Epic Encounters Reaction Paper

Epic Encounters

Images of the Middle East in American popular culture and mass media are generally shape the ideas that most people in the United States ever get to this region, nor do they have specialized training and education that would provide them with more factual information. This influences include movies, novels, television broadcasts and news programs, especially those that dramatize terrorist incidents like the Iran Hostage Crisis, the bombing of the Marine barracks in Lebanon, the wars with Iraq and of course September 11, 2001. Among the most important influences are the ideas of white evangelicals and fundamentalists about the key role that Israel will play in the End Times and the Second Coming of Christ, and the imperative to support it against the Muslims. This particular group has had a disproportionate influence on politics, especially in the Republican Party, and on the election of hawkish presidents like Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush. Of course, another major concern has been the security of the oil supply, particularly since the oil shocks of 1973 and 1979, and the more recent one in 2007-08. All of this had a highly damaging impact on the U.S. economy and also on the administration that happened to be in power at the time.

Israel played a key role in American culture, and not only for American Jews who were motivated by memories and images of the Holocaust to support a strong Jewish state. In the Leon Uris novel Exodus and the 1960 film by the same name, the Jewish refugees and resistance fighters who founded the new country were idealized, while the Arabs were shown as being led by fascists and escaped Nazi war criminals. Israel's victory in the 1967 Six Day War against Soviet-supplied Arab armies that vowed to push the Jews into the sea also had great appeal to the American public, especially with the country bogged down in a seemingly endless war in Vietnam (McAlister 158). For American evangelicals, the reestablishment of Israel in 1948 and the recapture of the Temple Mount in 1967 also played a vital role in Biblical prophecy. Hal Lindsey's pioneering book The Late Great Planet Earth (1970) sold twenty-eight million copies by 1998. Its main point was that the final battle in history would be fought at Armageddon in Israel, after which Jesus Christ would return again to rule the world from Jerusalem. For evangelicals and fundamentalists then, just about all violent events in the Middle East could be taken as signs of the End Times (McAlister 167).

Although Jimmy Carter was the first 'born again' president, in the end the shift of white evangelicals into the Republican Party was vital to the victories of Ronald Reagan in 1980 and George W. Bush in 2000 -- and both claimed to be evangelicals as well. It still has an important effect in the Republican Party today, not only among those who believe Barack Obama was a Muslim born in Kenya, but social conservatives who dislike the Mormonism of Mitt Romney or the moderate conservatism of John McCain. Evangelicals had taken little part in politics for decades prior to the 1970s, at…