File photo: Republican presidential hopeful, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., speaks at a news conference with Rev. John Hagee, a televangelist from Cornerstone Church, in San Antonio, Texas, in this Feb. 27 file photo.
By Robert Weitzel | The Capital Times (Madison, Wisconsin), March 27, 2008
According to a United Nations report, 971 Palestinian and Israeli children were killed between September 2000 -- the beginning of the second intifada -- and July 2007. Of those destroyed children, 854 were Palestinian. The intifada and the dying continue.
It is these children's lives that the evangelical political action committee, Christians United for Israel, is willing to sacrifice on the altar of its fundamentalist eschatology in the hope of bringing about Armageddon and the Second Coming of Jesus Christ.
Pastor John Hagee, televangelist and pastor of the 19,000-member Cornerstone Church in San Antonio, Texas, established CUFI in 2005. Hagee envisions the group as the Christian version of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the powerful pro-Israel lobby whose political clout has a significant influence on U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East.
The late Molly Ivins, a Texas political commentator and author, described Hagee as a "pre-millennial dispensationalist, whose theology focuses on selected apocalyptic passages of the Book of Revelation." In 1998, Hagee teamed up with Christian filmmakers to produce "Vanished in the Twinkling of an Eye," a "docudrama" about the tribulations following the Rapture.
Despite Pastor Hagee's obvious interest in eschatology, he insists that CUFI's support for Israel has nothing to do with end time prophecy. But in an unguarded moment Hagee set the truth free: "The judgment of the nations is going to happen as soon as Christ returns to Earth. As soon as he sets up his throne on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, he's going to rule the world with a rod of iron."
No comments:
Post a Comment