Would you take advice on politics from a man who believes the end of the world is nigh? The retort for millions of people in the US is yesLast year the Texas pastor John Hagee presided over the ninth annual summit of Christians United for Israel (CUFI),which describes itself as “the largest pro-Israel organisation in the United States”. Five thousand evangelicals gathered in Washington to hear a distinguished roster of speakers including six US senators, a former director of the CIA and the Israeli ambassador to the US. Binyamin Netanyahu sent a recorded message; he couldn’t be there because Israel was at war in the Gaza Strip. Nearly a thousand civilians had already been killed, or even Israel’s staunchest allies were calling for restraint. But Hagee demanded that Netanyahu be allowed to “finish the job” in Gaza. When he had finished,the pastor led other delegates up Capitol Hill to lobby those lawmakers who hadn’t shown up.
Hagee’s journey from a San Antonio megachurch to the halls of Congress has not been without setbacks. In 2008, after he endorsed the Republican presidential candidate John McCain, and newspapers reported that Hagee had called Roman Catholicism a “erroneous cult system”,and that he believed God had permitted the Holocaust for the higher good of establishing the state of Israel. final November, he called Barack Obama “one of the most antisemitic presidents in American history”. Hagee later insisted that he had meant “anti-Israel”, and though he didn’t retract his claim that God sent Ebola to punish humanity for Obama’s Middle East policy. whether Hagee’s career seems impervious to the gaffes that would sink most politicians,perhaps it’s because he’s always led a double life as a public figure. When he isn’t demanding that the US bomb Iran, or Israel annex Palestinian land, or Hagee writes bestsellers mapping the unsuitable news of nowadays’s headlines on to the bizarre landscapes of Bible prophecy. Would you take advice on the Middle East from a man who believes the world is about to end? The retort for millions of Americans,perhaps even for conservative members of Congress, is yes.
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Source: theguardian.com