Hagee Still Has Strong Support In Community

Hagee: Hitler and Holocaust comments not costing him among Jews. Getty Images

Hagee: Hitler and Holocaust comments not costing him among Jews. Getty Images

by James D. Besser
Washington Correspondent

Pastor John Hagee may be politically treif after his stinging repudiation by Sen. John McCain, but there are few signs that mainstream Jewish leaders who have warmed to his ardent support for Israel are turning away from the controversial Evangelical leader — despite theological views of the Holocaust that several have termed offensive.

Last week Anti-Defamation League National Director Abraham Foxman told The Jewish Week that Jewish groups should put on “hold” relations with Hagee’s Christians United for Israel (CUFI) after new revelations of 1990s-era sermons in which the apocalypse-minded televangelist suggested that Adolf Hitler was sent by God to spur the rebirth of Israel.

But while calling it a “perversion of Judaism to say God sent Hitler,” Foxman this week said

he is advocating only caution, not a broad retreat from dealings with Christian Zionist groups.

“There is no reason for us to reject Christian support for Israel,” he said. “But when those who say they are our friends say offensive things, we have to ask them: What does this mean? Do you understand its implications?”

A leading Hagee critic said that’s not enough.

“What does someone have to do say or do to prove that they’re a bigot in the eyes of the official Jewish community?” asked Rabbi Haim Beliak, co-founder of the JewsOnFirst Web site, which opposes the agenda of the Christian right. “Hagee is someone our parents would have instinctively understood is outside the pale of acceptable company for Jews. But now we have leaders of the community who are afraid to acknowledge that.”

Beliak attributed that reaction to the millions of dollars Hagee has raised for Israel and other Jewish causes — and to a “desperate fear that we no longer have any friends, that Israel has no friends, and so we have to take anybody who comes along. And that’s just not true.”

But a more common response from Jewish leaders to the latest Hagee dustup was ambivalence.

“Certainly Pastor Hagee’s Hitler remarks were awful and offensive,” said Rabbi Gary Greenbaum, U.S. director of Interreligious Affairs for the American Jewish Committee. “There is a considerable history of people finding ways to blame the Jews for the Holocaust, blaming the victims.”

At the same time, he said, “Pastor Hagee is a complex figure. I believe that his thinking may well have evolved over the last 10 years. I think we should judge him by what he says and does now and in the future — about gays and lesbians, about Catholics, and about Jews.”

According to Rabbi Jack Moline, a prominent Conservative rabbi in Alexandria, Va., who appeared at a CUFI event last year, “It bothers me that we are willing to turn on his friendship with Israel based on a few comments.” He added that the same thing bothered him about the Jewish reaction to Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Sen. Barack Obama’s longtime minister.

But Rabbi Moline said Jewish leaders who were surprised by Hagee’s recent Holocaust comments “haven’t been paying close attention. It was something that comes from his fundamental reading of the Bible.”

And Rabbi Moline expressed disappointment that Jewish groups did not criticize Hagee’s sermons about the Catholic Church (he has alluded to Catholicism as “the great whore” and “an apostate church”), which the rabbi labeled “sheer bigotry.”

Rabbi Moline said that if the new Hagee flap and the McCain repudiation “make some people look a little more closely at the wholeness of his ministry when they examine his Zionist credentials, that’s probably a good thing. But I don’t think there’s reason to turn away his friendship and support for Israel because we have issues with other areas in which the man expresses himself.”

Although Hagee has included biblical interpretations of the Holocaust in several of his books, it was a recording of a late-1990s sermon that caused the latest eruption.

In that sermon, Hagee argued that because Jews rejected the call of Theodor Herzl to return to Israel, “God sent a hunter. A hunter is someone who comes with a gun and he forces you. Hitler was a hunter. And the Bible says ... ‘They shall hunt them from every mountain and from every hill and out of the holes of the rocks,’ meaning: there’s no place to hide. And that will be offensive to some people. Well, dear heart, be offended: I didn’t write it. Jeremiah wrote it. It was the truth and it is the truth.”

God “allowed” the Holocaust to happen “because God said, ‘my top priority for the Jewish people is to get them to come back to the land of Israel,’” according to Hagee.

That was the political tipping point for McCain, who earlier faced stinging criticism from Catholic and gay groups for seeking and accepting Hagee’s endorsement.

While earlier revelations prompted McCain to say only that he rejected some of Hagee’s views, the newly uncovered tapes led the presumptive GOP nominee to repudiate the minister’s endorsement itself.

“Obviously, I find these remarks and others deeply offensive and indefensible, and I repudiate them,” McCain said in a statement last Thursday. “I did not know of them before Rev. Hagee’s endorsement, and I feel I must reject his endorsement as well.”

McCain’s characterization of some of Hagee’s statements as “crazy and unacceptable” represents a blow to the prominent televangelist’s efforts to expand his reach in American politics, said University of Akron political scientist John Green, and a potentially serious problem for McCain, who needs a strong turnout from an Evangelical electorate that remains cool to his candidacy.

“McCain wanted that endorsement because of his need to reach out to Evangelicals,” he said. “At a minimum, that effort has failed, and some may hold that against him. McCain will have to find new ways to reach out to that constituency.”

Green also pointed out that Hagee’s views — including his biblical interpretation of the Holocaust and redemption — are increasingly controversial even within Evangelical circles, making it harder to assess the political impact of the McCain endorsement and its repudiation.

David Brog, the CUFI executive director, said the newest controversies haven’t affected CUFI’s standing on Capitol Hill.

“Our main goal is to build a large, diverse grassroots movement of Christians who support Israel,” he said. “When you focus on the big picture, if this is a setback, it is a very small one.”

And they have changed few minds in the Jewish community, Brog said. “What I’ve seen is that those in the Jewish community who were inclined to support CUFI are really standing behind us; those who were previously inclined to criticize and argue against working with us will continue, and maybe step up the rhetoric. I really don’t see any change.”

He said Jews should not judge Hagee by his words “but by his actions,” citing Hagee’s “lifetime of defending Israel and fighting anti-Semitism.”

And he insisted Jews should not take offense at Hagee’s words about the Holocaust.

“Pastor Hagee is engaging in the same exercise that so many rabbis engage in, and anybody who believes in an omnipotent god: asking why God has permitted such tragedies in Jewish history.”

Hagee, he said “finds answers in the prophets, like so many rabbis. Trying to explain why God allowed these tragedies in no way saying these tragedies weren’t terrible. Our own Talmud teaches that the Temple was destroyed because of baseless hatred among the Jews.”
Hagee has “changed the way Christians view the Jews and Israel,” Brog said. “He has been teaching that anti-Semitism is a sin; he has been doing this day after day, for many years. So it’s like a Jew making these comments.”

But Rabbi Eric Yoffie, president of the Union for Reform Judaism and the only major Jewish leader to speak out against working with Hagee, termed Brog’s argument an “outrage.”

“If there is a dominant theological theme throughout Jewish history, it is that we can’t possibly understand God’s intentions” in tragedies like the Holocaust, he said. “What Hagee said was precisely the opposite; he attributed to God a particular understanding, which included, in this instance, the intention to punish the people of Israel by sending Hitler.”

While saying that he sees no signs of a wholesale shift by Jewish groups on the question of dealing with Hagee, Rabbi Yoffie said the latest controversy has “drawn more attention to this whole matter. People who were so quick to defend [Hagee] in the past, including virtually the entire leadership of the established Jewish community, are at least recognizing the profound ambivalences that exist here.

“It’s giving them pause — and I consider that appropriate,” Rabbi Yoffie said.

One group that was not silent was the newly formed J Street, the lobby and political action committee created to support politicians who favor a more robust Mideast peace process.

This week the group dove into the Hagee affair by demanding that Sen. Joe Lieberman, a leading McCain supporter who last year likened Hagee to Moses, withdraw his commitment to serve as a CUFI keynoter at the group’s Washington summit in July.

Hagee has been “banished to the fringes of American political life,” said J Street executive director Jeremy Ben-Ami, “yet CUFI is still warmly embraced by the Jewish communal world. One has to ask: at what price are we willing to accept support? I can’t understand the blindness that has overtaken so many in our community.”

The current controversy, he said, is an “opportunity for these Jewish leaders to reassess this deal with the devil.”

Lieberman, because of his stature in the community, could “set a fine example by deciding not to speak at the CUFI conference,” Ben-Ami said.

Lieberman’s Senate office said he was out of the country and could not comment.