David Brog who has written a book supporting Evangelical Christians to support Israel was Specter's Chief of Staff. Hagee has been shown to be one of those influencial Ministers on the TBN Network who are getting money "on the side." No wonder Specter supports Bush so handily in every action he takes to limit our Constitutional freedoms. And, I used to think Specter was a Moderate Repuglican having no idea who his Chief of Staff's loyalties were with. How can this be? Specter represents Pennsylvania, which is hardly a Deep South fundie state.
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We're Being Set Up for Wider War in the Middle East
by Paul Craig Roberts
Seated beside Lapin in the ornately gilded Trinity Broadcasting Network (TBN) studio was Pastor John Hagee, the author of an incendiary new book purporting to show that the Bible predicts a military confrontation with Iran. By then, Hagee’s book, Jerusalem Countdown, had sold nearly 500,000 copies. It had occupied the No. 1 position on the Wal-Mart inspirational best-seller list, showed up on Wal-Mart’s list of top 10 best sellers for seven weeks, and made the USA Today top 50 best-seller list for six weeks.
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David Brog, former chief of staff for Republican Sen. Arlen Specter, has gone to work for Rev. Hagee. Brog, who is Jewish, says he works for Hagee's evangelical enterprise because "we're bringing into a pro-Israel camp millions of Christians who love Israel and giving them a political voice. Israel's enemies are our enemies, and this group instinctively understands that." Brog goes on to say that Hagee's evangelicals understand that they are not supposed to talk about Jesus, only about saving Israel: "Christians who work with Jews in supporting Israel realize how sensitive we are in talking about Jesus. They realize it will interfere with what they are trying to do."
Gentle reader, is this an admission that evangelicals have set aside Jesus for war? Do these bloody-minded evangelicals really believe they will be wafted to Heaven for helping Israel involve the U.S. in more war? Have evangelicals forgotten that "an eye for an eye" is Old Testament? "Turn the other cheek" is New Testament.
On July 14, Reuters reported that alone among Christians, the "Vatican condemns Israel for attacks on Lebanon."
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from THE AMERICAN PROSPECT
David Brog, a former chief of staff to Senator Arlen Specter, the Pennsylvania Republican, serves on CUFI’s board of advisers. Standing With Israel, his book urging Jews to embrace the support of evangelical Christians, has just been published by Strang Communications. Brog believes that CUFI “can have an enormous influence. It can really create a player where there isn’t currently one.” As to whether Hagee has the organizational skills to pull off such a project, Brog added that the pastor is a “great administrator” and a “great leader,” and was able to build his church and TV ministry because “he’s a good businessman, he’s a good organizer.”
But Hagee the businessman -- along with friends like Hinn, Meyer, Parsley, and other TBN televangelists, including the network’s top executives, Paul and Jan Crouch -- has come under fire for excessive compensation derived from his nonprofit ministries. According to his organization’s tax returns, Hagee has earned more than $1 million annually since 1999 in salary and deferred compensation from his nonprofit Global Evangelism Television and Cornerstone Church. In 2004, the San Antonio News Express reported that he was the highest-paid nonprofit executive in that city; his pay was nearly twice that of the next best-paid executive.
TBN is the largest Christian television network in the world, claiming to reach more than 92 million households in the United States alone, and since 9-11 has expanded its worldwide reach into Muslim countries, including Iran. Despite TBN’s claim to represent the whole of Christianity, however, many Christians might not recognize their religion in TBN’s “Word of Faith” programming. Word of Faith is a nondenominational Pentecostal movement, based on the power of the spoken word to claim one’s spiritual and material desires and to purge devils from one’s life. The movement’s other central tenet, which critics say leads to the excessive compensation of its leaders, is the notion that “sowing a seed” -- contributing to the ministry -- will result in the donor’s “harvest” of personal prosperity. Like the televangelists’ individual ministries, TBN is operated by a nonprofit entity, so contributions are tax-deductible to the donor and tax free to the ministry. While TBN reaps more than $100 million of revenue per year, mostly from viewer donations, Hagee’s organization reports annual revenues of about $15 million.
more....at American Prospect
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