Palestinian, Israeli kids Are Cannon Fodder for Rapture
According to a United Nations report, 971 Palestinian and Israeli children were killed between September 2000 — the beginning of the second intifada — and July 2007. Of those destroyed children, 854 were Palestinian. The intifada and the dying continue.
It is these children’s lives that the evangelical political action committee, Christians United for Israel, is willing to sacrifice on the altar of its fundamentalist eschatology in the hope of bringing about Armageddon and the Second Coming of Jesus Christ.
Pastor John Hagee, televangelist and pastor of the 19,000-member Cornerstone Church in San Antonio, Texas, established CUFI in 2005. Hagee envisions the group as the Christian version of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the powerful pro-Israel lobby whose political clout has a significant influence on U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East.
The late Molly Ivins, a Texas political commentator and author, described Hagee as a “pre-millennial dispensationalist, whose theology focuses on selected apocalyptic passages of the Book of Revelation.” In 1998, Hagee teamed up with Christian filmmakers to produce “Vanished in the Twinkling of an Eye,” a “docudrama” about the tribulations following the Rapture.
Despite Pastor Hagee’s obvious interest in eschatology, he insists that CUFI’s support for Israel has nothing to do with end time prophecy. But in an unguarded moment Hagee set the truth free: “The judgment of the nations is going to happen as soon as Christ returns to Earth. As soon as he sets up his throne on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, he’s going to rule the world with a rod of iron.”
The problem with Hagee’s version of the truth is the fact that the Temple Mount is Islam’s third most sacred site and the location of the Dome of the Rock, the oldest extant Islamic structure in the world.
According to Judaism, the Temple Mount is where the final third temple will be rebuilt before the coming of the Jewish Messiah. Unfortunately for CUFI, the Second Coming of Jesus is on hold until the temple’s completion, and that cannot happen until Islam is destroyed — Hagee’s holy grail.
Predictably then, the good pastor opposes any peace plan to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, supports Israel’s persecution and “imprisonment” of 1.5 million Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, and advocates pre-emptive nuclear strikes against Iran. John Hagee lives, and his group exists, to light the fires of the Apocalypse using Israel as the match.
To get a candid look at Hagee’s organization and its members, journalist Max Blumenthal took his cameras to the group’s Washington-Israel Summit, held last July in the nation’s capital.
His video, “Rapture Ready: The Unauthorized Christians United for Israel Tour,” opens with Blumenthal cornering disgraced former Republican House Majority Leader Tom Delay and asking him how important the Second Coming is in his support of Israel. The “Hammer” replied, “Obviously, it is what I live for. Really, I hope it comes tomorrow.”
Blumenthal mingled with the 4,500 CUFI rank and file attending the summit and asked their opinion on Armageddon and the identity of the Antichrist:
Q. “Are you looking forward to Armageddon?”
A. “I’m looking forward to Armageddon and the cleansing of the Earth.”
Q. “Who is the Antichrist?”
A. “He will be a man of peace. So he will be one who has promoted peace for many years. The one who forces Israel into a peace treaty with the Arabs is the Beast.”
A. “Another reason that we support Israel is that we have a common enemy, the Muslims. We are fighting what is behind the Muslim people, which is Satan. Satan is actually the one who is trying to destroy the human race.”
John Hagee is not without fawning friends in Washington. Presidential hopeful John McCain made a campaign stop at the summit. House Minority Whip Roy Blunt followed McCain to the podium. Sen. Joe Lieberman was there and described Pastor Hagee as an “Ish Elokim,” a man of God. President Bush even sent along his best wishes.
On Feb. 27, Hagee endorsed John McCain for president at a news conference held at the Cornerstone Church. Sen. McCain graciously accepted, saying, “I’m very honored by Pastor John Hagee’s endorsement today.”
Pastor Hagee’s right-wing Jewish allies will do well to consider that after Islam is destroyed and the temple rebuilt and Jesus comes and raptures all “true believers,” all non-believers — including Jews — will be hunted down and converted or destroyed … that is, those few who survived the nuclear holocaust that was prayed for and schemed for by the “Ish Elokim” and CUFI.
In the meanwhile, Palestinian and Israeli children will continue to die singularly or in small groups by the bullets and the bombs and the fire sent their way on the wings of CUFI’s prayerful machinations.
Robert Weitzel of Middleton is a contributing editor to Media With a Conscience.
© 2008 Capital Newspapers
With the exception of the reference to all of the children that are being killed, this article reads like a comicbook.
It is nice to know that McCain is so well thought of by Pastor Hagee, and that should be remembered by voters.
Obama is also fortunate in having Preacher Wright as his religious mentor for 20 years, as that also has meaning.
However, poor Hillary just has to depend on Bill instead of all of the great religious support that has worked so well the last seven years.
Read “Have A Nice Doomsday”. CUFI=US foriegn policy.
All Americans should be reminded that any “pastors” who endorse John McCain are also endorsing his wife’s inherited beer distributorship that sells to addiction and creates addiction–with the side effects of drunk driving, job loss, and domestic abuse. For most real Christians, this does not compute.
Sadly, of course, many churches these days are populated with “prophecy wonks” who would rather speculate on the end times than personally carry out the intent of the teachings of Jesus. Church folks voting for addiction profiteers as President and First Lady is justifiable only by “unreal” Christians. There is no other answer.
It’s easy to scoff at the extreme ideas of these death cultists until you realize the power they hold. That power comes from the vast sea of religious moderates whose softer, easier, mostly unexamined faith gives tacit support to the extremists. No one wants to deny the basic idea of a God and be isolated from the supposed consensus, so they must allow even the extreme versions of Him to wreak whatever havoc they may.
In two thousand years some Mad Max priest will be preaching about Harry Potter to another full house.
Never underestimate the awesome raw power of human stupidity!
whatever their strange and very destructive beliefs, the most alarming feature of this situation is that a cult is heavily influencing American politics. Bush a cult member?
The difference between a cult and a religion is the amount of money they can terrify their members into surrendering — religions have bigger bank accounts.
re vinlander 1:15pm
“religions have bigger bank accounts.”
…and 501(c) tax exemptions, which is where they’re vulnerable if they should stray into politics.
The US Air Force was split off from the US Army in order to facilitate strategic bombing, i.e. the mass murder of civilians in terror campaigns. This was despite the fact that right after WW2, the effects of strategic bombing were extensively studied and shown to be relatively worthless. The one real success was destroying Luftwaffe fighters with mass numbers of long range Allied fighters. The bombers only functioned as bait.
The USAF is now loaded with “Christian” nutcases, some of them apocalyptic types who welcome the destruction of Earth as part of the second coming of Christ. The really scary thing is these nuts have access to the trigger of world destruction.
The more desperate people get, the more superstitious they become, the more they turn to God, the more religious they become, the more they’re taken in by the clergy, the more money they give to false prophets, the more they believe they have to die in order to live.
Nature tells overpopulated lemmings to jump off a cliff. It gives us religion instead.
I don’t believe for a moment that Hagee believes what he preaches. Can you say “Synthetic Har Megiddon”?
Agreed, that people that wield such power are so absorbed by such colorfully-lunatic beliefs couldnt have been dreamt up by the most skilled sci-fi/fantasy novelist - but maybe a comic cartoonist.
And Mr. David, I know that you are an apologist for everything that any Democrat does, but I didn’t know you were a neo beer-abolitionist. So, you think beer distributors cause all these social ills huh? The only crimes I see them comitting is their selling of so much watery crap fraudlently called “beer”.
This is a very very brave article !
To comment on the article, I doubt that Hagee believes what he preaches. He’s in it for the money. In earlier times he’d be selling snake oil or practicing as a lancer (physic who’d bleed you in an effort to cure your ills, one of them was responsible for the death of G. Washington). The flock of ‘pastors’ like Hagee might buy into the apocolypse crap, but their leaders are in the business for the money, perhaps for the political influence as well.
There’s a brilliantly chilling film called “The Doomsday Code” that contains scenes of actual End-timers doing their thing…
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6439295521791525424
All I can say is the “The Rapture can’t happen soon enough to suit me”
Check out Weitzel’s piece at Media with a Conscience . . quite a hoot
http://mwcnews.net/content/view/19562/42/
“Had a heck of a chuckle with your yankee beer being the source of addiction”
skippyagogo,
If you haven’t been over here for a while, you should know that in the major cities (DC being an odd exception), you can now find lots of good, locally made, full bodied beer with lots of hops and flavor. Expensive, though.
Haven’t been in the states since ‘00. They wouldn’t let me in today as I’ve been convicted for the possession of a roach in Canada’s ‘war on drugs’… Not sure it’s a great loss to be honest.
It’s amazing, isn’t it, that religion and its shamans are protected by most constitutions.
I mean you’d think after watching what religions of all kinds have done over ten thousand years we’d be awake up to them, we’d have banned them, stopped them terrorizing the tiny minds of the gullible.
But no, we haven’t. We can’t shake them off nor can we stop their deranged influence on the direction the world is heading in: down!
The fiction of religion and the conflict between them will destroy our world eventually.
And it will be all over nothing more than insane fantasies!
www.dangerouscreation.com
John Hagee - a man who never smiles, a man who sides with oppressors, a man who simply does not know what he is talking about, a man who is ignorance personified.
John Hagee makes my blood boil. He frankly pisses me off! Put it this way - if someone kills him, and spends the rest of his life in prison for that, I would send thank you cards to the assassin as often as I could.
John Hagee is completely ignorant of History and shows obvious disregard for Palestinian people. Yet, roughly 25% of Palestinians worldwide are Christians.
John Hagee believes that Muslims are the common enemy with regards to both Jews and Christians. How can this be when all three faiths basically resided together up until about 100 years ago? Actually Muslims are much more devout and have greater demands among its followers than what is expected among a devout Jew or Christian.
Someone assassinate John Hagee please…PLEASE! He is evidently a waste of space on planet Earth.
I mistyped -
I meant to ask, “How can this be when people of all three faiths basically resided in peace up until about 100 years ago?”
Actually in DC we have the Capitol City Brewery. Most beer drinkers like thier beer. I don’t like beer though myself but wanted to stick up for DC on that zinger.
Budweiser. Miller. End of arguement. Of course the smaller breweries are excellent around the world, but they’re small and aren’t representative of the national brew. That being said, I can’t stand the Canadian national brews either, the smaller companies get my beer money up here too.
Perhaps to forestall this dire scenario, Israel ought declare its statehood is invalid, and cease to exist as a Jewish State to be replaced with a unified secular West Bank, Gaza, and former Israel?
These muddle-headed end-timers would then have to wait another few millenia for their stars to allign again for this sorry dream of heaven to arrive, and that part of the Middle East would finally be at peace.
Will somebody get Mr. Hagee drunk and laid. This sacred sublimation stuff is getting onerous.
USAn and others,
I am most certainly not a neo beer abolitionist. But I do know well the dot-connect between beer and addiction. My own brother died young (52) as an alcoholic–liver disease. Beer, not liquor, was his lifelong companion.
I also know that most churches (excepting Catholic) don’t officially condone much drinking. Having their pastors endorsing McCain for reasons of war and tax cuts and opposition to social medicine while ignoring their own doctrines against alcohol excess–while the McCains rake it in for decades on beer—is hypocrisy beyond belief. You can bet Hagee’s own church is full of tee-totalers—their faith and discipline betrayed by him for some other agenda about propping him up as a self-appointed prophecy “expert”.
I’m betting a lot of the church folks don’t even know about the Hensley beer business of Cindy Hensley McCain. Somebody ought to tell them. You funmakers about watery or not and other jokes are missing the darn boat. Evangelicals’ votes are REQUIRED for McCain to win. This beer thing could knock out half of them, and it ought to.
If you like beer, fine, drink some. But don’t sell tens of millions of cans of it and run for president. You couldn’t
carelessly hurt that many people and still be a decent “leader”—and neither can the McCains be so.
I was wrong-thinking of a different statistic-no excuse, sorry.
Two things offend me greatly regarding this article. First, that someone who calls himself Christian and has a huge following can turn Christ into some kind of pro-team madman, a proponent of vengeance and punishment of others. NONE of this is consistent with Christ or his teachings. In the Bible Belt where I live, this one rural church used to have a billboard that said, “Christ died for your sins.” And I thought, the whole point of the Resurrection was to demonstrate the UNDYING quality of the human spirit, particularly when it was perfected by altruistic love, the species Christ embodied.
The second issue is that this species of TWISTED religion is playing a big part in our military AND high government offices. Tony Blair carries these delusions, as did probably the former head of Australia, i.e. a White Christian Aryan coalition that went along with a fraudulent case for war against Iraq, and by extension, the Muslim world.
EZEFLYER: I answered you on KARMA on the Robert Scheer piece (yesterday posted), and what I related applies to today’s articles on Cheney and his snickering disregard for the electorate’s views. I wish the never perfected heart technology… given it’s kept his dead heart ticking when Creative forces would have recalled him long ago, and saved the world MUCH agony.
This is what happens when you believe everything you read.
A study of the various religions indicates they all share certain similarities. By putting these similarities together, you can arrive at a logical interpretation:
1. A ’supreme being’ of some kind made itsself known to the planet several thousand years ago.
2. He/She/It was benevolent, intelligent, and believed in peace.
3. He/She/It sent out messengers to explain to people his benevolence and to try to convince the people to live together in peace. These messengers were the phophets Jesus, Mohammud, Bhudda, etc. and were sent to different areas.
4. The people hearing their message wrote down their account.
5. After the prophets (humans) died, the people began to argue over the meanings of the writings. Words were twisted and re-written and each believed that their ‘messenger’ was the true one. Religions were formed around these ‘books’ and not a single one of the people got the true message which was one of benevolence.
Whatever this ’supreme being’ was, he didn’t stay long. He visited this place with a message of peace and every single phophet echoes that in writings attributed to him. Strange that thousands of years later, people still argue over these ‘books’, point fingers, claim to know what “God wants”, but fail to understand the truth. Those of us with ears know that we’re all part of the same family and if we took the smallest effort to try to love one another, the world would be a truly amazing place.
Oil is only a payoff for the West’s efforts at providing PROXY COMBATANTS for Israel–for protecting Israel from expanding, encircling Islamic Arabism; a Jewish nation-state having supporters throughout the West willing to destroy the entirety of Western civilization for Israel’s sake. That’s the gut-wrenching truth of why Western democracies are sacrificing blood and treasury in the Middle East; especially the U.S., which has enough off-shore and on-land oil reserves to last 300 years at her present rate of consumption, and which reserves were PURPOSELY capped and/or not drilled because Israel’s supporters poured millions of dollars into ENVIRONMENTAL MOVEMENT groups’ coffers, to work at keeping America from oil/energy independence and tied to Israel’s interests in the Middle East. That’s the truth you’ll NEVER see nor hear reported in Western mainstream news media, because Israel’s supporters control what’s fit to be said or printed about why the West wars with Islamic Arabism.
TheLorax, you are right for the most part. Where you are mistaken is in calling Buddha a ‘prophet’. He never called himself that - having attained ‘enlightenment’, he was only attempting to teach others what he knew to be true. He is considered by most followers as the teacher (or, The Teacher, if you will), and the serious, courageous ones try to become like the Buddha. In Buddhism, the fundamental premise is that ‘Buddhahood’ is inherently possible for anyone - the goal is to end suffering, for oneself and others - not after dying - but right here. Of course, they do believe, that if you do not reach that level of understanding and end suffering, then there is some continuation - in the next life. In fact, it’s not ‘you’ that is reborn, they say, but the entity that is still ignorant of its true nature - the explanation gets a little impersonal and more abstract from here on
Anyway, that is one reason you DON’T find Buddhists (and most Hindus) ever claiming that their’s is the true god or true religion.
The mistake in this article is its suggestion that but for the lunatic pastor, peace would break out between Arabs and Israelis. Were it only so.
Unfortunately, the available evidence shows that peace is not going to break out because there are irreconcilable claims to land, mixed with a noxious mixture of religion.