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   Unclean! In a time when much of the media is writing the Christian Right's obituary for the umpteenth time, Christians United for Israel -- CUFI -- has emerged as one of the new powerhouses of the movement. Its leader, John Hagee, and its theology -- like that of Left Behind, but not as subtle -- is old-school, but its touchy-feely "We love Jews!" sensibility is in keeping with American fundamentalism's attempts to re-brand the faith as gentler and kinder, if just as orthodox underneath. It may be sneakier than that, as Max Blumenthal reveals in his Youtube report from a Washington CUFI powwow, where he broke away from the talking points of Joe Lieberman (he compares his pal Hagee, who blames anti-Semitism on Jewish "disobedience and rebellion," to Moses) and Tom DeLay to talk to actual believers. Theological warnings, security guards, and Christian Zionist interpretive dancing follow.  Preachers of Doom Jeff SharletWhy are we so obsessed with the apocalypse? By "we", I don't mean those of us who actually believe in the imminent end of the world, as foretold by a literalist reading of the Bible (presumably a small share of this magazine's readers), but those of us who find apocalyptic believers -- especially American apocalyptic believers -- to be a source of sufficient anxiety that publishers churn out explanatory volumes such as Nicholas Guyatt's Have a Nice Doomsday: Why Millions of Americans are Looking Forward to the End of the World... Evidently they do. Guyatt's breezy investigation is only the latest response to the success of books that skip the "why" and go directly to The End...
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[ Continue reading: ]  Fair Vanity Sharlet: Revealer contributing editor S. Brent Plate sent in the following commentary on Vanity Fair's special July issue dedicated to Africa. I let my politics get the better of me and at first rejected Brent's commentary with a long rant about why. Brent graciously wrote back with his own thinking, and before we knew it we had what's called an "exchange." [ Continue reading: ] Jews? What Jews? Those godless secularists! We refer, of course, to the conservatives at The Wall Street Journal, so enamored of the new book The Political Teachings of Jesus (by Tod Lindberg, editor of the rightwing Policy Review) that they decided to dispense... [ Continue reading: ] |