Going Undercover at Mad Pastor Hagee's Christians United for Israel Summit
By Ali Gharib, AlterNet
Posted on July 26, 2008, Printed on July 28, 2008
http://www.alternet.org/story/92860/
For Christians United for Israel and its founder, John Hagee, this year's
Washington-Israel Summit was supposed to serve as a rallying call for
Christians to stand up for Israel. The controversies surrounding Hagee's
teachings that inspire his politics, particularly his End Times theology and
its implications for the Jews he purports to love and protect and his
religious interpretations of the Catholic Church and Hitler, were meant to
take a backseat to the conference's aims of demonstrating political support
for Israel and actions against its enemies.

Hagee did not want the events at this year's summit to be brought to the
wider public. All but one event in the two-day session at the cavernous
Washington Convention Center were closed to the press. Press passes were
issued to Tuesday's Night to Honor Israel -- a bizarre fete attended by an
announced crowd of 5,000 -- but access to participants and speakers by
journalists was strictly monitored and restricted. The reasons became
abundantly clear in the question-and-answer session after the first panel,
when a woman asked how she would know if it was time to start up a
"Christian militia" to return the country to conservative values. "Let's not
use the term militia," Hagee responded, firmly establishing a thread that
could be observed over both days of meetings: Control the message.

Armed with a full-fledged participant's pass and a Christians United for
Israel (CUFI) notepad included in my registration pack, I attended both full
days of the summit undercover and spoke freely with participants and
speakers. The picture that emerged was very different from the one put on
for the world on Tuesday night. Message control was constantly stressed to
participants to conceal some of the more controversial themes of Hagee's
teachings and theology. But in candid interviews, conducted both as a fellow
participant and as a member of the press, Hagee's fervent following stayed
on message with the full spectrum of his teachings, not just those slices
made available publicly.

Away from the watchful eye of Hagee's Manhattan PR firm (many interviews
with participants were broken up), some summit attendees, despite specific
and repeated instructions not to talk to the press, were eager to discuss
the End Times -- a belief in final judgment and the end of the World -- and
what it meant for Jews.

Attendee Dean "Vernon" Melvin of New Mexico told me about Jesus' second
coming and the subsequent end of the world. "When Jesus returns in the sky
above us," he said, "those of us who are already saved and have died will
come up out of our graves and go into the sky with him."

Randy Driskill divided Jews into only two categories: "The Orthodox believe
that their messiah hasn't come yet. The messianic think Jesus is their
savior."

The "Orthodox Jews," said Driskill, had "scales over their eyes. They're
blinded by scales right now," he told me with a deadly serious look on his
face. "That's why they don't accept Christ." Ironically, a Google search of
"scales," "eyes" and "Jews" quickly turned up a passage from Hitler's Mein
Kampf in which he declares that when he saw that Jews headed up Vienna's
Social Democrats, "the scales dropped from (his) eyes."

Hagee teaches that during the "End of Days" leading up to the end of the
world, many Jews will accept Jesus, presumably after the scales fall off
their eyes. Melvin was more explicit about just what would happen to the
Jews who didn't: "Some of the Jews will perish and be going to hell."

While Hagee tries to distance his eschatology from his support for Israel,
it bears mentioning that the two are actually inexorably linked. In early
2007, Hagee participated in a conference call with bloggers and denied that
eschatology plays any part in his support for Israel. But as Bruce Wilson,
who monitors the religious right on the blog Talk2Action, pointed out in
April:

Pastor Hagee's words were directly contradicted by literature from Hagee's
San Antonio Cornerstone Church magazine, which exhorts readers to "Become a
Part of the Fulfillment of Prophecy" by sending money to help Jews resettle
in Israel. It is standard to Christian Apocalyptic Premillennial
Dispensationalist eschatology that Jews must be encouraged to return to
Israel where, according to the prophetic tradition, most of them will be
killed in the Tribulation, Apocalypse and battle of Armageddon except for a
"remnant," generally held to number 144,000 Jews who have converted to
Christianity, who will survive and serve as evangelical "super-Billy
Grahams" who will convert all of humanity, surviving the expected (nuclear)
end-times conflict, to Christianity.

It was, in fact, part of this form of eschatology that got Hagee in hot
water earlier this year and caused the presumptive Republican nominee for
president, John McCain, to publicly repudiate Hagee and renounce his
long-sought endorsement. In audio of a sermon released on the Internet by
Wilson, Hagee expressed a view that Hitler had been a tool of God to fulfill
a prophecy from the Book of Jeremiah in which God sends "hunters" after the
Jews to drive them into the Holy Land. Hagee said the passage of scripture
"describe(s) what Hitler did in the Holocaust."

In a poignant example of the obfuscation of Hagee's theology and how it
relates to Jews and Israel, when I asked CUFI's PR team for an interview
about eschatology, I was told that the topic would not be discussed in
connection with CUFI and that no one would be made available for interviews
about End Times.

In one of the sessions closed to the media, David Brog, the executive
director of CUFI, was giving notes on how attendees should act when they
visited Capitol Hill on Wednesday to beseech members of Congress to support
Israel. Among his instructions was how conference participants should deal
with accusations about Hagee, should they come up at the meetings. His
response was simple -- don't: "We're not there to talk about allegations
about Pastor Hagee." But Brog did speak to the issue of "Hitler as God's
will." Brog suggested that Hagee's explanations were the simple result of a
man searching for an answer to age-old question of an all-powerful God
allowing suffering.

"Pastor Hagee was looking for that answer. That had plagued him because he
loves the Jewish people," he told the crowd in the large meeting hall. He
further suggested telling members and their staff, "You don't know our
pastor like we know our pastor." Brog didn't speculate as to whether the
non-answer followed by that explanation would call the credibility of the
participants themselves into question.

During his speech at the Night to Honor Israel event, Hagee even went so far
as to make light of the phrase "Never again!" -- commonly used to engender
vigilance in face of any impending Jewish holocaust -- by using it to make a
joke about his troubles of late in the realm of national politics: "What
will I say next time I'm asked to endorse a presidential candidate? Never
again!"

Irrespective of this insensitivity to modern Jewish history, many Jews also
showed up over the last several days to give their support to Hagee and
CUFI. I asked many of them about their support for Hagee in light of his
apocalyptic views, and the answers were somewhat predictable. Rabbi Etan
Tokayer of New York City told me that he hadn't heard Hagee's controversial
comments, but even when I paraphrased them for him, he was dismissive.

"I can't speak intelligently about what he said because I haven't heard the
context," he told me, "but I do know that he's a supporter of a free
Israel."

Even those Jews who were familiar with Hagee's comments seemed willing to
overlook them because of Hagee's unwavering support for Israel. Sagie Harel
of Jerusalem told me that he could look past Hagee's religious beliefs and
take his support for its own value.

"Pastor Hagee has his own way of thinking about things, but we find him as
truly wishing from his heart to support Israel," he told me at his
conference sponsorship booth for a Web site that gives virtual tours of
Jerusalem. "I was truly excited to find a friend here in the good times and
the bad."

Among the Jewish supporters of Hagee at the conference were two Democratic
members of Congress: Rep. Eliot Engel, D-N.Y., and Sen. Joe Lieberman,
I-Conn., who still ardently support McCain for president. Both have put
aside their differences with Hagee on social issues and theology in favor of
an alliance on Israel. Speaking on the dais called the Middle East Briefing,
Engel garnered applause by speaking in favor of the now-discredited George
W. Bush unilateralism and for speaking out against evenhandedness in Middle
East affairs.

"I don't want the U.S. to be evenhanded in the Middle East," Engel told the
crowd after advocating going solo in military enterprises. "I want the U.S.
to stand squarely and behind our only true ally, Israel." That sort of
un-evenhandedness is, perhaps, behind what seemed to be a disregard for the
fate of Palestinians who were kicked off their land and now live in refugee
camps in neighboring countries. It's not unreasonable to say that those
refugees remain in camps because of the inaction of Arab governments, but to
say that they're there "not because of anything Israel did," as Engel said,
seems to miss a bit of the history.

Another Jewish conference attendee, Helen Freedman, was more specific in
giving her reasons for supporting Hagee and CUFI. Freedman and Hagee both
share a right-wing opposition to a negotiated settlement to the
Palestinian-Israeli conflict that would include a Palestinian state.

"We're here because we appreciate the support the evangelical Christians
give to Israel and their support of an undivided Jerusalem and a whole
Israel which includes Judea and Samaria -- no giveaway of land," she told
me. Judea and Samaria are the names that right-wing Israel supporters use to
refer to the occupied Palestinian territory of the West Bank. When I asked a
follow-up question and referred to the area by the latter name, Freedman
quickly corrected me, saying, "We don't call it the West Bank."

Freedman's support of a one-state solution that leaves a Jewish state
controlling all of what is currently Israel was reiterated often at the
conference. But in this case, like others, the public face of CUFI was very
different from the one expressed in private. At the Night to Honor Israel,
with the press wrapped attentively around every word Hagee uttered, he
declared that CUFI does not intend to dictate instructions to the state of
Israel.

"CUFI policy has been clear and consistent from day one: When it comes to
the difficult existential questions of whether to trade land for peace, we
do not decide," Hagee said, spacing the last words with his Southern
preacher's drawl to add emphasis. "The Israelis decide, and they alone have
the right to make that decision." Which makes perfect sense because,
frankly, Hagee never had a say in Israeli affairs in the first place -- that
is, aside from the influence that can be bought for the scores of millions
of dollars that he raises and sends to Israel.

But Hagee wasn't the only one who was late to read the memo reinforcing
Israeli sovereignty. At one of the off-the-record breakout sessions to give
marching orders for Capitol Hill, CUFI's state director for New Jersey,
Pastor Walter Healy, implied that his support for Israel comes from his
desire for a strong American outpost in the Middle East.

Speaking about Israel as a base for the U.S. military, Healy said that in
enlisting support he asks his friends and congregants, "How much does it
cost you to have an aircraft carrier on the Mediterranean that's protecting
the Middle East, and it's the size of New Jersey? It's nothing." The
American "aircraft carrier," of course, is Israel. But Healy does forget to
mention that with reports of U.S. military aid to Israel growing soon to
nearly $3 billion, and with the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs
estimating the total aid to Israel from 1949 to 1997 at $84 billion, the
cost can hardly be stated as nothing.

What is most troubling is that the morning before Hagee's declaration of
Israel's decision-making power, at the opening session of the conference
closed to the press, Hagee declared unequivocally, with the same booming
voice, "Those who divide (the land of Israel) will have a day in judgment."
So in short, Israelis can decide for themselves about a two-state solution,
but if they choose wrong by Hagee, they will go to hell. In Hagee's view,
there seems to be the potential for an awful lot of the Jews that he loves
so to go to hell.

I asked a member of the PR team from 5W Public Relations about the apparent
contradictions of the public and private statements, and they were explained
as "a difference between core theological belief and pragmatic political
considerations." But in Hagee's comments directed at the media during his
Night to Honor Israel speech, he stated simply that the media did not
understand the depth of his belief. "For us," Hagee said, "there are only
two ways to live: The Bible way and the wrong way. Christians United for
Israel is a Bible-based organization now, tomorrow and forever, without
apology to anyone for anything."

In Hagee's world of religious exclusiveness, though, the Jews get off
relatively lightly. The real scorn is reserved for the Muslim enemies of
Israel, including, predictably, Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran. With the door
slammed shut on the two-state solution, most of the attention at the CUFI
conference was focused on Iran and the threat posed by an alleged Iranian
pursuit of nuclear weapons. But many incendiary statements were also made
about Muslims in general.

Vernon Melvin, after confirming "it was God's will to drive the Jews into
Israel by using the evil of Hitler," went on to say that the attacks of
Sept. 11, 2001, were also God's will. "After you kill 50 million children in
abortion," Melvin told me, "I don't see how God can be as merciless to us as
he is today. It was certainly God's will." Of the perpetrators of the
attack, Melvin was at least a little less sure of their ideologies: "It was
carried out by terrorist Islamofascists, which I guess are the same things
as Muslims. According to them, we are sinners and should be killed. And one
can hardly argue about that, but, by God's grace, we're still here."

The statement that Muslims have a religious mandate to kill non-Muslims is
not new to Hagee's followers. In a 2006 interview with National Public
Radio's Terry Gross, Hagee had no problem walking back a qualifier of
"radical" Islam and making generalizations about the violence of Islam at
large:

Terry Gross: If you use the Bible as the basis for policy, is there any
room for compromise? And if you use the Bible as the basis for policy,
should Muslims use the Quran as the basis for their policy, and then again,
what possible basis is there for compromise at that point?

John Hagee: There is really no room for compromise between radical
Islam --

Gross: I'm not talking about radical Islam. I'm just talking about Islam
in general.

Hagee: Well Islam in general -- those who live by the Quran have a
scriptural mandate to kill Christians and Jews.

On the official panels, some of the speakers took more moderate views than
that. Neoconservative and noted Islamophobe Daniel Pipes said he estimates
that 10 to 15 percent of Muslims espouse a "radical utopian ideology" that
is commonly called Islamofascism by the right. But not to be outdone, former
Sen. Rick Santorum dissented from Pipes' view. A favorite of the religious
right for his attacks on gay marriage and abortion in such famous exchanges
as his comparison of gay marriage to "man on dog" marriage in an AP
interview and his questioning of Sen. Barbara Boxer on the Senate floor on
whether or not it is OK to kill a baby if its toe is still inside the
mother's "vaginal orifice," Santorum argued that radical Muslim ideology is
not outside of mainstream Islam.

"It's not a small number. OK? It's not a fringe. It's a sizable group of
people that hold these views," he told an audience that gave him several
standing ovations during the "Radical Islam: In Their Own Words" breakout
session. "(Pipes' notion of 'moderate' Islam) is the exception, I would
argue, of what traditional Islam is doing."

Santorum, whose ability to study Islam in its "own words" is highly dubious
(Pipes and the other panelist, Walid Phares, both speak Arabic), went on to
question whether Muslims are even capable of moral decisions: "You have to
do five things to be a good Muslim. You have to fast, you have to do the
Hajj, you have to give alms to the poor, you have to say the Shahaadah --
which is your proclamation of faith -- and you have to pray five times a
day. Anything about good and evil in there? Anything about sin? Right or
wrong?"

The most entertaining moments, and veering perhaps the most off message,
came in the Middle East briefing. It was basically an
ass-smoke-blowing-circle between Brog, Bill Kristol (the editor of the
neoconservative Weekly Standard), religious right leader Gary Bauer, Rep.
Engel, and evangelical Congressman Mike Pence, R-Ind. Kristol, after being
introduced as the great arguer of conservative causes, spent the first 10
minutes of his speech telling the crowd how he advised Dan Quayle to attack
the show "Murphy Brown" in 1992 and how he voted for a Communist in
Cambridge, Mass., and talking about his annual beach trips with Bauer. When
asked by the panel chair, Brog, Kristol wouldn't confirm that Bauer wears
swimming trunks in the ocean, only offering, "What happens at the beach
stays at the beach."

But as far off-message as the panelists got during their tirades about
Muslims, Iran, the special relationship between the United States and
Israel, and even beach vacations, CUFI was sure to keep the messages of its
followers on point as they ventured to Capitol Hill on Wednesday. Every
participant was issued a 15-page packet that outlined support for sustained
military aid to Israel, increased sanctions on Iran, support for the
divestment campaign against Iran, and exactly where each member of Congress
stood on each issue. The directions were as simple as Ikea's: 1) stick to
the talking points, 2) don't answer any questions beyond them, 3) don't talk
to the press, and 4) don't engage any opposition views.

The first two points were rather simply explained by Joel James, a
development manager for Eagles' Wings Ministries, in the regional breakout
sessions. "Two years ago," he told the Region 10 (Mid-Atlantic and North
East states) attendees, "something happened (on Capitol Hill) that was
embarrassing to CUFI and the body of Christ." Hagee's PR people have only
been with him for the 2007 and 2008 summits and were unaware of the
incident, as were participants I asked about it. But considering my
interviews with conference attendees, it's not hard to imagine that some of
the "core theological beliefs" that Hagee followers are so eager to discuss
were unsettling to some of the politicians in Congress and their staffs.

In addition to telling attendees to disregard criticisms of and accusations
about Hagee, Brog also told the participants to avoid the media because
"some in the media have disrespect for people of faith," and that discussing
issues with protesters was useless because "they hate us and everything we
stand for." This hardly seems like the modus operandi of an organization
that is constantly on the defense and begs for absolution by its ideas to be
made available to the public. Instead, it comes off like CUFI and Hagee have
something to hide. From observing both the public and private faces of CUFI
at the Washington-Israel Summit, I would venture to say that what they're
hiding is a fundamentalist, apocalyptic, Christian right ideology that does
not have high regard for most of the world's people and instead condemns
most of them -- even those it claims to love and defend -- to hell.