TO THE EDITOR:
A campus event reported in the Oct. 26 Daily Tar Heel and sponsored by Christians United for Israel (CUFI) preceded, overnight and town side, Porter Speakman’s “With God on Our Side.” The film sets Christian Zionism in its 180-year context and traces how its theology has cast the modern state of Israel as God’s chosen people on earth. No one should ever doubt the importance of keeping the horror of the Holocaust alive to each generation or miss the chance to gain personal insight on human capacity for inhuman deeds.
My own earliest exposure (in documentary form) to the victims of Nazi barbarism came in college; my latest encounter with Holocaust survivors came in Cairo last New Year’s Eve, when some 1,300 of us from all around the world were intent on reaching Gaza to help break the Israeli siege.
Surrounded by inquisitive Egyptian conscripts, beset by hard-hitting plainclothes police, our spirits were buoyed by mingled Holocaust survivors, including Hedy Epstein, 86, fresh from St. Louis and several days fasting.
I hope speaker Irving Roth’s acceptance of CUFI sponsorship rejects Christian Zionists’ frequent consignment of those “gathered in to Israel” to final conversion or worse. Fortunately for all our prospects, a happier destiny for us all may soon be held out to every non-zealot Zionist by the whole Arab world.
Edwin L. Brown
Professor Emeritus
Classics
