Last week, Right Wing Watch reported, Michele Bachmann: Obama Fulfilled End Times Prophecy With Iran Deal, So Celebrate! She is apparently happy about the Iranian nuclear deal because she thinks it will bring on the end times. I have to admit to being a little impressed. With conservative Christians, there is this general dissonance: on the one hand being thrilled about the apocalypse (Coming any day now!) and on the other hand freaking out about how liberals are making God mad. Why do they care? When God destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah, he made sure to save Lot because he was a good man.

The reason, of course, is that the conservative Christians just want something to bitch about. So it is good that Bachmann is standing up for things going to hell — at least as she sees it. She thinks this is all about Zechariah 12:3. But there is major question begging here. She takes it as given that the Iran nuclear deal means that Iran is going to attack Israel. The logic is, shall we say, weak: the deal will lead to Iran having a nuclear weapon; they will use it against poor defenseless Israel; but God will stop it.

How clueless do you have to be to think that Iran would use any nuclear weapon against Israel? Israel has between 75 and 400 nuclear weapons. To be honest, of all the nations in the world, the one we should be most worried about is Israel because they are (understandably, but frighteningly) paranoid. So if Iran attacked Israel, Israel would retaliate against it with overwhelming force — just like it does against the Palestinians. And that’s saying nothing about what the US would do. Israel is ranked 11th most powerful military in the world. It isn’t some weak country that anyone needs to worry about. Yet for conservatives, the idea that Israel might be able to get a nuke in the next decade is far more worrying than Israel having hundreds of uninspected nuclear weapons.

But Bachmann is even wrong on the Bible. Zechariah 12:3 is translated in many ways. But in no way does it say that the United States will be leading the fight against Israel — as Bachmann claims. And then, the actual text is much more vague. If we look at the New American Standard Bible — generally considered the closest to the original text — it says:

It doesn’t sound like destroying Israel; it sounds like occupying it. And there have been so many times over the centuries that Israel was occupied by others, are we really to think that Zechariah 12:3 wasn’t referring to all thos other times? Of course not. This is just another case of every generation of Christians thinking that they are the last. When finally there is a last generation of Christians, it won’t be because Jesus comes back. It will be because they finally realize that their beliefs are silly, and get onto to thinking something more reasonable.