Friday, May 23, 2008

Misplaced Jewish Mistrust of Obama - They Need to Look at McCain Supporters

While I understand that the support of Israel is an important issue to many Jewish voters, I truly cannot understand why some Jews are afraid of Obama's commitment to Israel. The New York Times, in fact has an article on this matter. Unfortunately, many of these skeptics are probably falling for the crazy untruths that are being circulating on the Internet by far right groups. Personally, I believe they have much more to worry about from John McCain who, although he is now trying to distance himself from them, has snuggled up to Christianist nutcases who see Israel solely as a means of starting Armageddon which would leave all but a small percentage of Jews slaughtered.
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As I have told many of my Jewish friends, with friends like Messrs. Hagee, Rod Parsley, Pat Robertson, who needs an enemy? People need to remember that McCain sought these people out and wanted their endorsements. Hagee's recently revealed commments on Hitler and the Nazis shows all too clearly that these folks in actuality care nothing about Jews or Israel. From my exposure to the far right base in the GOP, Hagee's views are anything but unique - he merely is foolish enough to have said them publicly and on video tape. For those who somehow missed it, here's what Hagee had to say:
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Jews are not "spiritually alive". . . Hitler and the Nazis were sent by God, to chase Jews back to the land of Israel. Because that's where God intends them to be. So, the Holocaust was a gruesomely inefficient system of divine "persuasion", and Hitler and the Nazis were doing "God's work".
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And the Bible says - Jeremiah righty? - “they shall hunt them from every mountain and from every hill and out of the holes of the rocks”, meaning: there's no place to hide. And that will be offensive to some people. Well, dear heart, be offended: I didn't write it. Jeremiah wrote it. It was the truth and it is the truth. How did it happen? Because God allowed it to happen. Why did it happen? Because God said, “my top priority for the Jewish people is to get them to come BACK to the land of Israel”. Today Israel is back in the land and they are at Ezekiel 37 and 8. They are physically alive but they're not spiritually alive. Now how is God going to cause the Jewish people to come SPIRITUALLY alive and say, “the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, He is God”?"
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As indicated by Hagee himself, to back up this lunacy, Hagee cites Jeremiah 16, and implies that God caused the Holocaust because of Jewish "iniquity" and "sin", and for filling God's "inheritance with the carcasses of their detestable and abominable idols." Moreover, as Bruce Wilson at Talk to Action reports:
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Two days ago I discovered that, according to John Hagee's own written words in Hagee's "Prophecy Study Bible", members of John Hagee's Christians United For Israel routinely sing, at their "Night To Honor Israel" events, a joyful-sounding song which, in scriptural terms, refers to Israel's coming, expected invasion and devastation. Building on my last discovery, of a John Hagee sermon in which John Hagee claims God sent Hitler and the Nazis, to chase Europe's Jews towards Palestine, and that Jews have dead (or non-living, inert) souls (see YouTube video towards the end of this post), this new finding helps solidify my case that Pastor John Hagee, who also has given a sermon espousing a crypto anti-Semitic conspiracy theory - of "international financial power brokers based in Europe", is an anti-Semite of the first magnitude.

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