On July 22, 2008 United States Senator Joseph Lieberman will deliver a capstone address at Pastor John Hagee's yearly Washington Christians United For Israel Summit and, presumably as an advance strike, prior to the conference, to suppress possible negative press coverage, CUFI lawyers have requested, alleging copyright violation, that YouTube remove a number of videos which contain footage from John Hagee Ministry broadcasts. As Huffington Post political journalist Sam Stein describes in a July 8, 2008 report, more than 120 YouTube videos were taken down in the sweep. It's likely that CUFI's claim to copyright violation ranges, in many of the cases of these removed videos, from shaky to dubious and all the way, in the case of journalist Max Blumenthal's mini-documentary "Rapture Ready: The Unauthorized 2007 Christians United For Israel Tour", to absurd. [below: "Rapture Ready", by Max Blumenthal and Thomas Shomaker]
However the preemptive strike will keep the critical videos out of the way at least until CUFIs upcoming conference is over. Included in the videos purged was one, showcasing audio clips from a late 2005 John Hagee sermon, in which Hagee claimed that "God sent Hitler" and that Jews are not "spiritually alive." That video, broadcast around the United States and also internationally last May, led presidential hopeful John McCain to abruptly renounce Pastor John Hagee's political endorsement. [below: the Young Turks' re-post of the "God Sent Hitler" video, still up on YouTube]
One of CUFI's lawyers told the Cutting Edge Press service, for a July 7, 2008 story, that "John Hagee Ministries, through its copyright attorneys, issued a request that YouTube remove any and all copyrighted materials belonging to John Hagee copyrights." If so, John Hagee Ministries has claimed copyright protection for John Hagee's version of conspiracy theory, identified by one national expert as clearly anti-Semitic, which closely resembled versions of the most notoriously vicious anti-Jewish conspiracy theory ever minted, "The Protocols Of The Learned Elders Of Zion," that was put out in profusion in the decades leading up to the Holocaust, internationally, in The United States and, especially, in Germany. [below: 10 minute documentary compares Pastor John Hagee's very own version, circa March 2003, of "The Protocols" with the Nazi version, as detailed in the infamous Joseph Goebbels-supervised Nazi propaganda film "The Eternal Jew"]
Pastor John Hagee's and JHM's censorship attempt has inadvertently raised a question that's potentially embarrassing both to Hagee and also to Senator Joe Lieberman, who in a speech at CUFI 2007 declared Pastor Hagee to be an "ish elochim," a "man of God" and likened Hagee to Moses; Is the promotion of a variant of the most notorious (and destructive) anti-Jewish conspiracy theory of modern times a proper educational enterprise for a 501(c)(3) 'educational" broadcast ministry such as Pastor Hagee's ? And if so, what's the didactic goal ? [10 minute documentary explores Senator Joe Lieberman's comparison of Pastor John Hagee to Moses]