"Featured speakers will include Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell and House Republican Leader John Boehner - as well as Vice President Dick Cheney and Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipni Livni....

This year's Policy Conference will include all of the elements that traditionally make the event a can't-miss experience for anyone committed to ensuring the future of the U.S.-Israel relationship. Key American and Israeli elected officials and thinkers will address plenary sessions, and the top leadership of Congress will be on hand for the Gala Banquet -- a one-of-a-kind celebration which annually draws half of the Senate and a third of the House." - AIPAC descriptions of 3-day Washington DC convention

Pastor John Hagee, founder of Christians United For Israel, a new and nominally "pro-Israel" American national political lobbying group, has built a career on aggressive support for hard right to fringe right Israeli politics and is now making inroads towards convincing the mainstream American Jewish community that he and CUFI are the best tactical allies Jews and Israel can expect to find.

This Sunday, March 11th, Pastor John Hagee will make an evening address at a the American-Israel lobby AIPAC's star-studded yearly convention which AIPAC's website says may be attended by a substantial fraction of the US Congress and Senate. When not lobbying Washington politicians John Hagee can also be found wearing a Jewish prayer shawl and preaching from a white and blue throne (for the colors of the Israeli flag) to his 20,000 church members, organized into 12 "tribes" named after the original 12 Tribes of Israel, at Hagee's San Antonio, Texas based megachurch.

But a close analysis of Pastor John Hagee's views seems to indicate that Pastor Hagee holds beliefs about liberal Jews that mirror sentiments to be found on conspiratorial websites promoting the debunked Protocols Of The Elders Of Zion and also the beliefs of the KKK and American Neo-Nazi groups such as Christian Identity. John Hagee also blames the Holocaust on Jews themselves and states that Nazi persecution of Jews was God's way of driving Jews to Israel, seems to blame Jews for the death of Jesus Christ, holds that Jews cannot get into heaven, calls liberal Jews "poisoned" and "spiritually blind", believes that the preemptive nuclear attack on Iran that he advocates will lead to a Mideast conflict that will kill most Jews in Israel and perhaps also lead to the Nuclear destruction of the East and West coasts of the United States of America, and meets  frequently with top leaders of the GOP and with contenders for the 2008 Republican presidential nomination.

"In this struggle, we are not alone; for the battle is but a renewal of ancient hostilities between the Kingdom of Jesus Christ and the Kingdom of Satan... loyal followers of Jesus Christ who make up the Church of Christ have every reason to believe that they are not alone as atheistic Communism launches its bitter attack against the Church, Christ, and God Himself" - Billy James Hargis, "The Far Left", 1964

"Our children are being taught a religion which is the rival and opposite of Christianity. It is called Secular Humanism and it is permeating every inch of the American fabric." - KKK Website, 2007

"It is a war of light vs. darkness, of Christ vs. antichrist, the Word of God vs. secular humanism. There will be a winner and a loser! To the winner go our children and our grandchildren. There is no compromise with the enemy. There is no neutrality in this war!" - Pastor John Hagee, 2006

Many on the American Christian right feel that an alleged "satanic", "secular humanist" conspiracy has sought for decades to undermine traditional American morality and drive "God" from public life. When CUFI Founder John Hagee addresses a star-studded audience this Sunday evening at this year's American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) conference, this will represent a major advance towards the mainstreaming of crypto-antisemitic conspiracy theories alleging a vast, "satanic secular humanist" conspiracy against Christianity and America; if Pastor John Hagee can write, in a bestselling book that has sold over 1.1 million copies, that anti-Semitism and the Holocaust are the Jews' fault and that Nazis were doing God's work, does anti-Semitism carry much stigma anymore ? What can be said about the fact that, as the founder and representative of CUFI, a lobby that advocates for foreign policy measures he thinks may kill most Jews on Earth, Pastor John Hagee will be addressing what is widely cast as the premier "Pro-Israel" political lobby in America ?

Are such attitudes now acceptable to organizations entrusted with the ongoing battle against anti-Semitism such as the Anti Defamation League, whose head Abraham Foxman told The Jewish Week that "there is a role" for Pastor John Hagee at the AIPAC summit because of Hagee's support for Israel ? Most reports on CUFI fail to go into the nature of that support, and almost none, it would seem, examine the stated and written beliefs of Pastor Hagee and CUFI's executive board in any detail at all.

In an ongoing series here on Talk To Action, I've written about the underlying structural anti-Semitism (see installments 4, 3, 2, 1) inherent among American Christian Zionist views which support a "strong" Israel, oppose all Israel peace negotiations with Palestinians that would make land concessions, rhetorically demonize and antagonize the Muslim world, label Islam as a "wicked" religion and slander Mohammed, and hope that an American or Israeli attack on Iran will touch off a widespread conflict leading both to the Rapture and to the death of most Israeli Jews or even most Jews worldwide.

As AIPAC's website describes the Sunday evening event CUFI founder Pastor John Hagee will be speaking at : "Two eloquent voices from diverse backgrounds explore the history of U.S. involvement in the Middle East and how Americans from all faiths can find common cause in supporting Israel.". The yearly conference, to say the least, influential, as noted by the website: "Key American and Israeli elected officials and thinkers will address plenary sessions, and the top leadership of Congress will be on hand for the Gala Banquet -- a one-of-a-kind celebration which annually draws half of the Senate and a third of the House."

Despite the extremely high profile nature of the AIPAC event, almost no media whatsoever have examined the controversial nature of Pastor Hagee's beliefs. The Jewish Week, almost singular among US media, reported on March 9th:

Growing ties between pro-Israel forces and a controversial, hardline "Christian Zionist" movement will move into the national spotlight... One keynoter at the event, which annually draws hundreds of lawmakers, administration officials, diplomats and political hopefuls, will be Pastor John Hagee, founder of Christians United for Israel (CUFI), author of several books about biblical prophecy and an opponent of new territorial concessions to the Palestinians on biblical grounds.... Rev. Hagee, who will speak at a Sunday plenary, was also a leading backer of a controversial Christian broadcast venture in Israel that critics charge sought to convert Jews.

Notably, The Jewish Week did not mention anything about what the actual substance of John Hagee's religious and prophetic beliefs might be.

In a 1998 study written for the Institute For First Amendment Studies entitled Anti-Semitism: Its prevalence within the Christian right, Skipp Porteous writes:

While some of the prejudice and hostility toward Jews is concealed, much is blatant. Stereotyping of Jews is widespread; and anti-Semitism in the form of aggressive missionary activity threatens the very existence of Judaism....

So-called "humanism" is under attack by the Religious Right in schools and other institutions across the country. Condemnation of humanism has anti-Semitic roots. Though seldom mentioned, Christian Right leaders link humanism with Judaism, saying "Judaism grew out of the rejection of Jesus Christ and steadily became humanism."...

It is important to note that on the few occasions conservative Christian leaders praise Jews, the praise is usually limited to certain ultra-conservative Jews...

Writing from a website that identifies with the Christian Identity movement illustrates Porteus' point about the linking of humanism with anti-Semitism. In a work entitled "Why We Hate The Jews", Pastor Mark Downey writes :

The Babylonian Talmud is the most vehemently hateful literature in the world, directed against Jesus Christ and Christianity, and therefore, viciously at war against the true Israel of God ... the White Race. Besides this demented preoccupation with the destruction of racially pure Christians, the jewish religion (or criminal code) is obsessed with the most pornographic perversions known to man.....

Most hyphenated judeo-Christians believe that the God of judaism is the same monotheistic God of Christianity and the Old Testament. Double-talk is the part and parcel of Talmudic judaism, which Christ called the "Synagogue of Satan"....

This is your basic run of the mill atheism and foundation for all pagan pantheisms. It's also called 'dialectical materialism', and 'secular humanism'.

Pastor John Hagee does not support Jews in general but, rather, the state of Israel and also certain Jews whose social and political views are in accord with Hagee's own beliefs. In a July 22, 2006 interview with the San Antonio Express News, Hagee delineated his position:

[interviewer] The Jewish community's response to your work has been mixed -- from supportive to dubious to dismissive. To what do you attribute this?

[John Hagee] I think if I could put a dividing line, the Orthodox and Conservatives who have a Torah appreciation give us wholehearted support. The rest [of Jews] who are not driven by the Word of God have a liberal agenda.

And the liberal agenda is they are pro-abortion. They're pro-homosexual. They're pro-gay marriage -- they want men to marry men and women to marry women -- and their difference with me is not really what I'm doing with Israel. Their hostility to me is poisoned by their liberalism. They take a liberal position that poisons their view of what we could be doing for Israel. [emphasis mine]

Views such as Mark Downey's or John Hagee's are no longer fringe, as many on the US left would like to believe. Indeed, prominent Christian Zionists such as the vastly influential Tim LaHaye, in his "Left Behind" book series that has sold over 60 million copies so far and been translated into major movies even an interactive video game, now expound close to an unreconstructed version of the sorts of ideologies characteristic of Billy James Hargis' "Christian Crusade" and The John Birch Society.... to virtually no repercussion. As Talk To Action contributor and expert on Apocalyptic Christian Dispensationalist thought, Political Research Associate's Senior Analyst Chip Berlet writes:

When White supremacists post websites demonizing Jews and gay people, they are condemned for the hatemongers they are.

When leaders of the armed citizens militias and their allies in the Patriot Movement in the 1990s urged their followers to form anti-government underground cells and battle global cooperation and the United Nations, they were condemned as dangerous guerrillas spreading divisive conspiracy theories.

When Timothy LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins write the Left Behind series of novels containing the same type of bigotry, they sell 70 million books and are interviewed by clueless journalists who use a double standard by not confronting LaHaye and Jenkins for spreading hate and conspiracism as well as promoting religious violence as a heroic duty.

Tim LaHaye, as Berlet illustrates in his multi-part Talk To Action expose' on the Apocalyptic ideology behind Tim LaHaye's and Jerry Jenkins' "Left Behind" series, believes in a hundreds of years old satanic, Illuminatist conspiracy:

I myself have been a forty-five year student of the satanically-inspired, centuries-old conspiracy to use government, education, and media to destroy every vestige of Christianity within our society and establish a new world order. Having read at least fifty books on the Illuminati, I am convinced that it exists and can be blamed for many of man's inhumane actions against his fellow man during the past two hundred years (Rapture (Under Attack) by Tim LaHaye, 1992, p. 138).

John Hagee's views are quite similar to LaHaye's. In a September 18, 2006 "Fresh Air" interview with Terry Gross, Hagee called liberal Jews "poisoned" for being "pro-gay marriage" and "pro-abortion". What else does Mr. Hagee think about people who hold such positions ? As illustrated below, Hagee appears to place liberals, and liberal Jews, squarely within the camp of an alleged "satanic", "secular humanist" conspiracy

In an April 19, 2005 decision, an Ontario Regional Panel for the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council issued the following judgment in response to complaints about a 2004 broadcast of one of John Hagee's sermons:

The Canadian Broadcast Standards Council has found that CITS-TV's September 17, 2004 broadcast of the episode of John Hagee Today breached the Human Rights and Religious Programming provisions of the CAB Code of Ethics.  By airing abusive or unduly discriminatory comments about gays and lesbians...

What was so offensive about Hagee's sermon ? Let's take a look Hagee began :

If you don't think that a secular humanist teacher doesn't see your child as a ward of the state, listen to this.....

Examples of alleged promotion of homosexuality in schools followed, and then Pastor Hagee stated the following:

When you invite death into your school, when you invite it into your home, when you invite it into your marriage, when you invite it into your mind, it will take you over!  Because the Bible teaches that death is a spirit.  Satan leads the culture of death.  Abortion is about death.  Suicide is about death.  Sexual diseases produce death.  Drugs, with all of their beautiful names of ecstasy and so forth, produce death.  Rock music with the lyrics of death and suicide and rape and rebellion against all authority is nothing more than the music of the Prince of Darkness.  Homosexual marriage is really the death of a society.  No children can be born.  There is a zero birthrate.  It is the death of tomorrow.  Homosexuals cannot re, reproduce so they recruit your children!....

Consider for just a moment how your children are being attacked through sex education.  Your child is being bombarded in public schools through Planned Parenthood, which is really nothing but a front for the abortion clinics of America, and something called SIECUS, which is an acronym for Sexual Information and Education Council of the United States.  This is a very powerful lobby in Washington, feverishly lobbying Congress to teach every child what they call [Hagee makes quotation marks with his fingers] safe sex training which is nothing but a condom-based education curriculum.  Which is not supported by the majority of America's students.  A recent Zogby poll reports that parents want abstinence education by a margin of five to one.  Yet the homosexual lobby with SIECUS and the NEA, uh, are pushing this curriculum....

Let me give you the gay agenda for public schools:  one, start brain-washing your children from day one..... [emphasis mine]

To put the following quotes into perspective, consider the following, from a piece by Mrs. Rachel Pendergraft, for the Arkansas "Knights Party USA" website that unabashedly celebrates the Ku Klux Klan to the point of advertising porcelain KKK figurines:

"Our children are being taught a religion which is the rival and opposite of Christianity. It is called Secular Humanism and it is permeating every inch of the American fabric."

Could such statements Pastor Hagee, as cited above, possibly have been an aberration ? That's very unlikely. Consider the following example of Hagee's writing, from the July/August 2004 issue of Hagee's Cornerstone Ministries church magazine:

In a piece entitled "The Five Principles Of Victory", Hagee begins with this introduction :

D-Day is a moment in time that changed history
and defined a generation. Victory is what D-Day achieved, and victory is what we, as Christians, should achieve in our own lives....

Sixty years ago the greatest military invasion in the history of the world was in progress, it was D-Day. Under the command of General Dwight D. Eisenhower, the Allies decided to attack Adolph Hitler, by crossing the English Channel and invading France. Eisenhower's plan for the D-Day invasion called for five divisions (150,000 men) to invade along a front - 50 miles wide. It was massive! D-Day was the 24 hours that saved the world! Had Ike's five divisions failed, the war could have easily been lost and the world, as we know it, would be vastly different.

That said, John Hagee begins in earnest:

Imagine... what if that mission had failed? Just think, Hitler's demonic plot [note: Hagee has also written that Hitler and the Nazis were doing "God's work" to drive Jews to Israel] to exterminate the Jews would have no one to stop him! The French, who so vigorously protested America's decision to liberate Iraq, would be goose-stepping and speaking German! The flag flying over Washington D.C. could now very well be a Swastika!

The "war" Hagee refers to seems to be an American civil war:

Now America is on the brink of birthing Sodom and
Gomorrah as Federal Judges approve of "same sex marriages"
without letting the American people vote on it! We, as a nation
must call upon the name of the Lord once again. We must
ask for forgiveness and Take America Back!....

In the words of Winston Churchill to Adolph Hitler, "we demand absolute surrender!" He would settle for nothing less than total victory! Let us learn that lesson from America's greatest generation. America should never send her troops into battle without the clear objective of total victory. Today the Church of Jesus Christ is in a culture war for the soul of this nation. It is a war of light vs. darkness, of Christ vs. antichrist, the Word of God vs. secular humanism. There will be a winner and a loser! To the winner go our children and our grandchildren. There is no compromise with the enemy. There is no neutrality in this war!...

The Allies came together in unity to crush the Axis power - why can't the church do that? We are in a culture war for America. The homosexuals are out of the closet - why can't the church of Jesus Christ get out of the closet? The A.C.L.U. is organized, funded and fighting day and night for "freedom from religion - no freedom of religion." Terrorist cells around the world are willing to strap bombs around their bodies to advance their cause. They are all unified! This is a call to arms to every Bible Believer in America... [ emphasis mine ]

Later in the same issue of the Cornerstone Church/John Hagee Ministries magazine, Hagee also writes:

When your child goes to public school they hear the theology of "secular humanism." They are blasted with a perpetual anti-Christian message and environment that is nothing less than an intellectual sewer for your child. Just a few
weeks ago the Southern Baptist convention passed a motion asking parents not to send their children to public school!

Secular humanism teaches that God does not exist and that man is self-sufficient. You are god! There is no absolute right and no absolute wrong. Many people ignorantly think "secular" means neutral. Wrong! Secular humanism is a worldwide religion and its goal is to expel every other faith!

In a multi part series that heavily references the Protocols Of The Elders Of Zion, Brig. Gen. Gordon "Jack" Mohr, C.P.D.L. draws out these themes quite crisply in part 6 of  "The Satanic Counterfeit":

This phase of the PROTOCOLS went into effect in America, when John Dewey, the father of the modern education movement, began to inculcate American education with the Jewish-led, Secular Humanist Movement.

This Satanic teaching abandons 2,000 years of Western Christian civilization and launches a vicious attack against everything have been taught that was dear and sacred. If vou want to understand Secular Humanism read the Jewish Talmud then think of every evil which is opposed to Christianity and you will come close to the correct answer.

The philosophy of Secular Humanism is relatively simple. There are no absolutes. s. Everything you do depends on the situation. (This has come to be known as "Situation Ethics.") and your environment. In the end, you are not responsible to any "higher power," such as God, for you are not to blame for your evil actions, they are caused by blind forces over which you have no control. [ emphasis mine ]