Max Blumenthal on "The Menage a Trois From Hell." via fastlad.
Brog, the former chief-of-staff to Arlen Specter, is now the first full-time lobbyist for the Christian Zionism movement. He claims that CUFI's lobbying efforts, including organizing 3500 evangelical activists to visit congressional offices as Israel and Hezbollah exchanged their first salvoes of missiles, are having an impact. "There is an ongoing debate in Washington over how long to let Israel continue the campaign against Hezbollah--how long will we let Israel fight its war on terror as we fight our own war on terror?" Brog told me. "And I think the arrival in Washington at that juncture of thousands of Christians who came for one issue and one issue only, to support Israel, sent a very important message to the Administration and the Congress, and I think helped persuade people that they should allow Israel some more time."
But CUFI has more on its agenda than simply "supporting Israel." Its founder and president, Pastor John Hagee, is determined to see America and Israel adopt his Armageddon-based worldview as their foreign policy. Consider what Hagee wrote this year in Charisma magazine: ""The coming nuclear showdown with Iran is a certainty. Israel and America must confront Iran's nuclear ability and willingness to destroy Israel with nuclear weapons. For Israel to wait is to risk committing national suicide."
Hagee's desire to doom the now-dormant Israeli-Palestinian peace process is equally disturbing. As I detailed in the Nation, in his book, The Beginning of the End, Hagee celebrated the murder of former Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin as a fulfillment of biblical prophecy and glorified his assassin, Yigal Amir. More recently, Hagee's allies, like nationally syndicated evangelical radio host Janet Parshall, became ecstatic at the outbreak of violence in Lebanon and Israel. "These are the times we've been waiting for," Parshall told her audience on July 21. "This is straight out of a Sunday school lesson."
Time and again, Christian Zionists have delighted in events that most Israelis considered grave tragedies. And yet, Israel continually expends more energy cultivating their support than it does on earning much-needed international goodwill. Case in point: after calling Ariel Sharon's descent into a comatose state God's punishment for the "dividing the land," Pat Robertson was granted a personal meeting yesterday with Sharon's successor, Ehud Olmert. Afterwards, Robertson told his 700 Club viewership that the Lebanese people were "sheltering a terrorist group" and urged them to pray for an Israeli military victory...
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4 comments:
i thought this was all old news? or maybe it's just more obvious in the south?
i'll never forget when i first encountered it. there was some well known institute not far from where i lived. i had no idea there was such a thing as christian zionism. my friend, F, who was jewish, though. woo. we drove by the place one day and she'd known all about it -- fascinated. she'd been in the south longer than i though.
CZ is what? 150 years old and some change in terms a coherent theology. Just that now, they have more money and influence and better organizational skills than the sane Christians.
well, and specifically a scarily large influence in the current administration.
The whole armageddon thing is based on a falacious interpretation of certain scriptures. The interpretation is flashy and exciting, and panders to a particular evangelical viewpoint. They are motivated and sincere in their beliefs, which appeal to people who are unable or unwilling to dig deeper than the scriptural skin they see. Moreover, they want to be Right.
Not all CZ's see current events through the colored lens of radical evangelism. Some of want Israel to exist, and deeply prefer the peace process to work. Unfortunately, it takes a willingness from both sides for that to happen.
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