Bartholomew's Notes

The headline refers to Obama’s unfortunate mix-up between the Soviet liberation of Auschwitz with the American liberation of Buchenwald. Back in May Aaron Klein described this as a “gaffe”, but apparently he now feels the need to imply some kind of Holocaust denial, perhaps having realised that it is absolutely impossible to insult or underestimate the intelligence of WND‘s target readership.

Of course, WND would never distort the Holocaust for its own purposes, and certainly not in a highly disrespectful and tasteless way:

The above picture and caption appeared in a WND puff-piece for anti-evolution film called Darwin’s Deadly Legacy. The film was condemned by the Anti-Defamation League for trivalizing the Holocaust.

Meanwhile, Ed Brayton has an excellent put-down of the WND-editor and all his works here.

(Hat tip: ConWebWatch)

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Pastor John Hagee, founder of Christians United for Israel, in 2006:

[The world is] standing on the brink of a nuclear Armageddon…We are on a countdown to crisis. The coming nuclear showdown with Iran is a certainty…That war will affect every nation on earth, including America, and will affect every person on planet earth.”

Also:

Israel will come back, and I believe that this next round will be more severe, more aggressive, and the moment that Israel determines that Iran has nuclear capability or buys a nuclear weapon from North Korea that they will bomb the nuclear facilities in Iran or go after Iran. And then it is really going to become intense in the Middle East…I think the United States and Israel should keep their ear to the ground, and the moment that they feel that Iran has a nuclear device that they need to take out the nuclear capabilities of that country. Make no mistake, Iran will use nuclear weapons against Israel and use nuclear weapons against the United States of America. Even if it’s a nuclear suitcase bomb, they will do everything in their power to get it in the hands of sleeper cells that are already in the United States of America.

David Brog, executive director of Christians United for Israel, 2008:

In recent months, many commentators have been talking about the inevitability of Iran getting a nuclear weapon.  Others have been discussing the inevitability of an Israeli or American military strike against Iran.  Yet neither of these supposedly “inevitable” options bodes well for the peace and security of Israel or her neighbors.  Before accepting either such outcome as inevitable, it is time to redouble our efforts to stop Iran from enriching uranium through the most effective tools at our disposal:  economic sanctions, divestment and diplomacy.

Given that Brog is Jewish it is hardly suprisingly he would hold such a view: unlike Hagee, who is obsessed with the sanguinary events of the Last Days, Brog doubtless has a long-term view of Israel which doesn’t involve Jesus coming back to save the day (despite his position at CUFI, he doesn’t appear to adhere to Christianity or Messianic Judaism).

Brog’s statement is calculated to obscure Hagee’s apocalyptic theology in the run-up to next week’s CUFI “Washingon-Israel Summit“, at which Joseph Lieberman and the Israeli ambassador will be speakers. CUFI is desperate to appear moderate following the McCain endorsement fiasco: Walid Shoebat – co-author of God’s War on Terror: Islam, Prophecy, and the Bible, which argues that Muslims are under the control of the anti-Christ – disappeared from the speaker line-up a couple of weeks ago.

(Hat tip: Sarah Posner, who also gets to the bottom of the Hagee-Jim Hutchens spilt, which I blogged here. I blogged on David Brog here.)

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Reuters reports on Christian Zionist disillusionment with Ehud Olmert:

Olmert raised about $70,000 for the New Jerusalem Foundation at a single Christian fundraiser in Dallas in 2002. But this year, the evangelical leader who helped organise that event voiced “outrage” at Olmert’s starting talks about sharing the city with the Palestinians as part of the U.S.-backed Annapolis process. He vowed to “do everything in my power” to prevent it.

Curiously, the donation figure is considerably smaller than was reported at the time, in the Jerusalem Post:

More than 4,000 Christians gathered in this Dallas, Texas, suburb Sunday to mark the 35th anniversary of the reunification of Jerusalem, offering prayers for Israel’s capital and donations to its children who have fallen victims to terrorism.

…[Mike Evans] reported that participants in the Dallas gathering gave more than $400,000 in cash and pledges, and that all gifts would go to the New Jerusalem Foundation for the victims of terrorism in Jerusalem.

Maybe those “pledges” never amounted to much.

Evans – who believes God struck Franklin Roosevelt dead for his failure to be more supportive of Zionism – has for a while now been railing against George Bush’s “betrayal” of Jerusalem, and doubtless it is he who is now going to “everything in his power” to oppose Annapolis.

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From the Koran (Sura 112, “Al-Ikhlas”, or “Purity of Faith”):

Say: He, Allah, is One. Allah is He on Whom all depend. He begets not, nor is He begotten. And none is like Him.

There is a commentary on this by a Muslim scholar named Abdullah Yusuf Ali (d. 1953), in his The Meaning of the Holy Qur’an:

…we must not think of [Allah] as having a son or a father, for that would mean to import animal qualities into our conception of Him.

This is of course a Muslim critique of the Christian idea of the Trinity; Judaism takes a similar line, as seen for example in Chapter Three of Hasdai Crescas’s fourteenth-century The Refutation of the Christian Principles:

We say: if the son were generated, then God would be generated. This follows from your statement that each one of them is God…

The Islamic critique is the subject of a new letter by Archbishop Rowan Williams, addressed to Muslims (emphasis added):

Here it is important to state unequivocally that the association of any other being with God is expressly rejected by the Christian theological tradition. Since the earliest Councils of the Church, Christian thinkers sought to clarify how, when we speak of the Father ‘begetting’ the Son, we must put out of our minds any suggestion that this is a physical thing, a process or event like the processes and events that happen in the world. They insisted that the name ‘God’ is not the name of a person like a human person, a limited being with a father and mother and a place that they inhabit within the world. ‘God’ is the name of a kind of life, a ‘nature’ or essence – eternal and self-sufficient life, always active, needing nothing. But that life is lived, so Christians have always held, eternally and simultaneously as three interrelated agencies are made known to us in the history of God’s revelation to the Hebrew people and in the life of Jesus and what flows from it. God is at once the source of divine life, the expression of that life and the active power that communicates that life. This takes us at once into consideration of the Trinitarian language used by Christians to speak of God. We recognise that this is difficult, sometimes offensive, to Muslims; but it is all the more important for the sake of open and careful dialogue that we try to clarify what we do and do not mean by it, and so trust that what follows will be read in this spirit.

Daily Mail headline (also reproduced on WorldNetDaily):

Archbishop of Canterbury: ‘Christian doctrine is offensive to Muslims’

(Hat tip: NT Wrong)

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A few days ago it was reported by Bruce Wilson, Max Blumenthal, and Sam Stein that a PR firm employed by John Hagee Ministries had succeeded in getting YouTube to remove videos featuring clips of Hagee’s controversial sermons. The PR firm was 5WPR, and 5W’s Senior Vice President Juda Engelmayer is listed as the contact for Hagee’s Christians United for Israel’s press relations.

Meanwhile, 5WPR has also been involved with defending a firm called Agriprocessors, which is the USA’s largest producer of Kosher meat. Agriprocessors has come under fire for a range of issues following an immigration raid on one of its plants, but the firm received supportive comments on a critical blog in the name of Morris Allen, a Conservative Rabbi with expertise in ethical kashrut practices. However, the Rabbi had not made the comments – and, as the Jewish Telegraphic Agency reports, one of them was traced back to Engelmayer’s apartment.

The JTA tells us that an intern has confessed that he sent the comment from Engelmayer’s apartment without his knowledge during a get-together; however, it also reports the president of 5WPR as saying that “A senior staff member failed to be transparent in dealing with client matters. He has taken full responsibility”. Other fraudulent postings came from IPs belonging to 5WPR.

The blog to which the comments were posted is Failed Messiah, which writes critically about ultra-Orthodox Judaism and the theocratic right in Israel.

The Jerusalem Post adds the detail that 5WPR’s clients

include McDonald’s, pornographer Joe Francis of Girls Gone Wild, Pastor John Hagee and a slew of right-wing Jewish organizations.

Gawker has more fun with the story.

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From MyFox Houston, 2 July:

The distribution of Qurans in a southwest Houston neighborhood has some residents worried about the motives of the group who dispersed the Islamic book.

But some residents, like Greg and Sue Ann Pieri, said they feared the group is imposing its beliefs on non-Muslims and found the gesture offensive.

“If we went into a Muslim country and left a bible, we would be in prison and then decapitated a few years later,” said Sue Ann Pieri, who chose not to destroy the book like other neighbors did.

According to the accompanying video, Pieri rescued serveral copies from the garbage “out of respect for Islam”. The same video shows hack Duarte Geraldino breathlessly reenacting how the Korans were delivered:

Whoever dropped off the Korans had to walk up the driveway, then the Koran was put in a plastic bag and either left at the doorstep here or on the doorknob of the house, so that people couldn’t open their doors without picking up the Muslim Holy Book – an outrage to some.

Charlie Butts at American Family Association news site OneNewsNow reported on the same incident ten days later:

A resident of the area — who asked to remain anonymous — made the discovery. She said she found a white plastic bag hanging on her door, and inside was an English copy of the Koran along with a flyer that read, “Please accept this gift from your Muslim neighbors.”

“If I were to go to their country and leave my Bible, I would be persecuted,” she notes…She collected the unwanted Korans and took them to a safe sight [sic] to be handled…

Interesting that Butts found a quote similar to that of Pieri’s, and that this anonymous resident also rescued unwanted copies. But that, unlike Pieri, this person decided to infer to Butts that Muslims are not Americans. At the risk of being pedantic, it may be of relevance that Butts is unprofessionally slapdash with his direct quote of the flyer, which in fact reads

Dear Neighbor,
Please accept the enclosed book as a free gift from the Muslim community
Sincerely,
The Book of Signs Foundation
on behalf of the Muslim community

The Book of Signs Foundation also did a distribution recently in Wheaton, catching the attention of the Chicago Tribune, which managed to find some less hysterical reactions:

…one woman said she didn’t know what a Quran was and didn’t know what she was going to do with it. Most others said they would read through it.

“I’ve read literature about the Quran, but never read the Quran,” said Kevin Ritchie, 46. He said he would read the book but remain skeptical about the religion. “I think they’ve got a right to pass them out, but I’m pretty much set with my religion,” Ritchie said.

The report also explains the delivery process:

Their chosen approach is non-invasive…Paid workers who distribute the Qurans don’t make the rounds in the rain and never leave books on the ground.

However, it should be noted that there actually is an Islamist link: the Book of Signs Foundation website is slightly mysterious,  but the Tribune and other sites identify the the organisation with the al-Furqaan Foundation, which has a Gideon-like mission of “Delivering THE MESSAGE of THE QUR’AN to Everyone in America”. According to the Foundation website, the Korans come with a preface by Dr. Zakir Naik, President of the Islamic Research Foundation and a former student of the late Ahmed Deedat. Deedat was famous for copying the techniques of Christian fundamentalists, penning a numerous tracts opposing other religions and attempting to prove the Koran through scientific arguments, and Naik follows the same method. If you’re willing to wade through the rhetoric, M. Zuhdi Jasser of the neo-conservative-linked American Islamic Forum for Democracy has noted more of the organisation’s Islamist links, with links to sources, at (cough) Family Security Matters.

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Doth not even nature itself teach you, that, if a man have long hair, it is a shame unto him? – I Cor 11:14

(See here)

UPDATE: Ruth Gledhill links to the blog ParishLife, which reveals the protestor’s identity.

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Hagee’s Rabbi associate met with anti-missionary group in Israel

A group blog run by some Israeli settlers features a two-part essay (here and here) by Ellen W. Horowitz (a Golan Heights settler) on the Christian Friends of Israel (CUFI) and John Hagee. Horowitz appears to have some inside information which is worth noting:

I met with Hagee confidant and friend Rabbi Arye Scheinberg four weeks ago at the home of Rabbi Simcha HaCohen Kook. I understand Rabbi Scheinberg had requested the meeting with Rav Kook in order to better understand certain positions the rabbinate has been taking. A Representative from the Jerusalem City Council and the director of a counter-missionary group were among those present at the meeting. Rabbi Scheinberg acknowledged the wealth of evidence and problems with certain CUFI directors, and assured me that Pastor Hagee was well aware of the situation with at least one of his main directors and publishers. I was told that Strang was “out” and that other changes were forthcoming. But other than the sudden removal of Jim Hutchins from the CUFI Regional Director section of the website, I have no indication that any action has been taken as a result of that meeting.

“Arye Scheinberg” is better known as “Aryeh Scheinberg” or “Aryeh Sheinberg”, and he has featured on this blog before, as the possible origin of the bogus story that Jery Falwell had adopted a “dual covenant” theology which sees Judaism and Christianity as equally-valid religions. “Jim Hutchins”, meanwhile, is actually Jim Hutchens, and he heads a Christian Zionist organisation called the Jerusalem Connection. Hutchens’ name is indeed missing from the list of CUFI regional directors, where he was once listed under the Washington area. However, Stephen Strang is still there, and I would be astonished by any public breach between Hagee and the powerful editor of Charisma magazine.

Horowitz is unhappy with certain CUFI directors whom she believes to have a missionary agenda. In particular, she notes that Charisma magazine has featured criticism of Orthodox Judaism, and it has condemned Orthodox harrassment of Messianic Jews. Although there is real evidence that Messianic Jews do indeed face serious problems in Israel (blogged here), and reason to suspect anti-Missionary fanatics of sending a parcel bomb to a Messianic pastor that seriously injured his son (see here), she dismisses such concerns as an “anti-Semitic blood libel”.

And as for Hutchens, Horowitz tells us that she has ” a significant and distressing report” on him, although no details are given. CUFI directors Michael Little and Robert Stearns are also criticised. However, as for Hagee himself, Horowitz notes that:

Pastor John Hagee has incurred the wrath of messianic and other evangelical groups because of his inconsistent and lukewarm approach towards overt Jewish evangelism. His toying with Christian theology caused such an outcry that he was compelled to do a rewrite on his book, “In Defense of Israel.”

The fact that Hagee’s friend Sheinberg has apparently been meeting with a counter-missionary group in Israel will also be controversial among evangelicals.

The tension over Christian Zionism and the evangelical urge to missionize has been increasing for a while. Last September Janet Parshell pulled out of a Christian Allies Caucus event, complaining that the Israeli attitude appeared to be one of “We’ll take your aid, your support and your tourist dollars, but we won’t take your Jesus”, while Christians should not have to “choose between the cross or Israel”. A statement on Jewish evangelism from the World Evangelical Council in April has also resulted in controversy.

Horowitz also thinks some of the money donated by Hagee may have been used in ways that were not appropriate:

1) Two months ago Pastor Hagee donated $250,000 to the One Family Fund .It was understood at the time that the funds would be allocated towards building a 5000 square meter bombshelter in Sderot. The organization diverted those funds and they are instead being used to reinforce the roofs of a synagogue and a school. Certainly worthy projects, but was Pastor Hagee, or a rabbi for that matter, consulted on the change in plans?

2) Pastor Hagee attempted to donate $25,000 to Mercaz Harav in memory of the terror victims of the yeshiva attack. Mercaz Harav declined the offer. Pastor Hagee then approached the Jerusalem municipality in order to funnel the funds through them for the terror victims. The municipality accepted the contribution and then a decision was made by the New Jerusalem Foundation to use those funds towards the building of a park. Did the mayor inform Pastor Hagee?

Horowitz’s essay was brought to my attention by IsraeleNews, a somewhat enigmatic website which reposts, at its own initiative, various essays on Israel and Christian Zionism. A couple of pieces of mine have also shown up there – lest there be any doubt, I do not share the website’s perspective or politics.

UPDATE: Sarah Posner has the background, here (scroll down):

Jim Hutchens, a former military chaplain, is president of the hard-line Christian Zionist group The Jerusalem Connection International, which has opposed any Israeli-Palestinian peace deal even more vociferously than CUFI has. Hutchens told me that after he confronted Hagee last year over the assertion in Hagee’s most recent book that Jesus did not come to be the Messiah for the Jews, CUFI removed him as Mid-Atlantic regional director. He was offered a co-director position for the District of Columbia, Hutchens said, but he decided to cut ties with CUFI completely. (A spokesperson for CUFI said she didn’t know what had precipitated the split, or which party initiated it.)

With Hagee’s efforts to garner Jewish support for CUFI, “the focus now,” said Hutchens, “is Jews united for Hagee.”…Hutchens and the other Christian Zionists he says share his concerns and are skipping the CUFI Summit represent the hardcore fringe of Hagee supporters.

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WorldNetDaily introduces us to Brad Thor, an author of bestselling pulp thrillers whom WND compares to both Salman Rushdie and Dan Brown:

The author of the best-selling new thriller, “The Last Patriot,” says his life already has been threatened for contending the Muslim holy book contains errors and is not based on the last revelations of Muhammad.

…In the book, which is being called the “Islamic Da Vinci Code,” Thor posits that Islamic scholars have engaged in a conspiracy to cover up missing parts of the Quran that allegedly reveal their prophet had a final moderate revelation that abrogates the violent passages of the Quran.

…Thor, who has served as a member of the Department of Homeland Security’s Analytic Red Cell Program, says his research confirmed that parchments and fragments of parchments of the Quran were uncovered at the Great Mosque in Sana’a, Yemen, in 1974.

“What they found when they started studying them was, uh-oh, there’s stuff in here that doesn’t look like the Quran today,” he explained, “and we’ve gone around telling everybody that the Quran is perfect and now here are these discrepancies.”

Actually, the parchments were found in 1971, not 1974, and the discovery has been in the public domain for a long time – Thor’s alleged “research” has “confirmed” nothing. Probably Thor came across them when reading a popular account, such as an article by Martin Bright which appeared in the New Statesman in 2001:

German scholars who studied the manuscripts discovered that some of the Koranic writing diverges from the authorised version, which by tradition is considered the pure, unadulterated word of God. What’s more, some of the writing appears to have been inscribed over earlier, “rubbed-out” versions of the text. This editing supports the belief of [John] Wansbrough and his pupils that the Koran as we know it does not date from the time of Mohammad. Andrew Rippin, professor of Islamic history at the University of Victoria in Canada, and the author of a revisionist history of Islam published by Routledge, said: “The Sana’a manuscripts [are] part of the process of filling in the holes in our knowledge of what might have happened.”

However, the various scholars cited by Bright distanced themselves from his vulgar and polemical appropriation of their work in the following issue. Michael Cook explained that the Sana’a fragments “scatter a few apples over the cobbles, but they don’t upset the apple-cart”, while Gerald Hawting of SOAS complained that

…The spurious air of conspiracy and censorship conjured up in Martin Bright’s article is nonsense. All of the named scholars whose “conclusions” are said to be so “devastating” for Islam hold or held senior positions in front-rank universities and their books are published by leading university presses and other houses, freely available for anyone who cares to read them.

I did not “warn” (whatever that might mean) the journalist concerned not to publish the article, and the “decent obscurity” I suggested was for the right-wing and fundamentalist websites by which he is so fascinated…

Against this it should be noted that one German scholar of the Koran chooses to use a pseudonym (“Christoph Luxenberg”), although his book The Syro-Aramaic Reading of the Koran doesn’t appear to have provoked much of a reaction.

Of course, a popular thriller with a fictitous premise is rather different from a scholarly tome, and it is clear that Thor is revelling in creating a possible controversy to rival the Danish Muhammad cartoons. However, he gives us no details about the death threats against him, and it has to be noted that US conservative circles have been known to define “death threat” very loosely; Joseph Farah absurdly (but predictably) tried to spin a contemptuous dismissal by CAIR of the new WND book Why We Left Islam as some sort of threat to his person. Of course, any real death threats to Thor should be denounced vigorously, but I wonder why we read nothing about their content or about any police investigations.

The “Analytic Red Cell Program”, meanwhile, was profiled in the Washington Post in 2004 – the idea was to ask creative people for their input as regards possible terrorist scenarios.

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Simon Jones brings my attention to the latest from Michael Reid, the British neo-Pentecostal Bishop who recently fled to Arizona following after admitting to for an eight-year affair with his music director. Reid, it will be recalled, has long-standing links with Oral Roberts and Earl Paulk, and from his Peniel Church in Essex he ran the now-defunct “Christian Congress for Traditional Values”, which campaigned against homosexuality and such.

Reid has since faded from the public eye, but a discussion threat at the evangelical “Reachout Trust” has postings from people with links to the church. These posters are all very negative towards Reid, whom they accuse of authoritarianism and hypocrisy, and of using the law to bully opponents.

According to one poster with inside knowledge, Reid has apparently withdrawn his resignation, and he and the rest of his family – who were also employed by the church – “have all given sick notes”, claiming stress-related illness. Further, there is a fear that Reid intends to blame the stress on the behaviour of church members, and perhaps to claim unfair dismissal, thus securing a compensation payout.

One of Reid’s favourite Biblical passages is 2 Thess 3:10, “For even when we were with you, this we commanded you, that if any would not work, neither should he eat”.

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