(jta) | A dovish pro-Israel lobby wants U.S. Sen. Joe Lieberman to cut ties with the Rev. John Hagee.
J Street, the recently established pro-Israel group, launched a petition drive this week to get Lieberman (I-Conn.) to distance himself from Hagee.
U.S. Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) last week rejected the endorsement of the founder and leader of Christians United for Israel when it emerged that, in the 1990s, Hagee had espoused a theology that depicted Adolf Hitler as a “hunter” spurring Jews to return to their ancestral homeland.
Lieberman, who backs McCain for the presidency, remains close to Hagee and is scheduled to speak at his organization’s Washington conference this summer.
“With McCain’s renunciation of Hagee last week following his remarks that Hitler was just doing God’s bidding, the new campaign takes Sen. Joe Lieberman to task for continuing to stand ‘shoulder-to-shoulder’ with the pastor and to vouch for his ‘pro-Israel’ credentials,” a J Street blast e-mail said. “This, despite the fact that the primacy the pastor places on Israel has everything to do with his apocalyptic vision of the hereafter and nothing to do with Israel’s best interest in the here-and-now.”
Hagee has came under fire after a video surfaced of a sermon in which he suggested that Hitler was acting out a divine plan to drive the Jews back to Israel and the Holocaust was punishment for the Jewish rejection of Zionism.
McCain responded by rejecting Hagee’s endorsement because of the comments, calling them “crazy and unacceptable.” In response, Hagee withdrew his endorsement of the senator, but he defended himself against those attempting to paint him as insensitive to Jewish concerns.
“To assert that I in any way condone the Holocaust or that monster Adolf Hitler is the worst of lies,” Hagee said at a news conference in San Antonio on May 23. “I have always condemned the horrors of the Holocaust in the strongest of terms. But even more importantly, my abhorrence of the Holocaust and anti-Semitism has never stopped with mere words.”
A year ago, Hagee’s keynote speech at the annual AIPAC policy conference was received enthusiastically by the thousands in attendance. But with this year’s AIPAC conference next week, some are making more aggressive efforts to keep Jewish organizations from working with Hagee.
Much of the Hagee firestorm surrounds a widely disseminated YouTube video in which he appeared — at least to many of his critics — to describe the Catholic Church as “the great whore.” Hagee maintained that he was referring to those who have bought into “the false cult system of Jew hatred and anti-Semitism,” whether they are Catholic or Protestant.
In the aftermath, Eric Yoffie, leader of the Reform movement, and Hagee traded barbs, but then sounded conciliatory tones and were said to be considering a meeting. But when news of the Holocaust comments surfaced last week, Yoffie wasted little time in upbraiding Hagee, saying it was an affront to victims of the Nazis to suggest they had brought their fate upon themselves.
“There needed to be a public response that I thought gave expression to the deep concern of the Jewish community about this kind of an approach to the Holocaust,” Yoffie said.