Double-header Vigil for Peace with Justice at John Hagee s Night to Honor Israel July 4, 2007, Phoenix, AZ
By: Charles E. Carlson
The Phoenix Project Strait Gate team played out a double-header on Sunday, June 24, 2007. First there was the warm-up in the desert with the red hot sun coming up over our backs in front of the CUFI State coordinator, David Friend, and his Scottsdale First Assembly Dream Center, the sponsor church for John Hagee s Night to Honor Israel. All contact was necessarily with the drive-by attendees and was accomplished by carefully crafted large big yellow and black signs with simple and brief messages that included: APOSTATE CHURCH, CHRIST FOLLOWERS DO NOT KILL HAGEE S RACISM KILLS PALESTINIANS CHOOSE LIFE, NOT WAR BLESSED ARE THE PEACEMAKERS
The purpose was to let the pastors and congregation know we blame them for what John Hagee does and says in Jesus name. Here are John Hagee’s own words from CUFI website agenda for his upcoming Washington DC Night to Honor Israel: “The enemies of Israel are the enemies of America. They are the enemies of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. These enemies have drawn the battle line. If a line has to be drawn…then draw that line around both Christians and Jews…WE ARE ONE…WE ARE UNITED. America, Israel and the world are facing a great danger in the Middle East. Iran’s president has become the new Hitler, and has sworn to blast Israel off the map with nuclear weapons. We are reliving history! The enemies of Israel are the enemies of America.”
Really Mr. Hagee? Are we American the enemies of the Lebanese people who Israel carpet bombed and used depleted uranium weapons on; are we the enemies of the Bedawins of the Negev Desert who Israel uproots; are we the enemies of the Syrians and Iranians who have done nothing to us because Israel has made all of these people their enemies? I think not.
Pastor Friend came out to view the vigil on the busy Pima Road and talked to the four off-duty police there in two patrol cars that the church had hired to guard the premises. Most of the attendees drove through our little gauntlet of signs, but they could not escape the conclusions that six properly dressed ladies and men stood in the scorching heat to tell them, that they had the blood of Palestinians and Iraqis on their hands. At least three stopped their cars in traffic to affirm us.
One attendee called the office four days later, having written down our phone number from a sign, and he named a church in Southern California where he attended when we have held vigils there. This man said he agrees with us about the wars, does not think churches should accept tax exempt status, and now he want to know if we follow Christ. These few made our day.
Evening to Honor the Dishonorable Israel
The temperature was 108 degrees Fahrenheit on 2nd Street in front of Symphony Hall at 4:30 PM when the crowd began trickling in to hear John Hagee, founder of Christians United For Israel. But there was the blessing of shade from the Hyatt Hotel across the street. Hagee and company, including a number of Israelis, was clearly distinguishable by their fitted navy Armani suits and ties, uncommon in the informality of a Phoenix summer. Hagee came from San Antonio, Texas to deliver his un-Christ-like, racist and hate-filled speech condemning the 3.9 million imprisoned, hope-deprived Palestinians living inside Political Israel in occupied West Bank and Gaza.
John Hagee, operating under the protection of tax-exempt status, openly promotes continued occupation of Palestine and Iraq, and a preemptive deadly strike on the people of Iran. Hagee preaches that “islamo-Fascism”(sic) is every man s mortal enemy. His words (which we have recorded) reveal his political campaign for deportation, exile, or what amounts to extermination of the Philistines, who are the symbol of his hatred for Islam.
The Palestinians are little more than animals to Hagee, once he called them “catfish out of water, gasping for air.” What would Jesus say, John Hagee? The Strait Gate Team of six men and five ladies stood on the public right-of-way bordering the foyer of Symphony Hall holding large signs in a perimeter to flank the some 1400 estimated incoming attendees, most of whom tried very hard not to look. Each attendee paid $18.00 to get in the door where they would also be asked for money for Israel. Many Jewish people were there watching out for the interests of Israel; Hagee makes them the honored guest, preaching that they have their own separate wide (not strait) gate to Heaven.
Four vigil team members did nothing but circulate, passing out literature, intercepting the incoming attendees outside the perimeter as they left parking lots across the street. Our aim is to place our report in the hands and pockets of one of every five who entered the hall, and in this we were successful, reaching upward of 500 individual attendees. The truth is a mighty bomb when sprinkled inside a hall reverberating with transparent and incendiary statements from the podium.
Three uniformed policemen, at our request, stood in the background the whole time, watchful for our rights It did not take long for our literature to take effect. Several of the attendees actually left their seats inside to come back, looking for arguments or retribution, some near rage after realizing our literature criticized them. These were predictably quick volunteered words of the common Judeo-Christian line, that Muslims are our enemies and are out to kill us all. These I directed to the Muslim family, asking if they had ever met a Muslim? Not one followed my advise. Hagee-ite bigotry was too deeply ingrained for them to risk loss of their ignorance by meeting those they claim to fear.
The Muslim family stood along the path holding a banner about the equality of all races before God, a direct challenge to the racism spewed at a Night to Honor Israel. All who came saw them. Inside it is taught that one race is the “chosen.” A Night To Honor Israel was falsely advertised as a night to promote unity between Israel and Christians held in a city owned auditorium…with no mention made of unity with others. The Arizona Muslim American Society correctly challenged the City Of Phoenix for renting the hall for a known racist purpose. Muslims also were present at our Denver Vigil in May, we are grateful for their courage.
Our message to the press For my part I told the Jewish News reporter (the only media who covered the event) that Project Strait Gate does not blame John Hagee, an opulent opportunist in the cesspool of commercial racism, instead we blame every Christian inside the hall…all should know better. I told her something like this:
“. We could travel the ends of the earth without finding a more hostile group to our message of peace and love than in this hall full of professing Christians, Zionist Jews, and Israeli delegates…there could Inside this hall you will find the most avowed pro-war crowd in Americaand would be no American engagement in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the Philistine people would be more free if it were not for those in this hall…Judeo-Christianity is the only significant center of war support in our country.
The burning question Will there be a change in the 1400 (Hagee s estimate) who could not help but read our simple and direct signs, and who saw our faces? Yes, some will take to heart the messages we placed in their hands: Why We Are in Front of Your Church Today, and Pharisee Watch, Vigil For Peace With Justice at Public Meeting of John Hagee s Christians United for Israel. Ours is a powerful message for the few who will listen. It is our prayer that a fire for peace and love will be kindled in many churches that were represented in that hall. Our own government has made a war on Islam now approaching its 18th year to replace our new enemy after Communism fell. We are to have perpetual war for the sake of limitless red ink; we live in as society glued together by debt…debt made to pay for endless war on Islam.
I resolved to ask next a churchgoer says he expects Islam to bomb us, “If you are a follower of Christ, as you say you are, why do you fear death so much that you would allow yourself to hate even to kill some one eslse?”
Then there were the many bright spots at Symphony Hall; people who came back and sincerely requested more copies of our literature to give to others; three visiting businessmen who saw us from across the street at the Hyatt Hotel Convention Center and came over to learn; the young photographer who was shocked by the hostility of the crowd, and came to understand it.
Our most committed Vigiler was Patty from Fresno, who drove 12 hours from to be with us. A little more commitment like that and John Hagee would have to find a new and more healthy promotion, such as selling his diet food supplement his website advertises.
Best of all when I returned to the Web this morning I found that Christians United For Israel had removed its agenda of future events from its website after this, our third successful Hagee Vigil for Peace With Justice.
I am immedieately reminded of the importance of our mission by today’s news from the Arabs living in Israel, as reported in the Israeli press, and I wonder how even John Hagee could stand these images. Israel s military literally dragged some 95 Bedouin men, women and children out of their village homes of 51 years into the scorching heat of the Negev desert to make a way for a new Jewish squatter s settlement. They were simply made homeless on the desert sands today.
I was amazed at the site of these villages when I bussed through the Negev from Eilat to Beersheba in 2002 in a buss packed with Israeli solders in uniform. I wondered then how the little flocks and shepherds could survive in such a place seemingly devoid of chlorophyll. I saw black robed moms following their little herds of sheep and goats, with children tailing along behind. The IDF soldiers riding on the bus with me showed considerable unhealthy interest in me when I photographed one Bedouin settlement on the fly. They scared me enough so I stopped taking pictures.
The Bedouins are not to be seen as part of Israel, they are an embarrassment because they can survive the uninhabitable. They are a people scheduled for extinction; they live in such a hostile place they have nothing to steal, so Israel steals their very lives. It builds a housing development and inhabits it with squatters who pump the precious water from under the sand for their swimming pools where the little families once lived a biblical nomadic life.
In another equally terrible story from the Israel Haaretz, Israeli squatters in the West Bank uprooted 300 olive trees belonging to Philistine families, dragging them away to destroy or replant on their own land. The IDF forced the squatters to give the trees back to the rightful owners, but what happens to an uprooted olive tree in the heat of summer in the West Bank? Israel is the agent of death, even death for trees.
Those in the Phoenix Symphony Hall are responsible for every branch and every Bedouin child. How can We Hold These Truths stop when this injustice is supported by groups calling themselves “Christian Zionists” in our own country? Our next vigil is now scheduled for Washington, DC on July 17, and we will find out the time and place. Hagee will share the program there with Newt Gingrich and Benjamin Netanyahu. Can you be there?
