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Notes -
Why doesn't Ted Cruz know the population of Iran? And what is with him generally? Or the whole upper echelons of the US govt?
I reference a recent Tucker Carlson interview with Cruz, where it turns out he didn't know said population (and has since responded with an AI meme image of Tucker asking Luke the population of the Death Star).
Turns out that the population of Iran is 92 million, I thought it was around 80. 80 would be a fairly reasonable answer. Even Yemen is surprisingly populous, around 41 million. Fun game to try - estimate the population of various countries in these areas.
I thought Ted Cruz was supposed to be super-smart, wouldn't it be natural to read up on Iran? He is on the Subcommittee on Near East, South Asia, Central Asia, and Counterterrorism. It's also relevant to US strategic choices and his particular love of Israel. Knowing about the subpopulations and relative size of the Azeris, Kurds and similar would be relevant to regime change, which is his professed goal:
To his credit he does know that Iran is Persian and predominantly Shia. And maybe being on a bunch of other subcommittees means he has to divide up his time and energy in all these different areas. But it's not like Tucker is asking really sophisticated questions about the position and integration of Azeri elites in the Tehran power structure. That really should be dealt with by an expert diplomat. But senators are supposed to be making strategic decisions, one has to have some base of knowledge to decide upon different courses of action.
Cruz also thinks that the Bible requires Christians to support the nation of Israel, which is somewhat non-mainstream in theology: "Where does my support for Israel come from, number 1 we're biblically commanded to support Israel". Tucker tries to ask 'do you mean the government of Israel' and Cruz says the nation of Israel, as if to say it's common-sense that the nation of Israel as referred to in the Bible is the same as the state of Israel today. It seems like he's purposely conflating the dual meanings of nation as ethnic group and nation as state, which is a stupid part of English.
Also Cruz said to Tucker "I came into Congress 13 years ago with the stated intention of being the leading defender of Israel in the United States”. How would this help in the context of a hostile interview, does he think that's a helpful thing to say? I can only imagine that Cruz thinks this is a winning issue, he wants to play hard rather than go down the wishy-washy 'Judeo-Christian' values route. Is declaring your devotion to a foreign country really that popular in America?
Trump also posted this somewhat ominous diatribe from Mike Huckabee (pastor and ambassador to Israel) praising Trump's divine prominence, his position similar to 'Truman in 1945' and how he has to listen to god and the angels only... https://x.com/Mondoweiss/status/1934999328583713096/photo/1
This episode reminds me of how George W Bush apparently didn't know of the difference between Sunni and Shia Islam until after deciding to invade, he brought up Gog and Magog when trying to persuade Chirac to join the war. Maybe that's false, some have disputed it. Or how Trump apparently won't read any long extracts of text and demands pictures. Maybe that's also false, lots of stories have been made about Trump policy. It's known that Biden didn't know whether people were alive or dead or what was happening much of the time. Large swathes of the Democrats can't tell the difference between men and women.
Here's another one I just found from another US congressman: https://x.com/VoteRandyFine/status/1839686465820766542
That's just weird!
There are serious structural problems with how America selects its politicians if this is the calibre of talent that's drawn into positions of great power. At the risk of sounding like an edgy atheist fighting a war everyone's tired of and moved on from years ago, surely theology should have no place in grand strategy. It's normal to have colourful characters in politics, some corruption, some old people who don't know what's going on, a certain level of lobbying. But this seems to be on a qualitatively different level, with serious results.
Some somewhat unstructured thoughts:
While "Cruz doesn't know anything about Iran" seems to have been the big takeaway that people focus on from this interview, I think the much more important and more alarming part is, as you pointed out, the religious element - but I don't think it's a case of stupidity, at least on that specific issue, or of ignorance. "What is with him" is that he genuinely believes that his God, through scripture, has commanded him to support Israel, and there are many in the upper echelons of the US government who genuinely and wholeheartedly believe the same thing.
"Republicans want to go to war in the Middle East because they're Millennialist Christians" is one of those horseshoe / bell-curve-meme situations where if you know nothing about the state of the American right, you probably believe it, if you are sort of read up on the American right, you probably think it's nonsense, and if you really listen to everything they say and the actions they take and try and discern their motivations, then yeah, it turns out they really just do believe it. Yes, sometimes they'll give other justifications based on liberal principles or American statecraft or plain might makes right rhetoric, and sometimes those justifications make sense, but they are all made in the shadow of the initial basis of theology. They are add-ons, NOT the central thing itself. In that way, it's telling that Cruz gives two reasons for his unconditional support of Israel, and the first one he describes is theological.
I really wish Tucker had asked the natural follow up, which is, "If your God has commanded you to support Israel, then surely you would do it even if it was actively against American interests?", but he instead chooses to focus on the difference between what Israel meant in the Bible and whether it can be understood to refer to the modern-day polity of Israel (the answer is very obviously no, because the polity did not exist in any meaningful form, but Cruz refuses to engage properly on that point).
HOWEVER, with all that said, I would be curious as to whether Tucker himself disagrees with the idea that Christians have some obligation to support some form of Israel, whether that is just "the chosen people" (i.e. Jews). I've heard some Christians explain this away by saying that "nah, doesn't matter because Jesus, new covenant, we're all God's chosen, etc. etc." but I don't think that holds out when you read through the Bible. I, personally, follow in the strong and storied European tradition of pick-whatever-works faith, so would be interested in what the more theologically-minded Christians of the motte believe.
Why doesn't it hold, in your opinion?
The Bible makes it pretty clear that there is something special about the relationship between the Jews and God, that this is passed down in a tribal fashion, and that this was not, at least in its entirety, entirely erased by the crucifixion and resurrection (e.g. Romans 11). I would personally read it as "the tribe of Israel is very special, but now everyone is able to become part of that tribe in a new, special way that didn't exist before, and this is partially because of how the tribe of Israel really dropped the ball".
Christian understanding does not end at the Bible. Indeed the Bible says not to use itself that way (2 Thessalonians 2:15). This would seem to be quite a problem for Protestantism but that's beside the point.
The point here is that for a couple thousand years Christians have understood God's relationship with Israel to have been transferred, in a sense, to the Church. Early Christians understood themselves to be part of the fulfilment of the Jewish religion; that Judaism has become Christianity and gentiles have a place in it. They didn't understand 'Judaism' to be a separate thing from Christianity.
However, especially with the destruction of the second temple, the Jews who rejected Christ underwent a radical shift in their beliefs and practices, leading to what we today call "Rabbinical Judaism" -- not the same religion that (partly) transformed into Christianity and, indeed, a younger religion than Christianity, which fairly heavily and consciously defined itself against Christianity.
Within this rubric, what we today call 'Judaism' is rather a Christian heresy and no, there's no expectation that its adherents have any special role that Christians need to worry about. The Church is the 'True Israel'.
For non-Protestant Christians, having so many Protestants in political power is bemusing, frustrating, and sometimes terrifying. This case is all three.
If you have another reliable record of apostolic teaching, you should listen to it. But you don't – both Rome and Constantinople have a history of backdating later innovations to ascribe apostolicity to them. Tradition can be useful, but to call it authoritative is an error.
Fortunately that's not needed here, because the Bible speaks to the issue. If Cruz gets it wrong, well, Cruz gets it wrong.
I'd like to respond with some clever remark about Roman Catholics in power, but that'd be silly because, like Protestants, they are too varied a group to generalize about that way. As far as I'm aware of Eastern Orthodox politicians in traditionally Orthodox countries, they seem more driven by ethnic nationalism than by any particularly Christian concerns.
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I understand the covenant as God having had a relationship with the righteous Hebrew nation. He did not have a covenant with those outside the righteous nation. Not with gentiles, obviously. But also not with Hebrews (= pre 70 AD descendants of Abraham) who abandoned the Law and adopt gentile worship and customs. If having the tiniest shred of Abraham's DNA made you one of the Chosen, there should be more consternation in the Bible about the Babylonian captivity or the children of kidnapped Hebrew women, but those people are just treated as gentiles AFAIK.
I think God probably gave the Hebrews living after 33AD a grace period, but the He really underlined His point in 70AD, after which AIUI it was no longer possible to continue the traditional Hebrew religion as commanded by God. So, after a brief period, the Hebrew diaspora (=Jews) created a new tradition partially rooted in the pre-70AD religion. I don't think God recognizes this new tradition as legitimate, and the NT says that the Christian church is the new Israel. There's the question of the 144,000 in Revelation, but I don't really know what to make of that, maybe some special mercy for descendants of Abraham of good conscience. Or some people say it means Christians. I don't know.
Edit: IIRC God promised the Hebrews: land, descendants, a relationship (one god/one people), and a messiah through the line of David. The land is now the whole Earth (evangelization), the Hebrews have myriad spiritual descendants, the God/people relationship remains intact, and the Messiah is Christ.
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