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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Things are hotting up in the spat between Mohammed Sawalha, President of the British Muslim Initiative, and UK liberal hawk blog Harry’s Place:
Last Friday, in the wake of a closely argued debate about whether Mohammed Sawalha, the President of the British Muslim Initiative, had used the phrase “Evil Jew” or “Jewish Lobby” in a speech, Harry’s Place received a letter. The letter is from Dean and Dean, a firm of solicitors who are acting for Mr Sawalha… We have responded to Mr Sawalha’s solicitors, through Mishcon de Reya, who are acting for us.
The dispute over the translation received wide attention; I blogged it here.
Dean and Dean have had a number of prominent clients; according to an old report in the Times,
clients have included the Saudi royal family, the King of Morocco, David Khalili, the wealthy Iranian art dealer, Nadhmi Auchi, the Iraqi-born billionaire, and the Hinduja brothers.
Mishcon de Reya, meanwhile, recently handled the McCartney-Mills divorce, and the firm previously acted for Princess Diana. Its partners include Anthony Julius, who represented Deborah Lipstadt when the Holocaust denier David Irving attempted to sue her for libel.
Unless Sawalha backs down, costs are likely to be eye-watering…
(PS – as an aside, Nadhmi Auchi is also worth keeping an eye on, for reasons unconnected with the above: as well as using Dean and Dean, he also retains the services of Carter-Ruck, with the inevitable result that a number of stories and profiles have recently disappeared from the websites of various newspapers.)
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The Kampala New Vision reports:
Archbishop Henry Luke Orombi yesterday said he fears for his life because of the campaign he has waged against homosexuals.
“Nowadays, I don’t wear my collar when I am in countries which have supporters of homosexuals,” he said while addressing Christians at Kitunga archdeaconry, West Ankole diocese in Ntungamo district.
“I am forced to dress like a civilian because those people are dangerous. They can harm anybody who is against them. Some of them are killers. They want to close the mouth of anybody who is against them.”
I can see the problem: a black man wearing a clerical collar walking down a street in the USA or UK is bound to be identified as Bishop Orombi and then attacked by murderous homosexuals.
In fact, of course, being gay in Uganda is rather more dangerous than being an African cleric in countries with “supporters of homosexuals”. Doug Ireland noted in 2006:
The police in Jinja, Uganda’s second largest city, have “launched an operation to repress the gays, who were on the verge of winning the heterosexual generation of the district,” announced the September 7 issue of the popular sex-and-scandal tabloid daily newspaper Red Pepper under the screaming headline, “JINJA COPS HUNT FOR GAYS.”
The newspaper called on the public to cooperate in tracking down “sodomites” to prevent them from “polluting” the general population, published the photo of a young gay man who was said to have intimate links to a man already imprisoned in for homosexuality — which is punishable with life imprisonment in Uganda — and urged its readers to help track down the young man.
Meanwhile, in the UK, a Ugandan lesbian named Prossy Kakooza is seeking asylum after being raped by Ugandan police. However, Orombi denied there was a problem when he spoke recently to journalists at GAFCON:
HO: If you were for the Shogah in Kampala a few weeks ago the gay demonstrated in the country and they were not arrested. The gay led a press conference and they were not arrested.
And as for the Kazooka case:
HO: I would not believe a thing like that is done in the public knowledge of the people of Uganda because the gay people who are Ugandans are citizens of the country and we would cherish the fact that we would want to send it our people. For some of those things probably you get information in England and we may not even get information, I don’t know how they get their information.
At VirtueOnline, David Virtue complained that this was an “isolated” case raised by a “whiny” journalist. Whereas of course Orombi’s “fear for his life” claim isn’t whiny at all…
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…or just kept off the public programme?
Here’s the Christians United for Israel website from a few days ago, giving details of its upcoming “Washington-Israel Summit”:
Here it is today:
Various questions have been raised in the media concerning Walid Shoebat’s self-described past; I’ve recently noted his bizarre Biblical exegesis and his past association with a website that denounced Catholicism, the Charismatic movement, and Billy Graham.
John Hagee, meanwhile, is keen for the CUFI “Israel Summit” not to become an embarrassment for Joe Lieberman, and he has been asking YouTube to delete videos containing clips of his contorversial sermons.
(Thanks to Fred Clarkson for bringing this to my attention)
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21 May, from the London Metropolitan University website:
London Metropolitan University, yesterday presented His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama with an Honorary Doctorate of Philosophy.
…Speaking at the ceremony Brian Roper, London Metropolitan University Vice-Chancellor said: ‘We are delighted to welcome His Holiness the Dalai Lama to London Metropolitan University and recognise his work by conferring this honorary Doctorate on him. His Holiness the Dalai Lama is a worldwide figurehead and a man who has inspired countless people throughout his life. Today we honour him, not just for his leadership of his people, but also for his demonstration, through all his words and deeds, that peaceful means of resolution always remain possible.”
8 July, from the China Daily:
Britain’s London Metropolitan University recently apologized for bestowing an honorary doctorate to the Dalai Lama after the move drew intense criticism from a number of Chinese.
Brian Roper, vice-chancellor of the university, expressed in a letter to the Chinese embassy in London on June 16 his regret of his school’s move, saying that offering the degree to the Dalai Lama was not a well-considered decision, according to an embassy official last week.
Roper said the university is committed to keeping a good relationship with China and fully supports the Beijing Olympics.
Index on Censorship tells it slightly differently, but it’s still rather unedifying:
London Metropolitan University has expressed ‘regret’ at offence caused to China by it’s recent award of an honorary doctorate to Tibetan religious leader the Dalai Lama in May…A representative of the Chinese embassy in London confirmed to Index on Censorship that the letter of apology had come after the embassy had demanded it from the university.
UPDATE: Free Tibet has issued a press release:
The China Daily’s report has been emphatically rejected by London Metropolitan University. In an emailed statement received by Free Tibet Campaign, the university’s PR Officer, Irene Constantinides, confirmed that the Vice-Chancellor had met with officials from the Embassy but stated “London Metropolitan University has not apologised for making the award”.
She said in the statement that the vice-chancellor “expressed regret at any unhappiness” caused to the Chinese people by the award, but reiterated that the university “will not be apologising for the award” and that the reward would not be retracted…A full copy of the statement emailed to Free Tibet Campaign by London Metropolitan University can be seen on request.
I’d like to know how exactly one expresses regret without conceding any kind of apology.
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Just weeks before the 2008 Christians United for Israel “Washington-Israel Summit” with John Hagee and Joe Lieberman (Walid Shoebat is also on the bill), Bruce at Talk to Action reports that YouTube has removed videos containing extracts from Hagee’s controversial sermons:
Last week, on July the 1st, I received notice from YouTube that eight of my videos on YouTube’s website had been taken down, allegedly for copyright violations. The videos included the notorious “God Sent Hitler” video which caused sufficient scandal, because it got shown widely on American and international TV, to force John McCain to renounce the political endorsement of Pastor John Hagee. JHM Ministries also targeted videos from Max Blumenthal, from People For The American Way and even from a Christian fundamentalist ministry critical of Hagee’s “Prosperity Gospel” teaching. According to a Huffington Post story just posted by Sam Stein, in all over 120 videos were taken down at the request of John Hagee Ministries.
Stein himself tells us:
…as Blumenthal and Wilson note, claims that this was merely an effort to combat copyright infringement contain several, glaring holes. For starters, Hagee had complained but never sought legal recourse for past publication of his sermons. Moreover, Blumenthal’s work, while filmed at a Christian United for Israel event, was his own, not Hagee’s. “There was no copyrighted material because it was me reporting on a public event,” he said.
Even [Hagee PR man Juda] Engelmayer admitted that he didn’t know how Blumenthal’s particular work “fit the criteria” that the lawyers used. “But if he puts it up [on YouTube] again, I’m almost positive it won’t be challenged.”
Hagee certainly doesn’t have a case: the clips appear in videos created for the purpose of criticism, and so amount to fair usage. Back in March Michael Savage lost a copyright suit against CAIR after CAIR used some of his anti-Muslim ramblings for its own purposes; in 1986 a court agreed that none other than Jerry Falwell could use material copyrighted to Larry Flynt.
One Hagee sermon has slipped through, though, in this video made by someone else:
PS: Note on Juda Engelmayer (sometimes spelt as “Juda Engelmeyer”): he works for a PR firm called 5WPR. According to The Jewish Week:
Fearing an onslaught of protestors, kosher meat giant Agriprocessors hastily changed a meeting planned for Tuesday afternoon in Midtown into a conference call….AfgriProcessors took on the New York-based firm 5W, which also represents evangelical televangelist Benny Hinn, controversial Pastor John Hagee, the Trinity Broadcasting Network, the Zionist Organization of America and Israel’s Ministry of Tourism, among others, after the bad publicity following [an] immigration raid.
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Joel Richardson (author of Antichrist: Islam’s Awaited Messiah) has responded to my post concerning the Book of Revelation and the Codex Vaticanus, and once again it’s a gift.
To recap: Richardson’s associate Walid Shoebat had given a presentation in which he had claimed that the letters in Revelation 13:18 which are taken to be the Greek for “666” are in fact Arabic for “In the Name of Allah”, revealed to the author of Revelation in visual form by God in the First Century and misunderstood as Greek by later Christians. Shoebat claimed that he drew this conclusion after viewing the ancient Codex Vaticanus. I noted various shortcomings to this bizarre thesis, including the observation that the Codex Vaticanus does not contain the Book of Revelation. Richardson then wrote to me insisting that the Codex does indeed contain Revelation, showing me an 1868 facsimile edition of the text to prove it. He suggested I was in error because I had allegedly got my information from Wikipedia, and perhaps had been drinking beer before writing. Alas for Richardson, I pointed out that Revelation was tacked onto the end of the Codex in Italy in the Fifteenth Century, and was in no way a part of the ancient manuscript itself. Further, the 1868 edition does not include this fifteenth-century supplement, and instead provides a typeset version. I also pointed him to some scholarly resources.
Richardson’s response to all this is amusing. He argues I am still “in error” for some reason, and that I “look bad”; and further that I
tried to overplay a largely irrelevant oversight on Walid’s image sourcing (it is irrelevant it his larger point because the image he used is precisely like the Textus Receptus and the Byzantine Majority text or any other ancient Greek Mss)
But Shoebat’s whole argument was that by looking at an ancient manuscript he realised that Greek letters were not intended, whereas Greek letters certainly were intended in the “Byzantine Majority Text”. And besides, it seems that Shoebat did not apparently look at any “ancient Greek Mss” anyway! It seems that the way to admit to being wrong in the circles in which Richardson moves is simply to declare the issue to be “irrelevant” and to change the whole terms of the argument. Hence Richardson points me to a new site he has made, in which he uses the letters from the 1868 edition (which, by the way, he elongates and misleadingly labels as part of the Codex) as the basis for his comparison with the Arabic.
Richardson continues by demanding to know why
…do I not see you publicly renouncing the doctrine of death for Apostasy that is practiced throughout the Islamic world and endorsed by Orthodox Muslims?
As it happens, I have written plenty on Islamism and its unhappy consequences, but what that has to do with the issue at hand is unclear to me. Presumably the argument is that prioritizing truth and reason over hating Islam is morally deficient in some way, and that therefore my counter-arguments to the Arabic “666” can be discounted.
For easy reference, here are the relevant pictures:
(1) The oldest fragment of Revelation 13:18 we have, from the Oxyrhynchus Papyri (“616” rather than “666”, so the middle figure is different):
(2) The phrase as it appears in the Fiftheenth Century supplement to the Codex Vaticanus* (the “A.D. 350” designation is incorrect for this part of the text):
(3) The text as it appears in the 1868 typeset edition:
(4) The 1868 text as elongated by Richardson:
(5) The 1868 text as reproduced in Shoebat’s presentation:
Salem Kirban looks like a serious scholar in comparison.
*Thanks to a reader for confirming the provenance of this – I had originally doubted the designation.
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