Hagee on Jews: A New Video

On the eve of next week’s Third Annual Washington Israel Summit of Pastor John Hagee’s Christians United for Israel (CUFI), the folks at the excellent JewsonFirst.org have released their new must-see video, entitled “Pastor John Hagee’s Preoccupation With the Jews”. It’s the best documentation of Hagee’s views on the subject that I’ve seen to date and should thoroughly embarrass the Summit’s keynote speaker, Sen. Joseph Lieberman, not to mention the many neo-conservatives — Bill Kristol, Clifford May, Frank Gaffney, Daniel Pipes, Charles Jacobs, and Dennis Prager, among others — who will be featured at the Summit as “some of the most influential leaders and thinkers in Washington.” Their message will then be carried to lawmakers all over Capitol Hill by the thousands of attendees from all around the country. Kristol’s best buddy, Gary Bauer, as well as Iran hawk, Patrick Clawson of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), former Sen. Rick Santorum, and Reps. Elliot Engel and Mike Pence, will also be on the agenda which you can find here. Notably absent, of course, will be Sen. John McCain.

After watching the video, be sure to also reread last April’s letter to the editor in the New York Times written in Hagee’s defense by no less than seven former chairmen of the community’s most powerful organization, the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations. I alluded to it in connection with Hagee and the neo-conservatives back in May in a post that can be found here. Hagee may be a “true friend of Israel” in the former chairmens’ view, but his views about the Jews who live there and here (presumably including the chairmen themselves, as well as Sen. Lieberman) are considerably more ambivalent.

As noted in the May post, the new pro-peace lobby group, J Street, conducted a major petition drive that received tens of thousands of endorsements to persuade Sen. Lieberman to cancel his participation in this year’s Summit, particularly in light of McCain’s decision to repudiate both Hagee and his views about Adolf Hitler’s role in history. But, as with Iraq, I guess, Lieberman is staying the course and has refused to pull out. The Summit should be interesting, but the press is barred from attending all but the closing banquet.

Jim Lobe

Jim Lobe served for some 30 years as the Washington DC bureau chief for Inter Press Service and is best known for his coverage of U.S. foreign policy and the influence of the neoconservative movement.

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4 Comments

  1. Good exposé — except for the prominent implication that questioning the Federal Reserve system and its influence is somehow an anti-Semitic code.

    Should we conclude from this:

    “The safeguards erected by the [classical] liberal legislation of the nineteenth century to protect the bank-of-issue [i.e., the central bank] system against abuse by the State have proved inadequate. Nothing has been easier than to treat with contempt all the legislative provisions for the protection of the monetary standard. All governments, even the weakest and most incapable, have managed it without difficulty. Their banking policies have enabled them to bring about the state of affairs that the gold standard was designed to prevent: subjection of the value of money to the influence of political forces.”
    -The Theory of Money and Credit, 1924

    that anyone advocating Austrian economics or the work of Ludwig von Mises (himself a Jewish refugee of Nazi invaded Austria) is part of the anti-Semitic “extremist spectrum”?

    Though much work has been done to decouple the questioning of US Middle East policy from accusations of implicit anti-Semitism, the battle has only just begun regarding US fiscal and monetary policy.

  2. Lay down with dogs, get fleas.

    Birds of a feather flock together.

    My fondest desire is that the Lieberman zionist and the evangelical nutbags wipe each out.

  3. Sadly, getting people, Jewish and non-, alike, to recognize the dangers and horros lurking just below the surface of Hagee’s “love” for Israel is proving to be a daunting task.

    At the heart of Hagee’s “love” lies a desire to have a front row seat for the apocalypse, in which a wrathful Jeeezuss tells Hagee and other apocalypticists to put all the unbelieving Jews to the sword.

    No wonder Hagee thinks Hitler was only doing Gawd’s will: he himself hopes to do the same.

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