http://www.albawaba.com/news/index.php3?sid=262503&lang=e&dir=newsMark Dankof
03-11-2003
For me, Jim Lobe's Inter Press Service article entitled, Conservative Christians Biggest Backers of Iraq War, reprises old memories past and new anxieties future, where the alliance of the Israeli lobby and the Dispensational Christian Right is concerned. Throw in a dose of oil and natural gas consortiums and central bankers into the mix for good measure along with ill-devised notions of Old Testament theocracy, and one has all of the combustible ingredients for the gestation of a global conflagration destined to kill not thousands, but millions of innocent people of every conceivable geographic, racial, and religious background.
In his article, Lobe mentions the shadowy Jewish rabbi, Yechiel Eckstein, co-chairman of Stand for Israel and the chairman of the Chicago based International Fellowship of Christians and Jews (IFCJ). Eckstein, once designated the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai Brith's (ADL) international liaison to Fundamentalist and Pentecostal Christians, has now entered into a new alliance with the peripatetic Christian Right mogul, Ralph Reed, to cement the alliances being consummated by the Zionist lobby, Christian Dispensationalists, the American/British oil and natural gas consortiums, central bankers, and the defense industry for a War for Empire destined potentially for tragedy on an apocalyptic scale. Reed now joins Eckstein in this effort as co-chairman of Stand for Israel.
I remember Rabbi Eckstein well. In 1988, while serving as 36th District Chairman of the Republican Party in King County/Seattle and occasional voice for a talk show on a 50,000 watt Christian station in that city, I received a phone call invitation from the then Regional Director of the Anti-Defamation League for the Pacific Northwest based in Seattle, to have lunch with Eckstein and his then cohort, Jan Van Der Hoeven, a Dutch Reformed clergyman representing the so-called International Christian Embassy in Jerusalem (ICEJ). I accepted the invitation, discovering upon arrival at ADL headquarters in Seattle that I was the only local Christian clergyman present at this private planning luncheon. Aside from Eckstein, Van Der Hoeven, a cadre of Jewish rabbis, and the ADL Regional Director, Marvin Stern, the only other individual I remember being present was a Christian clergyman traveling with Eckstein and Van Der Hoeven named Terry Moore. By strange coincidence, Moore and I were both graduates of Chicago's Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. He, however, was also a member of Dr. Clarence Wagner's Bridges for Peace organization, another Christian group I was to subsequently learn had major ties to the Israeli government and its supporting cast of characters.
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