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Cursor.orgMediaTransparency.org sponsor More stories by Bill Berkowitz PERC receives Templeton Freedom Award for promoting 'enviropreneurs' Media Transparency writersAndrew J. Weaver FundometerEvaluate any page on the World Wide Web against our databases of people, recipients, and funders of the conservative movement. |
ORIGINAL RESEARCHBill Berkowitz Christian Right's piece of the "Promised Land"Israel offers evangelical Christians land near the Sea of Galilee in the hopes of solidifying their support and boosting tourismAfter more than 30 years of organizing testimonial dinners for right wing Israeli politicians, handing out checks to Israeli charities, and forming alliances with conservative Jewish leaders and organizations to support Israel, Evangelical Christians may finally be getting a piece of the "Promised Land." Ted Haggard, a highly influential evangelical leader with close ties to the Bush Administration, told Charisma, a Christian fundamentalist - oriented magazine, that the land in question is in close proximity to where Jesus conducted a good portion of his ministry, including, where he may have delivered the "Sermon on the Mount." In a move geared toward solving Northern Israel's unemployment crisis, increasing tourism to the country, and solidifying relations with US Evangelical Christians, the Israeli government has offered 35 acres of land on the shore of the Kinneret (Sea of Galilee) for development by Christian Evangelicals. The Israeli government is hopeful they will build a large conference center, complete with the requisite amenities, to attract hundreds of thousands of evangelical tourists from the US and other countries. According to officials at Israel's tourism ministry, more than 400,000 Christian tourists brought $1.4 billion into Israel in the past year. An Audience with, and a Gift from, SharonIn May, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, and former Prime Minister and Finance Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who recently resigned his post due to opposition over what he called the unilateral withdrawal from the Gaza settlements, made the offer at a meeting with a host of evangelical leaders, which included Pastor Sunday Adelaja of the Embassy of God in the Ukraine, Pastors Brian and Bobbie Houston of Hillsong in Australia, Louis Cortes of Esperanza USA, and Ted Haggard, the Senior Pastor of the Colorado Springs, Colorado, New Life Church (website) and the president of the 30 million-member National Association of Evangelicals (website). For more on Haggard and New Life Church, see Jeff Sharlet's article, "Soldiers of Christ: Inside America's Most Powerful Megachurch." Also on hand was Dr. Paul Crouch, founder and president of the Costa Mesa, California-based Trinity Broadcasting Network (website) -- a giant in US Christian broadcasting whose web site claims the network is the "Largest Worldwide Religious Network" -- and Jay Sekulow, the Chief Counsel of the American Center for Law & Justice (ACLJ - website) -- a Christian-based law firm founded by the Reverend Pat Robertson in 1990 in order to counter the activities of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). According to the Daily Pilot, a newspaper covering Newport Beach and Costa Mesa, California, Crouch makes $403,700 a year and his wife Jan takes home over $300,000. "Both of them have an array of perks, including a private jet. They live like Saudi Arabian royalty in a huge mansion in the Newport Beach area." Recently, Crouch, brought his team of lawyers into a controversy involving charges that he had sex with former TBN employee, Enoch Lonnie Ford. According to the New York Daily News' Lloyd Grove, after Crouch's lawyers "sent a terse letter to the new NBC Universal-PAX TV reality show, 'Lie Detector,' the producers shelved a scheduled episode featuring [Ford] ... who claims to have had sex with the 70-year-old Crouch." Ford had submitted to a polygraph examination conducted by Dr. Ed Gelb, the show's resident forensic psychophysiologist and the results were going to be revealed on an episode to be aired in mid-March. "Crouch's lawyers threatened to sue everyone except for me," the show's host, Rolonda Watts, told the Daily News. Crouch has repeatedly denied the allegations. (For more details see Christianity Today's blog). Sekulow, a Jew who turned to Christ, has been a prominent spokesperson for the Christian right for more than a decade, and is currently one of the leading supporters of Judge John Roberts, President Bush's nominee for the US Supreme Court. According to its website, the organization which started up in Virginia Beach, Virginia, "has expanded its work and reach" to include the founding "of the European Centre for Law and Justice, based in Strasbourg, France and the Slavic Centre for Law and Justice, based in Moscow, Russia." According to its website, the organization "has a network of attorneys nationwide and its national headquarters is located in Washington, D.C. -- just steps away from the Supreme Court and Congress." Tightening the TiesTed Haggard, a highly influential evangelical leader with close ties to the Bush Administration, told Charisma, a Christian fundamentalist-oriented magazine, that the land in question is in close proximity to where Jesus conducted a good portion of his ministry, including, where he may have delivered the "Sermon on the Mount." While the offer of land in Israel came unexpectedly, Haggard told the Financial Times that under the right conditions perhaps as many as one million evangelicals would visit Israel annually. On his blog, Joel C. Rosenberg, an evangelical Christian who comes from an Orthodox Jewish background and the author of two best selling books, "The Last Jihad" in 2002 and "The Last Days" in 2003, pointed out that a "growing number of Israeli leaders want to reach out to evangelical Christians in the U.S. and around the world." According to Rosenberg, who served as a senior advisor to former Israeli Deputy Prime Minister Natan Sharansky and former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a government official told him that "The government will provide the land, the infrastructure, and all the zoning and other assistance required, and will leave the design and vision of the complex to the evangelical community. 'We don't want to interfere with the vision,'" the official said. "We just want to help make it happen. Catholics have so many sites here, as do the Greek Orthodox. But our best friends don't have any [major] site they can call their own." The Bible and Politics make Strange BedfellowsSupport for Israel by evangelical Christians grows out of both the Biblical role that Israel plays for Evangelicals, as well as practical political considerations. Veteran journalist and author Frederick Clarkson pointed out In his book, "Eternal Hostility: The Struggle Between Theocracy and Democracy" (Common Courage Press, 1997), that in the twentieth century, "most evangelicals" were "pre-millenialists...Christians who believe it is not possible to reform this world until Jesus returns." The Second Coming is then "followed by a 1,000-year rule of Jesus and the Christians." That is where "The Rapture" comes in, which Clarkson describes as "an event in which all the saved Christians, dead and alive, are brought up into the clouds with Jesus prior, during or after (depending of the school of theology) a period called 'the tribulation." In her seminal work on the rise of the Christian Right in the United States, "Spiritual Warfare: The Politics of the Christian Right" (South End Press, 1989), Sara Diamond wrote that the relationship between Christian evangelicals and Israel changed considerably when "popular broadcast ministries, especially those focused on studies of the 'end-times,' drew evangelicals to pay closer attention to Middle East politics." Diamond credits Hal Lindsey, author of "The Late Great Planet Earth," with adding "Israel's security" to the Christian Right's list of political concerns. In 1988, at the National Religious Broadcasters convention, Israeli government and military officials held a private briefing for Christian media preachers. That meeting was organized to "tell the untold story about the situation [between Christian evangelicals and Israel] and counteract distortions currently being presented in the media." Ten years later, then Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addressed an American group in Washington called Voices United for Israel. Most of the 3,000 in attendance were evangelicals, including Ralph Reed, then the executive director of the Christian Coalition and other prominent members of the fundamentalist Christian community. Over the past few years, a number of veteran Christian right leaders have joined forces with Jewish conservatives to launch pro-Israel organizations. Gary Bauer -- the former head of the Family Research Council, who now runs a group called American Values -- joined forces with Rabbi Daniel Lapin, head of the conservative Jewish organization, Toward Tradition, to form the American Alliance of Jews and Christians. Ralph Reed, the former executive director of the Christian Coalition, who is currently running for the Lieutenant Governor of Georgia, joined with Rabbi Yechiel Eckstein, the president of the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews, to launch "Stand for Israel." According to press reports, Stand for Israel is a project they hope will have the same political impact as the powerful Jewish lobbying group, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). Will the need for tourist dollars overcome suspicions that many Jews in Israel harbor about evangelical Christians? How will Palestinians react to a proposal that encourages tourism by a group that has been outspoken in its opposition to President Bush's Road Map to peace in the Middle East? "Evangelical Christians are highly motivated with a sincere feeling of connection to the land of the Bible. They will be interested in investing in a project they can identify with in Israel," Ari Marom, an Israeli official in charge of tourism marketing in the US, told the Financial Times. "The need and desire to strengthen our relationship with the evangelical community and encourage them to visit and support Israel not just from afar but up close, cuts across party lines." Opposing the 'Road Map' while Encouraging Evangelical TouristsSince President Bush introduced his "Road Map to Peace in the Middle East," a significant number of evangelical Christians have been unalterably opposed to it. According to the Financial Times, "some prominent US pastors are unyielding towards Palestinians' own yearning for statehood and have joined settler groups in Israel in campaigning against Sharon's plans to withdraw from the Gaza Strip." In 2003, at an Interfaith Zionist Leadership Summit in Washington, DC, a number of Christian right organizations including Americans for a Safe Israel (website), Gary Bauer's American Values (website), The Apostolic Congress (website), the Christian Broadcasting Network (website), the Christian Coalition of America (website), the Religious Roundtable, and the Zionist Organization of America (website), came together to develop a strategy for opposing the "Road Map. The Action Alert invited participants to: "Come if you are ready for action: 1) To oppose rewarding murderous Palestinian terrorism with statehood -- mocking our own war on terror and ultimately encouraging renewed Arab aggression against an Israel made invitingly vulnerable; 2) To expose how President Bush's stated policy of June 24, 2002 specifying essential pre-conditions for support of Palestinian statehood has been seriously undermined, eroding America's credibility and debasing our enduring national interest; 3) To lay bare the inherent absurdity of our State Department promoting a Road Map to Arab-Israeli "Peace" from a Quartet whose other three members -- Russia, the E.U. (France and Germany) and the U.N. -- repeatedly disparage U.S. interests and are demonstrably hostile to Israel; 4) To document the responsibility of Iran, Syria, Libya and Saudi Arabia for supporting Islamic terrorism; 5) To combat media ignorance and bias in Middle East coverage and virulent Anti-Israel/Anti-Semitic agitation on campus; and 6) To solidify and chart future strategy for the emerging alliance of Jewish and Christian Zionists." "We [Israel and the Palestinians] need to learn how to co-exist. When there is a peaceful resolution to the conflict, pilgrims will come," Riah Abu el-Assal, the Palestinian bishop of the Anglican Church in Jerusalem said. "They always have. We don't need to give out pieces of land." "While I don't know the particulars of the Israeli government's offer, I have long been an advocate for the Israeli government encouraging significant numbers of evangelical Christians to move to Israel and make the Holy Land their permanent home," Rabbi Shmuley Boteach told Media Transparency via email. Rabbi Boteach, a nationally syndicated radio talk show host, the author of 15 books, and a syndicated columnist, believes that while Israel should always maintain "a sizable Jewish majority," evangelical Christian immigrants should be welcome in Israel as long as they "respect the integrity of the Jewish faith by foreswearing the proselytization of the Jewish population." Concerned about security and the "well-being of the State of Israel," Rabbi Boteach said that "There is no better way to demonstrate this then to have a few hundred thousand evangelicals making Israel their home, and serving in the Israeli army to save the Middle East's only democracy from destruction at the hands of the many Arabs who have fought for its destruction." "I certainly don't expect to see large-scale immigration of evangelicals to Israel," Gershom Gorenberg, the associate editor of The Jerusalem Report and the author of "The End of Days: Fundamentalism and the Struggle for the Temple Mount," told Media Transparency. "Nor, for that matter do I expect to see them eschew proselytizing, "since that is a core value." sign in, or register to email stories or comment on them.
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MORE ORIGINAL RESEARCHBill Berkowitz PERC receives Templeton Freedom Award for promoting 'enviropreneurs'Right Wing foundation-funded anti-environmental think tank grabbing a wider audience for 'free market environmentalism' On the 15th anniversary of Terry Anderson and Donald Leal's book "Free Market Environmentalism" -- the seminal book on the subject -- Anderson, the Executive Director of the Bozeman, Montana-based Property and Environment Research Center (PERC - formerly known as the Political Economy Research Center) spoke in late-January at an event sponsored by Squaw Valley Institute at the Resort at Squaw Creek in California. While it may have been just another opportunity to speak on "free market environmentalism" and not the kickoff of a "victory tour," nevertheless it comes at a time when PERC's ideas are taking root.
Bill Berkowitz Neil Bush of Saudi ArabiaDuring recent visit, President’s brother describes the country as a 'kind of tribal democracy' In late February, only a few days after Saudi Arabia beheaded four Sri Lankan robbers and then left their headless bodies on public display in the capital of Riyadh, Neil Bush, for the fourth time in the past six years, showed up for the country's Jeddah Economic Forum. The Guardian reported that Human Rights Watch "said the four men had no lawyers during their trial and sentencing, and were denied other basic legal rights." In an interview with Arab News, the Saudi English language paper, Bush described the country as "a kind of tribal democracy."
Bill Berkowitz Newt Gingrich's back door to the White HouseAmerican Enterprise Institute "Scholar" and former House Speaker blames media for poll showing 64 percent of the American people wouldn't vote for him under any circumstances Whatever it is that former House Speaker Newt Gingrich has come to represent in American politics, the guy is nothing less than fascinating. One day he's espousing populist rhetoric about the need to cut the costs of college tuition and the next day he's talking World War III. One day he's claiming that the "war on terror" may force the abridgement of fundamental first amendment rights and the next he's advancing a twenty-first century version of his Contract with America. At the same time he's publicly proclaiming how "stupid" it is that the race for the presidency has already started you know that he's trying to figure out how to out finesse Rudy, McCain and Romney for the nomination. And last week, when Fox News' Chris Wallace cited a poll showing that 64 percent of the public would never vote for him, he was quick to blame those results on how unfairly he was treated by the mainstream media back in the day.
Bill Berkowitz American Enterprise Institute takes lead in agitating against IranDespite wrongheaded predictions about the war on Iraq, neocons are on the frontlines advocating military conflict with Iran After doing such a bang up job with their advice and predictions about the outcome of the war on Iraq, would it surprise you to learn that America's neoconservatives are still in business? While at this time we are not yet seeing the same intense neocon invasion of our living rooms -- via cable television's news networks -- that we saw during the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, nevertheless, a host of policy analysts at conservative think tanks -- most notably the American Enterprise Institute -- are being heeded on Iran by those who count - folks inside the Bush Administration.
Bill Berkowitz After six years, opposition gaining on George W. Bush's Faith Based InitiativeUnmentioned in the president's State of the Union speech, the program nevertheless continues to recruit religious participants and hand out taxpayer money to religious groups With several domestic policy proposals unceremoniously folded into President Bush's recent State of the Union address, two pretty significant items failed to make the cut. Despite the president's egregiously tardy response to the event itself, it was nevertheless surprising that he didn't even mention Hurricane Katrina: He didn't offer up a progress report, words of hope to the victims, or come up with a proposal for moving the sluggish rebuilding effort forward. There were no "armies of compassion" ready to be unleashed, although it should be said that many in the religious community responded to the disaster much quicker than the Bush Administration. In the State of the Union address, however, there was no "compassionate conservatism" for the victims of Hurricane Katrina.
Bill Berkowitz Frank Luntz calls Republican leadership in Washington 'One giant whining windbag'On the outs with the GOP, legendary degrader of discourse is moving to California He doesn't make great art; nothing he does elevates the human spirit; he doesn't illuminate, he bamboozles. He has become expert in subterfuge, hidden meanings, word play and manipulation. Frank Luntz has been so good at what he does that those paying close attention gave it its own name: "Luntzspeak."
Bill Berkowitz Spooked by MoveOn.org, conservative movement seeks to emulate liberal powerhouseFueled with Silicon Valley money, TheVanguard.org will have Richard Poe, former editor of David Horowitz's FrontPage magazine as its editorial and creative director As Paul Weyrich, a founding father of the modern conservative movement and still a prominent actor in it, likes to say, he learned a great deal about movement building by closely observing what liberals were up to in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Bill Berkowitz Ward Connerly's anti-affirmative action jihadFounder and Chair of the American Civil Rights Institute scouting five to nine states for new anti-affirmative action initiatives Fresh from his most recent victory -- in Michigan this past November -- Ward Connerly, the Black California-based maven of anti-affirmative action initiatives, appears to be preparing to take his jihad on the road. According to a mid-December report in the San Francisco Chronicle, Connerly said that he was "exploring moves into nine other states."
Bill Berkowitz Tom Tancredo's missionThe Republican congressman from Colorado will try to woo GOP voters with anti-immigration rhetoric and a boatload of Christian right politics These days, probably the most recognizable name in anti-immigration politics is Colorado Republican Congressman Tom Tancredo. Over the past year, Tancredo has gone from a little known congressman to a highly visible anti-immigration spokesperson. "Tancredo has thoroughly enmeshed himself in the anti-immigration movement and with the help of CNN talk show host Lou Dobbs, he has been given a national megaphone," Devin Burghart, the program director of the Building Democracy Initiative at the Center for New Community, a Chicago-based civil rights group, told Media Transparency.
Bill Berkowitz Institute on Religion and Democracy slams 'Leftist' National Council of ChurchesNew report from conservative foundation-funded IRD charges the NCC with being a political surrogate for MoveOn.org, People for the American Way and other liberal organizations If you prefer your religious battles sprinkled with demagoguery, sanctimoniousness, and simplistic attacks, the Institute on Religion and Democracy's (IRD) latest broadside against the National Council of Churches (NCC) certainly fits the bill.
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