I love creative reporting. After a sermon surfaced from Pastor John Hagee in which he said that Jews are not “spiritually alive” and that Hitler was merely a “hunter” who responded to their weakness, Mother Jones’s Justin Elliott wanted to know if American Jewish Zionists would condemn him. For Hagee is the founder of Christians United For Israel, a vital outrigger of the Israel lobby.
Elliott:
Here’s the question I set out to answer last week: would the most prominent Jewish and “pro-Israel” groups in the country finally take Hagee to task for his outrageous comments and for seeing Jews primarily in terms of their role in his eschatology? [I think that means Christian end-times doctrine]
The short answer is no. I submitted requests for comment about Hagee and his sermon to three organizations: the American Jewish Committee,
the Anti-Defamation League, and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.
But after this sermon, even John McCain pronounced it “crazy” and distanced himself from Hagee. Now read the way the AJC’s Rabbi Greenebaum writhes, refusing to criticize Hagee:
“I guess I understand that he was trying to say that people [Hitler?] can be an instrument of God’s will, but in the throes of the passion of giving the sermon, perhaps he didn’t stop and think what that meant.”…. [Concludes Elliott:] The enduring lesson here is that you can say almost whatever you want about Jews or the Holocaust, as long as you’re perceived as a supporter of Israel.
And if you’re a gentile who criticizes Israel, even in the soberest terms, from Jimmy Carter to Walt and Mearsheimer, you are an antisemite. Now you know the rules. O look on these works and despair: What has Zionism done to American Jewry?
