Religion

Heads may be rolling in Washington and it’s certainly way past time. But meanwhile, unnoticed because drowned out by media misdirection, the money and power business is going on as usual.

Real politicking happens safely away from the public gaze, at various conferences, private dinners, seminars and annual meetings, at discreetly-funded thinktanks and euphemistically-named political action committees; what we see in the mainstream media is only barely a quarter of a butt-cheek of the vast, wiggling, high-maintenance rump of the right.

So far there’s always been at least a little cosmetic distance between the big campaign money donors and America’s overabundance of absolutely-gaga, blood & thunder, fundie megalomaniac ‘clerics’. One of the reasons the religious right’ve come so far as fast as they have is that there’ve been buffer zones, like Focus On The Family and the Christian Coalition, to smooth out the hick edges and put an acceptable gloss on the more outre ejaculations of the biblical literalists.

But now one fundie nutjob, John Hagee, has bypassed those usual gatekeepers and power-brokers and gone straight to the big money – of all people, The America Israel Public Affairs Committee.

AIPAC’s recent rapturous reception of this fundamentalist Christian demagogue (whose ultimate aim is to bring about Armageddon, Christian dominionism and the ultimate destruction of Israel itself) is raising eyebrows, to say the least.

The America Israel Public Affairs Committee is a respectable organisation, whatver you may think of its politics. It describes itself as America’s pro-Israel lobby. No shilly-shallying there, no mystery about it: all perfectly above-board. I mean, look who’s big friends with them:

This Year’s AIPAC Policy Conference is the Largest Ever

Featured speakers will include Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell and House Republican Leader John Boehner – as well as Vice President Dick Cheney and Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni.

So far, so respectable.

AIPAC have shedloads of money, which they distribute to candidates who’ll urge the US to act in what AIPAC see as Israel’s interests. Because of their cash and big supporter base they have massive clout in US politics. I wrote about them a few weeks ago when both Hillary Clinton and John Edwards made unashamedly martial pro-Israel speeches at AIPAC meetings in the hope of getting campaign funding . (If you’re looking for a change of US policy re Palestine, Edwards or Clinton are not your go-to guys.) AIPAC money’s been behind the most hawkish, neocon Republicans in Congress and the White House and its power is such that it’s received wisdom that a Democratic presidential candidate can’t and won’t win without it. That’s why Clinton and Edwards’re both bending over backwards to prove to AIPAC they can outhawk anyone.

But it matters not how much Democrats declare everlasting loyalty to Israel and swear to take no option off the table in it’s protection – because it’ll never be enough. They’re just insufficiently apocalyptic.

No, Hagee’s the kind of man AIPAC can really get behind:

The Goy Who Cried Wolf
The Israel lobby gives America’s leading Christian right warmonger a warm welcome.
By Sarah Posner

Delegates at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) Policy Conference were treated to an air-brushed John Hagee last night, primed with his most innocuous talking points and stripped of his most outlandish Armageddon rhetoric. Hagee, the founder of the America’s leading Christian Zionist lobby, Christians United for Israel, left his clumsy exegeses of Biblical prophecy back home in San Antonio. He is well-versed in bringing an audience of several thousand people to its feet, and he knew he didn’t need his slide show of mushroom clouds and world-ending wars to work this crowd.

[…]

n anticipation of Hagee’s appearance at AIPAC’s conference, there has been much discussion about whether Hagee is actually an anti-Semite who blames Jews for the Holocaust yet anticipates their conversion at the Second Coming — and another debate over whether it’s actually good for Israel or the world’s Jews when groups like AIPAC ally themselves with him. But judging from the crowd’s reaction, and that of delegates I spoke with afterwards, none of that mattered. Like other Jewish leaders I’ve talked to about Hagee, the attitude is simply that Israel has very few friends, and it needs all the friends it can get. If Hagee is willing to mobilize hundreds of thousands, perhaps even millions of conservative Christians to the cause, then they’re willing to overlook his eagerness for the Second Coming (when we’ll all become Christians), because it’s just a silly fantasy that won’t come to pass, anyway.

[…]

At a time when the Middle East faces seemingly intractable conflicts with dire geopolitical consequences, the notion that Hagee — whose status is only elevated by invitations like AIPAC’s — is leading a political movement based on nothing more than a supposedly literal reading of his Bible only reinforces the view that the United States is being led by messianic forces at odds with world peace and stability.

[…]

When he does speak to actual Middle East politics, it’s only to encourage the further destabilization of the region. Hagee has been agitating for a war with Iran for well over a year now, certainly not a single-handed effort on his part, nor one for which he would deserve sole blame should it happen. But if it does happen (and some think it already has begun), Hagee most certainly should be blamed for something else: convincing his minions that war is not only palatable, but required by God.

Hagee’s speech, laced with charged comparisons of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to men like Pharaoh, Haman, and Hilter [sic], as well as countless Churchillian references, brought the crowd to its feet. “He’s A-OK,” said one AIPAC delegate who had never heard of Hagee before, adding that he wanted to get one of Hagee’s DVDs for his grandchildren to watch.

Should whichever candidate is successful in the Democratic nomination then go on to win the Presidency this weird and worrying coalition of dominionists and zionists is likely to be their new opposition and that’ll make the whole Clinton perjury flap look like a child’s tea party.

One of the unfortunate blowback effects of this very welcome exposure of Republican party corruption is the hollowing out of the slightly-less-insane rightwing leadership. When a void arises, the loony apocalyptic right is only too ready to step up and fill it.

And we all know how that kind of thing turns out.