I think that the Rev. Wright frenzy (not the Reverend, the frenzy) was horrible, which is why I was reluctant to really hammer on the Parsley/Hagee relationships with John McCain. However, these two pastors are far more destructive than Rev. Wright ever could be.

I’ve already written about the role of Pentecostals in the false and vicious “unpatriotic Muslim smear” (and doesn’t it bother you just a little that those missionaries are working in AFRICA?). Listen to the words of Reverend Hagee in this video.

After listening, if anyone here can explain why John McCain would actively court this man’s endorsement, I’d welcome hearing it.

Huffington Post

John Hagee, the controversial evangelical leader and endorser of Sen. John McCain, argued in a late 1990s sermon that the Nazis had operated on God’s behalf to chase the Jews from Europe and shepherd them to Palestine. According to the Reverend, Adolph Hitler was a “hunter,” sent by God, who was tasked with expediting God’s will of having the Jews re-establish a state of Israel.

Going in and out of biblical verse, Hagee preached: “‘And they the hunters should hunt them,’ that will be the Jews. ‘From every mountain and from every hill and from out of the holes of the rocks.’ If that doesn’t describe what Hitler did in the holocaust you can’t see that.”

In other words, the Jews were persecuted by Hitler to drive them to Palestine and re-establish the nation of Israel. Or put differently, the Holocaust was some sort of necessary persecution to restore the state of Israel.

I am not a biblical scholar, but I’m married to one, and I’ve done enough studying to know this is utterly false and incendiary. So I ask once again, what is Senator McCain thinking when he chose to court this lunatic?

h/t Crooks & Liars