Neo-Cons Silent on Hagee Repudiation by McCain

[laststeamtrain]

Neo-Cons Silent on Hagee Repudiation by McCain
Jim Lobe

One would have expected at least some debate among neo-conservatives about last week’s repudiation of Christian Zionist Rev. John Hagee by Sen. John McCain, but the silence to date has been positively deafening. Virtually nothing has appeared in the National Review Online, and nothing at all in Bill’s Kristol’s Weekly or Daily Standard. Most remarkably, Commentary’s hyper-active on-line blog, ‘Contentions’ — which, like the other two publications, has been obsessed with Obama and the Rev. Wright — has simply ignored the event, as if it never happened. Is it because any comment at all is seen as too politically risky? Criticizing McCain for so peremptorily rejecting the man who, after all, was the keynote speaker at last year’s AIPAC convention could undermine his courtship of Jewish voters and funders. Agreement with McCain’s decision, on the other hand, could be taken badly by the Christian Right, a strategic ally of the neo-cons since before the 1980 election campaign.

After all, it was the neo-cons, mainly Irving Kristol and Commentary’s former editor, Norman Podhoretz, who, like the Likud party (whose then-leader, Prime Minister Menahim Begin, gave the late Jerry Falwell his first private jet), saw Christian Zionists as a key political constituency in the U.S. that would mobilize effectively against any inclination by a future U.S. president to pressure Israel to dismantle Jewish settlements on the West Bank or remove Jewish settlers from East Jerusalem as part of a peace deal with the Palestinians. That Christian Zionists like Falwell and Hagee have seen a Greater Israel as simply the necessary instrument for hastening the “Rapture,” the “Second Coming,” and Armageddon (and the annihilation of all the world’s Jews — except for a few thousands who accept Jesus as their savior as depicted in what I consider to be the thoroughly anti-Semitic Left Behind series by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins) was of no consequence. As Kristol wrote in Commentary’s pages in 1982, the same year that Hagee launched his “Nights-to-Honor-Israel” ministry, “Why would it be a problem for us? It is their theology; but it is our Israel.”

In the 26 years since, this “devil’s bargain” between hard-line neo-conservatives and the Christian Right has been embraced by the increasingly neo-conservative and Likudist leadership of the organized American Jewish community, a development highlighted not only by Hagee’s starring role at the AIPAC convention, but also by an astonishing letter to the editor of the New York Times written last month in his defense by no less than seven former chairmen of the community’s most powerful organization, the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations. “Pastor Hagee has been a true friend of Israel for many years,” it said. “ Christians United for Israel is among the strongest supporters of Israel in the United States.”

Now, it’s true that Hagee has raised millions of dollars from his followers on Israel’s (and Jewish settlers’) behalf, but that’s a drop in the bucket compared to the many billions of U.S. taxpayers have provided. And what has been the price of Hagee’s “support?” Pressure on the Israeli and U.S. governments to reject a more conciliatory approach toward the Palestinians, an approach that might actually advance a just and sustainable end to the conflict based on territorial compromise? Pressure on the Israeli government, in particular, to reject any move to halt the West Bank settlement project, let alone to reverse it? This is the point made so eloquently last weekend by Jeffrey Goldberg when he wrote in the Times: “The leadership of the organized American Jewish community has allowed the partisans of settlement to conflate support for the colonization of the West Bank with support for Israel itself.” That is the same leadership, of course, that invited Hagee to speak at the AIPAC convention and that signed the letter defending him...

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http://www.ips.org/blog/jimlobe/?p=149

[opihimoimoi]

1. The Media has been comp'd no end...hence Silence of the Lambs

Hagee is a bad guy...not to be followed/nor listened to