McCain Rejects Hagee Endorsement Posted by: Dale Franks
on Thursday, May 22, 2008
John McCain has repudiated the endorsement of fundamentalist minister Jon Hagee. Hagee, for his part, has also withdrawn the endorsement.
This withdrawal comes in response to the revelation of the following comments by Rev. Hagee—who is, by the way, a well-known and aggressive supporter of the State of Israel—in a sermon:
Going in and out of biblical verse, Hagee preached: "'And they the hunters should hunt them,' that will be the Jews. 'From every mountain and from every hill and from out of the holes of the rocks.' If that doesn't describe what Hitler did in the holocaust you can't see that."
He goes on: "Theodore Hertzel is the father of Zionism. He was a Jew who at the turn of the 19th century said, this land is our land, God wants us to live there. So he went to the Jews of Europe and said 'I want you to come and join me in the land of Israel.' So few went that Hertzel went into depression. Those who came founded Israel; those who did not went through the hell of the holocaust.
"Then god sent a hunter. A hunter is someone with a gun and he forces you. Hitler was a hunter. And the Bible says — Jeremiah writing — 'They shall hunt them from every mountain and from every hill and from the holes of the rocks,' meaning there's no place to hide. And that might be offensive to some people but don't let your 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."
Frankly, I'm not sure why this should be so controversial. Leaving aside the unprovable theological content, the essential truth is that it was, in fact, the Holocaust that led directly to the founding of the state of Israel. Despite the decades-old Balfour Declaration, practically no progress had been made in creating an independent Israeli state prior to World War II, mainly as a result of the increasing importance of creating soothing relationships with the Arabs who were sitting on vast reserves of increasingly important petroleum.
It was public sympathy in the aftermath of the horrors suffered by Jews during the Holocaust, accompanied by the migration of the survivors to the Palestinian Mandate territory, that allowed the creation of Israel. I find it highly doubtful that Israel would have been created without the Holocaust.
That doesn't make the Holocaust a good thing, but it is a matter of fact that it was the primary reason that Israel was able to be founded. The sympathy for the Jews suffering, for that brief period of time, outweighed the opposing concern to placate the Arabs, in order to maintain access to their petroleum.
In any event, McCain's rejection of the Hagee endorsement did contain a suitable dig at Barack Obama.
Obviously, I find these remarks and others deeply offensive and indefensible, and I repudiate them. I did not know of them before Reverend Hagee's endorsement, and I feel I must reject his endorsement as well. I have said I do not believe Sen. Obama shares Reverend Wright's extreme views. But let me also be clear, Reverend Hagee was not and is not my pastor or spiritual adviser, and I did not attend his church for twenty years. I have denounced statements he made immediately upon learning of them, as I do again today.
There are those, of course, who refuse to acknowledge the significance of membership in a church for decades.
This illustrates how dumbed down the level of political debate is today.
Count how many words are in the accusations like," Haggee said Hitler helped the Jews create Israel" or whatever nonsense they are spewing.
Count how many words are in the full context of the sermon.
Whether one agrees with his conclusions or not, the several hundreds words in context come out as a theological food fight. The 15 words or less come out as the ranting of a loon.
Interesting how few words make a man a lunatic and how many words make a man reasonable - the difference is quantifiable. We could call it the 250 word gap. Which in the spoken word is the difference between one minute and a few seconds.
Are the print and electronic media under so much time pressure and space constrained that they can’t make up this gap?
Are the print and electronic media under so much time pressure and space constrained that they can’t make up this gap?
Yes. But sitting here in mid-2008, with a news media that still obstinately refuses to link to their primary sources when they are online offends me beyond belief, now that I think about it. I understood it in 1996. I understood it even in 2000, or 2003. Maybe I even understood it in 2005. But now? In the YouTube era? It is simply inexcusable that no major news reporting agency routinely links to primary sources, transcripts, full recordings of interviews and press conferences, all raw footage shot by the reporting crew, referenced web pages, etc. Inexcusable.
The controversial thing Hagee said wasn’t in the above quote, it was directly following it.
He said that Jews were not spiritually alive.
Depending on your interpretation of what that means, it could either be correct preaching or horrible antisemitic ranting. The fact is that no matter what, you don’t say that Jews "aren’t alive" in any way, shape or form and get away with it politically. You don’t get away with saying that for ANY group.
As for McCain rejecting the endorsement, good for him.
The controversial thing Hagee said wasn’t in the above quote, it was directly following it.
He said that Jews were not spiritually alive.
That’s nonsense. Do a Google News search for ’Hagee Hitler’ and ’Hagee "Spiritually Alive"’. The latter search turns up precisely two results, only one of which is from the past week, while the former turns up several pages worth of results.
Clearly it is the Hitler comments that are controversial, and that everyone is focusing on. The theological argument about whether Jews are spiritually alive has hardly even been noticed, except for 1 ABC News Story yesterday, and an obscure "Israel news" web site a week ago.
I think Isreal would have eventually declared independence from Britain, even if WWII was avoided. The writing was on the wall in the 1920s. Thats why the Muslim Brotherhood was founded.
