March 20: Greenpeace Trial Shows How to Make NGOs Pay

Trump to dismantle DOE.; Bibi signals to MAGA; India raids Open Society

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The Big Story

In a landmark ruling, the climate nonprofit Greenpeace was ordered by a North Dakota jury Wednesday to pay $660 million in damages to the pipeline company Energy Transfer over Greenpeace’s role in the Dakota Access Pipeline protests of 2016 and 2017, The New York Times reports. Both the ruling and the broader case are useful in terms of understanding the role that large left-leaning networks like Greenpeace occupy in organizing the activities of protest movements, and in demonstrating a strategy for how those who oppose them might legally challenge these groups going forward.

Three components of Greenpeace’s operation were at the crux of Energy Transfer’s civil lawsuit. First, the company alleged, Greenpeace (and Stichting BankTrack, Greenpeace’s Dutch parent NGO) “disseminated false statements” and “misinformation” about the company and the project via social media posts and mass emails to Greenpeace’s members, including false claims that the pipeline crossed “sacred” tribal lands and would destroy local water resources. These claims, Energy Transfer argued, were made for the purpose of “raising funds,” “inciting thousands of protestors,” and “damaging Energy Transfer’s reputation.” Second, Greenpeace put out similar statements to Energy Transfer’s lenders and investors, which ET alleged was an attempt to damage the company’s business relations. Third and most important, however, the company argued—and the jury found—that Greenpeace had knowingly coordinated with, supported, and fundraised for more radical groups that engaged in unlawful acts of trespassing, property destruction, and violence to halt construction of the pipeline.

While Greenpeace has said they only played a minor role in those protests, documents from the case seemed to prove otherwise. Evidence provided by Energy Transfer showed that Greenpeace had sent “direct action trainers” to the Standing Rock encampment to train protesters in illegal tactics such as the use of U-locks and chains to attach themselves to construction equipment. The nonprofit also knowingly coordinated with “direct action” groups such as the Red Warrior Society, a militant, black-bloc style group that operated a “Red Warrior Camp” autonomous zone at the protest and engaged in vandalism and violent confrontations with security guards and law enforcement. Greenpeace excused its employees from work—but continued to pay them—while they joined the Red Warrior Camp, and it raised funds for Red Warrior Camp via the official Greenpeace website.

We reached out to Kyle Shideler, the Center for Security Policy’s director and senior analyst for homeland security and counterterrorism, to explain the broader implications of the case, the ruling, and the opportunity that the ruling presents for meaningfully challenging groups like Greenpeace in the future.

Like many of the progressive nonprofits that have provided support to protest movements Black Lives Matter or the Gaza protests, which include violent or radical elements, Greenpeace is a well-established and mainstream organization. But it operates within a broader protest movement in which the mainstream groups provide cover (and money) for radical elements while working with these elements toward shared goals. Shideler says that the Dakota Access protests taught activists the importance of “diversity in tactics,” from the hardcore anarchists, who engage in the more illicit forms of protest, to the more established left-wing organizations (like Greenpeace), who help to both legitimize and organize the protests and handle their media messaging. Shideler explained:

Hardcore anarchists do the disruptions, the vandalism, the fighting with police. Broad-based mass movement organizations coordinate the movement of people, the large-scale protests, the media side of things, and bring in a wide variety of seemingly disparate causes into the fold.

That last item is crucial, because as we’ve seen in the years since the Dakota Access pipeline protests, protest groups never seem to narrow on a single issue, but take a broader and more “intersectional” approach to organizing. An issue like Standing Rock, Shideler explains, becomes an “autonomous zone” that can attract a wide range of activists from seemingly unrelated causes and unite them. By broadening the scope beyond a single issue (environmentalism in Standing Rock’s case) to include issues like police abolition and land-back initiatives, the pool of activists grows to exceedingly large numbers.

“Diversity of tactics” also proves useful in providing media coverage to the activists who engage in violent and illegal protest. The illegal and legal aspects of the protests become a part of the same media story, distorting what should be a narrative about domestic terrorism into a story that becomes one about free speech. The free speech issues distract people from the central issue of domestic terrorism. This is something we’re currently seeing play out with the wave of Tesla bombings as well as last year’s anti-Israel protests across college campuses.

We've seen this from like MSNBC and other media outlets, where they'll start talking about the broad legal protest movement, which is part of this debate. Right? So there are people firebombing Tesla dealerships, but there are also people legally protesting Tesla or writing articles complaining about Elon Musk, and the media carefully conflates the violence with the legal protesting as one thing.

Protest events like Standing Rock, as well as others like Occupy Wall Street, create what Shideler calls a “funnel,” or a radicalization pipeline that can lead activists down a rabbit hole that starts with them being ordinary, harmless protesters but offers them a path to becoming full-blown agitators and possible terrorists. As he explained:

Radical politics seeks to move people through a funnel from willingness to hold a sign all the way to the willingness to be a genuine professional organizer, professional activist, or one might even say a professional terrorist. Greenpeace helps move people through that process. They provide training on techniques. They might, for example, provide training for how to break into an oil rig. Usually the direct action their members take is comparatively benign, but the training is there if they want to go further. The real focus is getting people through this pipeline into genuine activism and becoming professional organizers.

In addition, Greenpeace provides the infrastructural backbone of the mass protests. They offer activists transportation, training, and, most importantly, legal support. In the case of Mahmoud Khalil, for instance, people have been left wondering how a campus activist could have immediate access to 19 lawyers, leading others to wonder if Khalil had been the recipient of deep state funding through the U.S. Agency for International Development. The reality, Shideler suggests, is that professional activists already have a massive network behind them with preexisting legal structures to protect them in the case of arrest. Though Greenpeace never explicitly tells activists to engage in illegal activity, it ensures that if they do, they will be “lawyered up” in case of an arrest. “If an activist does get caught doing something illegal, he will find that the legal support system that supports that protest is behind him,” says Shideler.

The ruling in the case between Energy Transfer and Greenpeace provides a legal strategy for those fighting such groups. Local civil cases like this one can be used, the case proves, to hammer these organizations, especially when filed as civil cases beneath the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act. RICO cases can be filed in civil courts against these organizations as long as lawyers can prove a conspiracy between multiple entities. Shideler explains:

I honestly think it needs to be the future of how both state officials and nongovernmental organizations look at dealing with these issues. To build civil RICO cases, you're looking for cases where a group receives benefit from a criminal action which they facilitated or helped to organize, even if they did not themselves commit the crimes. The crime may have been committed by someone else, but the person who benefited from that crime and played a role in facilitating it is the target, right? So it's all about making sure that you have predicate crimes that can actually be applied in the case, so that you can draw the connection. What were the relationships between the parties of the conspiracy? As the public becomes more and more frustrated with these kinds of organizations engaging in this behavior, I think prosecutors are going to be more increasingly comfortable saying, “I can make this a civil RICO case.”

Shideler pointed back to the Tesla firebombings and said that someone with pockets as deep as Elon Musk could be immeasurably important in providing the support to investigate these groups and make civil RICO cases similar to the one between Energy Transfer and Greenpeace more common.

IN THE BACK PAGES: Tony Badran on Middle East Christians and the sectarianization of the American right

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The Rest

→President Trump signed a long anticipated executive order to shut down the Department of Education earlier this afternoon, fulfilling a promise he made on the campaign trail, The New York Times reports. Shutting down a cabinet-level agency is no easy feat, requiring congressional approval and 60 votes in the Senate, meaning that Trump would need to wrestle seven Democratic votes in addition to all 53 Republicans. So far, no Democrats have expressed willingness to gut the agency. The order directs Education Secretary Linda McMahon to "take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure (of) the Department of Education and return education authority to the States, while continuing to ensure the effective and uninterrupted delivery of services, programs, and benefits on which Americans rely." Though Trump has called the agency a big “con job,” he admitted he would need both congressional support and teachers unions endorsements to make shutting it down a reality.

→Tweet of the Day

Is Prime Minister Netanyahu reaching out to MAGA? That seems to be the case, with Netanyahu harnessing Trumpian rhetoric in this message he posted to X yesterday in response to new developments in the “Qatargate” scandal. Israeli President Issac Herzog’s office shot back by saying that the president is very proud of Israel’s independent judicial system. Opposition leader Yair Lapid said the prime minister had “lost it” and was spreading “dangerous conspiracies.”

→India’s law enforcement and economic intelligence agency Enforcement Directorate raided and searched the offices of Open Society Foundations and entities linked to it Tuesday in Bengaluru, The Times of India reports. The raids stem from foreign direct investment sourced by OSF that may violate India’s Foreign Exchange Act, which aims to promote an orderly development and maintenance of the foreign exchange market. Apparently, OSF was put under Prior Reference Category in 2016, which means that it would need to have all of its funds approved by India’s Ministry of Home Affairs before sending money to Indian NGOs and individuals. Allegedly, OSF sent funds to three Indian companies that all went on to misuse the funds, according to The Economic Times. OSF founder George Soros has faced accusations from the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) of undermining India's interests.

→Israeli tanks moved into the Netzarim Corridor in Gaza yesterday, potentially paving the way for expanded ground operations, The New York Times reports. The seizure of the corridor, which bisects northern and southern Gaza, is the most significant ground operation since fighting resumed earlier this week. The recaptured territory comes as Israel launched more airstrikes today, according to NPR. In retaliation, Hamas fired three rockets into central Israel this morning, which resulted in no casualties. Israel Prime Minister Netanyahu hopes that the renewed military pressure will force Hamas’ hand into releasing the remaining Oct. 7 hostages.

→In the largest purchase of an Israeli company ever, Google’s parent company Alphabet has purchased Israeli cybersecurity firm Wiz for a colossal $32 billion, according to The Times of Israel. “It is an extraordinary vote of confidence that exemplifies that despite the war, the Israeli industry is still relevant,” said Yael Belgrai Cohen, head of the tech division at business analytics firm Dun & Bradstreet Israel to the news outlet. And as friend of The Scroll David Reaboi notes on X, the sale is also a rebuke to the idea that shadowy “Zionist mafias” are the reason for Western support of Israel:

→Article of the Day

The Daily Wire’s Luke Rosiak found that employees of the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service, the latest federal agency targeted for cuts and downsizing by the Department of Government Efficiency, were so brazen in their corruption that they essentially used the agency’s funds to live like “reigning kings.” President Trump ordered that the agency—which Rosiak says he had difficulty ascertaining the actual purpose of, but officially is responsible for providing “conflict resolution” services to private and public workers—be downsized or cut outright last Friday. According to Rosiak’s report, employees were hiring friends and relatives and living lavishly on government credit cards; one (you can’t make this up) used agency funds to commissioning paintings from his wife of FMCS leaders. The obtuseness of FMCS’ directive actually fueled its corruption, with employees taking endless trips to resorts facilitated as personal vacation beneath the justification of “building awareness of the agency in the hopes that someone would actually want to use its voluntary services.” Check out this quote by one of FMCS’ employees:

Let me give you the honest truth: A lot of FMCS employees don’t do a hell of a lot, including myself. Personally, the reason that I’ve stayed is that I just don’t feel like working that hard, plus management doesn’t seem to care if we stay out at lunch for a long time. Can you blame me?

Your tax dollars at work, ladies and gentleman.

Read the full article here: https://www.dailywire.com/news/fmcs-slush-fund-abolished-by-trump?topStoryPosition=undefined

→Somali Community Link, a nonprofit formed by Somali community leaders in Columbus, Ohio, collected millions of dollars in government funds despite an independent audit finding that the group’s finances were rife with fraud and mismanagement, the Washington Examiner reports. In 2022, the group received $2.3 million from the Department of Treasury to help administer its Emergency Rental Assistance Program. The aforementioned audit (all nonprofits that receive over $750,000 in federal grants are required to hire independent auditors) raised some red flags, to put it mildly. The audit revealed that $187,111 in grant funding that Somali Community Link received to distribute as rental assistance was not spent for that purpose or returned to the Treasury Department. An additional $10,000 was also missing. The audit found that Somali Community Link did not have reporting procedures in place that are required of recipients of federal money, like documentation of payroll and grant management and failed to alleviate the risk of fraud. Despite that, the group has continued to pull in federal funding; Republican Ohio state Sen. Michele Reynolds and Democratic Ohio state Rep. Ismail Mohamed, himself a Somali from Columbus, announced they secured $350,000 in funding for the nonprofit.

This isn’t the first time that a Somali American nonprofit has been at the heart of COVID fraud scandals. You might remember from last year that Feeding Our Future, a Minneapolis-based NGO, collected over $250 million from the U.S. Department of Agriculture to distribute thousands of meals to schoolchildren during the pandemic. Those meals, however, seldom were served and that money was largely stolen. FOF’s executive director as well as Salim Salid, the co-owner of the restaurant that received the largest share of those squandered funds, were found guilty Wednesday on all charges for their roles in the sprawling meal fraud scheme, according to ABC News.

→Video of the Day

In what is being referred to by some as “the greatest archeological find in history,” archeologists have discovered mysterious structures hidden beneath the sands near Egypt’s Great Pyramid of Giza that was built 4,500 years ago. The archeologists believe that the underground structure might be a tomb ground, but haven’t yet verified that hypothesis, MSN reports. The team used ground-penetrating radar near Giza’s Western Cemetery and discovered an L-shaped structural anomaly that “appeared to be an entranceway” to an underground chamber. The Great Pyramid’s King’s Chamber holds the remains of King Khufu, the second pharaoh of the Fourth Dynasty who commissioned the Great Pyramid, as well as his family members and high-ranking officials, suggesting the underground structure could be another tomb ground, researchers believe. According to News18, the researchers used synthetic aperture radar and then discovered five identical structures near the Khafre Pyramid’s base, linked by pathways, and eight deep vertical wells descending 648 meters underground, meaning that the pyramids might have had a far more sophisticated use for the Egyptians than just elaborate tombs, which is what scientists believed them to be until now. There is still mystery and beauty in this world, after all.

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The Right’s Sectarian Moment

There is no massacre of Christians happening in Syria. But that lie took hold for a reason—and grasping it is the key to understanding something important about American domestic politics.

By Tony Badran

Many Americans, particularly those who get their information from popular right-wing social media accounts and podcasters, now take it as an article of faith that there are ongoing massacres of Christians in Syria. Syria’s Islamist government, which in December replaced the Assad family regime that had ruled Syria for over five decades, is generally blamed. But more prominently, the massacres are said to be the fault of the United States and Israel, and the “neocons” who allegedly control both governments.

In fact, there has been no massacre of Christians in Syria. There was an uprising by Alawite militias, which is the sect of Muslims—not Christians—to which the Assad family belonged. Though Assad and his brother have left the country, local militias and loyalist commanders who had worked with the Iranians during the war have refused to disarm. With the new regime still lacking capacity and struggling to find its footing and impose central authority, these Alawite militia commanders, backed by Iran, started launching regular attacks against the new government forces. Earlier this month, they ambushed a unit of the security services, killing 16 soldiers, as part of a coordinated series of attack—the most ambitious to date, and likely signaling Iranian and Hezbollah support. Since March 6, more than 1,000 people have reportedly been killed in the fighting, several hundred of whom appear to have been Alawite fighters and members of the new government’s security services.

The most reliable death toll for Christians killed during this entire event is five people. There is no evidence that any of these five were targeted because of their religion—one was reportedly killed by a stray bullet. Nor has any widespread massacre of Christians occurred at any point in Syria’s 14-year-long war.

The narrative transformation of hundreds of Alawites killed by Syrian security forces and mercenaries during a military uprising into “hundreds of innocent dead Christians” murdered by forces “backed by the United States and Israel” is an important story, though. Not only does it shine a light on a massive, largely underreported effort underway to divide American evangelicals, it also exposes a larger phenomenon of which this effort is a part—which is the embrace of the sectarian politics of the Middle East by Washington, D.C., since the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Whether through deepening U.S. engagement in the region, or through encouraging the influx of people from the region to the U.S., especially to our universities, America has enmeshed itself with the Middle East and its peoples, habits, and categories.

Attacks on “Christian Zionism” have long been central to the propaganda of terror-sponsoring anti-American regimes and movements, from the Palestinians to Iran, whose leaders describe evangelicals as deviant Christians who have distorted true Christianity—by which the mullahs mean the politics of local Christian communities that they rule over. This third world discourse is now being adopted into a full-blown op targeting American evangelicals, run most prominently by Tucker Carlson and his allies.

In April, Carlson hosted a Palestinian Lutheran pastor who routinely rails against American evangelicals and “Christian Zionism” as “imperial theology,” to denounce the American “religious right” and “Christian members of Congress” for supporting Israel’s war in Gaza and sending money “to oppress Christians,” instead of supporting “their brethren in the Holy Land.” Tucker framed the episode by singling out evangelicals, as he often does: “Many Christian churches in the United States, particularly evangelical churches, support [the fighting]. But there is virtually never a word about the Christians who live there. The ancient Christian community in Gaza, the West Bank and Israel proper.”

In another interview in December, Carlson raged against “Protestant Christian churches in the United States” for “totally ignoring the murder of Christians in the Middle East and the oppression of Christians.” The example he chose to highlight this murder of Christians was how Israel “shot up” the Church of the Nativity in 2000: “You’re shooting into the church on the site where Jesus was born. Really?”

Another of Tucker’s guests, Russian “philosopher” Aleksandr Dugin, whom Carlson interviewed in Moscow shortly after hosting the Palestinian pastor, has very specific thoughts about American evangelicals that neatly echo Carlson’s talkers. After the fall of Assad in December, Dugin opined that in addition to holding “weird heretic messianic views,” “Christian Zionism is geopolitically unfounded … and theologically contradictory.”

The campaign doesn’t stop there. It’s now targeting evangelical readings of the scriptures, which inform their position on Israel and the Jews, under the guise of criticism of the “Scofield Reference Bible”—an early-20th-century study Bible (King James Version) annotated by the minister Cyrus I. Scofield, and which helped popularize dispensationalism. Carlson and his proteges (erroneously) trace the “heresy” of Christian Zionism to Scofield and his commentary. “The Scofield stuff,” Carlson noted, has had “massive implications for our foreign policy and in our domestic politics.” Carlson’s guest, country singer John Rich, helpfully informed his host that the Scofield study Bible was “connected to the Rothschilds.”

The “influencer” Ian Carroll parroted this line, exposing a “rabbit hole” for his audience. “In the early 1900s, right around when the Federal Reserve was founded,” Carroll intoned, “the Balfour Declaration happened, right at that exact same time, the Rothschild family hired this dude, this pastor in the Deep South; he made a new version of the Bible … He wrote this new Bible that has all these new interpretations of the text … That’s where Judeo-Christianity kinda came from … The Scofield Bible was funded by the Rothschild family. And it was pushed because they owned the publisher … so they had the deals that they could make to get that Bible into all the megachurches across whole denominations of Christianity. So that was when Christianity kind of got Jewified.” Other low IQ antisemites on social media like Jake Shields and Dan Bilzerian would regurgitate these talkers, asserting that Scofield was “paid by Zionists,” and calling the study Bible “complete Jewish propaganda,” a “Zionist psyop,” that “edited sections about Israel that were not in the original protestant Bible.”

These voices are demanding that American evangelicals abandon their beliefs, condemning them as bad people if they don’t. The condition for this redemption—the criterion—is to denounce their readings of the scriptures and turn away from Jews. The telos is for the Eastern Christians to take the place of the Jews both in the scriptural and American story. “If the fate of Syrian Christians given by US into the hands of ISIS and Al-Qaeda terrorists doesn’t bother so called ‘judeo-christians’ they can not be called ‘christians’ at all,” wrote Dugin in another post.

For Dugin, and seemingly others in this space, the Eastern Christians are not merely our brothers in Christ. They’re our ancestors and, although their practices are alien to American Protestantism, the authentic “biblical model.” America and its religion must find redemption in the East. In order to be considered real Christians, these people argue, evangelicals must undergo a realignment—away from Jews, and the West entirely. Which means, of course, away from America.

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In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, a premise took hold in foreign policy circles: that sustained exposure to our values and way of life would convert the young people of the Middle East to the values of freedom and democracy that Americans believed themselves to embody—that this exposure would bring out the inner American that naturally dwells within the people of that region. To believe otherwise, following the successful democratization of Eastern and Central Europe after long decades of Soviet rule, was to assert that Iraqis and Afghans were somehow different than Poles and Czechs—a fact that should be plainly obvious to even a casual visitor to any of those places, but which was taken at the time by key members of the Bush administration, starting with President Bush himself, and his chief national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, as de facto evidence of racism.

The response to the 9/11 attacks, which were framed as an assault on Western civilization, or the Judeo-Christian tradition as it was commonly referred to at the time, became the ill-conceived and ill-fated U.S. project known as the Freedom Agenda, which Washington presented as a latter-day mission civilisatrice in the lands of Islam. Americans who believed in that cause, or who wanted a slice of the ever-growing counterterrorism pie, immersed themselves in learning about Islam, the intricacies of the Arabic language, and the ethnographic nuances of the various countries and sectarian communities of the region.

Interestingly, not only did Barack Obama not change this course set by his Republican predecessor, he deepened it—by making this communitarian outlook central to his policies both at home and abroad. This began with his famous 2009 Cairo speech, in which Obama purported to showcase his “respect” for Islam, and addressed “Muslims” as a community, bypassing states for communal categories. Similarly, when expounding on his approach to the region, Obama spoke of a primeval Sunni-Shia sectarian conflict, not of a regional order of states, categorized based on their relationship to the U.S. as allies or adversaries—which is how reality actually worked on the ground of the Middle East. In fact, when Obama embraced a peculiar version of George W. Bush’s Freedom Agenda in Egypt, he did so against a long-standing U.S. ally and in favor of a Muslim Brotherhood regime that riled regional allies. As a result, Obama’s policy cemented sectarianism as the default mode of American discourse about—and eventually policy related to—the Middle East.

If the year 2001 was the first turning point for America and its interaction with the Middle East, then 2014 was a major milestone in its sectarian path. Although by then we’d been over a decade deep in the mysteries of Sharia and Hadith and other exotic local nonsense valorized by our increased engagement with that part of the world, 2014 brought on a new and infinitely more toxic phenomenon.

That year, reports emerged of the remnants of Iraqi Christians fleeing the city of Mosul as a reorganized terrorist group, known as ISIS, which overran the city, was demanding they convert, pay a tax, or face death, and had identified their homes by spray-painting them with the Arabic letter “n”—the first letter in one of the Arabic words for Christians, which then became a fashionable marker on social media profiles and a trending hashtag. Whereas in 2001 our initial reaction to Islamic terrorism was to look inward and draw on our American identity against those who were attacking it, the response this time on both the left and the right was to identify as fellow victims with a contrived, foreign category: Middle Eastern Christians.

While “Middle Eastern Christians” meant the specific sects and communities affected by ISIS’ takeover of parts of Iraq and eastern Syria, they quickly became conflated as a group, the same way all Spanish-speaking people are lumped together into the U.S. Census category of “Hispanics.” More importantly, “Middle Eastern Christians” were suddenly now presented as an overseas extension of “American Christians”—themselves now conceived as an identity group, who might bond with Mideast coreligionists over a sense of shared victimhood.

It’s hard to overstate how ahistorical these assertions were, and how much they would come to corrupt American foreign policy—inspiring new and ever more deformed politics, including and up to today, where it’s become fashionable to argue that America’s foreign policy should be explicitly sectarian, conceptualized to side with Christians in the greater Middle East, from Lebanon to Armenia—rather than a foreign policy based on advancing American interests.

This foundational idea—that there exists some sort of pan-Christian “identity”—was entirely an American fabrication. Sectarian division has been a constant in Christianity from the outset (see Paul’s letters), with schisms shaping it throughout the centuries, including a defining split between its Western and Eastern iterations, and with factional violence being a regular feature in its history. The internal segmentation of Western Christianity is integral to an important part of America’s story as a refuge for European factions that were persecuted or alienated from the practices and beliefs of their nominal coreligionists in Europe—not just Catholics but also mainstream Protestants.

What’s more, the idea of Americans forming common identity with Middle Eastern Christians runs counter to our historical interaction with these Churches. Beginning in the first half of the 19th century, American Protestant missionaries began working in the Ottoman Empire. While the purpose of the mission was to convert Muslims, very early on the missionaries decided instead to work among the Eastern Churches. The missionaries saw these Churches as deficient, idolatrous, and in need of spiritual renovation, having lost the essential principles of the Gospel. The missionaries deemed this reformation and revival necessary before proselytizing the Muslims—who as it happened, showed very little interest in converting anyway—apostasy being both a crime and a cause for social ostracism.

Attempts to convert Muslims to Christianity not being practical, American missionaries focused instead on the Eastern Churches. Far from identifying with these Churches, let alone regarding them as receptacles and guardians of authentic faith, American missionaries looked at them as a broken tool that needed repairing before they could in turn be used in the field of mission to the Muslims—for whom they were now positioned as a stand-in, which itself was in need of saving.

The attitude of American Protestant missionaries toward the Catholic Church was hardly more positive. As a committee of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions made up of Jedidiah Morse, Samuel Worcester, and Jeremiah Evarts, declared in 1811, “Prophecy, history, and the present state of the world seem to unite in declaring that the great pillars of the Papal and Mahometan impostures are now tottering to their fall … Now is the time for the followers of Christ to come forward boldly and to engage earnestly in the great work of enlightening and reforming mankind.”

Whereas the missionaries saw the local rituals as superstitions—a testament of how much these Churches had corrupted the faith—the local Churches looked at the Protestants’ lack of ceremonialism as evidence of deviance or even atheism. Their hostility was both doctrinal and political. These Churches, Catholic and Orthodox, operated under the Ottoman millet system, which allowed them to govern their own institutions and thereby exert significant influence over the daily lives of their flocks, such as through personal status laws (marriage, inheritance), thus providing a strong incentive against conversion for fear of loss of legal status. In order to maintain their status, they were more than happy to work with the Ottoman authorities, and their local representatives, to disrupt Protestant missionary activity.

In 1823, for example, when American missionaries in Mount Lebanon met at a house which was to be turned into a mission center, the Maronites complained that this would be an affront. The (Maronite) ruler of the Mount Lebanon Emirate then ordered the missionaries to abandon the residence. In 1825, a Maronite convert to Protestantism by the name of Asaad al-Hasruni was hounded by the Church, forcibly detained and tortured. Both Orthodox and Catholic clergy, with Ottoman support, regularly met Protestant distribution of tracts and Bibles with protests and bans. In 1841, the Maronite patriarch petitioned the Ottomans to ban Protestant missionaries throughout the empire.

The lens through which the local Churches viewed the Protestant missionaries was power. The 19th century was the period of great power competition and intervention in the declining Ottoman Empire. This power dynamic manifested itself in sectarian terms as the great powers claimed protector status over various Eastern Christian sects, who served as a pretext for European interventions.

The point of this local history is to illustrate the fact that—very far from supporting any imaginary notion of a unified Christian identity—great power patronage over local sects during the Ottoman period only underscored sectarian rivalry and the lack of any cohesion or common purpose among Christian sects. As a result of the capitulations of the Ottoman Empire, the French claimed protection over the Eastern Churches which had entered into communion with the Catholic Church and over the institutions of the various Catholic missionary orders, which had been working among the Oriental Churches for a couple of centuries, resulting in splits within these Churches. Meanwhile, Russia claimed protection over the Orthodox. The British, who could not make such claims over any of the Eastern Christian sects, looked instead to even more exotic minority groups like the Druze—although British missionaries did take an interest in the Nestorians in the Kurdish regions.

The sectarian policy of the great powers only underscored the artificiality of a common Christian identity or purpose as it relates to the Churches of the East. Both the missionaries and the great powers wished to elevate their interests, and denominations, at the expense of their competitors. For this reason, the British (and Prussia), who wished to block the French, and thereby Catholic, advantage in Syria, preferred backing continued Ottoman control. French sectarian machinations in Syria directly led to the pogrom against the Jews of Damascus in 1840, which was fanned by the French consul. That episode only reinforced the soundness of Britain’s policy with the Ottomans.

All of this was over a century before the establishment of the State of Israel. To be sure, American Protestant support for Jewish independence, seen as a fulfillment of prophecy, exacerbated the preexisting chasm, theological and political, between America and Eastern Christians. But it was hardly the cause of that chasm.

***

All that history was no match for America’s post-9/11 political landscape. Of course, promoting religious freedom or waging war on behalf of Christian-coded concepts like “the West” is hardly a novelty in American foreign policy. But the trend toward embracing Middle Eastern sectarianism that emerged at this point in history was of another nature. U.S. Middle East policy was now being used to mainstream a fundamentally sectarian outlook, which distorted the realities of the region while introducing a distinctly un-American way of thinking into mainstream American political discourse, especially on the right.

The full public expression of this new American sectarianism and its constituent elements came in September 2014, when the gala dinner of a newly founded Middle Eastern Christian advocacy group called In Defense of Christians (IDC) went off the rails.

In advance of the event, IDC had brought in pro-Assad clerics and monastics from the region for meetings in Washington, including at the Obama White House. But they also made the mistake of inviting Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas to give a speech at their gala.

Cruz understood this event as a politicized theater with state-approved representatives of the Syrian dictatorship. Rather than back out or shy away from this, he challenged it head-on. Christians, he told the audience, “have no greater ally than the Jewish state.” “Those who hate Israel hate America, and those who hate Jews hate Christians. And if this room will not recognize that then my heart weeps … If you hate the Jewish people, you are not reflecting the teaching of Christ.” Cruz was promptly booed off the stage.

This entire conceit rests on a fundamental misunderstanding: Their aversion to Jews aside, Middle Eastern Christians are not members of some wider Christian political entity, which exists nowhere on earth. They are subjects of their ruling regimes. And as a result of their constant need for patronage, they are generally instruments and agents of influence for the nastiest regimes in the region—for the very simple reason that the closer they cling to these regimes, the better their domestic position, earning them protection against both regime predation and broader sectarian hostility.

Consequently, the representatives and spokesmen of the many fractured minority Christian sects in Middle Eastern countries are routinely corrupted by this power dynamic. To give but one example, one of the bishops in attendance at the 2014 IDC event, then-Greek Catholic patriarch Gregory Lahham, was known for his close association with the regime and was also accused by other European Catholic bishops of being a “financial ally” of Assad and acting as his informant at the Vatican. These regime instruments also went on to meet with then-President Obama and lobbied on behalf of Assad, claiming that he “protects Christians.”

Sectarian maneuvering and minority balancing acts are elementary knowledge for anyone familiar with the Middle East—as is the recognition that minorities in the region are often at odds with one another, and are often divided internally. Which is why the IDC gathering rejecting alignment with the Jews was so predictable: The clerics’ job was to lobby Washington on behalf of their local rulers, who approved their visas and would likely be debriefing them, over tea or coffee, when they came home. Since most were from the Levant, that meant they were subject to Iranian power, and therefore, their advocacy was, by definition, in favor of Iran. The fact that these clerics were pushing an alignment with Iranian power itself was a reflection that they, and their political masters, had picked up on Obama’s policy, and saw a role for themselves in clothing that policy in a way that they imagined might be useful to the White House—which quite obviously agreed.

Indeed, after initially dismissing ISIS as the junior varsity team of terrorists, Obama quickly saw in the group’s rampage, and the reaction it elicited in the U.S., an opportunity to advance his vision of a regional realignment with Iran. By 2014, White House messaging had already mainstreamed talkers that “anyone calling for regime change in Syria is, frankly, blind to the past decade,” and that stabilizing Syria (and Iraq) would need to involve partnering with Iran. When the Eastern Christian leaders, based in Beirut, Damascus, and Baghdad, came to Washington and met with Obama that same year, they reinforced the president’s messaging, which aligned with that of their overlords. One of them made sure to tell a pro-Hezbollah paper in Lebanon that Obama told them at the meeting, “we know that President Bashar Assad protects Christians.”

Again, there is nothing surprising about this stance, which is hardly worthy of condemnation—considering that any local clergyman who traveled to Washington and did the opposite would have likely run into a world of trouble as soon as he returned home. Those who were surprised at these clerics’ and their D.C. handlers’ loud rejection of making common cause with Israel and the Jews, as well as their evangelical allies in the U.S., only betrayed their own ignorance and naivete of the political, cultural and even theological positions of Eastern Christians toward Jews and American evangelical Protestants alike.

What was of note, however, was how American pundits from various Christian denominations, such as Fox News contributor Mollie Hemingway and New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, joined the IDC’s audience’s rejection of the American worldview that Cruz articulated. The premise of their criticism was that there was a supposed shared identity between American Christians and the Christians of the Middle East which superseded the American national interest—which should be if not subordinated to the preferences of those Christians, then at least suspended in solidarity with them.

"The United States considers [Assad] an enemy,” wrote Hemingway, “but Christians in the region view him differently because his regime is fighting the guys who are killing them and seeking their eradication.” Hemingway proceeded to lecture the senator from Texas that he should ignore the political agenda of these Christian clerics, “especially if our politics aren’t aligned.”

With the incorporation of third world magical cosmology to amplify a narrative of sectarian grievance, the sectarians of the right embraced Obama’s revisionist proposition for America: Disjoining the nation from its Judaic foundation is the path for dismantling American exceptionalism. Indeed, as it turned out, the IDC episode marked the beginning of a major influence campaign focused on American evangelicals. What began at the time as an attack on a specific evangelical, Ted Cruz, for insisting on the bond with the Jews and rejecting a substitute alignment with Eastern Christians that necessarily demands severing that bond, would, a decade later, reach its endpoint as a campaign anathematizing evangelicals as a group, precisely for their attachment to this biblical bond—which is the underpinning of America’s own covenantal story.

***

Although the new American sectarianism was arguably a byproduct of civil rights legislation and the resulting notion of “protected groups,” which was given added significance by George W. Bush’s "global war on terror," this contrived ecumenism, which lumps together numerous sects and denominations in a new sociopolitical package, only came into fruition as a mainstream political framework under Barack Obama.

Bush’s failed experiment in reengineering the Middle East had already heralded America’s acceptance of sectarian categories as a primary policy instrument, both at home and abroad. Obama put this understanding on steroids. Sectarianism defined Obama’s worldview in both the domestic and foreign spheres. In fact, the elimination of the distinction between those spheres was a major feature of his political program. At home, Obama supercharged identity politics, turning communal grievance, often imagined, into the coin of the realm, through his public approval of movements like Black Lives Matter, and his attempt to use the Iran deal to push Jewish Democrats to the back of the bus. In a sectarian quota system, the state, which is to say the Obama Democratic Party, would dole out pieces of the pie, often according to its own hierarchical structure that it sets—at the core of which was a reordering of the place of Jews in the Democratic Party, by elevating Iran and Palestine above Israel.

The sectarian current was crucial for Obama’s program for remaking America in his image. In turn, the categories he needed could only find necessary grounding in the politics of the Middle East. This is why despite declaring a so-called pivot to Asia, Obama refused to let go of the region. In fact, the defining initiative of his second term in office was to tie the U.S. to Iran, leveraging American power to prop up Iranian intervention from the Gulf to the eastern Mediterranean.

At home, Obama’s hierarchy of sectarian grievances offered an avenue for party factions to each have their piece of the identity politics rainbow pie. Part of Obama’s pivot on ISIS was his realization that he could jujitsu his opponents by using their position to advance his own. Republicans think that jihad is the primary enemy of civilization and Christianity? No problem—Obama agrees! Furthermore, he believes Iran shares our enmity toward these Sunni jihadists, who threaten our common holdings from Baghdad to Beirut. So, as a matter of fact, does Russia, with whom Obama partnered to avoid striking Assad in 2013 following his chemical weapons attacks. No more regime-change wars that disintegrate “state institutions”! After all, Assad, who is supported by Iran and Hezbollah, protects Christians.

You know who the real problem is, as then-VP Joe Biden put it? Our allies—Turkey and Saudi Arabia. And of course, Bibi Netanyahu.

After first seeming like a rare public gaffe, the ISIS crisis allowed Obama’s messaging to reframe the conversation by tapping into nascent resentment in the ranks of his domestic opponents, many of whom had become disillusioned with nearly a decade and a half of the global war on terror, which turned out to be a colossal waste of time, money, and American lives. Obama played to this room with studied talkers such as “there are no good guys in Syria,” or by describing the conflict as a primordial Sunni-Shia conflict in which we had no stake, which projected the false pretense of detached neutrality even as he consciously and deliberately aligned the U.S. with one of those two sides—the one killing Sunnis en masse. By publicizing his meeting with the Eastern Christian clerics, Obama validated and stoked this nascent “Christian” sectarianism on the right to his advantage.

Obama’s policy, which was to align with the "death to America" regime and its terrorist tentacles, now was about backing the camp that “protected Christians.”

Just as seamlessly, the appeal of sectarianism on the right, while expressed in terms of foreign policy, was tailored for Obama’s domestic agenda: Instead of thinking about themselves as Americans, who approach foreign policy through the lens of the American national interest, right-wingers—now identified as “American Christians”—were crudely baited to think of themselves as a minority identity group, one that’s simultaneously tribal/subnational and global/transnational, and this way get themselves a piece of the sectarian pie like the other grievance groups which nurtured their resentment toward their rivals.

For people with any self-confidence, or even a slight investment in and knowledge of American history, the offer was an obvious con, an exchange of some lumps of fool’s gold for the contents of the vaults at Fort Knox.

***

The Obama era laid the groundwork for the entrenchment of sectarian discourse even after the 44th president’s departure from office and the victory of Donald Trump in 2016.

In fact, it was right after Trump entered the White House in 2017 that Tucker Carlson began to lean into the Middle Eastern Christians op in earnest. Carlson was ostensibly focused on shaping the incoming president’s policy toward Syria. To that end, he found an ally in then-Democrat member of Congress Tulsi Gabbard, who would become a regular on Carlson’s Fox News show. Although framed as a call to abandon Obama’s “regime change” policy, Carlson's and Gabbard’s proposition in fact was an affirmation of Obama’s actual policy: that is, backing Assad’s remaining in power—and getting Trump to sign on to that policy.

Fresh off her visit to Syria in January 2017, during which she met with Assad, Gabbard appeared on Carlson’s show. He proceeded to pitch her, repeatedly, on whether Assad was open to an “alliance” with the U.S. against ISIS and al-Qaida. Gabbard spoke of a coming “genocide” of “religious minorities” should Assad be toppled.

Four months later, Assad used chemical weapons—again—on the town of Khan Shaykhoun in northwestern Syria. In response, Trump ordered a missile strike against the Syrian dictator. Almost exactly one year after that, in April 2018, Assad would use chemical weapons again, this time in Douma, north of Damascus. Seemingly anxious about a possible U.S. response, a couple of days before Trump ordered another strike Carlson aired a segment where he warned that should we “go to war” with Assad, “we might likely see the genocide of one of the last remaining Christian communities in the Middle East and we ought to care about that.”

The following month, Carlson returned to this theme in another segment. “Christianity is nearly extinct in the Middle East, where of course it was born,” Tucker said in his opening remarks. “One of the largest surviving communities of Christians is in Syria, but they could find themselves targeted even more than they already are by Islamists if President Bashar al-Assad falls from power, as many in Washington are hoping he does.” “Why does nobody care?” Tucker began by asking his guest. “There are a lot of Christians in Syria, why is there no concern for them?”

Under Biden, this view of America as unexceptional and sinful became official policy, both domestically and globally, rooted in a politics of resentment and despair. Americans’ loss of confidence in themselves and their historical definitions of their own country made them susceptible to the peddlers of that most un-American of sentiments, self-pity, which now manifested itself in the manufactured identification with Middle East Christians—people who lacked control over their own lives.

This demoralization attracted grifters. It also drew in predators, both domestic and foreign, who would come to see their ticket in amplifying the politics of despair and delirium on the American right.

Having understood that the No. 1 asset in a sectarian grievance system was victimhood, “influencers” on the right needed a unifying narrative of persecution. In the aftermath of Oct. 7, 2023, they would find their instrument. The sectarianism fostered over the previous decade would, almost naturally, come to channel grievances toward the Jews—with “Middle Eastern Christians” serving as the wedge.

By attaching themselves to this amorphous and seemingly universalist category of “Christians,” operators like Carlson, Candace Owens, and others have been able to foster an identity of shared victimhood—one that appropriates the victimization of Christians abroad and leverages it as part of the new grievance politics at home. Based on this dynamic, “Middle East Christians” became a projection of Americans’ own narrative: The larger the former’s suffering—framed as a consequence of U.S. government policies—the more it reflects our own, at the hand of the same government, or the nefarious forces that control it.

***

Although Syria by and large had taken a backseat since 2020, the dynamics and secondary effects of the war on Israel in 2024 would hurl it back into the spotlight. With Israel having decimated Hezbollah—which had opened the Lebanon front against Israel on Oct. 8, 2023—over the course of the year, and with Russia still preoccupied in Ukraine, in early December 2024, Assad was exposed. What began as a limited operation by the Turkish-backed opposition forces in northern Syria quickly, and unexpectedly, snowballed into a total rout. Within days, Assad had fled the country to Moscow.

To explain what had just happened, Carlson invited the globalist pro-China economist Jeffrey Sachs on his show. “This is Netanyahu’s war to remake the Middle East,” Sachs explained. It goes back to right after 9/11, when “the neocons and the Israelis” decided they were going to launch wars in seven countries to remake the Middle East. “We’ve been at war in six of them now. And I mean the United States, on behalf of Israel, including in Syria.” In Sachs’ telling, what happened in Syria was, actually, “a culmination of a long-term effort by Israel to reshape the Middle East in its image.” It’s all part of the “greater Israel” idea. All of this had been hidden from the public, Sachs helpfully explained. “Israel has driven so many American wars,” he added.

Funnily enough, it was Obama who, as part of reorienting America away from Israel and toward Iran, made “neocons” into code not just for Israel supporters but for any Jew who engaged in American politics in ways that the Democratic Party did not like. Obama reframed these people as perennial warmongers, and denounced them as a cabal that drags the U.S. into never-ending wars on Israel’s behalf.

The reality of “neocons” was beside the point for Obama, as well as for the sectarians on the right. So was the fact that none of the main-decision makers in the run-up to or during the Iraq War—George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Colin Powell, Richard Armitage, Condoleezza Rice, Donald Rumsfeld and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Richard Myers—was Jewish, or the fact that most of the key “neocon” intellectuals, who included such well-known Jews as Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Jeanne Kirkpatrick, were dead by 2014. Bill Kristol, the manqué son of actual neocon intellectual Irving Kristol, would soon join Obama in 2017 as a founding partner of the Russiagate hoax. By “neocons,” Obama and his court meant Jews.

The sectarians on the right followed Obama’s lead, seeing in “neocons” what Obama saw in it—a useful category in the interparty battle, this time on the Republican side, where they could be used to blame someone else for George Bush’s legacy of failure. Having been used by Obama and his sectarians on the left, and then adopted by Carlson and the sectarians on the right, “neocons” now transmogrified into a stand-in for something else—a powerful clique that controlled American presidents irrespective of their political or ideological affiliation, and which exercised irresistible influence over the direction of American foreign policy.

Since a primary function of the victimhood narrative is to shape sectarian-political alignments, the selection of which narrative of Christian persecution to identify with most closely must serve this purpose. This is why, for example, the very real slaughter of Christians in Africa must take a back seat to imaginary “massacres of Christians” in countries where “neocons pursued regime change.” In addition, Africa cannot be as easily tied to Israel—as much as Candace Owens can ramble on about a “Mossad plot” in the Democratic Republic of Congo to explain the beheading of Christians in the Evangelical and Baptist Center at the hands of Islamists. You can make it work with Armenia, for example, despite its distance from Israel. But that’s because Armenia’s neighbor and foe, Azerbaijan, is an ally of Israel, which works well for the sectarians on the right who demand that the U.S. forgo all strategic and geopolitical reasoning and act exclusively on sectarian grounds behind the Armenians, because they’re Christians, and sectarian ‘asabiyya supersedes everything. That Armenia is a close ally of Iran—Obama’s ally—and that supporting it would fold us into the Iranian camp, much like what happened in Syria, Iraq, and Lebanon, and thereby reinforce Obama’s regional order, is surely just a coincidence.

Similarly, it was no coincidence that the fake story in March of a “mass slaughter of Christians” in Syria pushed by the sectarian influencers on the right was an information campaign run directly on Iranian state media and amplified by their validators on social media in support of a kinetic operation by Iranian-backed militia on the Syrian coast. In other words, much like it was in 2014, this sectarian foreign policy from the right is simply Obama’s regional program, recast in language that defines “American Christians” as the equivalent of their imaginary Middle East Christian cousins—a low-ranking victim group.

The new sectarians know they aren’t going to convince all American evangelicals; their aim instead is to divide them. And why? Maybe it's because they are, as of today at least, a cohesive voting bloc that predictably votes for MAGA. In contrast, the faction that is targeting them, already openly admit that they're anti-Trump. It seems, then, that the whole project is for the wolves to snatch and scatter the flock.

***

There’s another irony here. For all its denunciation of neoconservatism, the new sectarian foreign policy on the right is itself a parody of actual neocon foreign policy.

The primary criticism of neoconservative foreign policy is that it divorced military interventionism from the national interest, attaching it instead to more abstract “values.” This resulted in ill-thought military adventures in the region, which—not least because those societies are fundamentally alien and American values are not simply one-size-fits-all apparel that could be easily adopted elsewhere—turned these campaigns into constant features, with no end in sight.

The new sectarian right, under the banner of “ending forever wars,” pushes exactly the same outlook. America is supposed to adjust its foreign policy posture abroad to align with Christian sects overseas, and especially in the Middle East, that demand U.S. patronage regardless of who they are—and irrespective of their geopolitical alignments, and how that affects U.S. interests and national security.

And why? Because the new American sectarian foreign policy lens is distorted by inherent antisemitism. It cannot see what is plainly obvious: that Israel is an asset of American power, not a sectarian extension of a domestic grievance identity group that enjoys quasi mystical influence. Which is why what was at first hinted at with Syria and Iraq has now become explicit: The true persecutor of Middle East Christians, and therefore the truly evil force in the world, is Israel.

“For decades, Bashar al-Assad protected minority religious communities in Syria, including the country’s large Christian population,” Carlson tweeted, in a post that now has more than 34,000 retweets. “Assad protected the Christians. The weaker Assad was, the more Christians died. During the years that neocons in the west backed the war against Assad, the percentage of Christians in Syria went from ten percent to two percent. Now that Assad has been driven from power, many of the remaining Syrian Christians are being slaughtered and their holy places desecrated. Bari Weiss and John Bolton haven’t said a word about it. But no one who’s paying attention can be surprised it’s happening. Neocon projects in the Middle East invariably destroy ancient Christian communities, from Iraq to Gaza and in many places in between. Can this be an accident? You wonder.”

In this view, Israel is not waging a defensive war against a multipronged Iranian-backed terror group that attacked its territory and murdered and kidnapped its citizens. That’s a false consciousness. Rather, Israel is implementing a global “neocon project” designed to murder Christians.

The following day, The Federalist’s Sean Davis articulated the implied answer to Carlson’s rhetorical wondering, presenting the fictional massacre of Christians in Syria as a veil-lifting moment. The “mass slaughter of Christians,” said Davis, “seems to follow every single neocon foray into regime change in the Middle East.” It “happens so regularly,” he added, “that you begin to wonder”—there’s that word again—“whether the mass slaughter of Christians was the whole point of the project in the first place.”

Ah, so that’s what the Zionists have been up to all along!

The bottom line is, for all their pretense about “realism” and “the American interest,” in reality the sectarian cosmology is fundamentally delirious. To describe this howling madness as any form of “realism” is a sign of intellectual and moral collapse—which is where those people are right now, and where the country will be if this thinking is adopted by any large or influential segment of Americans.

The effort to torque American Protestantism away from its biblical heritage is the latest manifestation of the process of reverse proselytization that has been taking place since the mid-20th century, and was given much greater velocity and force by the U.S. response to 9/11. Ironically, the fruits of the Protestant mission to the Arab Middle East, Arab Protestants, have shown that the dominant Arab political culture wins out in the end, rendering their politics indistinguishable from that of the Catholic or Eastern Churches in the region. The result of American Protestant proselytization in the Middle East is that Arabs targeted for conversion have instead became drivers of the reverse cultural and political conversion of Americans to the defining regional religion, which is finally not Islam but sectarian hate.

If Barack Obama’s unique personal biography and political outlook, and the political machine he built, were all necessary preconditions for this reversal, it was the American right that finally took the bait he offered, emptying the categories of “left” and “right” of whatever meaning they once held, in return for the dubious benefit of becoming “American Christians” in the new sectarian system. To say that Jesus weeps is highly speculative and probably blasphemous. What seems true enough is that the foes of America and Americanness—at home and abroad—are watching the spectacle with glee.