A meeting last week at the White House almost went unnoticed. Netanyahu flew in to bury his golden goose, Lindsay Graham, to drop off some top-secret info to Trump about Iran’s alleged nuclear program, which almost certainly is contrived, and to meet with 4 prominent evangelical leaders for a quick brainstorming session on how to influence American evangelicals. The strategy? Present criticism of Israel as war on evangelicalism. When asked by a reporter about Vance’s claims that Israel is running an evangelical influence operation, Netanyahu denied it, despite having just walked out of a closed-door meeting with evangelicals.
For the last two weeks, the controversy over “Judeo-Christian” has flared up again. There was no natural, organic reason. Pro-Israel influencers got the memo, and within hours, X had erupted in both human and AI bots announcing that the term was perfectly innocent. Hundreds of them. With nearly identical tweets, the same type of phenomenon was noticed by the Trump White House weeks ago, before they determined it was a coordinated campaign by Israel to shank the president, and led by his former digital campaign manager, Brad Parscale.
As I wrote about at NXR, Wesley Huff, the up-and-coming Christian apologist and influencer, told us that the term was purely academic and meant nothing about the modern State of Israel. Jordan Peterson retweeted Huff, advertised himself as being in full agreement, before adding that Americans owe the modern state of Israel for the development of Western Civilization and that anyone uncomfortable with the phrase is a morally defective reprobate. Which was fascinating, because Peterson’s “agreement” managed to contradict Huff’s point almost word for word.
Not to be left out, Allie Beth Stuckey cited the opinions of Wesley Huff, Jordan Peterson, and charismatic clean-up specialist Mike Winger. Then, after what we are apparently to believe was a long season of prayerful discernment and diligent study as an accomplished exegete, she announced that this was her carefully considered professional opinion as well.
It was one of those moments on social media when you could practically hear the starter pistol. I said at the time that it was coordinated, and somebody in the United States had just received the carrier pigeon from Tel Aviv. Or the bat signal. Or the encrypted Signal chat. Or whatever mechanism is used to synchronize the talking points, because what followed looked about as spontaneous as a North Korean election. Within hours, the same arguments, same buzzwords, and same framing were suddenly materializing everywhere, as though half the platform had wandered into the same writers’ room.
My suspicion was that it had something to do with JD Vance’s appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience, where he acknowledged that an Israeli influence operation aimed squarely at American evangelicals - the same campaign I identified as being directed by Brad Parscale, Dinesh D’Souza’s boss at Salem Media, last September - was suddenly no longer a “conspiracy theory.” According to Vance, elements of the Israel lobby were turning on Trump because he had the audacity to end the war with Iran before Israel had finished carpet-bombing Christian neighborhoods in Lebanon.
The Vice President of the United States, speaking to the largest podcast audience on earth, had just told millions of listeners that Israel was engaged in an influence campaign targeting the American public, and suddenly, American evangelicals saw the curtain behind the puppet ministry background twitched. Almost immediately, the machinery lurched back to life, and everyone wanted to rehabilitate the phrase Judeo-Christian. The term has long functioned as one of the most useful linguistic crowbars in the propaganda toolbox, blurring distinctions, baptizing political loyalties, and gently reminding Americans about what they owe the Jewish people.
Then, Netanyahu flew to the United States on a mission to prove that JD Vance wasn’t making it up.
NETANYAHU’S VISIT
Benjamin Netanyahu flew to Washington last week and buried his old friend Lindsey Graham on Tuesday, a man responsible for untold millions or billions in funding for him over the years. And by Wednesday, he was standing in front of a small huddle of American evangelical leaders, explaining to them that the war for their souls is the same war as the one for Israel. He was sitting down with the evangelicals to help them gameplan how to best influence Americans to keep the war going.
It was a tough week. First, Lindsay Graham died. Then, irony died.
The same day he met privately with Israel’s rented evangelicals, ABC reporter Linsey Davis asked about Vice President Vance’s accusation that Israel was trying to influence American citizens to help keep the war going. Netanyahu lied, “We're not, actually…that's not our policy.” He had just walked out of the meeting where he was doing that exact thing.
Lance Wallnau, the New Apostolic Reformation Apostle, appeared on Kenneth Copeland’s Word-Faith television channel afterward and explained that Netanyahu had warned that “the same people who did 9/11 want a nuclear bomb.” I assume he meant Iran, because Israel and the CIA already have access to some. Wallnau also divulged that Netanyahu wanted to bring Trump some information on Pickaxe Mountain, Iran’s nuclear site. It’s unclear whether Netanyahu had spoken to Wallnau about it or had heard it elsewhere. Netanyahu famously brings “urgent intelligence” to Trump in person each time he visits, to lobby Trump for more military action. Trump told Fox earlier, “"I don't need Bibi to tell me" about Pickaxe Mountain, and that Netanyahu was only bringing it up because "he wants me to stay involved."
Netanyahu finds urgent and sensitive intel on Israel’s enemies like Joseph Smith came up with prophecies. Always self-serving, and with curious timing. In any respect, the evangelicals with whom Netanyahu met in Washington were out like good ambassadors shortly thereafter, warning American evangelicals exactly what Netanyahu wanted. The message: we need more war.
As the quotation I’m about to share will show, it was a remarkable display of political shape-shifting. Before American cameras, Netanyahu played the indispensable ally, the Churchill of the Middle East, the lonely sentinel holding back civilization’s enemies. Before evangelical leaders, he slipped into another costume entirely, wrapping his geopolitical ambitions in the language of prophecy, covenant, and spiritual warfare, as though supporting Israel had somehow become the Eleventh Commandment.
THE EVANGELICAL CABINET
Netanyahu’s office released the transcript of his short speech:
“We’re descendants from the original Hebrews of the Holy Land. And we are the first part of that Judeo-Christian heritage, which we cherish and which has given the world, the civilization, freedom and faith. And, again, we have to stand up and defend it. It’s under attack from the rising tide of antisemitism and anti-Evangelicalism. It’s not accidental that the two are coming under a joint attack, because we are one. And what I ask you is only one thing. Stand up. Stand up and don’t cower. When you’re faced with an attack, what do you do? Attack back. That’s all. That’s my long speech. And I’m very grateful to you for your consistent support, for the constancy of your friendship. And now it’s time to fight, fight, fight, that’s it.”
In a case of “I think thou dost protest too much,” Netanyahu started with the locus classicus canard of the Zionist experiment, the claim upon which the entirety of Israel’s American public relations campaign is built; that they are the descendants of the original Hebrews. By way of Europe. Two thousand years later.
Benjamin Netanyahu’s family is from Poland and Lithuania; his surname was Mileikowsky until his grandfather chose a Semitic-sounding. His great-great-grandfather, Hirsh Ber, was still in Belarus when George Washington was president of the United States in 1790. That’s as far back as anyone can trace his family lineage, including himself, so claiming to be the descendants of the original Hebrews in the Holy Land is a bit presumptive. But that’s not the point. The point is Netanyahu dropped the line that Wesley Huff, Jordan Peterson, and Allie Beth Stuckey all told us has no propagandic purposes at all.
Long before “Judeo-Christian heritage” became a term, another Israeli leader had spent decades getting to the point where “we are the original Hebrews” wouldn’t solicit laughter from the Western world. David Ben-Gurion, the first president of Israel, was not born David Ben-Gurion. He was born David Grün, the son of Polish Jews in Płońsk. Like thousands of other Zionist settlers arriving from Eastern Europe, he discarded his distinctly European surname - most of them in place for centuries - in favor of an invented Hebrew one.
By the time Israel declared independence in 1948, getting Israelis to pick a new Hebrew surname became a cultural crusade. Tens of thousands of Jewish immigrants from Poland, Russia, Germany, Ukraine, Hungary, Lithuania, and elsewhere were given booklets of approved Hebrew surnames - like a book of baby names - to newcomers. They were told to pick out an ancestry they liked, essentially to find a name that sounded cool. Before Israel even possessed internationally recognized borders, it already had bureaucrats helping manufacture ancestral continuity one surname at a time. That’s how important the project would become for legitimizing the claim that “we are descendants of the original Hebrews.”
Then came the army. In June of 1948, Ben-Gurion gathered Israel’s senior military commanders for lunch. They probably expected a briefing. Instead, they got a naming ceremony. Before anyone left the table, they were expected to abandon their European surnames and adopt Hebrew ones. Some asked for time to think about it. Ben-Gurion wasn’t interested. By the end of the day, several of Israel’s highest-ranking officers had brand-new identities, minted faster than driver’s licenses at the DMV. Because service in the IDF was compulsory, and because they could make a soldier under their command do anything, they could effectively force the name changes through the IDF. By 1955, every IDF officer at the rank of lieutenant colonel and above had to Hebraize his surname. If it sounded foreign, it was expected to disappear.
.Officers, Ben-Gurion insisted, had to serve as examples, because the army must be Hebrew “in spirit...and in all its internal and external expressions.” That is a pretty extraordinary admission. This wasn’t simply about language. It was about presentation. Identity became something that could be curated and projected until the distinction between inherited history and constructed history grew increasingly difficult to notice. The campaign didn’t stop with generals. Everyone did it. Golda Meyerson became Golda Meir. Moshe Shertok became Moshe Sharett. Aubrey Solomon became Abba Eban. Even signatures on Israel’s Declaration of Independence were quietly “Hebraized” to give the founding document a more authentically Hebrew appearance.
The political movement that spent decades replacing European names with Hebrew ones now insists no one should notice when it invokes an image of uninterrupted ancestral continuity stretching back to the patriarchs. The paperwork became the pedigree. The branding became the biography. And after generations of carefully cultivating the image, the sales pitch arrives in Washington wrapped in the comforting language of “shared heritage.” It’s an impressive feat of political marketing.
The language Netanyahu speaks is not Hebrew. It is Temu-Hebrew. It’s a European language, pronounced in European dialects, with European syntax, and a Hebrew vocabulary that’s heavily supplemented by a non-Hebrew vocabulary. It’s an overt statement to even say its scaffolding is ancient Hebrew. It is a completely contrived tongue, a made-up Frankenstein language wearing Hebrew skin. It’s a loose liturgical Hebrew vocabulary attached to a European engine, built in the early 20th century, with European syntax (Russian, German, Yiddish), with thousands of loan words directly from those European languages, Slavic pronunciation, a complete lack of actual Hebrew phonology. It is so far from actual Hebrew that a 1st century Pharisee would not be able to carry a conversation with Benjamin Netanyahu.
It’s a garbage tongue, a living, breathing metaphor for a European people group who migrated to Palestine in the 20th century to celebrate to cosplay as ancient Israelites. It’s the Pig-Latin of world languages; vaguely reminiscent of a language, but isn’t. It is, to Hebrew what Pidgin is to English.
Klingon is, without question, a more impressive tongue. A dude named Marc Okrand deliberately built Klingon using sounds and grammatical patterns that are rare or nonexistent in human languages, like stacking uvular and ejective consonants, so it wouldn't sound like a random Earth language slightly re-skinned. He created its phonology, morphology, or core vocabulary from scratch. In his living room. Klingon holds up under decades of use, translation projects, and grammatical scrutiny by linguists say it's one of the most profoundly sophisticated languages on the planet.
"The Klingon Dictionary" exists, and it has enough depth that people actually learn to speak it fluently. There’s a full Klingon translation of Hamlet. It is an actual full language, is deeply sophisticated, some even say beautiful, and Okrand did it all himself in the course of 40 years. But it’s not a miracle. It doesn’t prove God has blessed the Klingon people.
There is no evidence that these are descendants of the original Hebrews other than their claim. There’s no evidence in their DNA; the closest you get is “Middle Eastern,” which is not in dispute, considering they came from Japheth. There’s no evidence in their native tongues of any Hebrew or Aramaic roots. Not even Yiddish, the language of the Ashkenazi in the Rhineland, has any Semitic language artifacts. It’s grammatical backbone, core vocabulary, and sentence structure are High German, in the same family branch as Dutch and English. It’s literally more English than Hebrew. Almost every language on Earth is somehow connected to another; for example, some vocabulary words in Polynesia are taken from the Inca in the New World. There’s some evidence, depending upon who you talk to, of Hebrew words in Native American vocabulary, or so the tale is told. But there is no Hebrew or Aramaic among those “returning” to Palestine in the Zionist project. Nothing.
Neither, if they were indeed the original descendants, would it mean a single thing about how evangelical Americans are supposed to behave toward Israelis in the year 2026.
But the real point of my tirade, an obligatory post to point this out, is that Netanyahu dropped a claim that the Internet spent the last two weeks trying to disprove and debunk. He said, “…we are the first part of that Judeo-Christian heritage that is dear to our hearts and has given the world, human civilization, freedom and faith.”
AWKWARD.
For two solid weeks, we were lectured by the evangelical commentariat that Judeo-Christian is just a harmless academic descriptor. Nothing political. Nothing strategic. Nothing propagandistic. Why, it’s practically a taxonomic label, like “marsupial” or “Early Bronze Age.” To question it, we were assured, was to expose our own embarrassing ignorance. Then, Benjamin Netanyahu himself walked into a room full of American evangelical leaders and pulled it out like a shotgun.
Not “shared values.” Not “allies.” Not “friends.” Not even “democracies.” No, he reached for the golden key. Judeo-Christian heritage. The very expression we had just been told carries no modern political freight was suddenly being deployed by the Prime Minister of Israel in a meeting whose entire purpose was to cultivate American evangelical support for Israel’s geopolitical objectives. Apparently the world’s foremost beneficiary of the term never received Wesley Huff’s memo explaining that it means absolutely nothing outside of academia. Who could have foreseen Netanyahu hijacking a perfectly sterile, academic term and ruining it like that? The gall of him, am I right?
YOU WILL NOT SEE ANOTHER DISCOUNT LIKE THIS IN 2026. ACT NOW!
If the phrase is merely an innocent historical category, why is it always unsheathed at precisely the moments when Israel needs American Christians emotionally invested in Israel’s wars, Israel’s security, Israel’s foreign policy, and Israel’s survival? Strange coincidence. Every single time the political stakes rise, out comes Judeo-Christian like a diplomatic Swiss Army knife. It is introduced not as a theological proposition to be debated but as an emotional password, designed to collapse two thousand years of covenantal distinction into one warm, fuzzy slogan. Before anyone has time to ask whether modern Israel and biblical Israel are the same thing, the phrase has already done its work.
Benjamin Netanyahu did not name-drop Judeo-Christian heritage because he was leading a seminary lecture on intellectual history. He wasn’t defending a doctoral dissertation. He was lobbying American religious leaders. He was making a sales pitch. He selected the phrase because he believes it is persuasive. Because he believes it creates obligation. Because he believes it persuades Christians that supporting the policies of the modern Israeli state is not merely prudent, but somehow intrinsic to their faith.
That is what propaganda does. It doesn’t invent words. It weaponizes them. It takes familiar language, loads it with political meaning, and repeats it until people stop noticing they’re being nudged. Then, when someone points out the obvious, a chorus of professional explainers appears to assure everyone that the loaded language isn’t loaded at all. It’s just a coincidence, they insist, that the slogan keeps showing up in the mouths of the very people with the greatest political interest in Americans believing it. It’s not that Jordan Peterson and Wesley Huff and Allie Beth Stuckey think they’re smart that bothers me. It’s that they think we are stupid.
Adding that this shared inheritance is “under attack from the rising wave of antisemitism and anti-Evangelicalism,” told them to “stand up and don’t cower” and asked them what they do “when you’re faced with an attack.” Quoting Jesus, Netanyahu answered, “Attack back.”
Just kidding. Jesus would never tell Christians to attack other Christians. But Satan would.
But notice the coup. Now, Netanyahu has framed the battle as the proverbial them vs Israel and evangelicals. Now, rejecting Israel is somehow rejecting evangelicals.
Notice what just happened. With one carefully chosen phrase, Netanyahu quietly redrew the battlefield. There are no longer Israelis over here and American evangelicals over there. There is now a single, unified camp: us. Israel and evangelicals fused into one political identity, sharing one heritage, one mission, one set of enemies. And if there is an us, there must be a them. That’s why the hyphen is dangerous. That is the triangulation.
You are no longer simply being asked to support an ally. You are being encouraged to see yourself as part of the same embattled tribe. If Israel is criticized, you are criticized. If Israel is opposed, you are opposed. If Israel is under attack, your faith is under attack. The categories begin to blur until disagreement with a foreign government’s policies starts feeling suspiciously like an attack on Christianity itself.
It’s remarkably efficient. Why defend every bombing, every lobbying campaign, every diplomatic maneuver, or every political controversy on its own merits when you can simply merge the identities? Once the emotional welding is complete, criticism of one becomes criticism of both. You don’t have to answer objections. You only have to ask why someone “hates evangelicals.”
If you appreciate my work, please grab a premium subscription to access exclusive content (like this article). This is how I provide for my family, so I sure appreciate it. Act now, and get a HUGE discount. BIGGEST EVER, good through August 7.
