with the support of our own governments?
	And then what?
	We just go along with our lives, knowing that that's what happened, that this is what we are as a society, that our so-called civilization is comfortable allowing something like that to happen, that our rulers could do the same thing to another inconvenient population at any time.
	And of course, I always think back to what our rulers did to the global population, people like Trump and Netanyahu, in 2020.
	Medical martial law, lockdown, busting the supply chains of our own food, and even shutting churches down.
	That's the legacy of Trump.
	And all these people who are looking at this, at him now, finally waking up to some degree, some of them.
	And yet, where were they when he was doing all that stuff in 2020?
	They made excuses for him.
	She said, how exactly is everyone planning to go about living their lives at that point?
	How does that work exactly?
	She said, I'm asking because I really don't know.
	I mean, I know what my own government and its allies should do, but I don't know what we as ordinary members of the public are supposed to do to stop this.
	It's not some mystery how to get a ceasefire in Gaza.
	The empire is the fire.
	It simply needs to cease firing.
	And this is the whole Ukraine thing as well.
	If Trump wanted to stop the war, he could stop it by stopping the ammunition going to Ukraine.
	He doesn't want to stop it.
	It's just a lie, a bluff of the worst sort.
	Israel's Holocaust in Gaza is made possible only by the support of its Western backers, primarily the United States.
	Numerous Israeli military insiders have acknowledged none of this would be possible without U.S. support.
	We are the nation that is the source of wars and starvation and assassination around the world.
	And I look at this and I think, how long is God going to go before he judges America for this kind of stuff?
	Now, it's not you and I. We don't approve of this.
	We can speak out about it, but we can't stop it.
	And yet it's done with our tax money.
	It's done in our names.
	That really should concern us all.
	She said, if the U.S. and its Western allies ceased backing Israel's onslaught in Gaza, a ceasefire would have to occur.
	Same with Ukraine.
	It's not a mystery how to get food into Gaza.
	You just drive it in and give it to people.
	But the Israelis won't let that happen.
	And they fought to keep that from happening From the very beginning, they've got roads, they've got gates.
	The only reason people in Gaza are starving is because Western governments, including her own in Australia, conspired to pretend to believe that the UNRWA is a terrorist organization in order to justify cutting off critical aid while doing nothing to pressure Israel into allowing food to flow in.
	The organization's funding and delivery systems to feed Gaza are all 100% fully available at no cost to Israel, by the way.
	They're just not being allowed to provide aid because the goal is to remove all Palestinians from Gaza via death or displacement.
	The people of Gaza are starving because the West is helping Israel starve Gaza.
	It's just that simple.
	This isn't some kind of unfortunate famine caused by a drought or by natural disaster.
	It's deliberately manufactured.
	It's a starvation campaign.
	It's implemented with genocidal intent.
	To paraphrase Utah Phillips, Gaza isn't starving.
	It is being starved.
	And the people who are starving it have names and addresses, she said.
	So we see this continuing on a regular basis.
	This is on Sunday.
	Israeli forces kill 72 Palestinians in Gaza over 24 hours.
	Every day we see this type of thing.
	15 more die.
	This is an op-ed piece, again, from J.D. Hall.
	In it, he talks about how we should view war as Christians.
	He says, from Sherman's march to Nagasaki, how Americans learn to forget all about a just war.
	He said, evangelicals are still cheering as the bodies are piling up.
	It's a tragedy beyond words.
	He said, the targeting of a church building in Gaza, at least the fifth time in this conflict that Israel has struck Christian sites while Christians are meeting, has taken place.
	And it has solicited quite a few comments from evangelicals who are promoting total war.
	He says, total war is a military concept in which a nation mobilizes all available resources toward achieving absolute victory over an enemy, often disregarding the usual constraints of warfare, such as distinctions between combatants and civilians.
	It is in contrast with a limited war where efforts and targets are restricted.
	It actually makes my heart ache, he says, to see fellow Christians so woefully uneducated in Christian ethics.
	Ethics is different from morality because ethics is situational by nature.
	Morality is immutable.
	He says, I don't mean that morality changes.
	Of course it doesn't.
	But ethics are the working out of those immutable moral principles in time and space in certain situations.
	So the way he defines it here is that we have a God-given morality, and then we look at it and say, well, in this situation, here's how that morality applies.
	We call that ethics.
	He said, there was a time that education in Christian ethics is part and parcel to a Christian experience.
	It appears, however, to be woefully lacking today, because it's common to see evangelicals calling for Gaza to be turned into glass.
	He said, there's no better example of the danger of poor Christian education in American churches than its failure to teach its church members the concepts of ethics as it pertains to war.
	People are dead, piles and piles of them, because we are ignorant on this topic.
	Without evangelical support for the war in Gaza, given our disproportionate political power in the United States, it's unlikely the carnage would have lasted this long.
	At least, not with our bombs and our tax dollars.
	He says, the Bible itself, of course, says there is a time for war.
	However, this doesn't mean that all war is just.
	Neither does it mean that in warfare, all ethics are cast aside.
	For the Christian, war is not, as some imagine it, a place without rules.
	No, I'm not talking about cumbersome rules of engagement that get our troops killed because they can't fire back without explicit permission.
	He says, I'm talking about the ethical considerations of a justice in war as taught by St. Augustine.
	He said, many evangelicals believe that as soon as war is declared, as though that officially happens anymore, it never does, then a level of violence against any person, in or out of uniform, is fair game.
	Probably the same ones who see nothing immoral about torture or the bombing of Christians in Nagasaki.
	They act as though God requires nothing of us morally in the middle of a battle.
	And by more than one evangelical, I was called naive and ignorant of the demands of modern warfare, as though it's more any more violent than ancient warfare was.
	Yeah, you will be called naive and ignorant if you hold up moral principles.
	I really do hate that.
	He said, the men who built Western civilization carried swords, not only with strength, but with conscience.
	And I've got to say, as recently as the 1800s, Travis learned to read using G.A. Hinty books, which, as I've said before, is always done in the context of a real historical event.
	One of them actually was the Roman destruction of Jerusalem in 70 AD.
	But many of them were, there were a lot of battles that you would know, but a lot of them were even small battles that were known to the Victorians, but wouldn't be known to most people today unless you were like a PhD in British history or something like that.
	But it would have that context of a real event for the one that took place with the destruction of Jerusalem.
	It was called For The temple, and he referred to the writings of my mind just went blank.
	What was the name of the historian?
	Josephus.
	Josephus, thank you.
	Yeah, Josephus.
	So he leaned heavily on Josephus's writings.
	And we see from contemporary writings how even in a war like that, which is brutal, I mean, it was hand-to-hand combat.
	You didn't push a button from a thousand miles away and kill people that you never see their bodies.
	No, you were cutting them up hand by hand.
	And even in that kind of situation, they followed ethics that we see.
	They were not necessarily Christians, but they followed ethics.
	They understood those kind of a natural law in a sense.
	And when we read those books, you could see that even the bad guys in the books had the kind of moral clarity that you don't get from the heroes in today's movies or today's novels.
	Anyway, he said, the men who built Western civilization carried swords not only with strength, but with conscience.
	They believed in boundaries.
	They believed in the shadow of Augustine.
	They lived rather in the shadow of Augustine's just war theory and of Aquinas's refinement of it.
	Christian nations didn't wage war the way that pagans did.
	Pagans would just have a berserker attack that kill and chop up everything inside.
	They knew the sword was not a license for savagery.
	Though history has always seen blood and horror, it is also filled with moments when Christian leaders refused to let necessity become an idol.
	They fought, but they fought with restraint.
	George Washington, for example, understood that winning liberty meant winning it with honor.
	Throughout the American Revolution, he repeatedly ordered his troops to show respect to civilians and prisoners.
	When his army marched through hostile territories, he insisted they refrain from looting or from mistreating the inhabitants.
	In one documented case during the New Jersey campaigns, when soldiers began harassing loyalist sympathizers, Washington did not turn a blind eye.
	He demanded they stop and reminded them that their fight wasn't just about independence.
	It was about building a nation that was worth living in.
	The same restraint shaped the siege of Boston.
	Rather than allow his troops to take vengeance on British civilians caught in the crossfire, he permitted a civilian evacuation.
	Even though those civilians had supported the crown, he knew that harming the innocent would poison their cause.
	Nanyahu could learn from this.
	His decisions were shaped by something deeper than politics.
	They were shaped by a Christian conscience, trained in the difference between combatants and non-combatants.
	During the siege of Malta in 1565, Christian knights faced overwhelming Ottoman forces.
	The battle was brutal, the odds were dire, yet the knights of the Order of St. John refused to slaughter prisoners or to desecrate bodies.
	Even in moments of desperation, they offered medical aid to wounded Muslim captives.
	They stood behind their walls with blood on their faces and bandages in their hands.
	Their creed demanded it.
	Their honor required it.
	And this is, like I said, this is what you'll see if you have kids.
	Read them some J. Henti stories.
	They will pick that up.
	In 1813, after the Battle of Leipzig, Christian generals from Prussia and Britain did not exact ruthless punishment on the defeated French.
	They fed prisoners.
	Lutheran pastors opened churches for the wounded.
	Those who died were given proper burial and Christian rites.
	There was no triumphalism, only duty.
	Their actions were not born of sentimentality, but of Christian command.
	War might be ugly, but that didn't make cruelty permissible.
	I guess one of the things, you know, when I couldn't do much or anything except watch TV, we watched a production of War and Peace, and I thought it was excellent, and it wasn't very old.
	It was maybe, you know, about 2006 or 8, I think.
	But watching that, it was a series.
	I think it was done by the BBC.
	But it was not like a two-hour movie.
	It was a series of these things.
	It's pretty long.
	War in Pieces is famous for being a big book.
	And in that, you get a sense of the atrocities of Napoleon and of the bold-faced, ruthless ambition of the man and his disregard, not only for the lives of his own troops, but his disregard, especially for the people that he was invading in Russia.
	It is a mixture of war and peace.
	It's a mixture of people who are going about trying to live their lives with Napoleon at the gate.
	You know, war was moving slowly, and they didn't have long-range weapons and that type of thing, but it was always imminent.
	It was always the elephant in the room as these people were living their lives.
	And I got to say, you know, Napoleon and his work.
	Many people have done movies about Napoleon and that type of thing, but that movie or that book, I should say, Tolstoy really gets to the essence of what a monster he was.
	And that really is, I thought about that as I'm looking at it.
	It's like, you know, that is really what we're seeing now with these people, whether it's Zelensky or whether it is Netanyahu or Trump.
	They don't care about any of the people.
	They've got this goal.
	They want to take territory.
	And the whole thing is like a big game of risk to them.
	And they don't care how much blood is spilt.
	It's just their little game that they're playing.
	But getting back to this, the Battle of Leipzig, he said, these examples are not mythical.
	They're not romantic glosses over violent times.
	As a matter of fact, that's one of the things, you look at it and you say, well, maybe these Henti books, it's H-E-N-T-Y, by the way, maybe these Hinty books were just romanticized.
	Well, no, he relies on Josephus's records, which were contemporary with what happened with that.
	Anyway, he said, there are hard won moments when men remembered that war is not an excuse to forget God.
	They point to the enduring influence of a worldview that saw every soul as bearing the image of the Creator, even if that soul wore another uniform.
	When Western leaders remembered the difference between combatants and innocents, it didn't make them weaker.
	It made them stronger.
	It gave them moral clarity.
	It showed the world that their cause was not conquest, but justice.
	It reminded their own troops that they were not beasts, they were men.
	And they were Christian men at that.
	You see, even when somebody is a combatant in a war, they can show people what Christ is about and his position.
	But, you know, here we are living in peace, haven't been touched by war, and yet we are showing people a monstrous false impression of what Christ is about.
	That's what bothers me about this whole thing.
	He says, this is what the modern world has lost.
	Today's warfare is ruled by efficiency and detachment.
	Buttons are pushed from thousands of miles away.
	Collateral damage is calculated like a tax, but our ancestors knew better.
	They knew the power to destroy had to be bridled by the wisdom to refrain.
	Their stories remind us of what war can be when it is shaped by the cross rather than by the club.
	If restraint in war ennobles a civilization, then ruthlessness corrodes it.
	Victory is measured, if victory is measured in enemy corpses and cities reduced to rumble.
	The abandonment of the just war principles has never won us peace.
	It has only left us haunted.
	Haunted.
	And I've seen reports of a couple of Israeli soldiers who committed suicide.
	Perhaps that's because they were haunted by what they saw, what they were commanded to do.
	And then he brings it home to American history, going back to William Tecumseh Sherman's march across Georgia in 1864.
	He said he wasn't conducting war, he was unleashing terror.
	The campaign was designed not simply to defeat Confederate forces, but to break the will of Southern civilians through destruction.
	Does that sound familiar?
	He said, homes were burned, railroads were twisted into grotesque iron sculptures, entire towns were razed, livestock was slaughtered, food stores were torched to starve the population into submission.
	Sherman called it, quote, hard war, unquote, but Christian soldiers of earlier generations would have called it what it was, vengeance against non-combatants.
	His march hastened the end of the war, but it also introduced a new moral standard to American warfare, the idea that civilian suffering is an acceptable means to a military end.
	Sherman himself was never quite comfortable with what he had done.
	He defended it as necessary, but not noble.
	And many in the North, even those who supported the Union cause, were disturbed by the brutality.
	The legacy of the march became a stain, a reminder that victory without virtue is a hollow triumph.
	The 20th century saw even darker departures.
	The firebombing of Dresden in 1945, often justified as retribution against the Nazi war machine.
	The reality is that Dresden held little strategic value.
	It was a cultural city, a city of art and architecture with minimal military installations, yet British and American bombers dropped over 3,900 tons of explosives in just two days.
	The result was a firestorm that killed as many as 25,000 civilians, most of them women and children and elderly.
	Photos of Dresden afterwards resemble the aftermath of a volcanic eruption.
	Streets are unrecognizable.
	Churches, libraries, museums, all obliterated.
	Survivors described people melting into the pavement or reduced to ash where they stood.
	Allied leaders knew the city was no threat, but they bombed it to send a message.
	That message was not Christian justice.
	The message was total war.
	The same pattern repeated itself in Nagasaki.
	Few Americans today remember that Nagasaki, the second city hit with a nuclear bomb, was the historical heart of Japanese Christianity, which is notoriously hard to get the Japanese to convert to Christianity because it conflicts with their long-standing culture of ancestor worship.
	So basically, Christianity was pretty much unknown outside of the city of Nagasaki and outside of the church that was basically ground zero for the second nuclear bomb.
	It was home to the largest Christian community in Japan, including the famous Yurakami Cathedral.
	When the bomb detonated over the city, it vaporized that cathedral along with thousands of faithful believers who were gathered inside for confession.
	Of all the cities that could have been targeted, why did they target that one?
	Defenders of bombings often repeat the mantra that they ended the war.
	Well, as I said before, you know, if you've got a nuclear bomb, they say, well, you couldn't go from island to island fighting people.
	Well, you could have dropped a nuclear bomb on this one island, on the combatants, and another one on more combatants, and that would have had the same message.
	And you would have not been coming after civilians.
	Truman's own diary entries show that he knew that Japan was near collapse.
	Yet, instead of pursuing conditional peace, the U.S. chose to drop a new, terrifying weapon on civilian centers and do it twice.
	The moral consequences of those decisions linger even now.
	The results were not decisive victories born of brutal realism, they were psychological scars.
	They undermined our claim to moral authority, and the world remembers not only our triumphs but our atrocities.
	Those atrocities have a way of justifying more evil down the line.
	If civilians can be burned to end a war, why not torture prisoners to start one?
	Or to prevent one, right?
	That is the poison of pragmatism, unmoored from righteousness.
	Every time the West has tried to shortcut Christian ethics for the sake of expedience, it has paid a heavy price.
	Whether in Sherman's Trail of Fire, or the charred bodies of Dresden, or the ruins of Nagasaki, or the cages of Gitmo, we have seen what happens when the sword forgets the sheath.
	These are not victories.
	They are funerals for our conscience.
	None of these actions were necessary to win.
	Just war theory is not idealistic fluff.
	It is the scaffolding that has held together Christian civilizations' approach to conflict for centuries.
	It recognizes that war, when it must be fought, must still honor God.
	And it demands proportionality.
	It demands that you not attack non-combatants.
	And it demands that your primary goal is to stop the war.
	We don't see that from any of our politicians.
	When those principles are followed, even war can bear witness to the gospel.
	When they are abandoned, the gospel is mocked, and we become like those that we claim to fight.
	Too many evangelicals today cheer for war as if it were a football game.
	We were never told to win at all costs.
	We were told to stand for righteousness.
	This is not about pacifism.
	It's about justice.
	It's about refusing to become monsters that we fight.
	What is happening in Gaza is no longer a war.
	It is not a conflict, nor a campaign, nor a military operation in any meaningful sense.
	What is happening in Gaza is slaughter, mechanized carnage, digitally guided obliteration, and the coldly efficient erasure of an entire people under the pretense of defense.
	Trump is gleeful about the commercial real estate prospects.
	How reprehensible can this guy get?
	Over 37,000 Gazans have been confirmed dead, the majority of them women and children.
	By UN estimates, more than 70% of the casualties are civilian.
	Entire neighborhoods are gone, and the hunger is not incidental either.
	Israel's defense minister said it plainly.
	He said, quote, we are putting Gaza under siege.
	No electricity, no food, no water.
	They didn't say they were targeting Hamas.
	They said they were starving Gaza.
	And they have.
	The American conscience is numb, lulled into silence by euphemisms like surgical strike or collateral damage or precision munitions.
	In 1945, when the U.S. dropped bombs on Nagasaki, the weight of that moral horror was felt even by its architects.
	Scientists wept.
	Chaplains broke down.
	Decades of post-war literature explored the shame.
	It was not repeated.
	But in Gaza, we repeat it every week.
	And not in war against an empire or nuclear power, but against a captive people and a walled ghetto.
	This is not war, it is overkill.
	And it is a theological affront to every Christian principle of just war.
	Every bomb is signed with our taxes.
	Every death echoes.
	And as Brian Shahabi points out, U.S. evangelicals are calling for Christians now to boycott, divest, and sanction Israel.
	Not because of the way that this massacre has been conducted, but because they are not, they're preventing Christians from visiting the so-called Holy Land.
	I got to say, land is not holier than the people who are created in God's image.
	And that's all people.
	And that's the thing that bothers me about this.
	Huckabee has had a lot of tours to the Holy Land since the 1980s.
	He has taken more than 100, led more than 100 tours to Israel.
	And he gets paid several thousand dollars by each person that's in the tour.
	In 2024, his Holy Land tour started with a base price of $5,850 with upgrades available for an additional $7,000 with a maximum cost of $12,850.
	Now all of a sudden, Huckabee is changing his tune about how wonderful Israel is because they're cutting that off.
	It's becoming widely known that the settlers are not just attacking Palestinian Muslims by taking their land, destroying their buildings, and killing their livestock.
	These Israeli Zionist settlers are doing the same thing to Palestinian Christians.
	Even worse for Huckabee, Israel is reportedly not giving out visas anymore to evangelical Christians and their missionaries.
	So Huckabee and other evangelical Christians in Trump's administration are crying foul.
	They're actually calling for Christians in the U.S. to boycott, divest, and sanction Israel.
	Just like pro-Palestinian groups in the U.S. are doing it, But they're doing it for the genocide, not because you cut off our vacation tours.
	Listen to the disgraced former Congressman Matt Gates give the same arguments to boycott, divest, and sanction Israel that the pro-Palestinian groups use.
	You can't make this stuff up.
	And yet, look at the difference in their motivations for doing this.
	It truly is amazing.
	And so we're going to leave it at this point right here.
	I just have to say that we can talk about, and many people want to know, what I think.
	It doesn't really matter what I think.
	It matters what the Bible says.
	You need to work that out yourself.
	I'm not going to sit here and talk about things that are very divisive.
	I want people to understand, first of all, there is a God.
	Secondly, he has spoken to us.
	And thirdly, that this cheering of war is diametrically antithetical to what he told us.
	And it couldn't be further removed.
	And I think people are far too concerned about what is going to happen on this earth politically with wars and all the rest of stuff in the future.
	To me, it almost borders on a kind of occultism.
	You know, we want to read the future.
	That's not the purpose of this.
	And I would say this.
	You know, the famous passage where Jesus said, you'll know them by their fruits, what was he talking about?
	He was talking about false prophets, false teachers.
	He said, you'll know these wolves among the sheep by the fruit that their teaching brings.
	If your teaching, if your eschatology gets you to cheer the mass murder and starvation of women and children, perhaps you need to take a closer look at your theology and your predictions that are there.
	And so one person, thank you for sending this to me, Ryan, for the love of the road.
	He said, somebody on one of the platforms, a telegram, so I'd like to know if you believe in replacement theology, that the church replaces Israel in end times eschatology.
	Well, what I want to do is I want to stop evangelicals from replacing Christ with Israel, with a political entity, because that's what I see happening here.
	So that's basically my answer in a nutshell.
	I'm not interested in getting people on to argue over this theology.
	I want them to look not so much as to what's going to happen to the church in the near future or to Israel in the near future.
	I want you to think about eternity that is before you.
	It's really simple.
	It's very childlike.
	That's why you see people writing John 3.16 all over the place, right?
	Whosoever believes has eternal life.
	Whosoever believes in the Lord Jesus Christ, he is the only way.
	You're not going to get your way to heaven by having your eschatology right or your theology right or your obedience perfect.
	Those are never going to be good enough.
	The good news, and it is good news, why wouldn't we focus on that?
	The good news is that you can know that you have eternal life and you should know that and you should work that out.
	Be focused on that and be focused on trying to show the love of Christ to people.
	Well, thank you for joining us.
	I'll turn this back over to Travis.
	�� The common man.
	They created common core to dumb down our children.
	They created common past to track and control us.
	Their commons project to make sure the commoners own nothing.
	And the communist future.
	They see the common man as simple, unsophisticated, ordinary.
	But each of us has worth and dignity created in the image of God.
	That is what we have in common.
	That is what they want to take away.
	Their most powerful weapons are isolation, deception, intimidation.
	They desire to know everything about us while they hide everything from us.
	It's time to turn that around and expose what they want to hide.
	Please share the information and links you'll find at thedavidnightshow.com.
	Thank you for listening.
	Thank you for sharing.
	If you can't support us financially, please keep us in your prayers.

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