Also see: Joe Lieberman Endorses Hitler
"Hagee was, and wasn't, wrong on Holocaust" by Jeff Jacoby | June 1, 2008
.... There has been some controversy in recent days over comments about God and the Holocaust made by the Rev. John Hagee, the influential evangelical pastor of San Antonio's 19,000-member Cornerstone Church. In a sermon delivered a decade ago and recently unearthed, Hagee suggested that the Holocaust was part of a divine plan, and that Hitler was a "hunter" whose persecution of the Jews was not only willed by God but foretold by the prophet Jeremiah 2,500 years ago. "Why did it happen?" Hagee asked. "Because God said, 'My top priority for the Jewish people is to get them to come back to the land of Israel.' "
Hagee's interpretation of scripture was grotesque and jarring, to say nothing of presumptuous in its claim to know the mind of God. But his long-forgotten sermon became news for one reason only: He had endorsed John McCain for president, and the left saw a target of opportunity. Many denounced the pastor's remarks, some doubtless hoping that the storm would neutralize political damage caused to Barack Obama by the America-damning diatribes of his longtime mentor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Others went even further, demonizing Hagee as an anti-Semite and smearing him, in the words of one Huffington Post blogger, as the kind of person who "celebrate[s] the Holocaust."
For his part, McCain wasted no time cutting his ties to Hagee. He called the comments about Hitler "crazy and unacceptable," and repudiated the preacher's endorsement.
As a Jew who believes in God and as the son of a Holocaust survivor, I find Hagee's theological explanation for the extermination of 6 million Jews strained and incoherent. Auschwitz and Babi Yar were not God's handiwork. They were created by men and women who were endowed with free will and chose to commit evil. Hagee's theory that God willed the murder of Europe's Jews because they didn't embrace Zionism smacks of blaming the victims - and worse, of letting their victimizers off the hook.
Wanna check that 6 million number there, dude?
For more, see links
Also see: Israel and the Evidence: holohoax
And yet . . .
And yet the belief that the Holocaust, like all calamities, is part of God's plan is hardly alien to Jewish or Christian thought....
As anyone even fleetingly familiar with the Hebrew Bible knows, it is not "crazy," let alone anti-Semitic, to believe that Jewish suffering can be a punishment from God. What is, if not crazy, then at least reckless, is to claim to know God's reasons for permitting the Holocaust. How a good and loving God can allow such evil is an old, old question, for which we have, in the words of Isaiah, only one ultimate answer: "For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, says the Lord."
John Hagee is no anti-Semite. Far from it: He is a passionate enemy of anti-Semitism, who has built a great ministry upon the conviction that Jew-hatred is a sin. The Jewish people and the Jewish state have few friends in the Christian world so devoted and indefatigable - even if it is politically unfashionable to say so.
At least, until Christ returns and fries you all.Or are Zionists like you playing him for a fool, Jeff?
