revealing interviews on yesterday's DN! regarding Pat Robertson and his remarks:
DEMOCRACY NOW!:
* The Cannon of Christianity: Pat Robertson Calls for the Assassination of
Hugo Chavez *
Christian televangelist Pat Robertson set off an international firestorm
this week when he called for the assassination of Venezuela's
democratically-elected president Hugo Chavez. We speak with journalist and
author Chris Hedges and attorney Michal Ratner of the Center for
Constitutional Rights.
Listen/Watch/Read
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=05/08/24/1343225<snip>
CHRIS HEDGES: Well, this fits a pattern of essentially seditious statements that have been made by Pat Robertson since the early 1980s, when he embraced this new doctrine within the Christian right known as Christian reconstructionism or dominionism -- that's not a term that he would use to describe it, but that's how shorthand for those of us who look at it from the outside -- where he calls for the creation of a Christian America, a Christian state. And there has been an assault against the democratic system, largely unseen, I think, by the majority of the American people, ever since the early 1980s.
The empire that Robertson and the other radical Christian right evangelicals have amassed, the media empire, is now huge. What began as a relatively small operation, basically a radio operation, now sees just Pat Robertson's Christian Broadcasting Network alone employing over a thousand people, to have facilities in three U.S. cities, as well as the Ukraine, Philippines, India and Israel, and this is part of a large empire where radical Christians now control six national television networks, each reaching tens of millions of homes and virtually all of the nation's 2,000 religious radio stations. Christian radio now outnumbers every other format, except country music and news talk. And the latest venture is putting up direct broadcast satellite networks, such as Sky Angels, that carries -- Sky Angel carries 36 channels of Christian radio and TV and nothing else.
<snip>
CHRIS HEDGES: Well, I think it's important to understand the ideology that comes into play with these kinds of statements. Robertson, along with most of the radical Christian right, endorses violence as a kind of curative for the satanic movement, secular humanism, liberalism, Islam, whatever it is that they see outside the gate. So the final aesthetic of their movement, in many ways, is violence. This is what the whole “End Time” series is about. So if you go back and look at his statements, he repeatedly sees incredibly destructive and violent acts as the hand of God.
<snip>
But what we're seeing is not a kook. What we are seeing is somebody who has this messianic belief that violence and destruction is being carried out against non-believers, against those who do not endorse his radical ideology and that he is a kind of player, along with God, in that destructive force.
AMY GOODMAN: Hasn't he also called for the destruction of the State Department?
..much more..