Joe Lieberman To Headline Upcoming Hagee Summit

Senator Joseph Lieberman is scheduled to headline Pastor John Hagee’s 2008 Christians United For Israel Washington-Israel Summit this July 22. In accepting Hagee’s invitation, Lieberman became the most senior elected representative confirmed to appear at the annual gala. Last year, when Lieberman spoke at Hagee’s summit, he compared the Texas televangelist to the biblical prophet Moses, dubbing him “an Ish Elochim,” or “a man of God.” Unless he rescinds his pledge to appear at this year’s summit, Lieberman can be expected to deliver another soul-stirring tribute.

Hagee’s vitriolic condemnation of Catholicism, his jeremiad declaring Hurricane Katrina divine punishment for New Orleans’ hosting of a “homosexual rally,” and his generally disturbing apocalyptic theology became national news last February when John McCain accepted his endorsement in a widely publicized ceremony.

While initially resisting pressure to reject Hagee’s endorsement, McCain finally ended his relationship with Hagee when a sermon by the preacher describing the Holocaust as the will of God registered on the mainstream media’s radar (Hear the now-infamous sermon here).

“Obviously, I find these remarks and others deeply offensive and indefensible, and I repudiate them. I did not know of them before Rev. Hagee’s endorsement, and I feel I must reject his endorsement as well,” McCain said on May 22.

How extreme is Hagee? And how cozy are he and Lieberman? Watch this video by Bruce Wilson of Talk2Action.org to find out.

Lieberman was aware of many of Hagee’s vile statements well before McCain renounced him. On May 13, Fox News’ Megyn Kelly asked Lieberman to respond the gathering criticism of Hagee’s remarks. But instead of distancing himself from Hagee’s views as McCain had, Lieberman launched into a spirited defense of the televangelist, describing him as someone who “represents a lot of people in this country, particularly Christians who care about the state of Israel.”

At the time, prior to McCain’s sweeping renunciation, Lieberman could have reasonably claimed to be unaware of the preacher’s repugnant views on the Holocaust. Now, he has no excuse for ignorance. As a key McCain surrogate who McCain may select as his running mate, Lieberman must know why Hagee is no longer welcome on the so-called Straight Talk Express.

So why the silence? Why won’t Lieberman, who is married to the daughter of Holocaust survivors, end his relationship with Hagee as well? Why, in apparent defiance of the McCain campaign, does he remain scheduled to headline Hagee’s upcoming summit? If Lieberman plans to continue touting his moral fiber and independence as his greatest assets, he must renounce the hate-mongering Hagee.

The new progressive pro-Israel lobbying organization J Street released a petition today calling for Lieberman to terminate his relationship with Hagee. You can add your name by clicking here. With your help, Lieberman may finally conclude that Hagee is really a mamzer, not a man of God.

My Interview With Pastor Hagee (and What Will Lieberman Say Now?)

During a press conference at the 2007 Christians United for Israel Washington-Israel Summit, I asked CUFI Executive Director Pastor John Hagee about passages in his book “Jerusalem Countdown” in which he appeared to blame Jews for their own persecution. Hagee was visibly piqued by my question, insisting that his statements were directly inspired by the Book of Deuteronomy. When I attempted to ask Hagee a follow-up question, a former intern for AIPAC, Kara Silverman, the former assistant communications director for AIPAC, cut me off.

Moments later, a team of off-duty DC police officers hired by CUFI surrounded my co-producer and I and demanded that we immediately leave the conference, threatening us with arrest if refused to comply. You can view my exchange with Hagee and the ensuing fracas at 7:45 of my video report on CUFI’s summit, “Rapture Ready:”

For nearly two years, a handful of independent journalists and I have raised the alarm about Hagee’s long record of anti-Semitic statements. Until now, our reporting has been largely ignored by the mainstream press and the politicians who have clamored for Hagee’s support. The supposedly “pro-Israel” groups that have joined with Hagee in support of Israeli military aggression, providing him with much-needed moral cover in the process, have also turned a blind eye to the pastor’s Judeophobic tendencies.

Michelle Goldberg was, as far as I know, the first journalist to point out Hagee’s Holocaust apologia, exposing his now-infamous “Hitler was a hunter” statement in a piece for the Huffington Post in November 2006. When AIPAC invited Hagee to headline its annual conference in March 2007, I noted Hagee’s repugnant views on the Holocaust and his record of anti-Semitic remarks in a Huffington Post article entitled, “AIPAC Cheers an Anti-Semitic Holocaust Revisionist (and Abe Foxman Approves).”

Though this disturbing information was widely disseminated, and was accessible simply by Googling Hagee’s name, the John McCain campaign courted Hagee’s endorsement, and ultimately accepted it in a highly publicized ceremony three months ago.

Now, thanks to the work of the tenacious researcher Bruce Wilson, (see Bruce’s video here) the website Talk2Action, and a massive push by the liberal blogosphere, the McCain campaign has been forced to cut ties with its most influential Christian right supporter. But McCain’s reversal on Hagee’s endorsement does not in any way signal that Hagee will suddenly recede from politics, or that the pastor’s influence in Washington will wane. In fact, Hagee still maintains a close relationship with one of McCain’s key political allies, a turncoat senator who is likely to become his secretary of defense if he is elected president: Joseph Lieberman.

During a banquet at CUFI’s 2007 convention, I watched with astonishment as Lieberman strode to the stage, then compared Hagee to Moses (watch Lieberman’s remarks at 5:30 of my video) “I want to take to opportunity to describe Pastor Hagee in the terms the Torah used to describe Moses,” Lieberman declared. “He is an Ish Elohim. A man of God. And those words really do fit him. And I have something else,” the senator continued. “Like Moses, he’s become the leader of a mighty multitude. Even greater than the multitude that Moses led from Egypt to the Promised Land.”

Was Lieberman aware at the time of Hagee’s statements about Jews and the Holocaust? I don’t know. But with McCain’s tacit acknowledgment of Hagee’s anti-Semitism, Lieberman must now decide: is Hagee a man of God, or just a mamzer?

Update: A friend just sent me Lieberman’s defense of Hagee during a 5/13/08 Fox News segment:

SEN. LIEBERMAN: Well, look, I think that the DNC is obviously doing this because they set Pastor Hagee as some kind of response to Reverend Wright for Senator Obama. But I don’t think that’s fair in the basic way that everybody’s already said which is that John McCain never went to Pastor Hagee’s church. He accepted his endorsement. He represents a lot of people in this country, particularly Christians who care about the state of Israel. He founded a group called Christians United for Israel.

And statements that were brought out that he had made about the Catholic Church were a total surprise to me. I know to Senator McCain they were obviously reprehensible. And I give Pastor Hagee a lot of credit for just plain apologizing. And I must say there’s a difference because Reverend Wright never did apologize. He just restated the objectionable and reprehensible things he had said.

Correction: I misidentified Kara Silverman as Alison Silverman and incorrectly stated that she was the former assistant communications director for AIPAC. She was an intern for AIPAC.

Witnessing Republican Disaster in Mississippi

Last weekend, I traveled to Mississippi’s first congressional district, a bastion of Republican power that has been home to William Faulkner, Elvis Presley, and the scene of massive riots on the night James Meredith attempted to integrate the University of Mississippi. With the district in the midst of a hotly contested special election campaign, I probed the impact of a million-dollar Republican strategy to attack the insurgent Democratic candidate, Travis Childers, by linking him to Barack Obama and Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

(Watch one of the GOP ads here).

See my Al Jazeera English report on Mississippi’s special election

After following Childers on the campaign trail, then attending a rally of his Republican opponent, Greg Davis, it became clear to me that the GOP’s strategy would fail miserably. On Tuesday, the Republicans’ worst nightmare came true: Childers defeated Davis by a stunning 8 point margin.

Mississippi’s First encompasses a working-class region reeling from the country’s economic downturn. Voters there from both parties told me they were more concerned with bread and butter issues like gas and food prices than with whether Obama’s supporters fundraised online for Childers, the issue exploited by the national GOP. Childers was the perfect candidate in this environment, running as a pro-life, pro-gun economic populist who opposed free trade and promised to take on big oil. I followed the candidate around a Piggly Wiggly supermarket, watching as he pointed shoppers to the whopping prices of milk and eggs, then indignantly blamed the White House for the price spike.

While the more than a dozen Republican voters I interviewed outside the Greg Davis rally insisted to me that their candidate represented “Mississippi Values” far better than his opponent, a key theme of the Republican attack ads, several complained that the ads had poisoned the campaign, and said they resented the GOP’s nationalization of the election. However, Davis was to blame for this negative tone. Though he was a successful mayor of Southaven, a white flight suburb just south of Memphis, and was widely credited for the town’s economic revitalization, he allowed Washington Republican groups like Freedom’s Watch and the National Republican Campaign Committee to define his campaign, thereby distracting voters from his accomplishments.

Not only did Davis err by echoing the demagogic attacks in his stump speeches, he invited Dick Cheney to speak at his last campaign rally, a terrible reminder that he would be a tool of the Bush White House if sent to Washington. The failure of Cheney’s last-minute GOTV appearance reflects just how tainted the national Republican brand has become.

At the same time, the Republican attack ads provoked a backlash among African-Americans who make up nearly one-quarter of Northern Mississippi’s population. When I asked one African-American voter who she planned to vote for, she simply said, “Barack Obama.” I asked her to clarify, and she explained that by linking Childers to Obama, the Republicans had made her even more enthusiastic about voting for Childers. To harness this backlash, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee distributed thousands of leaflets to black voters in Mississippi’s first attacking Davis for his role in bringing a statue to Southaven of Nathan Bedford Forrest, a Civil War hero who happened to found the Ku Klux Klan.

When I returned from Mississippi, I went straight to Capitol Hill, to the National Republican Congressional Committee, the nerve center of the attacks on Childers. The NRCC spent $1.27 million to destroy Childers — 20% of its entire budget. After spending almost $3 million in its failed bid to hold three congressional seats in special elections this season, the NRCC is poorly positioned to make any impact this November. But the group’s spokesman, Ken Spain, suggested that, with little else in their arsenal, his group would stick with its ill-fated strategy of nationalizing local elections.

The Lost Cause lives on.

Mississippi Values

I just returned from Northern Mississippi, where I probed the impact of GOP attack ads linking insurgent Democratic candidate Travis Childers with Barack Obama and Jeremiah Wright. My piece, which I produced for Al Jazeera English, aired the day after Childers’ stunning victory:

Frank Rich’s American Daydream

This Sunday, Frank Rich reported some of the most exciting news that has appeared on the pages of the New York Times in a very long time. According to Rich, Americans are on the verge of transcending the racial and cultural rifts that divided them for centuries. There simply aren’t “enough racists of any class in America, let alone in swing states, to determine the results come fall,” the former theater critic insisted. This statement is so true that Rich did not even need to bolster it with actual statistical evidence.

Rich went on to announce that the rancorous street fights of the 1960s over militarism and civil rights have been neatly transmuted into “quieter social activism and grand-scale social networking.” “The millennials’ bottom-up digital superstructure,” he wrote, has enabled economically marginalized ghetto dwellers and indignant campus radicals to air their grievances with the simple click of a button. So sit back in your Aeron chair, relax and blithely tend to your Facebook page.

“There is a heartening undertow,” Rich assuredly declared. “We know the page will turn.”

To support his confident prediction of a coming cultural utopia, and to make a larger point about the supposedly refreshing dynamics of the 2008 presidential campaign, Rich cited a Times report on protests in Harlem against the Sean Bell verdict. “This is not 1968,” Rich claimed, “when the country was so divided over race and war that cities and campuses exploded in violence. If you have any doubts, just look (to take a recent example) at the restrained response by New Yorkers, protestors included, to the acquittal of three police officers in the 50-bullet shooting death of an unarmed black man, Sean Bell.”

Unlike Rich, and what seemed like the entire Times Metro desk, I attended the demonstration that erupted in Jamaica, Queens — the neighborhood where Bell lived and died — just hours after the verdict was announced. While this protest did not end violently, it was large, brimming with anger, and anything but restrained. At one point, I found myself in the midst of what seemed certain to become a brawl between a faction of furious protesters and a squadron of cops they had surrounded. It appeared from my vantage point that the cops retreated from the melee only because they were badly outnumbered.

But don’t take me at my word. Watch the video I produced about the Sean Bell demonstrations, especially the latter half, which depicts the uncomfortable reality that Rich overlooked in his reductionist portrait of an imaginary post-racial America.

50 Shots: The Sean Bell Demonstrations

This blog is still temporarily on ice as I finish up my forthcoming book (due out next March), but I wanted to feature a new video report I have just completed. Check out the video and a quick run-down:

On April 25, the three NYPD detectives who killed bridegroom Sean Bell the night before his wedding and wounded his two friends were acquitted of all charges. The undercover officers, who had riddled Bell’s car with 50 shots, claimed in court that they were scared by Bell and his friends, even though the men were unarmed and on their way home from a club. Detective Michael Oliver must have been especially frightened. He alone fired 31 shots, even stopping to reload on his way to killing Bell. Arthur Cooperman, a 78-year-old judge scheduled to retire next year (the cops were spared a jury of their peers), essentially ruled that the officers’ supposed fear justified their indiscriminate firing of 50 shots at Bell and his unarmed friends.

The crowd that gathered outside the courtroom was stunned when the verdict was announced. Hours later, in the streets of Jamaica, Queens, where Sean Bell lived and died, marchers gathered almost spontaneously to vent their rage against the verdict and the epidemic of police brutality that has touched communities across New York City. As night descended, and the march detoured first to the site of Bell’s killing, then to a housing project in South Jamaica, Queens, the crowd grew in size and in the intensity of its anger. Calls for violent retaliation against the police nearly became reality, as marchers surrounded vans filled with NYPD officers, forcing the police to withdraw from the streets and rely on aerial surveillance instead.

I attended the march with a cameraman by my side, and stayed until the end, well after the media had left, to report on the frustration that animated the march, and capture the drama that unfolded. Though the city has remained peaceful in the wake of last weekend’s demonstrations, my video suggests that the heightened tension between residents of inner-city communities and cops may cross a dangerous threshold unless justice is done. With bold visual evidence, my coverage clearly contradicts the New York Times’ careless contention that “the acquittals in the Bell case have so far been largely met with a muted response. Thousands of protesters did not fill the streets, no unrest ensued.”

In my video, I also probed the Sean Bell verdict’s impact on the presidential campaign. As my friend Roberto Lovato wrote last week, Barack Obama’s “Failure to use his rhetorical gifts to speak forcefully to and about real black and non-black anger about the Sean Bell verdict may re-animate doubts about commitment to that part of his base that is not white middle- and working-class.”

Sure enough, after Obama responded to an African-American reporter’s question about the verdict with a boilerplate call for “com[ing] together,” and stressed the need to respect Cooperman’s decision, he received an angry phone call from Al Sharpton. Sharpton, who has pressed for a federal investigation into Bell’s killing, reportedly accused Obama of seeking to “grandstand in front of white people.” Though Sharpton has since denied attacking Obama, their alleged tiff highlights the quandary Obama faces as he looks to cultivate support among blue collar white voters while maintain his credibility in the black community.

I was proud to feature new music in my video by my friends for over a decade, the legendary live hip-hop band, Dujeous. Their song, “Eyewitness,” which was inspired by Sean Bell’s killing, features one of hip-hop’s most incisive political rappers, Immortal Technique. Check it out.