Jul 20 2008

Stand Up And Oppose Pastor John Hagee

(6:00PM EST – promoted by Nightprowlkitty)

cross posted from The Dream Antilles

From Monday, July 21 through Thursday, July 24, Pastor John Hagee will be in Washington, D.C. to lead the national gathering of his infamous Christians United For Israel.  The CUFI conference is studded with rightwing zealots and features workshops like “Radical Islam: In Their Own Words,” led by neo-conservative Daniel Pipes and former right-wing Senator Rick Santorum; and “The Basics of The Arab Israeli Conflict,” led by representatives of the pro-occupation David Project and StandWithUS and Gary Bauer, president of anti-choice, homophobic American Values.

Unbelievably, the Anti Defamation League (ADL), the supposed bigotry watchdog, has not condemned Hagee for his anti semitic, anti gay, anti Muslim rhetoric.  To the contrary, ADL has given him a free pass. In fact, in a recent letter to Hagee, John Fox, president of ADL wrote, “We wholeheartedly support your efforts to eradicate anti-Semitism, including its historic antecedents in the Christian community. We especially appreciate your extraordinary efforts to rally so many in the Christian community to stand with Israel.”  This is utter, embarrassing nonsense.

As a result of ADL’s unprincipled behavior, Jewish Voice For Peace and others have condemned the conference and are calling on the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) to stand up against Hagee’s pervasive bigotry and to condemn his statements.

Join me in DC.

A very brief review of just some of Hagee’s views, and ADL’s supposed responses to them, make it clear that he is a virulent anti-semite, staunchly anti-gay, and completely anti-muslim, and that ADL should be forcefully condemning him.  But they’re not.  Hagee’s statements are obvious:

The anti-Christ is gay and Jewish. source

ADL has said, “the statement … that the Antichrist, who is evil incarnate, is Jewish, borders on anti-Semitism at best and is anti-Semitic at worst.”  This is a remarkably tepid condemnation of a statement that is appallingly racist.

Jews control the federal reserve.  source. ADL has said, “The charge that “Jews control the Federal Reserve” is a classic example of the hatemonger’s paranoid-style exploitation of legitimate concerns – in this case, the nation’s economy. Moreover, the wide appeal of this anti-Semitic conspiracy theory among all kinds of extremists strikingly demonstrates how the agendas of otherwise opposing hate groups meet on common ground: the scapegoating of Jews.”  

God caused the devastation of NOLA by Katrina to stop a scheduled Gay Pride parade. source, source.

“Those who live by the Qur’an have a scriptural mandate to kill Christians and Jews… it teaches that very clearly.” source.

ADL’s mission statement proclaims that it “fights anti-Semitism and all forms of bigotry, defends democratic ideals and protects civil rights for all.”  To repeat, “all forms of bigotry” and “protects civil rights for all.”  What am I missing here?

Don’t Hagee’s statements about Jews, the GLBT community, and Muslims in general qualify as forms of extreme bigotry?  Why am I having to ask this question?

What to do:  Please sign the petition at Jewish Voice for Peace urging ADL to condemn Hagee.

Please spread this petition widely.

5 comments

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  1. I know that online petitions might do no good, but what else have we got at this moment?

    Thanks for reading.

  2. …

    • RUKind on July 21, 2008 at 11:12
    • #

    AIPAC is little more than a formalized intercontinental “conservative” Mafia. Israel has had a disturbing tendency to hire vote for corrupt thugs for their leaders. The whacko hyper-fundamentalist Jews providing the key voting block to keep those clowns in place. Sound familiar?

    It’s no wonder our scumbags support their scumbags. And AIPAC is the club they both belong to. The Israeli people don’t like their government any more than we like ours. Corruption and lies are poison to a democracy.

    Side note: the New England ADL sided with the local Armenian population by accepting their treatment by the Turks as genocide. The national ADL forced the local NE head to resign. There was a big blow-up over that up this way. The national ADL eventually backed down.

    It seems the surface story was Turkey’s nice treatment of their Jewish population and they didn’t want to upset that apple cart. The back story was the Turkish government mafia was in cahoots with the Israeli government mafia and both were in cahoots with the neo-con/Hageeist-type mafia here.

    Side note II: Hagee is a direct religious scam-artist descendant of the founder of the Christian Right, Rev Billy James Hargis. The following is an excerpt from an essay I did in early May:

    And here’s where the threads start morphing and twisting over time. The Reverend Billy James Hargis is considered one of the founders of the Christian right movement. He started up his own fundamentalist college and all and just to prove his right-wing whack job bona fides we have the following:

    Hargis was unintentionally also partly responsible for the existence of the Fairness Doctrine. In 1964, Hargis, who was a staunch supporter of Barry Goldwater in that year’s presidential race, made false statements about a journalist who was critical of Goldwater. The journalist asked for air time in order to give his rebuttal to Hargis’ statements, and the broadcaster refused. The journalist took his case to court, and eventually the case went all the way to the United States Supreme Court. The high court upheld the equal-time allowance in Red Lion Broadcasting Co. v. FCC (1969), codifying what became known as the Fairness Doctrine in American broadcasting.

    Fun factoid here: Hargis formed American Christian College in 1971 in order to teach fundamentalist Christian principles. However, a sex scandal involving claims by two of his students who, on their honeymoon, confessed to each other that they were not virgins, and then found they had lost their virginity to Rev. Hargis. Hargis was forced out of American Christian College’s presidency as a result. Further scandals erupted when members of Hargis’ youth choir, the “All American Kids”, accused Hargis of sexual misconduct as well. The college eventually closed down in the mid-1970s. Hargis always denied the allegations.

    A right-wing, whack-job, fundamentalist, Christian preacher backing a crazy old Arizona Republican senator for president. Where have I heard that one before? Hargis? Sounds like Hagee?

    WRT Hagee:

    In Hargis’ day such ideas were considered to lie on the political fringe alongside KKK, neo-nazi, and John Birch ideology. Now, over 40 years later, the mainstreaming of beliefs very similar to those of Hargis has advanced so far that a Christian leader – who alleges a vast satanic “secular humanist” conspiracy against Christian America, blames Jews for the Holocaust, says Hitler’s Nazis were doing God’s work, places gays, the ACLU, and Islamic terrorists together on the side of absolute evil, calls liberal Jews “poisoned” and “spiritually blind” and states that he hopes for a catastrophic conflict that will kill most Jews in Israel and maybe most Jews on Earth – will be addressing, this Sunday evening, at this year’s AIPAC Washington convention, perhaps 1/2 of the US Senate and 1/3 of the US House Of Representatives ; this will amount to an historic advance towards the mainstreaming of anti-Semitism.

       Pastor John Hagee, founder of Christians United For Israel, a new and nominally “pro-Israel” American national political lobbying group, has built a career on aggressive support for hard right to fringe right Israeli politics and is now making inroads towards convincing the mainstream American Jewish community that he and CUFI are the best tactical allies Jews and Israel can expect to find.

    …

    Back to 21 JUL now. Hagee sees CUFI as an American Christian AIPAC. AIPAC loves him. The GOP loves him. McCain loves him (privately). Netanyahu, Omert, Sharon – all the corrupt Likud leaders are AIPAC. They all want to bomb Iran in the worst way.

    I think that’s all surface chop to distract us from the undertow. There’s some big money/power mojo going down here that we’re being distracted from perceiving. Even the Iraq Oil War is just a diversionary profit scheme. There’s something much bigger afoot.

    They love our outrage. It keeps us distracted from what’s really happening. So many outrages coming one right after another. Coincidence or planned?

    Something’s going down that does not meet the immediate eye.

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