Of course you think it is different because there are Jewish and Christian fundamentalist think tanks, posing as academia, that have been putting out reports that Iran will launch a nuke as soon as they get capabilities. These reports filter up through the media, mostly right wing, and created the meme that Iran is an imminent threat. Some in the Pentagon and IDF have are very sympathetic to fundamental beliefs, such as the armageddon. Yes, end of times. Religious fundamentalism is alive and well in the west it just gets hidden where muslim is more rampant and out in the open.
When you see stuff like this:
notes:
-Christians united for Israel
-Prominent senators, at least posture, that they are sympathetic
-Satan is behind Islam
-Obama is the anti-christ, it is prophecy
-War must be started with Iran
And this:
The revelation this month in GQ Magazine that Donald Rumsfeld as Defense Secretary embellished top-secret wartime memos with quotations from the Bible prompts a question. Why did he believe he could influence President Bush by that means?
The answer may lie in an alarming story about George Bush’s Christian millenarian beliefs that has yet to come to light.
In 2003 while lobbying leaders to put together the Coalition of the Willing, President Bush spoke to France’s President Jacques Chirac. Bush wove a story about how the Biblical creatures Gog and Magog were at work in the Middle East and how they must be defeated.
In Genesis and Ezekiel Gog and Magog are forces of the Apocalypse
You start to wonder if somebody is worried about nuclear proliferation or starting the final battle that ends Islam.
Then you see something like this:
During the fighting in the Gaza Strip, the religious media – and on two occasions, the Israel Defense Forces weekly journal Bamahane – were full of praise for the army rabbinate. The substantial role of religious officers and soldiers in the front-line units of the IDF was, for the first time, supported also by the significant presence of rabbis there.
The chief army rabbi, Brigadier General Avichai Rontzki, joined the troops in the field on a number of occasions, as did rabbis under his command.
In addition to the official publications, extreme right-wing groups managed to bring pamphlets with racist messages into IDF bases. One such flyer is attributed to “the pupils of Rabbi Yitzhak Ginsburg” – the former rabbi at Joseph’s Tomb and author of the article “Baruch the Man,” which praises Baruch Goldstein, who massacred unarmed Palestinians in Hebron. It calls on “soldiers of Israel to spare your lives and the lives of your friends and not to show concern for a population that surrounds us and harms us. We call on you … to function according to the law ‘kill the one who comes to kill you.’ As for the population, it is not innocent … We call on you to ignore any strange doctrines and orders that confuse the logical way of fighting the enemy.”
