At Powerline, Joel Mowbray (author of "the bum rap against John Hagee") reports that AIPAC delegates in Washington this week were loving Hagee in absentia. Mowbray writes that at the break-out session featuring Christians United for Israel's Executive Director David Brog (which, like other political organizing sessions was officially closed to the press), Hagee got a standing ovation:
At this week's AIPAC conference, one of the best-attended breakout sessions was on Christian Zionists. On the three-person panel was David Brog, executive director of Rev. John Hagee's Christians United for Israel. When Brog started his talk by mentioning Hagee's name, the overflow audience stopped him with a standing ovation.Given the "Hitler" sermon that Hagee reportedly delivered a decade ago caused John McCain to duck for cover, the natural assumption would be that Hagee's deputy would be greeted by reactions ranging from ambivalence to anger. As it happens, I could detect neither. ...
It will obviously be a long time before the mainstream media let the public forget about Hagee's much-ballyhooed "Hitler" sermon, but it seems like many in the Jewish community already have.
The Forward, which also reports "a right turn" for AIPAC's action agenda, confirms the Hagee adulation, adding the previously unreported tidbit that Hagee had been invited to speak at this year's AIPAC conference "but could not attend due to his busy schedule."
In an interview this week, David Saperstein, Director of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, elaborated to me on a widespread reluctance among Jewish leaders to completely disassociate themselves from Hagee. Describing the feelings of Reform rabbis and leaders as "paradoxical," Saperstein said that on the one hand, they have an "appreciation of [Hagee's] financial, cultural, and political support for Israel in broadest sense," but are simultaneously experiencing "alarming concern about his vision of the world, comments about gays, Catholics, Katrina, Muslims, the Holocaust." Saperstein added that the "repugnance" Jews feel towards Hagee's views has "only intensified in the past month or two," but that "we often find common ground with groups whose views . . . are deeply troubling to us or that we are deeply opposed to."
Here the question remains: What is that common ground, exactly? That Hagee believes that the Bible foretells a world-ending showdown that will swallow a Muslim holy site, decimate an army of Arabs, and lead the Christianization of the Middle East?
"There may come a point where growing numbers of people who say, let him do what he does with Israel, but I won't have anything to do with him," said Saperstein, "but that is not where the community is now."
What exactly would it take for that to happen?
--Sarah Posner
