The Road to Armageddon:
Powerful Christ Zionist John Hagee
Encourages Netanyahu to Strike Iran
Bill Berkowitz / Daily Kos Community
(April 18, 2024) — Pastor John Hagee is a heat-seeking missile that views current developments in the Middle East as a prelude to the End of Times. Pastor Hagee, a staunch Armageddonist who has been fulminating against Iran for many years, has the ears many conservative legislators in the US, as well as Israel’s right wing government, led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. His John Hagee Foundation has donated over $58 million to far-right Israeli organizations.
During the course of his long career, Pastor John Hagee has been preaching and prophesizing about the End of Times, beating a muscular pro-Israeli drum, written numerous books, established the world’s largest pro-Israel organization, and accumulated humongous wealth and political influence.
Now, with the Israel/Hamas War continuing unabated and Iran’s recent attack on Israeli targets, Hagee is lobbying members of Congress to back Israel in its now-hot conflict with Iran.
The San Antonio Current reported (https://www.sacurrent.com/news/san-antonio-pastor-john-hagee-says-hell-lobby-congress-to-back-israeli-attacks-on-iran-34301573) that Hagee is joining 250 evangelical leaders in Washington to urge lawmakers to join the escalating fight.
According to the San Antonio Current’s Michael Karlis, “The pastor’s apparently unconditional support for Israel stems from his belief that the Middle Eastern country is at the center of prophesy about the second coming of Christ. He’s also frequently called for US strikes on Iran, and once likened President Barack Obama’s signing of the 2015 nuclear deal with Tehran to a ‘finger in the eye of God.’”
Hagee is well situated to lobby Congress: In 2006 Hagee founded what is now the largest pro-Israel religious-based lobbying group in the world, the 8 million member Christians United for Israel (CUFI).
“Prophetically, we are on the verge of the Gog and Magog war that Izekiel described in chapters 38 and 39,” Hagee said recently. “This attack by Iran, who launched more than 200 missiles yesterday, is a tribute to the weak and pathetic leadership of Joe Biden.”
As The Forward’s Jay Michaelson reported: “Christian Zionists bitterly opposed the Oslo Peace Process, and helped to sabotage it by supporting the Israeli right. They also opposed the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, the end of which has now made containing Iran harder than ever.
They were central to former president Donald Trump’s decision to move the American embassy to Jerusalem and his hard-right positions on Israel more generally: supporting settlements and opposing civil rights for Palestinians.
They have long supported Jewish settlement expansion in the West Bank as part of God’s plan for a Jewish return to Israel — part of the sequence of biblical prophecies that culminates in the Second Coming (and destruction of world Jewry).”
In an MSNBC column last fall, Sarah Posner, a longtime historian of the Christian right, wrote that “For many ‘Christian Zionists,’ and particularly for popular evangelists with significant clout within the Republican Party, their support for Israel is rooted in its role in the supposed end times: Jesus’ return to Earth, a bloody final battle at Armageddon, and Jesus ruling the world from the Temple Mount in Jerusalem.
In this scenario, war is not something to be avoided, but something inevitable, desired by God, and celebratory” (https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/truth-many-evangelical-christians-support-israel-rcna121481).
Posner noted that, “On Oct. 15, Hagee preached at Free Chapel in Gainesville, Georgia, a megachurch pastored by televangelist Jentezen Franklin. … Hagee maintained that the epic showdown at Armageddon, or the Mount of Meggido in Israel, will be ‘the most bloody battle ever recorded in the history of the world.’
He claimed the Bible prophesied that for armies that ‘come against Israel’ from China, Russia or Iran, ‘God is going to wipe them out.’ After that, he predicted, ‘there will be 1,000 years of perfect peace, no presidential elections, no fake news, none of all of this nonsense.’ Instead, there will be ‘one king, and one leader, Jesus Christ the Son of God. One law, it will be his law.”
For Hagee and his Christian nationalist/Christian Zionist brethren, the prophetic clock is ticking. And, Hagee believes its past time to move it along.
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