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Glenn Beck Is Restoring Courage

Rally in East Jerusalem is what you’d expect it to be

by
Marc Tracy
August 24, 2011
Glenn Beck in Israel last month.(Gali Tibbon/AFP/Getty Images)
Glenn Beck in Israel last month.(Gali Tibbon/AFP/Getty Images)

At 5 pm Israeli time, Glenn Beck launched his “Restoring Courage” rally in the Old City, in East Jerusalem; as of publication, it’s still going strong. Jerusalem Mayor Nir Birkat is among the luminaries in attendance. Beck has given out awards (“The first award is given to the Fogel family,” live-blogs Haaretz. “This would be funny if it wasn’t so terrible”), and he has declared, “In Israel you see courage. In Israel there is more courage in one small square mile than there is in the whole of Europe.” You likely already have an opinion of Beck and his Israel mini-tour, which is culminating in this rally. If you’re Alan Dershowitz, you are cautiously supportive; if you’re Rabbi Eric Yoffie of the Union for Reform Judaism, you are disapproving (in fairness, if you are Yoffie, Beck has compared your faith to radical Islam). And if you are a regular reader of The Scroll, you can guess where I stand.

One thing to note is that many who have traveled from the United States to attend are being funded by WallBuilders, the organization of “historian” David Barton, who, as columnist Michelle Goldberg documented, has a past littered with white-supremacist and anti-Semitic associations and whose work is dedicated to arguing that the United States was explicitly founded as an evangelical-Christian nation. Which doesn’t make Barton a particularly strange bedfellow for Beck. But for Israel, he certainly is. Isn’t he?

Marc Tracy is a staff writer at The New Republic, and was previously a staff writer at Tablet. He tweets @marcatracy.