-Caveat Lector-
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From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: November 14, 2006 2:31:52 PM PST
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Olmert's Fifth Column, Fundamentalist "Christians," Tell
GOP "Nuke Iran!"
Israel's war with the Muslim world is “a battle between good and
evil” and Israel is carrying out “God’s foreign policy.” This is
the message taken to the White House.
For Evangelicals, Supporting Israel Is ‘God’s Foreign Policy’
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK
November 14, 2006
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/14/washington/14israel.html?
pagewanted=print
WASHINGTON, Nov. 13 — As Israeli bombs fell on Lebanon for a second
week last July, the Rev. John Hagee of San Antonio arrived in
Washington with 3,500 evangelicals for the first annual conference
of his newly founded organization, Christians United For Israel.
At a dinner addressed by the Israeli ambassador, a handful of
Republican senators and the chairman of the Republican Party, Mr.
Hagee read greetings from President Bush and Prime Minister Ehud
Olmert of Israel and dispatched the crowd with a message for their
representatives in Congress. Tell them “to let Israel do their job”
of destroying the Lebanese militia, Hezbollah, Mr. Hagee said.
He called the conflict “a battle between good and evil” and said
support for Israel was “God’s foreign policy.”
The next day he took the same message to the White House.
Many conservative Christians say they believe that the president’s
support for Israel fulfills a biblical injunction to protect the
Jewish state, which some of them think will play a pivotal role in
the Second Coming. Many on the left, in turn, fear that such
theology may influence decisions the administration makes toward
Israel and the Middle East.
Administration officials say that the meeting with Mr. Hagee was a
courtesy for a political ally and that evangelical theology has no
effect on policy making. But the alliance of Israel, its
evangelical Christian supporters and President Bush has never been
closer or more potent. In the wake of the summer war in southern
Lebanon, reports that Hezbollah’s sponsor, Iran, may be pushing for
nuclear weapons have galvanized conservative Christian support for
Israel into a political force that will be hard to ignore.
For one thing, white evangelicals make up about a quarter of the
electorate. Whatever strains may be creeping into the Israeli-
American alliance over Iraq, the Palestinians and Iran, a large
part of the Republican Party’s base remains committed to a fiercely
pro-Israel agenda that seems likely to have an effect on policy
choices.
Mr. Hagee says his message for the White House was, “Every time
there has been a fight like this over the last 50 years, the State
Department would send someone over in a jet to call for a cease-
fire. The terrorists would rest, rearm and retaliate.” He added,
“Appeasement has never helped the Jewish people.”
This time Elliott Abrams, the White House deputy national security
adviser who met with him, essentially agreed, Mr. Hagee said.
Leaving the White House offices, “we felt we were on the right
track,” he said.
Now, in tandem with the Israeli government, many evangelical
Christians have focused on a new villain, Iran’s president, Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad. Evangelical broadcasters and commentators have seized
on Mr. Ahmadinejad’s comments questioning the Holocaust and calling
for the abolition of the Israeli state. And many evangelicals now
talk of the Iranian leader as a “mortal threat” to Israel.
Some evangelical leaders say they are wary of reports that a panel
including former Secretary of State James A. Baker III might
recommend negotiating with Iran about the future of Iraq.
“It certainly bothers me,” said Dr. James C. Dobson, founder of
Focus on the Family and one of the most influential conservative
Christians. “That has the same kind of feel to it as the British
negotiating with Germany, Italy and Japan in the run up to World
War II.”
At rallies this fall for Christian conservative voters, Dr. Dobson
sometimes singled out Mr. Ahmadinejad as a reason to go to the
polls, arguing that Democrats could not be trusted to face down
such dangers.
“Hitler told everybody what he was going to do, and Ahmadinejad is
saying exactly what he is going to do,” Dr. Dobson explained. “He
is talking genocide.”
The same name, with many pronunciations, comes up repeatedly on
Christian talk radio shows, said Gary Bauer, a Christian
conservative political organizer. “I am not sure there is a foreign
leader who has made a bigger splash in American culture since
Khrushchev, certainly among committed Christians,” he said.
Mr. Hagee, for his part, said Mr. Ahmadinejad’s comments about
Israel and the Holocaust were part of what motivated him to found
Christians United For Israel late last year. Since the fight with
Hezbollah, Mr. Hagee said, he is doing all he can to keep the
pressure on United States officials to take a hard line with Iran.
When 5,000 evangelicals gathered last month for a “Night to Honor
Israel” at his San Antonio megachurch, for example, Mr. Ahmadinejad
was much discussed.
Mr. Hagee compared the Iranian leader with the biblical pharaoh of
Egypt. “Pharaoh threatened Israel and he ended up fish food,” Mr.
Hagee said, to great applause.
Evangelical Christians who know President Bush, including Marvin
Olasky, editor of the magazine World and a former Bush adviser,
said Mr. Bush, unlike President Reagan, has never shown any
interest in prophecies of the second coming.
Such theological details, however, have not kept the Israeli
government and Jewish pro-Israel lobbying groups from capitalizing
on the powerful support of American evangelicals. Fearing a
backlash over Lebanon last July, Israeli officials and their
American allies sought public statements of support from American
evangelicals. Some groups declined because of risks to missionaries
in the Arab world.
Dr. Dobson read a statement on his popular radio program expressing
“heartache” at the civilian casualties but comparing Israel’s fight
to “the Biblical skirmish between little David and mighty Goliath.”
He explained, “There sits little Israel with its five million
beleaguered Jews, surrounded by five hundred million Muslims whose
leaders are determined to drive it into the sea.”
Rabbi Yechiel Eckstein, the founder of the International Fellowship
of Christians and Jews and the Israeli government’s official
goodwill ambassador to evangelicals, said the statements turned out
to be superfluous because there was a groundswell of grass roots
evangelical support.
Mr. Eckstein said he had discovered the depth of that support when
he ran television commercials on the Fox News Channel seeking
donations. The response, mainly from evangelicals, “burned out the
call centers,” Mr. Eckstein said. During the five-week war, his
group added 30,000 new donors. Thanks to the influx of money, he
said his organization has exceeded its income from the first 10
months of last year by 60 percent, putting it on track to pull in
$80 million this year. “The war really generated a momentum,” Mr.
Eckstein said.
Evangelicals’ support for Israel, of course, is far from uniform.
Mr. Hagee is an author of several books about the interpretation of
biblical prophecies. He says he believes the Bible assigns Israel a
pivotal role as a harbinger of the second coming. Citing passages
from Revelation and Ezekiel, he argues that conflict between Israel
and Iran may be a sign that that time is approaching.
Others say they believe more generally that God maintains his Old
Testament covenant with the Jewish people and thus commands
Christian believers to help protect their “older brothers.”
“My theology indicates that Israel is covenant land,” Dr. Dobson
said in an interview.
Many conservative Christians and their Jewish allies acknowledge a
certain tension between the evangelical belief in a Biblical
commission to convert non-Christians and their simultaneous desire
to help the Jews of Israel.
“Despite all the spiritual shortcomings of the Jewish people,” Dr.
Dobson said, “according to scripture — and those criticisms come
not from Christians but from the Old Testament. Just look in
Deuteronomy, where Jews are referred to as a stiff-necked and
stubborn people — despite all of that, God has chosen to bless them
as his people. God chose to bless Abraham and his seed not because
they were a perfect people any more than the rest of the human
family.”
Dr. Dobson, along with some other evangelicals, has expressed
disappointment with what he saw as the Bush administration’s
pressure on Israel to sign the cease-fire that ended the fight.
“They began by saying they had to take a hard line, by saying they
would support Israel and they ended up urging them to compromise
and go home,” Dr. Dobson said. “All that is going to do is allow
everybody to reload. That didn’t solve anything.” (Mr. Hagee said
that he believed the administration gave Israel “ample time” but
that Israel erred by not “unleashing the full might of its ground
troops” until it was too late.)
The Israeli government and its American allies have been building
their alliance with evangelicals for decades. Israeli officials
began working closely with Mr. Hagee and his church, for example, a
quarter century ago, when he met several times with then-Prime
Minister Menachem Begin.
The Jerusalem Post, an English-language newspaper, recently started
an edition for American Christians.
The Israeli government temporarily cut off ties with the Christian
broadcaster Pat Robertson after he suggested that Prime Minister
Ariel Sharon’s stroke might have been God’s punishment for
withdrawing from territory that belonged to the Biblical Israel.
But then Mr. Robertson flew to Israel during the fight with
Hezbollah. In a gesture of reconciliation, the Israeli government
recently worked with him to film a television commercial to attract
Christian tourists.
“Israel — to walk where Jesus walked, to pray where Jesus prayed,
to stand where he stood — there is no other place like it on
earth,” Mr. Robertson says in the commercial, according to the
Jerusalem Post.
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