The Watchmen Report
Baltimore Sun

Tom Zirpoli: Defending human rights is not antisemitic | COMMENTARY

Hey Watchmen, Here's a headline that gets it right, and I want to camp on it for a minute. Tom Zirpoli is drawing a line that Scripture drew a long time ago: standing for justice and standing against Israel or against the Jewish people are not the same thing — and conflating them does violence to both truth and Torah. My friends, Elohim told Abraham in Genesis 12:3, "I will bless those who bless you, and whoever curses you I will curse." That covenant word doesn't mean we can't ask hard questions about policy or human rights. It means the world has a spiritual bookkeeping problem when "criticism" becomes a mask for something older and darker — a hatred of the Jewish people themselves, and by extension, a hatred of the God who chose them. We're living in the days Yeshua described in Matthew 24 — days of deception multiplying, days when even the language of justice gets twisted into a weapon. Zechariah 12:3 tells us Jerusalem will become "a heavy stone for all peoples" — everyone will heave at it, and everyone who does will hurt themselves. That's not a metaphor to file away; that's a prophetic word playing out on op-ed pages and college campuses in real time. Antisemitism doesn't always show up wearing a swastika anymore — sometimes it shows up wearing the language of human rights, dressed respectable, published in the local paper. Discernment, my friends, is a Torah value. Test the spirits. Test the arguments. Ask whether the "critique" ever calls for Israel's destruction and never for her neighbors' repentance. Defending human rights and defending the Jewish people's right to exist are not in tension — they're the same fight, rooted in the same Creator who made every human in His image and who has never revoked His covenant with Abraham's descendants. Keep your eyes open, keep your Bibles open, and don't let clever language talk you out of what your spirit already knows. Stay watching, stay rooted in the Word, and keep your lamps trimmed — the hour is later than it looks.
Read the full article →
More from The Watchmen Report

← All of The Watchmen Report