The spokesman for American theofascism speaks

By Mel Seesholtz, Ph.D.Online Journal Contributing WriterJul 1, 2008,
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James Dobson has a Ph.D. in child development. He advocates spanking. He was once known as “the Religious Right’s New Kingmaker.” The “king” he helped make was George W. Bush, who tops “the list when American voters pick the worst U.S. President in the last 61 years.”
As a prominent character in the Bush-Rove nightmare, Dobson, according to Brian Elroy McKinley, set "himself up as a religiously-based political dictator bent on getting us to support his personal view of legislated morality.
"And what’s even worse, Dobson goes to great length to use Scripture to support his view, and yet according to Time magazine he doesn’t even have any formal theological training. In short, Dobson, using his position as a radio psychologist, has set himself up as our moral authority and asks us all to blindly follow. [italics added]
His Focus on the Family empire is considerable, although not as powerful as it once was. A mid-September 2007 article from The Denver Channel.com reported, “Focus on the Family is laying off 30 employees and reassigning 15 others, due in part to a drop in projected revenue . . ."
Dobson and his organization have slowly but surely been losing power. Perhaps that’s why the chairman needed to make more outrageous statements to garner public attention and mobilize the sheeple “to blindly follow” and contribute to his cause.
Dobson used his June 24, 2008 radio broadcast to make preposterous claims and attack Barack Obama. The attack was the lead story on CNN.com:
A top U.S. evangelical leader is accusing Sen. Barack Obama of deliberately distorting the Bible and taking a “fruitcake interpretation” of the U.S. Constitution.In comments to be aired on his radio show Tuesday, Focus on the Family founder James Dobson criticizes the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee for comments he made in a June 2006 speech to the liberal Christian group Call to Renewal.In the speech, Obama suggested that it would be impractical to govern based solely on the word of the Bible, noting that some passages suggest slavery is permissible and eating shellfish is disgraceful.“Which passages of scripture should guide our public policy?” Obama asked in the speech. “Should we go with Leviticus, which suggests slavery is OK and that eating shellfish is an abomination? Or we could go with Deuteronomy, which suggests stoning your child if he strays from the faith? Or should we just stick to the Sermon on the Mount? . . . a passage that is so radical that it's doubtful that our Defense Department would survive its application.”
The first and most obvious question is “Why was this the lead story?” As Wayne Besen of Truth Wins Out noted in his reaction to the story, “Dobson is not an ordained minister, nor is he a religious scholar.” Moreover, Dobson is notorious for twisting and misrepresenting legitimate research: "In the past two years, at least seven researchers have accused Dobson of manipulating or cherry picking their results to back his anti-gay teachings. Letters and videos documenting the concerns of these respected professors can be viewed at RespectMyResearch.org.
"The first researcher to step forward was New York University educational psychologist Carol Gilligan, PhD. On Sept. 14, 2006 Gilligan wrote a letter to Dobson that stated: “I was mortified to learn that you had distorted my work this week in a guest column you wrote in Time Magazine . . . What you wrote was not truthful and I ask that you refrain from ever quoting me again and that you apologize for twisting my work.”
"The most recent scientist to claim Double-Talk Dobson distorted his work was University of Minnesota’s Gary Remafedi, M.D., M.P.H. In a letter to Dobson, dated April 28, 2008, he wrote, “I want to draw your attention to a gross misrepresentation of our research at the website of 'Focus on the Family.’”
"Other leading researchers who have taken issue with Dobson's use of their work include: Dr. Kyle Pruett, Professor of child psychiatry, the Yale University School of Medicine; Dr. Robert Spitzer, Professor of Psychiatry, Columbia University; Angela Phillips, Professor, Goldsmiths College in London; Dr. Elizabeth Saewyc, Associate Professor, school of nursing, University of British Columbia; and Dr. Judith Stacy, Professor of Sociology, New York University."
So the question remains: why would mainstream media give Dobson such front-page coverage without qualification? As Mr. Besen said in his follow-up article, "the wonderful 'liberal media' continues to treat this man as if he is a God-fearing grandfather. What disturbs me, is that the one time Dobson was truly exposed as a kook was when he suggested Sponge Bob Square Pants might be gay. This was worthy of laughs, but when some of the brightest minds in the world take Dobson to task for manipulating years of hard work, the media is largely MIA. Isn’t it time the media paint a full and accurate portrait of a man who has had the ear of many presidents? . . . We urge the media to report the facts and allow America to see the real James Dobson."
Dobson’s statements in his broadcast were nothing short of megalomaniacal: “it is undemocratic to try to pass legislation that I find offensive to the Scripture.” It seems Dobson thinks he alone knows THE “correct” interpretation of scripture and, therefore, he and he alone should decide what legislation is acceptable. Does this sound like the ranting of a theofascist dictator to you?
Dobson’s other statements and accusations are thoroughly addressed on a web site sponsored by “a coalition of pastors and other Christians, lead by Pastor Kirbyjon Caldwell.” Appropriately, the site is titled JamesDobsonDoesNotSpeakForMe.com. Dobson’s statements are compared, point by point, with what Mr. Obama actually said in his 2006 speech which, by the way, warned against the dangers of America become a theocratic state.
Rev. Jim Wallis of Sojourners was both astute and eloquent in his reaction to Dobson’s radio broadcast. It was also based on first-hand knowledge. Rev. Wallis was present at the 2006 speech.
Indeed, Sojourners sponsored the event and reported, "The clear purpose of the show was to attack Barack Obama. On the show, Dobson says of himself, “I’m not a reverend. I’m not a minister. I’m not a theologian. I’m not an evangelist. I’m a psychologist. I have a Ph.D. in child development.” Child psychologists don’t insert themselves into partisan politics in the regular way that James Dobson does and has over many years as one of the premier leaders of the Religious Right. He has spoken about how often he talked to Republican leaders – Karl Rove, administration strategists, and even President Bush himself. This year he tried to influence the outcome of the Republican primary by saying he would never vote for John McCain or the Republicans if they nominated him, then reversed himself and said he would vote after all but didn’t say for whom. But why should America care about how a child psychologist votes?
"James Dobson is insinuating himself into this presidential campaign, and his attacks against his fellow Christian, Barack Obama, should be seriously scrutinized. And because the basis for his attack on Obama is the speech the Illinois senator gave at our Sojourners/Call to Renewal event in 2006 (for the record, we also had Democrat Hillary Clinton and Republicans Rick Santorum and Sam Brownback speak that year), I have decided to respond to Dobson’s attacks. In most every case they are themselves clear distortions of what Obama said in that speech. I was there for the speech; Dobson was not."
In a missive dated “June 2008” and titled “Judicial Tyranny and California Lunacy,” Dobson demonstrated once again how he distorts facts, cherry-picks the Bible, relies on scare tactics, name-calling and irrationalities. For someone who claims to be a defender of and believer in the Bible, Dr. Dobson seems completely ignorant of Romans 13:1-2, NIV: "Everyone must submit himself to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established. The authorities that exist have been established by God. Consequently, he who rebels against the authority is rebelling against what God has instituted, and those who do so will bring judgment on themselves."
The duly elected and/or appointed judges -- the judicial arm of the “governing authorities” -- who dared render a decision contrary to his wishes, Dobson calls “imperious courts,” “judicial tyranny,” “powermongers [sic] in black robes,” “judicial tyrants.” It would seem Dobson deserves nothing but condemnation, according to the Bible that is.
Aside from name-calling, in “Judicial Tyranny and California Lunacy” Dobson railed against two rulings by California courts: “The first of these unfortunate decisions was issued by the Los Angeles-based Second District Court of Appeal, which declared it illegal for parents without teaching licenses to home school their own flesh and blood.”
Teachers are professionals and as such they have had extensive training not only in pedagogy but in the subject matter they teach. They’ve had to pass certification examinations and be licensed by professional boards. To be sure, America’s public education system has its problems, but how many home-schooling parents have pedagogical training plus academic training and expertise in ALL the various subjects they must teach? Dobson favors home-schooling not because it aids in a child’s social, emotional and intellectual development, but because it affords a means for some to indoctrinate children into the “biblical worldview,” which includes such “facts” as the earth is about 6,000 years old, Adam and Eve were real people, and dinosaurs played with human children in Eden. This clip from Jesus Camp makes the point, as does this response to it.
Dobson’s use of “their own flesh and blood” is a pretentious emotional appeal that excludes adopted children. Apparently he has little time and little concern for them. But he did have time to snipe at the judges of the Second District Court of Appeal: “They might not even be parents, or if they are, who knows how effectively they did the job when their children were young.” Such a statement is not only inappropriate, it shows how very small Dobson really is.
Not surprisingly, aside from again ignoring the Biblical directive in Romans 13:1-2 and attacking the judicial arm of the “governing authorities,” Dobson’s second subject was one of his favorites: advocacy of legal discrimination and bigotry. "The second decision handed down from on high a few weeks ago was even more egregious. The California Supreme Court, by a vote of 4 to 3, overturned an electoral decision supported by 4,618,673 voters in the year 2000. It concerned Proposition 22, which defined marriage exclusively as being between one man and one woman. . . . The Court sniffed, 'Not so fast, common people. We hold the trump card and you lose.'”
True, Proposition 22 -- like 1964’s Proposition 14 that allowed real estate agents and landlords in California to reject home buyers or tenants of their choice, even if their decision was based on racial discrimination -- was passed by popular vote, but both were declared unconstitutional by due process of law. It’s doubtful a Proposition 14 would ever be proposed today. Times and attitudes have changed in relation to many social issues. Dobson, however, remains sequestered in the past.
Attitudes toward gay people and their right to civil equality have also changed significantly since 2000. More and more people -- including a considerable number of evangelical Christians -- have grown weary of Christiantist leaders’ vituperative attacks on gay and lesbian Americans and their obsessive ranting about gay marriage, while ignoring virtually all other social concerns.
Over ninety percent of Fortune 500 companies now have anti-discrimination policies that protect gays. More and more companies, colleges and universities, states and municipalities are offering same-sex domestic partner benefits, despite challenges and litigation from the Christianist Right’s legal minions.
The Los Angeles Times conducted a poll after the state’s Supreme Court’s decision. The question posed was “Did the California Supreme Court make the correct decision?” The results, as of May 18, reflect the changing times and attitudes. Of the 35,257 respondents 75.8 percent said “yes,” while only 24.2 percent said “no.” Other poll results sound the same note:
63 percent say gay marriage is a choiceJun. 3, 2008 04:46 PMUSA TodaySix in ten Americans say the government should not regulate whether gays and lesbians can wed the persons they choose, a new survey finds.As same-sex couples start lining up to get marriage licenses in California on June 17, the USA TODAY/Gallup Poll found 63 percent of adults say same-sex marriage is “strictly a private decision” between two people.
Then there’s reality and basic common sense. Jonathan Rauch, senior writer with National Journal and a guest scholar at the Brookings Institution, made the case in his June 21 Wall Street Journal article “Gay Marriage Is Good for America”:
Marriage, remember, is not just a contract between two people. It is a contract that two people make, as a couple, with their community – which is why there is always a witness. Two people can't go into a room by themselves and come out legally married. The partners agree to take care of each other so the community doesn't have to. In exchange, the community deems them a family, binding them to each other and to society with a host of legal and social ties.This is a fantastically fruitful bargain. Marriage makes you, on average, healthier, happier and wealthier. If you are a couple raising kids, marrying is likely to make them healthier, happier and wealthier, too. Marriage is our first and best line of defense against financial, medical and emotional meltdown. It provides domesticity and a safe harbor for sex. It stabilizes communities by formalizing responsibilities and creating kin networks. And its absence can be calamitous, whether in inner cities or gay ghettos.In 2008, denying gay Americans the opportunity to marry is not only inhumane, it is unsustainable. History has turned a corner: Gay couples -- including gay parents -- live openly and for the most part comfortably in mainstream life. This will not change, ever.Because parents want happy children, communities want responsible neighbors, employers want productive workers, and governments want smaller welfare caseloads, society has a powerful interest in recognizing and supporting same-sex couples. It will either fold them into marriage or create alternatives to marriage, such as publicly recognized and subsidized cohabitation. Conservatives often say same-sex marriage should be prohibited because it does not exemplify the ideal form of family. They should consider how much less ideal an example gay couples will set by building families and raising children out of wedlock.
Mr. Rauch’s statements are echoed by every legitimate medical and sociological association in America and are well summarized in this fact sheet from the American Psychological Association.
Dobson made two other statements in his June 2008 diatribe that attest to his being out of focus not only in relation to American families, but in relation to reality itself: "Has it occurred to Californians to consider what amounts to another 'recall election' for the four justices who have disregarded the institution of marriage? . . .
"Marriage is not simply a Judeo-Christian concept, although it finds its origins in the Garden of Eden. The Creator said to Adam and Eve, 'For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and they will become one flesh.'" [Genesis 2:24, NIV]
Anyone who doesn’t agree with Dobson is wrong, immoral and anti-American -- sanctimonious megalomania at its darkest. To suggest judges who upheld constitutional guarantees of equality for all citizens be “recalled” speaks to Dobson’s theofascist agenda.
Apparently Dr. Dobson is unaware of the fact that the civil institution of marriage is not a “Judeo-Christian concept” and existed long before Jehovah was created. But the truly scary part is that Dobson believes Adam and Eve were real people and lived in the Garden of Eden . . . no doubt along with Tyrannosaurs Rex.
Since he obviously takes the Bible as literal history and the final word on morality and living a truly “Christian” life, shouldn’t Dr. Dobson hear, honor and obey the words of Jesus before he claims to “stand up for Christ” again: “Sell everything you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.” [Luke 18:22, NIV]
Dobson and the other leaders of the Christianist Right live large. One has to wonder how they justify that given Jesus’ explicit directive. Or maybe that’s one of those “outdated” Biblical edicts they feel so justified in ignoring when it suits their social-political purposes.
The Focus on the Family chairman ended his “passionate” June 2008 message with more irrationality: "let me remind you that California and the rest of the country would not be in the mess it is in if the U.S. Congress had not ignored and run from their duty to protect the institution of the family. All three presidential candidates voted against the Marriage Protection Amendment, and to my knowledge, not a one of them has uttered a word about the preservation of the traditional family. Honestly, we have to assume that they don’t give a hoot about marriage." [italics added]
“Protect the institution of the family?” If “the family” is in danger, it’s certainly not from same-sex couples who have fought so hard for the right to marry and have their families recognized. Perhaps Dobson has in mind a constitutional amendment making divorce illegal. Probably not though, since that would hurt his power-base as the 2004 Barna Group report, titled “Born Again Christians Just As Likely to Divorce As Are Non-Christians,” documented: “among married born again Christians, 35% have experienced a divorce. That figure is identical to the outcome among married adults who are not born again: 35%.” Barna also documented that “nearly one-quarter of the married ‘born agains’ (23%) get divorced two or more times.”
“Preservation of the traditional family.” Does Dobson really think that gay and lesbian Americans marrying will cause heterosexuals to stop marrying? Does Dobson really think that gay and lesbian Americans marrying will cause all existing “traditional families” to self-destruct? Can anyone really be that irrational, that delusional?
“We have to assume that they don’t give a hoot about marriage”: the ultimate non sequitur. How typical that a deceptive, deceiving charlatan prefaces such an absurdity with “honestly.”
Obviously Dobson wants to amend the U.S. Constitution so that it denies civil rights rather than protecting them. A new version of the Federal Marriage Amendment -- now dubbed the “Marriage Protection Amendment” -- has been introduced into the U.S. Senate. Two of the senators who “have named themselves as co-sponsors of S. J. RES. 43” are particularly noteworthy:
Sen. Larry Craig (R-ID), who was arrested June 11, 2007 on charges of lewd conduct in a Minneapolis airport terminal, is co-sponsoring the amendment along with Sen. David Vitter (R-LA).Craig, who entered a guilty plea to a reduced charge of disorderly conduct, was detained and charged for attempting to engage in sexual activity with a male undercover police officer. His arrest and plea became public two months later. At that time, Craig attempted to withdraw his plea and enter a new plea of not guilty. To date, his efforts have been denied by the courts.In July of 2007, Vitter was identified as a client of a prostitution firm owned by the late Deborah Jeane Palfrey, commonly known as The DC Madam.
Now that’s hypocrisy on a par with the antics of one of Dobson’s old buddies, Ted Haggard. It’s also akin to that of Rev. R. Albert Mohler, ninth president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and a member of the board of Focus on the Family who, not surprisingly, supported Dobson’s criticism of Mr. Obama. You remember Rev. Mohler, the “sanctity of life” guy who had no problem with eugenics as long as those exterminated were gays.
On March 2, 2007, Mohler published an article titled “Is Your Baby Gay? What If You Could Know? What If You Could Do Something About It?” In it he implicitly acknowledged that sexual orientation has a genetic component and/or is hormonally determined prior to birth, but looked forward to the day when medical science could change that: "If a biological basis is found, and if a prenatal test is then developed, and if a successful treatment to reverse the sexual orientation to heterosexual is ever developed, we would support its use as we should unapologetically support the use of any appropriate means to avoid sexual temptation and the inevitable effects of sin . . ."
Biblical literalists have always argued against any pre-natal meddling with a fetus, claiming that whatever the fetus was, was its God-given birthright. Funny how that thinking changes so radically when gay people are involved. Mohler’s pre-natal genetic cleansing proposal is nothing less than a 21st century theofascist program of eugenics.
The more they pontificate, the more the self-righteous leaders of the Christianist Right contradict themselves and expose their theofascist agenda. Yet a considerable number of Americans continue to support these bigots and hate-mongers who hide behind “religion.” Why? Could it be that they share the same Schadenfreude needs? Or has religion just made them too scared to think for themselves and see reality as it is?In memory of the late George Carlin and his reality-based thoughts about religion . . .
Copyright © 1998-2007 Online Journal

Are You Ready to Face the Facts About Israel?

by Paul Craig Roberts

"On October 21 (1948) the Government of Israel took a decision that was to have a lasting and divisive effect on the rights and status of those Arabs who lived within its borders: the official establishment of military government in the areas where most of the inhabitants were Arabs." - Martin Gilbert, Israel: A History
I had given up on finding an American with a moral conscience and the courage to go with it and was on the verge of retiring my keyboard when I met the Rev. Thomas L. Are.
Rev. Are is a Presbyterian pastor who used to tell his Atlanta, Georgia, congregation: "I am a Zionist." Like most Americans, Rev. Are had been seduced by Israeli propaganda and helped to spread the propaganda among his congregation.
Around 1990 Rev. Are had an awakening for which he credits the Christian Canon of St. George's Cathedral in Jerusalem and author Marc Ellis, co-editor of the book, Beyond Occupation.
Realizing that his ignorance of the situation on the ground had made him complicit in great crimes, Rev. Are wrote a book hoping to save others from his mistake and perhaps in part to make amends, Israeli Peace/Palestinian Justice, published in Canada in 1994.
Rev. Are researched his subject and wrote a brave book. Keep in mind that 1994 was long prior to Walt and Mearsheimer's recent book, which exposed the power of the Israel Lobby and its ability to control the explanation Americans receive about the "Israeli-Palestinian conflict."
Rev. Are begins with an account of Israel's opening attack on the Palestinians, an event which took place before most Americans alive today were born. He quotes the distinguished British historian, Arnold J. Toynbee: "The treatment of the Palestinian Arabs in 1947 (and 1948) was as morally indefensible as the slaughter of six million Jews by the Nazis. Though nor comparable in quantity to the crimes of the Nazis, it was comparable in quality."
Golda Meir, considered by Israelis as a great leader and by others as one of history's great killers, disputed the facts: "It was not as though there was a Palestinian people in Palestine and we came and threw them out and took their country away from them. They did not exist."
Golda Meir's apology for Israel's great crimes is so counter-factual that it blows the mind. Palestinian refugee camps still exist outside Palestine filled with Palestinians and their descendants whose towns, villages, homes and lands were seized by the Israelis in 1948. Rev. Are provides the reader with Na'im Ateek's description of what happened to him, an 11-year old, when the Jews came to take Beisan on May 12, 1948. Entire Palestinian communities simply disappeared.
In 1949 the United Nations counted 711,000 Palestinian refugees.
In 2005 the United Nations Relief and Works Agency estimated 4.25 million Palestinians and their descendants were refugees from their homeland.
The Israeli policy of evicting non-Jews has continued for six decades. On June 19, 2008, the Laity Committee in the Holy Land reported in Window Into Palestine that the Israeli Ministry of Interior is taking away the residency rights of Jerusalem Christians who have been reclassified as "visitors in their own city."
On December 10, 2007, MK Ephraim Sneh boasted in the Jerusalem Post that Israel had achieved "a true Zionist victory" over the UN partition plan "which sought to establish two nations in the land of Israel." The partition plan had assigned Israel 56 percent of Palestine, leaving the inhabitants with only 44 percent. But Israel had altered this over time. Sneh proudly declared: "When we complete the permanent agreement, we will hold 78 percent of the land while the Palestinians will control 22 percent."
Sneb could have added that the 22 percent is essentially a collection of unconnected ghettos cut off from one another and from roads, water, medical care, and jobs.
Rev. Are documents that the abuse of Palestinians' human rights is official Israeli policy. Killings, torture, and beatings are routine. On May 17, 1990, the Washington Post reported that Save the Children "documented indiscriminate beating, tear-gassing and shooting of children at home or just outside the house playing in the street, who were sitting in the classroom or going to the store for groceries."
On January 19, 1988, Israeli Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin, later Prime Minister, announced the policy of "punitive beating" of Palestinians. The Israelis described the purpose of punitive beating: "Our task is to recreate a barrier and once again put the fear of death into the Arabs of the area."
According to Save the Children, beatings of children and women are common. Rev. Are, citing the report in the Washington Post, writes: "Save the Children concluded that one-third of beaten children were under ten years old, and one-fifth under the age of five. Nearly a third of the children beaten suffered broken bones."
On February 8, 1988, Newsweek magazine quoted an Israeli soldier: "We got orders to knock on every door, enter and take out all the males. The younger ones we lined up with their faces against the wall, and soldiers beat them with billy clubs. This was no private initiative, these were orders from our company commander.... After one soldier finished beating a detainee, another soldier called him 'you Nazi,' and the first man shot back: 'You bleeding heart.' When one soldier tried to stop another from beating an Arab for no reason, a fist fight broke out."
These were the old days before conscience was eliminated from the ranks of the Israeli military.
In the London Sunday Times, June 19, 1977, Ralph Schoenman, executive director of the Bertrand Russell Foundation, wrote: "Israeli interrogators routinely ill-treat and torture Arab prisoners. Prisoners are hooded or blindfolded and are hung by their wrists for long periods. Most are struck in the genitals or in other ways sexually abused. Most are sexually assaulted. Others are administered electric shock."
Amnesty International concluded that "there is no country in the world in which the use of official and sustained torture is as well established and documented as in the case of Israel."
Even the pro-Israeli Washington Post reported: "Upon arrest, a detainee undergoes a period of starvation, deprivation of sleep by organized methods and prolonged periods during which the prisoner is made to stand with his hands cuffed and raised, a filthy sack covering the head. Prisoners are dragged on the ground, beaten with objects, kicked, stripped and placed under ice-cold showers."
Sounds like Abu Gharib. There are news reports that Israeli torture experts participated in the torture of the detainees assembled by the American military as part of the Bush Regime's propaganda onslaught to convince Americans that Iraq was overflowing with al-Qaeda terrorists. On July 23, 2008, Antiwar.com posted an Iraqi news report that the Iraqi government had released a total of 109,087 Iraqis that the Americans had "detained." Obviously, these "terrorist detainees" had been used for the needs of Bush Regime propaganda. No one will ever know how many of them were abused by Israeli torturers imported by the CIA.
Rev. Are's book makes sensible suggestions for resolving the conflict that Israel began. However, the problem is that Israeli governments believe only in force. The policy of the Israeli government has always been to beat, kill, and brutalize Palestinians into submission and flight. Anyone who doubts this can read the book of Israel's finest historian Ilan Pappe, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (2006).
Americans are a gullible and naive people. They have been complicit for 60 years in crimes that in Arnold Toynbee's words "are comparable in quality" to the crimes of Nazi Germany. As Toynbee was writing decades ago, the accumulated Israeli crimes might now be comparable also in quantity.
The US routinely vetoes United Nations condemnations of Israel for its brutal crimes against the Palestinians. Insouciant American taxpayers have been bled for a half century to provide the Israelis with superior military weapons with which Israelis assault their neighbors, all the while convincing America – essentially a captive nation – that Israel is the victim.
John F. Mahoney wrote: "Thomas Are reminds me of Dietrich Bonhoeffer: an active pastor who comes to the unsettling realization that he and his people have been fed a terrible lie that is killing and torturing thousands of innocent men, women and children. Not without ample research and prayer does such a pastor, in turn, risk unsettling his congregation. The Reverend Are has done his homework and, I suspect, has prayed often and long during the writing of this courageous book."
Bonhoeffer was a Lutheran theologian and pastor who was executed for his active participation in the German Resistance against Nazism.
Professor Benjamin M. Weir, San Francisco Theological Seminary, wrote: "This book will make the reader squirm. It asks you to lend your voice in behalf of the voiceless."
Americans who can no longer think for themselves and who are terrified of disapproval by their peer group are incapable of lending their voices to anyone except those who control the world of propaganda in which they live.
The ignorance and unconcern of Americans is a great frustration to my friends in the Israeli peace movement. Without outside support those Israelis who believe in good will are deprived, by America's support for their government's policy of violence, of any peaceful resolution of a conflict began in 1947 by Israeli aggression against unsuspecting Palestinian villages.
Rev. Are wrote his book with the hope that the pen is mightier than the sword and that facts can crowd out propaganda and create a framework for a just resolution of the Palestinian issue. In his concluding chapter, "What Christians Can Do," Rev. Are writes: "We cannot allow others to dictate our thinking on any subject, especially on anything as important as Christian faithfulness, which is tested by an attitude towards seeking justice for the oppressed. It's a Christian's duty to know."
Duty, of course, has costs. Rev. Are writes: "Speak up for the Palestinians and you will make enemies. Yet, as Christians, we must be willing to raise issues that until now we have chosen to dodge."
More than a decade later, President Jimmy Carter, a true friend of Israel, tried again to awaken Americans' moral conscience with his book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid. Carter was instantly demonized by the Israel Lobby.
Sixty years of efforts by good and humane people to hold Israel accountable have so far failed, but they are more important today than ever before. Israel has its captive American nation on the verge of attacking Iran, the consequences of which could be catastrophic for all concerned. The alleged purpose of the attack is to eliminate nonexistent Iranian nuclear weapons. The real reason is to eliminate all support for Hamas and Hezbollah so that Israel can seize the entire West Bank and southern Lebanon. The Bush regime is eager to do Israel's bidding, and the media and evangelical "Christian" churches have been preparing the American people for the event.
It is paradoxical that Israel is demonstrating that veracity lies not in the Christian belief in good will but in Lenin's doctrine that violence is the effective force in history and that the evangelical Christian Zionist churches agree.

The Voice of the White House for June 7th 2008

Washington , D.C., : “Not only is our beloved President sliding off the muddy cliff into the cesspit of public oblivion, he is dragging the far-right Republicans and the pro-Israeli neocons with him. Added to this mixed bag of fruits and nuts, we also have the evangelical Christians who are loud, vicious and entirely crazy.

McCain, who has the acumen of a jar of pond scum, chased the lunatic Christian nut, John Hagee, around, panting after his endorsement. McCain must be living back in the Coolidge administration because the so-called Christian Right has been repudiated by most Americans and their endless rantings about abortion and gays are falling on very deaf ears.

Now, we learn that the pathetic Hagee is claiming the fictional anti-Christ is going to be both Jewish and gay! It has always been a curiosity to me, and others, that born-again freakos loathe gays so much. Given the Haggard revelations, I strongly suspect that the loudest gay-bashers secretly lust after other men and are filled with self-hatred.

These pin heads are in love with the Book of Revelations which most historians know was written a hundred years after the early Christian era by the inmate of a Roman lunatic colony on the island of Patmos . They love this nonsense because you can read into it anything you want…and they do, regularly. Hagee has also said that Hitler was a Jew, which he wasn’t, and that God made Hitler go after the Jews to force them to repopulate the Holy Land !

Most of the Jews who fled to Palestine in 1946-1948 are not even ethnic Jews but are descended from Caspian Sea Turkish tribes and have about as much historical right there as Canadian geese.

If it isn’t the idiot Hagee bellowing about evil gays, it’s professional Jews screaming about 800 passenger gas vans and twenty millions barbecued. This is what comes of promulgating Political Correctness. No one dares to speak out against this sort of imbecilic propaganda just as one cannot poke fun at Mongoloids, dwarves or urine colored people. Don’t forget the old law of physics: Every action has a reaction. I’m waiting, eagerly, for it.”

Conversations with the Crow: Part 4

Editor’s note: When we ran the first conversation, there was the question of reader interest and acceptability. It is pleasant to report that our server was jammed with viewers and the only other tbrnews story that has had more viewers was our Forward Base Falcon story that had a half a million viewers in less that two days. We are now going to reprint all of the Crowley conversations, including a very interesting one on John McCain, in chronological sequence. It is also pleasant to note that two publishers and three reporters have all expressed concrete interest in the Crowley conversations.

On October 8th, 2000 , Robert Trumbull Crowley, once a leader of the CIA's Clandestine Operations Division, died in a Washington hospital of heart failure and the end effects of Alzheimer's Disease. Before the late Assistant Director Crowley was cold, Joseph Trento, a writer of light-weight books on the CIA, descended on Crowley 's widow at her town house on Cathedral Hill Drive in Washington and hauled away over fifty boxes of Crowley 's CIA files.

Once Trento had his new find secure in his house in Front Royal , Virginia, he called a well-known Washington fix lawyer with the news of his success in securing what the CIA had always considered to be a potential major embarrassment. Three months before, July 20th of that year, retired Marine Corps colonel William R. Corson, and an associate of Crowley , died of emphysema and lung cancer at a hospital in Bethesda , Md.

After Corson's death, Trento and a well-known Washington fix-lawyer went to Corson's bank, got into his safe deposit box and removed a manuscript entitled 'Zipper.' This manuscript, which dealt with Crowley 's involvement in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, vanished into a CIA burn-bag and the matter was considered to be closed forever.

The small group of CIA officials gathered at Trento 's house to search through the Crowley papers, looking for documents that must not become public. A few were found but, to their consternation, a significant number of files Crowley was known to have had in his possession had simply vanished.

When published material concerning the CIA's actions against Kennedy became public in 2002, it was discovered to the CIA's horror, that the missing documents had been sent by an increasingly erratic Crowley to another person and these missing papers included devastating material on the CIA's activities in South East Asia to include drug running, money laundering and the maintenance of the notorious 'Regional Interrogation Centers' in Viet Nam and, worse still, the Zipper files proving the CIA’s active organization of the assassination of President John Kennedy..

A massive, preemptive disinformation campaign was readied, using government-friendly bloggers, CIA-paid "historians" and others, in the event that anything from this file ever surfaced. The best-laid plans often go astray and in this case, one of the compliant historians, a former government librarian who fancied himself a serious writer, began to tell his friends about the CIA plan to kill Kennedy and eventually, word of this began to leak out into the outside world.

The originals had vanished and an extensive search was conducted by the FBI and CIA operatives but without success. Crowley 's survivors, his aged wife and son, were interviewed extensively by the FBI and instructed to minimize any discussion of highly damaging CIA files that Crowley had, illegally, removed from Langley when he retired. Crowley had been a close friend of James Jesus Angleton, the CIA’s notorious head of Counterintelligence. When Angleton was sacked by DCI William Colby in December of 1974, Crowley and Angleton conspired to secretly remove Angleton’s most sensitive secret files our of the agency. Crowley did the same thing right before his own retirement , secretly removing thousands of pages of classified information that covered his entire agency career.

Known as “The Crow” within the agency, Robert T. Crowley joined the CIA at its inception and spent his entire career in the Directorate of Plans, also know as the “Department of Dirty Tricks,”: Crowley was one of the tallest man ever to work at the CIA. Born in 1924 and raised in Chicago , Crowley grew to six and a half feet when he entered the U.S. Military Academy at West Point in N.Y. as a cadet in 1943 in the class of 1946. He never graduated, having enlisted in the Army, serving in the Pacific during World War II. He retired from the Army Reserve in 1986 as a lieutenant colonel. According to a book he authored with his friend and colleague, William Corson, Crowley’s career included service in military intelligence and Naval Intelligence, before joining the CIA at inception in 1947. His entire career at the agency was spent within the Directorate of Plans in covert operations. Before his retirement, Bob Crowley became assistant deputy director for operations, the second-in-command in the Clandestine Directorate of Operations.

One of Crowley ’s first major assignments within the agency was to assist in the recruitment and management of prominent World War II Nazis, especially those with advanced intelligence experience. One of the CIA’s major recruitment coups was Heinrich Mueller, once head of Hitler’s Gestapo who had fled to Switzerland after the collapse of the Third Reich and worked as an anti-Communist expert for Masson of Swiss counterintelligence. Mueller was initially hired by Colonel James Critchfield of the CIA, who was running the Gehlen Organization out of Pullach in southern Germany . Crowley eventually came to despise Critchfield but the colonel was totally unaware of this, to his later dismay.

Crowley ’s real expertise within the agency was the Soviet KGB. One of his main jobs throughout his career was acting as the agency liaison with corporations like ITT, which the CIA often used as fronts for moving large amounts of cash off their books. He was deeply involved in the efforts by the U.S. to overthrow the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende in Chile , which eventually got him into legal problems with regard to investigations of the U.S. government’s grand jury where he has perjured himself in an agency cover-up

After his retirement, Crowley began to search for someone who might be able to write a competent history of his career. His first choice fell on British author John Costello (author of Ten Days to Destiny, The Pacific War and other works) but, discovering that Costello was a very aggressive homosexual, he dropped him and tentatively turned to Joseph Trento who had assisted Crowley and William Corson in writing a book on the KGB. When Crowley discovered that Trento had an ambiguous and probably cooperative relationship with the CIA, he began to distrust him and continued his search for an author.

Bob Crowley first contacted Gregory Douglas in 1993 when he found out from John Costello that Douglas was about to publish his first book on Heinrich Mueller, the former head of the Gestapo who had become a secret, long-time asset to the CIA. Crowley contacted Douglas and they began a series of long and often very informative telephone conversations that lasted for four years. . In 1996, Crowley , Crowley told Douglas that he believed him to be the person that should ultimately tell Crowley ’s story but only after Crowley ’s death. Douglas , for his part, became so entranced with some of the material that Crowley began to share with him that he secretly began to record their conversations, later transcribing them word for word, planning to incorporate some, or all, of the material in later publications.

In 1998, when Crowley was slated to go into the hospital for exploratory surgery, he had his son, Greg, ship two large foot lockers of documents to Douglas with the caveat that they were not to be opened until after Crowley ’s death. These documents, totaled an astonishing 15,000 pages of CIA classified files involving many covert operations, both foreign and domestic, during the Cold War.

After Crowley ’s death and Trento ’s raid on the Crowley files, huge gaps were subsequently discovered by horrified CIA officials and when Crowley ’s friends mentioned Gregory Douglas, it was discovered that Crowley ’s son had shipped two large boxes to Douglas . No one knew their contents but because Douglas was viewed as an uncontrollable loose cannon who had done considerable damage to the CIA’s reputation by his on-going publication of the history of Gestapo-Mueller, they bent every effort both to identify the missing files and make some effort to retrieve them before Douglas made any use of them.

All of this furor eventually came to the attention of Dr. Peter Janney, a Massachusetts clinical psychologist and son of Wistar Janney, another career senior CIA official, colleague of not only Bob Crowley but Cord Meyer, Richard Helms, Jim Angleton and others. Janney was working on a book concerning the murder of Mary Pinchot Meyer, former wife of Cord Meyer, a high-level CIA official, and later the mistress of President John F. Kennedy. Douglas had authored a book, ‘Regicide’ which dealt with Crowley ’s part in the Kennedy assassination and he obviously had access to at least some of Crowley ’s papers. Janney was very well connected inside the CIA’s higher levels and when he discovered that Douglas had indeed known, and had often spoken with, Crowley and that after Crowley’s death, the FBI had descended on Crowley’s widow and son, warning them to never speak with Douglas about anything, he contacted Douglas and finally obtained from him a number of original documents, including the originals of the transcribed conversations with Robert Crowley.

In spite of the burn bags, the top secret safes and the vigilance of the CIA to keep its own secrets, the truth has an embarrassing and often very fatal habit of emerging, albeit decades later.

While CIA drug running , money-launderings and brutal assassinations are very often strongly rumored and suspected, it has so far not been possible to actually pin them down but it is more than possible that the publication of the transcribed and detailed Crowley-Douglas conversations will do a great deal towards accomplishing this.

These many transcribed conversations are relatively short because Crowley was a man who tired easily but they make excellent reading. There is an interesting admixture of shocking revelations on the part of the retired CIA official and often rampant anti-social (and very entertaining) activities on the part of Douglas but readers of this new and on-going series are gently reminded to always look for the truth in the jest!

Date: Wednesday, March 20, 1996
Commenced: 9;32 AM(CST)
Concluded: 10:08 AM (CST)

RTC: Hello, Gregory. Sorry I was out the last time you called but we were off on family business. My son’s family. By the way, I have some information for you that might interest you. You know, there are a number of people here who are not happy with you and they are certainly not pleased that I am talking with you. Not at all. This morning I had a call from some shit at Justice who wanted to warn me, being a friendly and caring person of course, that you were a very bad person and I would ruin my reputation by telling you anything. He had a similar talk with Corson yesterday. Bill called me last night about this and we both laughed about it. This is a sure sign that you must be right. Both of us know you were friends with Mueller and the thought of him loose in America is something the Company and now Justice does not want talked about. First off, they don’t know what name he used while he was here.

GD: Are you serious, Robert?

RTC: Oh yes, very. You see, the CIA and don’t forget the Army, used high-level Nazis after the Cold War broke out. We especially went after the Gestapo and SD people because they had the most to do with fighting the Communists, both in German in the ‘30s and then during the war.

GD: I knew Gehlen very well and met some of them. I agree. His top recruiter was old Willi Krichbaum who was a Colonel in the SS and a top Gestapo person. I talked many times with Willi who had been in the Freikorps after the first war and he was quite a fellow. He was Mueller’s top deputy in the Gestapo and in charge of the border guards at one time. And, don’t forget, Willi was head of the Wehrmacht’s Geheime Feldpolizei who had a terrible reputation with the troops. Hanging deserters at the end of the war. Yes, Gehlen told me the SS intelligence men were his best people.

RTC: You have a grasp of this from the time, don’t you. So, of course no one now wants to infuriate the rah-rah patriotic idiots and most especially the Jews by letting anyone know about this. You see, they brought Mueller and others over here and gave them new names and identities. The higher they had been, the more they concealed them. Now your friend Mueller’s name was known to Truman, Beetle Smith, Critchfield, Gehlen and about three others. Now that everyone is dead and you are tearing open old caskets, they are absolutely frantic to find out what name Mueller was here under and actually so they can run around the files and burn anything with that name on it. Then they can say, like the pious frauds they are, that Oh no, we never heard of that person. We searched our records, sir, and believe us, there was no such person anywhere. That’s what they want. Smith is dead, Truman is ditto, Critchfield will never talk because he ran Mueller and still has his pension to consider. I know the name but they have never brought the subject up to me. They think you’re a loose cannon, Gregory, with no loyalty to the system and they think I am getting daft in my old age and marginalize me.

GD: Think they’ll shoot me? A boating accident? Something like that?

RTC: When I was in harness, yes, they would. A bungled robbery or a rape like Kennedy’s lady friend but not now. Besides, they don’t know what you have on them and if you were crushed to death by an elephant falling out of a plane, who knows what might come out? I have to send you some documentation which you then have to let them know you have. But in a safe place, not in a local storage locker under your name or in your attic or garage. A gentle hint of joys to come. I have hinted at that and very strongly. The Justice oaf today got an earful from me and when I told him I would tell you about this, he got scared and hung up on me. Now, I can expect Tom Kimmel to call me and try to find out if I’ve told you or given you anything. You know, you got some rare documents that were very helpful to his case to clear the Admiral but now he’s a torn person. The family want desperately to accept these as genuine but are furious that you, a terrible person in their eyes, had them. No gratitude. I suppose if that awful Wolfe had found them and passed them along, he would be a great hero to the Kimmel family but you are one whose name is never to be mentioned. You know, Gregory, I find this very entertaining. And Kimmel is horrified that Bill and I like you and talk to you. Both of us have been warned, I by people from the Company I haven’t seen since I retired and Bill by the fringe wannabees like Trento and others. I think it’s time we nailed Critchfield, don’t you?

GD: I’m game, Robert. If he ran Mueller, he must be scared.

RTC: Will be scared shitless. In the old days, he’d have had you killed at once but those days are no more. You knew Gehlen and that will be my approach. You are quick enough with in house terms so that I can convince Jimmy that you were once part of his operation. You’ll have to play it by ear but you are about ten times smarter than him so you should have fun. I want you to convince him that you were really there and knew some his people. And most important, convince him you knew Mueller. Oddly enough, Jimmy never met Mueller because he operated him out of Switzerland through Willi and later, Mueller moved up the ladder to the point where Jimmy had no access to him. Let’s keep his bowels open, Gregory, what do you say?

GD: I have no problem. Should I tape him?

RTC: Why not get him on a speaker phone with both a tape recorder going and a reputable witness? That way, if something comes of this and they get to the witness, you have a backup.

GD: I have a retired colonel acquaintance who was with your people in ‘ Nam . He’d be perfect as a witness. Just let me know. Is Justice going to do something nasty to me?

RTC: God no. They just want to scare me off of you, that’s all. They’re all such pinheads, Gregory. They chatter like old whores at a tea party and I can remind you that gossip is king here. Everyone inside the Beltway runs around like the little self-important toads that they are, pretending to be really important. They see a Senator in a restaurant, wave at him and get waved at back. This impresses their client who does not realize that the Senator will always wave back on the assumption that the waver might be someone important he might have forgotten. And they tell you that the President, or the Secretary of this or that said this to them when no one knows them at the White House or anywhere else. This jerk from Justice is a small, malformed cog in a big and brainless machine. Typical. I had to deal with these punks for years and I have more respect for a black tart, believe me. At least they don’t try to hide the fact that they fuck for money.

GD: (Laughter)

RTC: It really isn’t funny. If the public was aware of the crooked, lying sacks of shit that run this country, they would be boiling the tar and preparing the chicken feathers.

GD: You know, speaking of Gehlen, he told me in ’51 that his famous ’48 report about the Russians being poised to invade Europe was made up at the Army’s specific request. Gehlen told me that far from moving hundreds of armored units into the east zone, the Russians had torn up all the railroad tracks after the war and shipped them back to Russia . And most of the armored divisions were only cadre.

RTC: But it did work, didn’t it? Big business got to gear up for a fictional coming war and the military got a huge boost.

GD: Ever heard of General Trudeau?

RTC: Oh yes, I knew him personally. What about him?

GD: He found out about Gehlen and bitched like hell about what he called a bunch of Nazis working for the CIA and inventing stories about fake invasion threats.

RTC: Now that’s something I didn’t know. You know they shipped him out of the European command and sent him to the Far East ? Yes, and I met him when I was in Hawaii . I’m surprised they didn’t do to him what they did to George Patton. A convenient truck ran into his car and shut him up.

GD: Why?

RTC: George found out that the top brass was stealing gold from the salt mine and many generals and colonels were getting very rich. And then the accident and with George dead, they just went on stealing.

GD: I can use that.

RTC: I can get you some paper on that out of my files. Patton was strange but one of our better generals. Lying thieves. Gold has a great attraction for people, I guess.

GD: A few years ago, one of your boys, Jimmy Atwood and I went down into Austria to dig up some Nazi gold. Atwood is a terrible asshole but very useful. I think he viewed me the same way. Anyway, we had a former SS officer and a Ukrainian camp guard along. What a wonderful adventure, Robert.

RTC: Were you successful? Treasure hunts rarely are.

GD: Oh, very. And we brought most of it back with us.

RTC: How ever did you get it through customs?

GD: Boat. Brought it in by boat. I’ll tell you about this some time. Did you ever hear about it?

RTC: No, I didn’t. Should I have?

GD: Probably a rogue operation. Two Limeys got knocked on the head and put over the side on the way to the Panama Canal but other than that, it was an uneventful trip.

RTC: Well, someday, I’ll discuss the Kennedy assassination and you can tell me about the gold hunt. Sounds fair?

GD: Oh yes, why not?

RTC: I remember the time we had to fly the KMT general out of Burma with an Air America transport full of gold. He was our boy out there but he had a hankering to make more money so he began to raise opium and used our weapons to kill of the locals. Thirteen million in gold and twelve trunks full of opium. Quite a problem getting it all into Switzerland and into a bank. But he performed and we kept our word. That fucking Colby was into drugs as well.

GD: William?

RTC: Yes, our beloved DCI. A nasty piece of work, Gregory. Was working in SEA doing the drug business when he was tapped for PHOENIX . And just kept on going when he got to Saigon . PHOENIX got to be a really nasty business and Bill set up torture centers all over our part of the country. Regional Intelligence Centers they called them. Well, Church got his hands on some of the goings on and guess what? Colby snitched on all his co-workers. I know for a fact from some of the old ones that they’re going to kill him for that. I remember he has some kind of a telephone device hidden in his glasses. Princeton man. You can always tell a Princeton man, Gregory, but you can’t tell him very much. Watch the papers pretty soon.

GD: How will they nail him? Run down in a crosswalk? A stampede of elephants flatten him in his garden?

RTC: You have an overheated imagination. I don’t know the how but I do know the why. Give it six months and the Dictator of Dent Place will be another stone in the cemetery.

GD: What about the one who killed himself by tying weights to his legs and shooting himself in the back of the head before jumping off his boat?

RTC: John Arthur Paisley. He used to be the deputy director of the Office of Strategic Research. Paisley . Tragic. Shouldn’t have sold out to the Russians. He was such a rotten mess when they found him that it took weeks to do an ID on him. There’ve been more.

GD: I have a packet coming in from overseas and the mail truck is at the end of the block. Let me ring off now, Robert and I can call you back later today.

RTC: Make it tomorrow. OK? Things to do.

(Concluded at 10:08 AM CST )

EARLY WARNING SIGNS OF FASCISM:

When fascism comes to America, it will be carrying a cross and wrapped in an American flag. -Sinclair Lewis-

EARLY WARNING SIGNS OF FASCISM:
-Powerful and continuing nationalism
-Disdain for human rights
-Identification of enemies as a unifying cause
-Supremacy of the military
-Rampant sexism
-Controlled mass media
-Obsession with national security
-Religion and government intertwined
-Corporate power protected
-Labor power suppressed
-Disdain for intellectuals and the arts
-Obsession with crime and punishment
-Rampant cronyism and corruption
-Fraudulent elections

Sound familiar?

John Hagee: deviant theology, dangerous foreign policy

By John Taylor
Online Journal Contributing Writer

May 7, 2008, 00:21

Pastor John Hagee gleefully anticipates the death of hundreds of millions of people in a series of wars preparing the world for the second coming of Christ: “The end of the world is rapidly approaching . . . Rejoice and be exceeding glad.”

Worse, Hagee wants to jump start what he sees as the inevitable battle between Israel and the US and an alliance of the Islamic states and Russia: “The United States must join Israel in a preemptive military strike against Iran to fulfill God’s plan for both Israel and the West.” Hagee’s bizarre interpretation of the Bible sees war with Iran as a “biblically prophesized End Time confrontation . . . which will lead to the Rapture, Tribulation and the Second Coming.”

If Hagee were just another kook, walking around Times Square carrying a sign saying “The End is Near,” there would be no need to worry. In fact, Hagee is senior pastor of the Cornerstone Church in San Antonio, Texas, with a congregation of 18,000, appears weekly on 150 TV stations around the world and is the head of Christians United For Israel (CUFI), a lobbying group founded to advance the interests of the State of Israel in the U.S. Congress. Not only does Hagee advocate aggressive war against Iran, he is a strong supporter of our continuing misadventure in Iraq and he opposes any Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank, arguing that God has given all of Palestine to the Israelis.

John Hagee’s end time theology transmogrifies Christianity into little more than a death cult in which the State of Israel is worshipped like a latter day Golden Calf. Despite his weird views, Hagee has access to senior politicians in the US and Israel; he likes to brag that he has met every Israeli prime minister since Menachem Begin.

President Bush praised Hagee’s CUFI for “spreading the hope of God’s love and the universal gift of freedom.” How to square “spreading . . . God’s love” and the “gift of freedom” with bombing the Iranians is hard to fathom, but, in any event, evangelicals like Hagee have been among President Bush’s strongest supporters and the president is not about to abandon them now.

Senator Joe Lieberman is also a Hagee fan and praised him at last year’s CUFI meeting in Washington, likening him to Moses, “a man of God . . . leading a mighty multitude.” If comparing Hagee to Moses seems over the top, remember Hagee and Lieberman have a lot in common. Both men were keen to see the US invade Iraq and both would like to have Uncle Sam attack Syria and Iran, a wish shared by many in Washington, especially arms makers, the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and neocons in the White House and the Pentagon.

John McCain recently thanked Pastor Hagee for endorsing his run for the presidency. Eight years ago, McCain made a point of denouncing Hagee’s fellow evangelical Jerry Falwell as an “agent of intolerance” and an “evil influence on the Republican party.” Clearly times have changed.

Hagee’s distorted view of Christianity, his hatred of Islam (Hagee once said "those who live by the Koran have a scriptural mandate to kill Christians and Jews”) and his toxic criticism of American Middle East policy have all become part of American political discourse. For example, Senator Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma believes “We are Israel’s best friend . . . because of the character we have as a nation . . . This is not a political battle at all. It is a contest over whether or not the word of God is true.” Former House Majority Leader Dick Armey opined, “I am content to have Israel grab the entire West Bank . . . I happen to believe the Palestinians should leave.” And just a few months ago, presidential candidate Mike Huckabee, an ex-evangelical preacher himself, said he favored the establishment of a Palestinian state, but not in Palestine, rather in Egypt or Saudi Arabia.

Many people, some influential, some not, think religious belief should guide American Middle East policy. Others would say that that the Bible and foreign policy ought to remain entirely separate and that a discussion of Hagee’s religious doctrine is about as meaningful as trying to decide how many angels can fit on the head of a pin. What individuals on both sides of this debate don’t realize is that Hagee’s highly selective reading and strange interpretation of the Bible put him well outside mainstream Christian belief.

Hagee regards God’s covenant with Abraham in the book of Genesis as granting the Patriarch and his descendents unconditional title to the Holy Land. He concludes, therefore, that no territorial compromise with the Palestinians is desirable or necessary. Hagee preaches that those who bless Israel will themselves be blessed (Genesis 12:3) and that a close military and political alliance between the United States and Israel is mandated in scripture. Further, Hagee sees the 1948 emergence of an independent Israel as a sign of the second coming of Christ. Finally, and most controversial of all for an evangelical preacher, Hagee claims that God’s covenant with the ancient Hebrews allows Jews to be saved without belief in Christ.

Did God grant Abraham and his offspring unconditional and eternal possession of the Holy Land? Many scholars would argue that remaining in the land required the Israelites to keep God’s laws. Failure to do so would bring divine punishment. Moses warned in Deuteronomy 28, “If you are not careful to do all the words of this law . . . you shall be plucked off the land that you are entering to take possession of.” The Hebrews’ captivity in Babylon and the Roman conquest of Jerusalem in 70 AD demonstrate to many scholars that God’s covenant with Abraham and his descendents was conditional and their right to the Holy Land by no means absolute.

When Hagee advocates unqualified American support for the State of Israel as a means of obtaining the Almighty’s blessing, he assumes the modern State of Israel is a linear and worthy successor to Abraham. Does blessing Israel mean giving the government of the State of Israel unconditional political, financial and military support? One could argue that Israel’s efforts to colonize the lands captured in 1967 and to dispossess the Palestinians violate the Old Testament commandments against theft and killing. Furthermore, Hagee’s callous disregard for the suffering of indigenous Christians and Muslims is certainly contrary to the New Testament injunctions to “love thy neighbor as thy self” (Matt. 19:19) and to “do unto others as you would have others do unto you” (Matt. 7:12), to say nothing of “Blessed are the peacemakers for they shall be called the sons of God” (Matt. 5:9). Hagee’s bizarre theology has hijacked the messages of the Old and New Testaments to sanctify the injustices done in the Holy Land.

The second coming of Christ is a difficult issue because the Bible can be interpreted in many ways. In his book, Jerusalem Countdown, Hagee enumerates 10 “signs” which he claims “prove” that Christ’s return to earth is imminent. But Luke’s gospel (17: 20) gives a diametrically opposing view: “The Kingdom of God is not coming with signs to be observed.” Furthermore, Pastor Hagee may say he knows when Christ is returning but his confidence is inconsistent with the parable of the bridegroom (Matt. 25): “you know neither the day nor the hour wherein the Son of man cometh.”

Most people who have studied the Christian religion, believers or not, would assert that the New Testament requires belief in Christ for salvation: that is, after all, what makes Christians Christians and the New Testament new. Hagee’s interpretation of scripture posits that salvation for Jews is also possible in Christianity because of God’s covenant with Abraham. Pastor Hagee’s view is obviously erroneous: the gospel of John states, “I (Christ) am the way, the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me.” (John 14:6)

It is easy to understand why Hagee preaches what he does. If you make the State of Israel an object of veneration and at the same time insist that its inhabitants convert to Christianity, you are not going to make many friends in Israel or among Israel’s supporters in the US. And for similar reasons Hagee asserts the Bible favors the Israelis over the Palestinians: Pastor Hagee obviously enjoys meeting Israeli Prime Minister Olmert, speaking in front of the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee and having Malcolm Hoenlein, the head of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, visit him in San Antonio. Hagee bartered his faith for power and fame, money and notoriety. An advocate of unjust war, Hagee has put down the Bible and taken up the sword. His kingdom is very much of this world.

The Founding Fathers were wise to forbid in the Constitution the establishment of a religion in the US. Although morality, often finding its roots in religion, will always influence government and election of public officials, the specifics of religious belief and practice have been kept, for the most part, in private life, to the nation’s great benefit. Making decisions about war and peace based on strange interpretations of arcane End Time prophecy is dangerous and absurd. That Hagee is a serious political player in 21st Century America shows we have truly entered a post Enlightenment era.

John Taylor, a lifelong Republican, received an AB in Near Eastern Languages from The University of Chicago. He is a US Army veteran. As a young man he served in the Middle East as a civil servant, archaeologist and banker. Prior to retirement he worked in the energy business in Texas for 20 years.

Should the United States Worry About “Zionists” as Fifth Column?

Yes.

Jefferson Corner/ Kenny's Sideshow

Last week calls by candidate Hillary Clinton to obliterate Iran for and on behalf of Israel and her willingness to commit to nuclear war costing the lives of hundreds of millions of people for and on behalf of a state that since its inception has been at war with all of its close and distant neighbor is a grave warning to Americans of the danger of Zionism on America and the world.

In few weeks President George Bush will lead a delegation of “Whose Who” in politics, government, business, media and arts and head east to Tel-Aviv to their “Mecca” to celebrate and give allegiance to the State of Israel on its 60th anniversary. Europeans will be celebrating for having gotten rid of the majority of Jews within Europe.

Since its inception in the late 18th century Europe, the zionist movement worked so hard to transform All Jewish communities within the West in its own image and tried and have succeeded to a great extent to transform the US and European Jewry to loyal followers and Israeli loyalists resurrecting the feelings of alienation among world Jewry to their own countries and of course reigniting again the horrible seeds of anti-semitism. The measure of success of the zionist enterprise is its ability to disfranchise old established Jewish communities in their native countries and countries of birth and citizenship and give them their “choice” of immigrating to Israel, the only place “where Jews can feel Jews”.

To this end trillions of dollars of “Jewish” money and from citizens tax payers from around the world were committed to Israel building its new infrastructure based on defense, armaments and Spartan siege mentality. Unlike the claims of zionists of having made the desert bloom, Palestine was a thriving community with well known products around the world such as Jaffa oranges. With Trillions of dollars pouring into Israel and with an already thriving Palestinian community, one can make the “moon bloom”. Hence the Zionist myth of making the “desert bloom” we did that in Arizona and we are not zionists.

The zionist ideology based on “Jewish nationalism” fed on and in reaction to European and Western/Christian anti-semitism, pogroms and the holocaust, succeeds for the most part in converting and transforming Jewish loyalties to “their” Jewish state Israel and the zionist movement. If the Catholic church and Islam tried to convert and shift loyalties of community of the faithful from that of their national state to loyalty to Rome and Mecca, I am sure that zionists would cry foul and would charge Rome and Mecca with inciting “treason” among citizens of the world. zionism as a form of racism did succeed in making transformation of Judaism from a religion of faith to one “religious nationalism” with the Israel being the “nation” and central to Jewish life and succeeded in making the Jews feel the needs for “separate” and shifting loyalties from their native countries to that of Israel. This new zionist ideology is not different from that of the communist ideology which demanded shifting of loyalties from ones country to that of the Soviet Union and Moscow. If Islamists loyal to a foreign agenda could not be trusted or entrusted with the interests of the United States claims often raised by the likes of Steve Emerson, Daniel Pipes, Charles Krauthhammer then the same can be said of zionists within the United States, they too could never be trusted with the interests of the United States since they too are loyal to a foreign agenda, Israel.

Not only did the zionist movement demand Jewish loyalties to zionism and Israel it also sought to recruit Christian evangelical movements and transformed them to Christian zionists with shifting loyalties to Israel from than of their own country especially in the United States. This unholy alliance came about as an alliance between Israel’s Likud party and right wing Republicans during the Reagan administration where each was supporting the other for their own domestic and international agenda, especially in oppositions toward peace between Israel and the Arabs. Of course we all know the agenda of evangelical zionists which is the ultimate conversion of Jews or putting them to death in fulfillment of biblical prophecies. Such is the unholy alliance.

In the hey day of the Soviet Union, it succeeded to a limited extent in having a”fifth” column within the government of the United States. The Zionists went even further, they made sure that committed and loyal zionists are in every branch of the US government and in key positions, in the White House, Justice Department, Home Land Security, State, Defense, CIA, NSC and other key security agencies, especially in US Congress where key decision makers, staffers are loyal zionists. However it was not enough for the zionists to have such an army of Israeli loyalists among the tens of thousands in government, it made sure that it also spread its tentacles to the media, art and culture and of course in business, hence the danger to Western democracies and to the world in general.

The arrest two week ago of the 84 years old American Jew, Ben-Ami Kadish on charges of spying for Israel is but a tip of the iceberg where committed zionists with loyalties to zionism and Israel are in the tens of thousands within the different branches of government especially the State and other security agencies, with many security agencies employing dual nationals (Israelis and US) and employing former members of Mossad in key positions with US security agencies...

This commitment and loyalty to Israel was and is the driving force behind many of the very dangerous acts and decisions taken by officials within the different US administration. The Ben-Ami Kadish case is but on case, to be added to the Pollard case and many other cases the government simply refuses to bring out into the open.

One has to keep in mind the many incidents where zionists put the interests of Israel first. The case of the missing/stolen 100 kilogram of uranium 235 missing from the Apollo plant in Pennsylvania is but one of those incidents where the managing director of the plants having strong ties to Israel. The same is true of the case the nine kilogram of weapon grade uranium found missing from Erwin, Tennessee. The case of the missing two tons of uranium missing during a trip between Antwerp to Genoa but an added story to Zionists loyalty to Israel where the owner of the ship was identified by the Norwegian as an Israeli secret agent.

In the United States, the zionists tentacles are found every where. Lyndon Johnson as president under the influence of his “zionist “ national security advisor Walter Rastow made sure that nuclear capabilities of the F-4 Phantoms delivered to Israel where left intact in violation of the US export regulation, even refusing to fully investigate the case of the missing nuclear fuel from the Apollo plant.

More dangerous was Johnson's total disregard of the lives of US sailors killed in cold blood by Israeli jets and torpedo boats on the USS Liberty with Johnson's Jewish national security agency director snuffing out any resolution and finding Israel responsible for the cold blooded murder. Admiral McCain (father of John McCain) as Commander of US Sixth Fleet denied help to the attacked ship and its dead and injured crew on orders from the Zionists within the White House. In the 73' War, Kissinger a die hard zionist almost caused a nuclear war between the US and the Soviet Union in his attempt to save Israel in the first few days of the October War, stripping the US army of its tanks and missiles in Europe and flying military equipment directly to the battle field in an added attempt to save Israel while putting the US and its armed forces in Europe at risk. However Kissinger's committment to Israel did not stop there. He made sure he got rid of all “Arabists” within the State Department for fear that they may be hostile to Israel. Kissinger's decisions again, were based on his zionist ideology and not based on the US national security interest.

Zionists with the State and Defense Departments were the driving force behind Cheney-Bush War on Iraq. It is their zionism and loyalty to Israel, that was the driving force for getting the US committed to war. Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Pearl, Douglas Feith, Elliot Abrams and William Kristol are all zionists with loyalties to the zionist agenda and Israel, are fully responsible for the death of more than 4,000 US soldiers, responsible for the more than 40,000 combat injuries, more than a million Iraqis dead and of course the more than $ 600,000 Billions the cost so far, of the War on Iraq. All of that for and on behalf of Israel. These zionists with their loyalties to Israel are similar to Communists with their loyalties to Moscow. However the George Bush administration is not the only administration to put zionists in charge of the US policies in the Middle East. Bill Clinton entrusted US policies in the Middle East to key staffers who came directly from Israeli/zionist work shop. Dennis Ross and Martin Indyke where and are committed zionists and Israeli loyalists...

Presidential candidates John McCain, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama should think twice before making loyalty to Israel and zionism the central theme of their presidential campaign. How about putting America first for a change?

Jefferson Corner

Barack Obama, Rev. Wright, and Racism, America Responds: We’re Not Done With You Yet

By mark karlin
April 29, 2008

Nothing more profoundly and disturbingly symbolizes America's subtle racist double standard than George Stephanopoulos's question during the Philadelphia debate to Barack Obama: "Do you think Reverend Wright loves America as much as you do?"
We have all these right wing "God is destroying America because it has sinned" preachers running around with barely a question asked of the Republicans they back. Yes, Hagee, Robertson, the late Jerry Falwell, and countless other religious leaders of the fundamentalist cloth have delivered countless white versions of "God Damns America" statements. The only difference is that they don't "say it black" in black churches, and then see it looped endlessly around on FOX TV and other cable networks, not to say rerun again and again on talk radio.
The point that appears to be forgotten here is that Rev. Wright is not running for president. Barack Obama is.
As Wright takes a valedictory tour to take advantage of a national platform that has been offered to him by a media tinderbox filled with the kindling wood of race, the question remains as to why this is still front page news. Whether Wright is preaching the gospel and indignation to a media that can't get enough of this sidebar story because race sells only second to sex as far as spiking up ratings -- or whether he is just on an ego trip -- the point to ask is why this is a front page story at all.
The Washington Post, the New York Times, and most of the mainstream media have buried the lies, broken laws, torture, Iraq War malfeasance, incompetence, cronyism, etc., of the Bush Administration for the most part in the back pages of the newspapers (if printed at all) -- and generally kept it off of television news altogether; but it can't get enough of whether the former minister of a presidential candidate -- who served his nation in the Marines by the way -- "loves America."
Is this a joke?
No it's the "Made in America" racial double standard at work.
It's as racist as "nailing" Barack Obama for not wearing a flag pin, even though George and Charlie and Hillary weren't wearing flag pins at the Philadelphia debate -- and McCain is not asked why he frequently doesn't wear one. The double standard on the flag pin is so glaring that most Americans can't see it in front of their own eyes; one need only look at the television screen to see that Barack Obama is not the only candidate or television moderator not wearing the Bush Administration symbol of patriotism reduced to the size of a miniature piece of tin.
Yes, it's the old "black people have to prove themselves more than white people" thing rising to a full fever pitch. It's the media and America answering Barack Obama's challenge to confront our racist past during his dazzling speech in Philadelphia.
Unfortunately, the response by the media, other politicians in the race, and commentators has been, "not so fast, Barack -- we aren't finished with the racial double standard just yet."
We wish Rev. Wright a pleasant retirement, but we really don't know what his relevance is to the severe crises facing America. No white candidate, including Bush and McCain, has been so hammered about such an irrelevancy, considering the kooky religious figures that they have backing them.
That kind of scrutiny we reserve for a black man.
In case anyone needs to be reminded about the history of racial injustice in America, we encourage you to most appropriately watch and listen to the incomparable Nina Simone singing, "Mississippi Goddam." [1]
It's been the goal of the Clinton campaign to prove that Obama can't transcend the reality of his being a black man in a nation that is still looking for a "Great White Hope."
The re-emergence of Rev. Wright as a national news story when we have Bush and Cheney preparing to possibly bomb Iran and Senator Clinton threatening to "obliterate" the same nation, not to mention a three trillion dollar debt, the destruction of our environment, the loss of jobs to overseas slave-labor nations, and the nearing of a tipping point in our dependency on oil -- well all this re-emphasizes that Clinton may be right: we are still stuck in the gutter of our baser instincts and anyone who wants to appeal to our better selves is in for a rude awakening.

Church's Obama Message Removed After Outcry

Is this preacher, Pastor Roger Byrd, a KKKlans member or a skin head? He kinda looks like one. He is white, short hair, talks like one, I don't know, makes me think he is. REALLY, this is a classic example of what worthless messages you can find in today's church's in the good old USA.

Tom


POSTED: 5:01 pm EDT April 22, 2008
UPDATED: 5:39 am EDT April 23, 2008

JONESVILLE, S.C. -- Following a day of national attention and public outcry over a sign in front of a small church in a small town, the message has been changed.

The sign in front of the Jonesville Church of God said, "Obama, Osama, hmm, are they brothers?"

On Tuesday, the Church Of God's International Office issued a statement saying that the sign had been removed. (Full Text Of Church Of God Statement)

The message on the sign now reads: "How will you spend eternity, smoking or no smoking?"

Pastor Roger Byrd said that he had just wanted to get people thinking. He said that the message wasn't meant to be racial or political.

"It's simply to cause people to realize and to see what possibly could happen if we were to get someone in there that does not believe in Jesus Christ," he said.

When asked if he believes that Barack Obama is Muslim, Byrd said, "I don't know. See it asks a question: Are they brothers? In other words, is he Muslim? I don't know. He says he's not. I hope he's not. But I don't know. And it's just something to try to stir people's minds. It was never intended to hurt feelings or to offend anybody."

Obama has said repeatedly during his campaign that he is a Christian and attends Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago.

The amount of attention the message received surprised Byrd.

"I'm very surprised," he said, "It shocked me and startled me."

Byrd had said that he and his congregation decided on Sunday night to leave the sign up, and that he didn't want it to appear that controversy forced him to take the sign down.

The WYFF4.com story about the sign was viewed more than a quarter million times by users across the country. Hundreds of negative comments regarding the sign were posted online. On Tuesday, Byrd apparently decided the wording on the sign should be replaced.

He was not available for comment on Tuesday.

Christian Fundamentalists -- The High Cost of Being Sincerely Wrong

By Dennis Diehl

Dennis Diehl

Dennis was a 26 year pastor. Having experienced this reckless shift in how a Church chose to change itself, Dennis began to bring to the ...

Goodmorning...I used to be one of you. I know how you think and the Biblical brainwashing you have been through that makes you think the way you do about world events, Biblical prophecy, the Second Coming of Jesus and the Kingdom of God on earth. I know how ministers and pastors, most well meaning, but full of sanctified ignorance and misunderstanding of the intent, origins, errancy and the historical inaccuracies of much we read in the Bible, have filled your minds with misguided zeal. I know how you read and understand the prophecies of the four kingdoms of Daniel and the dreams of Nebuaccanezzar, King of Babylon. I doubt you know they were written after the fact and not prophetically.

I know how you read Daniel 11 and 12 as just how things will be "in the end times." I know how some of you think "a thousand will fall at your right side, and ten thousand at your left, but it will not come nigh unto your dwelling." I know how you read Matthew 24. I know some of you think that you will be "born up on eagles wings" and taken to a "place of safety," maybe in Petra, Jordan to wait out the end time carnage that you see in the Trumpets, Vials, plagues and Horsemen of Revelation. Some of you have already left and some left years ago, only to return and get back to work.

I know you read the Book of Revelation as if it was a newspaper and see these times as those times and that book as revealing all that is about to happen so Jesus can return. I know you have forgotten that 2000 years ago the opening of the Revelation says "to show unto my servants, things which must SHORTLY, come to pass." I know that you view "shortly" differently than most people understand "shortly." I know some of you think you are part of the exclusive 144,000 thousand. I know you don't understand Gematria or the 12 signs of the Zodiac but I spare you.

I know that even though you know Paul said Jesus for sure would come in his lifetime, and that he was among the "We, who are alive and remain unto the coming of the Lord, shall be caught up together with the Lord, and WE shall be saved," was wrong. I know you know that later in his life, Paul gave up on Jesus coming for him in his lifetime and said that he had fought a good fight, kept the faith and would have to settle for a crown of righteousness that he'd get later, but not soon anymore. I know you know that Paul motivated the church to not marry the loves of their lives, give lots of money to the church and be ready to go at a moments notice, in vain. I always wonder about the people who believe what Paul said about the times being short and it being better to not marry and be like him. Did they get really bitter when their lives passed and Jesus didn't return, nor did they get to be intimate with the ones they loved because Paul said not to? I bet they did anyway, just like today in all churches who try to regulate relationships. The minister gets to rant about such things, but most just sneak around and do what they want anyway. You can thank Paul and his misquided view of the immediacy of Jesus return in HIS lifetime for the skepticism of most.

I know that you know Jesus said in Matthew 24 that "this generation shall not a pass until all these things be fulfilled" and that since we now know it was not the generation of Jesus this happened for, Jesus was not ill informed, but rather meant that the generation that these things happened in, would see it through. This allows your pastor to motivate you by drawing your attention to all that is happening in your world as proof of this being all about YOU. That's the apologetic, but that is not what Jesus, who was mistaken about this meant, when he is aleged to have said it. I know that you know "no man knows the day or the hour, but the Father only," but choose to ignore that and predict, predict, predict to put fear, fear, fear, into each other. Or as one said, "Just because we don't know the day or the hour doesn't mean we can't know the month or the year." Right... I know your ministers tell you that Jesus will return in 3 or 5 or not more than 10 years, and they are wrong, but hopeful and of course, the fear and hope of it keeps you in your seats and giving the bucks.

I know that the gayness of some people, the lack of belief of others, the movies, TV and all the events going on in the Middle East are proof that you won't have to wait much longer for Jesus. Little does the Pastor know that out of every 100 members of his church, about 10 are going to be gay by nature and that the same would be true for the 100 of the clergy he got together with at his last ministerial conference where they condemned it. I know you know that all fundamentalist college campuses have a normal number of gay students in attendance. Or maybe you don't. I know they are in denial on this topic but I spare you. Oh, and this would include the faculty of course.

I know you believe the nation of Israel is the most special of God's holy nations and that as one man said to me, "anyone who picks on Israel, is challenging God himself." I know you don't believe that anyone who picks on Afghanistan is picking on God. I have to say that meme has gone a long way to insure the safety of that small rather troublesome piece of the planet. The tales of the Old Testament have insured that the rules and ways of an obscure deity, on an obscure mountain, in an obscure land, speaking to an obscure people about obscure and dictatorial and controlling obcure practices, are relevant to today. They mostly aren't. My experience is that when a nation, government, president, church or group "can do no wrong," wrong is all they get good at. I know you know that too but don't apply it to the group you associate with. You should.

I know you are told you are special and that others are not. I know that you are told you are chosen and called, while others are not chosen and not called. I know you believe you have special saving knowledge while others are lost. I know you are told that you are true and others false. I know you are led to believe that your thinking is correct on all topics biblical and prophectic and all others are wrong. I know you can't imagine you are wrong about a hundred biblical ideas and speculations, but you are. I know you think that this President was put in power by God himself but I am not sure that you know that even he says he hears the voice of God, which is why he went to war. I know when others hear the voice of God in your local congregation, you marginalize them and think they are weird and strange or may need help. But on a national scale, you seem to accept the voice of God in the heads of men who can start a war that leads to everything BUT the Second Coming. I know you can't imagine having to clean up after such a mistake because I know you can't imagine any biblical or prophetic mistakes being made. But they are being made big time and cleaning up after the shit hits the fan, may be all you get to do, and of course, ask the pastor what went wrong and where is Jesus? Oh, you'll also get to ask why you can't afford to live and why your job ended and you lost everything you worked hard for. You'll also learn the church won't be able to help you much then, and no, you can't have any of your tithe money back to get back on your feet. That was money you gave to God and he has already spent it. I know you don't know that 100% of all endtime prophecies made by fundamentalist and evangelical TV Preechers, have failed miserably. I know...just around the corner.

I know you are afraid to die personally just as every human being before you has. I know you, like Paul, prefer to be "changed," at the sound of the trumpet and not die at all. After all, Paul said "we would not all die." I am not sure you realize he had to retract that later in life.

I know how you feel about "God's Law" and how much better off we'd all be if we kept "it." But I also know you aren't real sure which ones to keep. Sabbath over Sunday? Passover over Easter? Holydays over holidays? I know some think parents should still get to stone rebellious children. I know you are nuts if you think that. I know you that "God's Law" means different things to differrent people and I know that you tend to confuse what to keep from the Old Testament nation of Israel and drag it over into the New and the Church. Well except tithing of course. I know how you think we are all spiritual Israelites, but how would you feel if someone kept calling you a spiritual Zulu in order to be saved? How about a Spiritual Sioux? Actually I'd love that but that's my preference.

I also know, because I was one of you, that you don't know near as much as you think you know. You're knowing is, at times, wishful thinking, or sanctified ignorance based on the sole fact that it's what you have always been taught. I know that learning new perspectives is not something you are encouraged to do. I know that admitting you are wrong is not something you are often able to do. When science makes a mistake, it admits it and uses whatever information was good for future studies. When religion and churches make mistakes, they kill the people who point it out. That's how it goes.

But I also know that over zealous pastors and fundamentalists need to be cautioned about your zealotry gone wrong. Zealous and sanctified ignorance can provoke all the Vials, Trumpets, Trombones and Beasts of Revelation and you will get everything promoted in the Book of Revelation EXCEPT the Second Coming. What you will get is one big mess to clean up, if you survive along with the rest of us. You'll get a place in history as the reason why the next generation wants nothing to do with organized religion or ministers and pastors who can't admit they are wrong and it's not all about them after all. You'll reap a whirlwind but not Kingdom of God to bale you out.

While the President may or may not have said, "God told me to strike at Sadaam and I did...", it has never in the history of the planet worked out well when society has let religion call the shots as to what is and what isn't. I know you know that. I just hope you will think long and hard about the chaos fundamentalism of any kind, Islamic or Christian can bring to the lives of well meaning humans who simply want to be left alone to live, learn and love without the drama of religious ignorance.