Friday, June 20, 2008

Hagee's non-apology

(Photo of TV preacher, John Hagee)

This from Bruce Wilson at Talk2Action.

John Hagee sent a letter of apology to the Anti-Defamation League last week for a sermon in which he preached that God sent Hitler to drive the Jews to Palestine.

The ADL accepted the apology.

But there's a big problem. The sermon, said Hagee, was "decades old," [it was preached in 1999.] Actually, "the sermon in question," was given between September 24, 2005 and January 1, 2006. And the latter sermon is still sold today on Hagee's website.

Hagee pronounced that "Hitler was an agent sent by God to force Europe's Jews, with persecution and Holocaust, towards Palestine. The allegedly, divinely-mandated real estate red-lining of Jews, claimed Hagee ... is 'God's top priority.'"

So Hagee's "alleged wildly misleading or deceptive apology letter to the ADL resembled in nature a press release that ... muddied the waters. Hagee's letter was sufficiently vague that the Pastor could not be accused, technically, of lying but Hagee's letter to the ADL, citing the wrong sermon, could be seen as an extremely misleading non-apology, especially considering that John Hagee's Ministries still sells the three sermon set, 'Countdown to Crisis," which contains the late 2005 sermon in which Hagee made the controversial 'God sent Hitler' claim."

Unfortunately, as Mr. Wilson says, "a number of media outlets picked up the story ... [including] Haaretz and the New York Times, [both of which] declared Pastor Hagee had truly apologized, and over the next few days other Jewish media publications entrained and inadvertently sanctioned the inaccurate account: The Jerusalem Post, the JTA News Service both announced Hagee's 'apology.'"

So it goes in the world of wingnut, anti-Semitic Christian TV preachers who try to use Israel for their own convoluted and mistaken prophetic pronouncements.

Lies, lies, lies! And bomb, bomb, bomb Iran! Armageddon is coming. The Rapture is nigh. God's gonna get you!

Read Mr. Wilson's entire article here. You will also find numerous related articles here.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Although I accept any help Israel can get, I think this man is not honest and I am not sure of his motives. I think he is a phony and is not beyond preaching hate, as he has done against the Catholic Church and some others that he does not approve of. He knows what God wants and does, according to him. I wonder why God had so many people oppress and kill Jews over history. It certainly wasn’t to force them to the Holy Land. Dead people do not travel anywhere. Now that half the Jews of the world are in Israel, wouldn’t you think God would ease up on the oppression and danger?
Bob Poris

Anonymous said...

My wife's Pennsylvanian grandfather died 2 years ago, aged 91. In his later years he'd become a Pentacostal, and we had the great delight to sit through a Pentacostal funeral--which, all the gods forfend, we will never, ever do, again. It included pleas that we all convert, because otherwise we were doomed to hell, and that all the Jews in the audience were urged to go back to their "homeland" so that the prophecy could be fulfilled.

This, from a grinning, bouncing mask of a preacher. During a funeral for a person who was occasionally mentioned.

I'd known these people were in some respects sociopathic, but I never realized they were as vile as that.

Anonymous said...

Was that the Christian thing to do? I hope not.
What would Jesus say? He lived and died as a practising Jew.
Bob Poris

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