Max Blumenthal on the Path to 9/11
MAX BLUMENTHAL
Friday, September 08, 2006
Discover the Secret Right-Wing Network Behind ABC's 9/11 Deception
Less than 72 hours before ABC's "The Path to 9/11" is scheduled to air, the network is suddenly under siege. On Tuesday, ABC was forced to concede that "The Path to 9/11" is "a dramatization, not a documentary." The film deceptively invents scenes to depict former President Bill Clinton's handling of the Al Qaeda threat.
Now, ABC claims to be is editing those false sequences to satisfy critics so the show can go on -- even if it still remains a gross distortion of history. And as it does so, ABC advances the illusion that the deceptive nature of "The Path to 9/11" is an honest mistake committed by a hardworking but admittedly fumbling team of well-intentioned Hollywood professionals who wanted nothing less than to entertain America. But this is another Big Lie.
In fact, "The Path to 9/11" is produced and promoted by a well-honed propaganda operation consisting of a network of little-known right-wingers working from within Hollywood to counter its supposedly liberal bias. This is the network within the ABC network. Its godfather is far right activist David Horowitz, who has worked for more than a decade to establish a right-wing presence in Hollywood and to discredit mainstream film and TV production. On this project, he is working with a secretive evangelical religious right group founded by The Path to 9/11's director David Cunningham that proclaims its goal to "transform Hollywood" in line with its messianic vision.
Before The Path to 9/11 entered the production stage, Disney/ABC contracted David Cunningham as the film's director. Cunningham is no ordinary Hollywood journeyman. He is in fact the son of Loren Cunningham, founder of the right-wing evangelical group Youth With A Mission (YWAM). The young Cunningham helped found an auxiliary of his father's group called The Film Institute (TFI), which, according to its mission statement, is "dedicated to a Godly transformation and revolution TO and THROUGH the Film and Televisionindustry." As part of TFI's long-term strategy, Cunningham helped place interns from Youth With A Mission's "global training network" in film industry jobs "so that they can begin to impact and transform Hollywood from the inside out," according to a YWAM report.
Last June, Cunningham's TFI announced it was producing its first film, mysteriously titled "Untitled History Project." "TFI's first project is a doozy," a newsletter to YWAM members read. "Simply being referred to as: The Untitled History Project, it is already being called the television event of the decade and not one second has been put to film yet. Talk about great expectations!" (A web edition of the newsletter was mysteriously deleted yesterday but has been cached on Google at the link above).
The following month, on July 28, the New York Post reported that ABC was filming a mini-series "under a shroud of secrecy" about the 9/11 attacks. "At the moment, ABC officials are calling the miniseries 'Untitled Commission Report' and producers refer to it as the 'Untitled History Project,'" the Post noted.
Early on, Cunningham had recruited a young Iranian-American screenwriter named Cyrus Nowrasteh to
write the script of his secretive "Untitled" film. Not only is Nowrasteh an outspoken conservative, he is also a fervent member of the emerging network of right-wing people burrowing into the film industry with ulterior sectarian political and religious agendas, like Cunningham.
Nowrasteh's conservatism was on display when he appeared as a featured speaker at the Liberty Film Festival (LFF), an annual event founded in 2004 to premier and promote conservative-themed films supposedly too "politically incorrect" to gain acceptance at mainstream film festivals. This June, while The Path to 9/11 was being filmed, LFF founders Govindini Murty and Jason Apuzzo -- both friends of Nowrasteh -- announced they were "partnering" with right-wing activist David Horowitz. Indeed, the 2006 LFF is listed as "A Program of the David Horowitz Freedom Center."
Since the inauguration of Bill Clinton in 1992, Horowitz has labored to create a network of politically active conservatives in Hollywood. His Hollywood nest centers around his Wednesday Morning Club, a
weekly meet-and-greet session for Left Coast conservatives that has been graced with speeches by
the likes of Newt Gingrich, Victor Davis Hanson and Christopher Hitchens. The group's headquarters are at the offices of Horowitz's Center for the Study of Popular Culture, a "think tank" bankrolled for years with millions by right-wing sugardaddies like eccentric far right billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife. (Scaife
financed the Arkansas Project, a $2.3 million dirty tricks operation that included paying sources for
negative stories about Bill Clinton that turned out to be false.)
With the LFF now under Horowitz's control, his political machine began drumming up support for Cunningham and Nowrasteh's "Untitled" project, which finally was revealed in late summer as "The Path to 9/11." Horowitz's PR blitz began with an August 16 interview with Nowrasteh on his FrontPageMag webzine. In the interview, Nowrasteh foreshadowed the film's assault on Clinton's record on fighting terror. "The 9/11 report details the Clinton's administration's response -- or lack of response -- to Al Qaeda and how this emboldened Bin Laden to keep attacking American interests," Nowrasteh told FrontPageMag's Jamie Glazov. "There simply was no response. Nothing."
A week later, ABC hosted LFF co-founder Murty and several other conservative operatives at an advance
screening of The Path to 9/11. (While ABC provided 900 DVDs of the film to conservatives, Clinton administration officials and objective reviewers from mainstream outlets were denied them.) Murty returned with a glowing review for FrontPageMag that emphasized the film's partisan nature. "'The Path to 9/11' is one of the best, most intelligent, most pro-American miniseries I've ever seen on TV, and conservatives should support
it and promote it as vigorously as possible," Murty wrote. As a result of the special access granted by ABC, Murty's article was the first published review of The Path to 9/11, preceding those by the New York Times and LA Times by more than a week.
Murty followed her review with a blast email to conservative websites such as Liberty Post and Free Republic on September 1 urging their readers to throw their weight behind ABC's mini-series. "Please do everything you can to spread the word about this excellent miniseries," Murty wrote, "so that 'The Path to 9/11' gets the highest ratings possible when it airs on September 10 & 11! If this show gets huge ratings, then ABC will be more likely to produce pro-American movies and TV shows in the future!"
Murty's efforts were supported by Appuzo, who handles LFF's heavily-trafficked blog, Libertas. Appuzo was instrumental in marketing The Path to 9/11 to conservatives, writing in a blog post on September 2, "Make no mistake about what this film does, among other things: it places the question of the Clinton Administration's culpability for the 9/11 attacks front and center... Bravo to Cyrus Nowrasteh and David
Cunningham for creating this gritty, stylish and gripping piece of entertainment."
When a group of leading Senate Democrats sent a letter to ABC CEO Robert Iger urging him to cancel The Path to 9/11 because of its glaring factual errors and distortions, Apuzzo launched a retaliatory campaign to paint the Democrats as foes of free speech. "Here at LIBERTAS we urge the public to make noise over this, and to demand that Democrats back down," he wrote on September 7th. "What is at stake is nothing short of the 1st Amendment."
At FrontPageMag, Horowitz singled out Nowrasteh as the victim. "The attacks by former president Bill Clinton, former Clinton Administration officials and Democratic US senators on Cyrus Nowrasteh's ABC
mini-series "The Path to 9/11" are easily the gravest and most brazen and damaging governmental attacks on the civil liberties of ordinary Americans since 9/11," Horowitz declared.
Now, as discussion grows over the false character of The Path to 9/11, the right-wing network that brought it to fruition is ratcheting up its PR efforts. Murty will appear tonight on CNN's Glenn Beck
show and The Situation Room, according to Libertas in order to respond to "the major disinformation campaign now being run by Democrats to block the truth about what actually happened during the Clinton years."
While this network claims its success and postures as the true victims, the ABC network suffers a PR catastrophe. It's almost as though it was complacent about an attack on its reputation by a band of political terrorists.
# posted by max blumenthal @ 5:21 PM 31 comments
Tuesday, September 05, 2006
For anyone wondering why I haven't been blogging recently, I have just returned from a two week long trip through the West. I don't even have time to write about what I saw there, but I'm hoping to in the coming days. In the meantime, I'm going down to the wire on a long investigative piece about the Washington Times that is scheduled to appear in the Nation during the third week of this month. And if you haven't seen my recent piece on George Allen's ties to the white supremacist Council of Conservative Citizens, you can check it out here.
# posted by max blumenthal @ 2:54 PM 0 comments
Thursday, August 17, 2006
Who the Righteous Gentiles Really Were
The lobbyist for Christians United for Israel, David Brog (not to be confused with my main man with the plan David Brock), has written a response to my article, "The Birth Pangs of a New Christian Zionism." His letter would have been unspectacular and totally forgettable were it not for his warped assertion that "Christian Zionists are the theological progeny of the religious righteous gentiles who saved Jews from the Holocaust." Luckily, Evan Derkacz of Alternet has saved me the time of having to explain to Brog who the righteous Christians of Third Reich-era Germany really were. Here is Evan's eloquent riposte to Brog:
In a response letter Brog takes issue with the portrayal of his organization as extremists, when in fact, Brog only cemented Blumenthal's point -- offending Christian/Jewish history in the process.
Blumenthal's original article only used the word "extremist" once, and that in reference to John Hagee's rhetoric. That Brog got the sense of extremism from the article is likely because the mirror he looked into reflected just that. Last month, CUFI founder, John Hagee, who has the ear of Republic National Committee Chair Ken Mehlman, demanded that:
"the United States must join Israel in a pre-emptive military strike against Iran to fulfill God's plan for both Israel and the West... a biblically prophesied end-time confrontation with Iran, which will lead to the Rapture, Tribulation, and Second Coming of Christ."
Extremist is a slippery term and most extremists don't fancy themselves such. But this view, by almost any definition, would rate. Perhaps Brog felt that the face he showed Blumenthal was so moderately contructed and didn't warrant any more than the kid gloves treatment Brog expects from most media.
But what I take issue with most strongly is his revisionist history, so prevalent in right wing circles. Here's Brog's quote:
Christian Zionists are the theological progeny of the religious righteous gentiles who saved Jews from the Holocaust, and true to their creed, they are seeking to stand with the Jews against current threats to their existence.
Sounds logical... too bad it's not true.
This deeply offensive sleight of hand fits into the movement to repackage the Founding Fathers, Abolition, and the Civil Rights Movement as right wing victories. In fact, they were not. These movements all fought against right wing orthodoxy.
The religious righteous gentiles, most of whom were Lutheran Evangelicals, were not right wing Christians and indeed would hardly be recognizable as coreligionists to today's conservative Evangelicals.
I'm not contending that they were liberal or progressive Christians either; just that they were mostly intellectuals who did not believe in the inerrancy of the Bible, promoted ecumenism, believed in science and the enlightenment, were for peace and against nuclear arsenals, abhorred authoritarianism and put no stock in eschatology -- or End Times mythology.
When Luther himself translated the Bible into German he was ambivalent about the Book of Revelation, eventually opting to include it only as an appendix.
The religious righteous gentiles were led by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was ultimately executed for his deeply conflicted participation in an attempt to assassinate Hitler. Bonhoeffer's and Barth's and Martin Niemoeller's Confessing Church bravely opposed the Nazi regime right from the start. Their theological basis for opposing Hitler and protecting Jews was rooted in the teachings of Jesus -- something the theology of Christian Zionism is most emphatically not. Brog's and Hagee's theology is born of apocalyptic passages of the New Testament which do not concern themselves with Jesus' words or ideas.
In fact, Conservative Christian efforts to merge with the government would put it much closer to the state-sponsored Evangelical Church of the German Nation which Barth, Bonhoeffer and the rest of the Confessing Church so vigorously opposed.
What is so important about Evan's rebuke of Brog and his paymasters is that he establishes a counterpoint to the narrative that people like Hagee and Falwell spin before their supporters. Hagee, Falwell and other right-wing evangelical leaders are nationalists; they openly concede that their goal is the integration of church with state. The Confessing Church on the other hand was initially dedicated to denouncing state interference in Protestant religious affairs -- specifically, against the so-called "Aryan paragraph," which forced Protestant churches to classify on strictly racial grounds some members of their congregations as Jews -- and ultimately, as the war came home to Germany, to speaking out against the Nazis' extermination of the Jews. They were conservatives to be sure, and they agonized over their decision to oppose Hitler, but nothing about their actions was motivated by a desire for power. The Christian right exists exclusively as a political bloc. If its leadership denounces the federal government, they do so from the position of courtiers, not cassandras. They will only condemn the state to the extent that the state obstructs their will to power. And they will cast any enforcement of first amendment protection of religious freedom as "anti-Christian discrimination." As cynical as Israel is for cultivating the support of the Christian right, I doubt Falwell or Hagee or any of their lot will wind up with plaques bearing their name beside those of Niemoller and Bonhoeffer at Yad Vashem's memorial to righteous Gentiles. To Israel, evangelicals are political assets and nothing more.
Another point worth making is that Bonhoeffer and company represented a minority within the Protestant church with respect to the Jewish question. Most of their colleagues in the German church saw Hitler's ascension as a blessing from God and collaborated enthusiastically with his regime. A documentary released last year called "Theologians Under Hitler", attempted to detail the German church's regrettable relationship with the Third Reich. Although it was edited in amateurish fashion and isn't the most exciting film, it recounts an important and under-examined historical episode that should serve as a warning about the fusion of the right-wing of the American church with the Republican party.
I wasn't able to discuss any of this during my Democracy Now appearance, but I did have time to explain how the Christian right uses Israel to weaken the political influence of American Jews on issues of Constitutional rights. You can watch me, listen to me or check out a transcript here. I'm followed by John Dean, who discusses his excellent book, Conservatives Without Conscience, which examines the prevalence of the authoritarian personality in modern American conservatism. Dean does not shy away from describing the Christian right and the right in general (see Rep. JD Hayworth's praise for Henry Ford's anti-Semitic "Americanization" concept) as an authoritarian movement disguised behind the patina of banal Christo-nationalist nostalgia. The bestselling status of his book shows the increasing appeal of this critique.
Friday, September 08, 2006
Discover the Secret Right-Wing Network Behind ABC's 9/11 Deception
Less than 72 hours before ABC's "The Path to 9/11" is scheduled to air, the network is suddenly under siege. On Tuesday, ABC was forced to concede that "The Path to 9/11" is "a dramatization, not a documentary." The film deceptively invents scenes to depict former President Bill Clinton's handling of the Al Qaeda threat.
Now, ABC claims to be is editing those false sequences to satisfy critics so the show can go on -- even if it still remains a gross distortion of history. And as it does so, ABC advances the illusion that the deceptive nature of "The Path to 9/11" is an honest mistake committed by a hardworking but admittedly fumbling team of well-intentioned Hollywood professionals who wanted nothing less than to entertain America. But this is another Big Lie.
In fact, "The Path to 9/11" is produced and promoted by a well-honed propaganda operation consisting of a network of little-known right-wingers working from within Hollywood to counter its supposedly liberal bias. This is the network within the ABC network. Its godfather is far right activist David Horowitz, who has worked for more than a decade to establish a right-wing presence in Hollywood and to discredit mainstream film and TV production. On this project, he is working with a secretive evangelical religious right group founded by The Path to 9/11's director David Cunningham that proclaims its goal to "transform Hollywood" in line with its messianic vision.
Before The Path to 9/11 entered the production stage, Disney/ABC contracted David Cunningham as the film's director. Cunningham is no ordinary Hollywood journeyman. He is in fact the son of Loren Cunningham, founder of the right-wing evangelical group Youth With A Mission (YWAM). The young Cunningham helped found an auxiliary of his father's group called The Film Institute (TFI), which, according to its mission statement, is "dedicated to a Godly transformation and revolution TO and THROUGH the Film and Televisionindustry." As part of TFI's long-term strategy, Cunningham helped place interns from Youth With A Mission's "global training network" in film industry jobs "so that they can begin to impact and transform Hollywood from the inside out," according to a YWAM report.
Last June, Cunningham's TFI announced it was producing its first film, mysteriously titled "Untitled History Project." "TFI's first project is a doozy," a newsletter to YWAM members read. "Simply being referred to as: The Untitled History Project, it is already being called the television event of the decade and not one second has been put to film yet. Talk about great expectations!" (A web edition of the newsletter was mysteriously deleted yesterday but has been cached on Google at the link above).
The following month, on July 28, the New York Post reported that ABC was filming a mini-series "under a shroud of secrecy" about the 9/11 attacks. "At the moment, ABC officials are calling the miniseries 'Untitled Commission Report' and producers refer to it as the 'Untitled History Project,'" the Post noted.
Early on, Cunningham had recruited a young Iranian-American screenwriter named Cyrus Nowrasteh to
write the script of his secretive "Untitled" film. Not only is Nowrasteh an outspoken conservative, he is also a fervent member of the emerging network of right-wing people burrowing into the film industry with ulterior sectarian political and religious agendas, like Cunningham.
Nowrasteh's conservatism was on display when he appeared as a featured speaker at the Liberty Film Festival (LFF), an annual event founded in 2004 to premier and promote conservative-themed films supposedly too "politically incorrect" to gain acceptance at mainstream film festivals. This June, while The Path to 9/11 was being filmed, LFF founders Govindini Murty and Jason Apuzzo -- both friends of Nowrasteh -- announced they were "partnering" with right-wing activist David Horowitz. Indeed, the 2006 LFF is listed as "A Program of the David Horowitz Freedom Center."
Since the inauguration of Bill Clinton in 1992, Horowitz has labored to create a network of politically active conservatives in Hollywood. His Hollywood nest centers around his Wednesday Morning Club, a
weekly meet-and-greet session for Left Coast conservatives that has been graced with speeches by
the likes of Newt Gingrich, Victor Davis Hanson and Christopher Hitchens. The group's headquarters are at the offices of Horowitz's Center for the Study of Popular Culture, a "think tank" bankrolled for years with millions by right-wing sugardaddies like eccentric far right billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife. (Scaife
financed the Arkansas Project, a $2.3 million dirty tricks operation that included paying sources for
negative stories about Bill Clinton that turned out to be false.)
With the LFF now under Horowitz's control, his political machine began drumming up support for Cunningham and Nowrasteh's "Untitled" project, which finally was revealed in late summer as "The Path to 9/11." Horowitz's PR blitz began with an August 16 interview with Nowrasteh on his FrontPageMag webzine. In the interview, Nowrasteh foreshadowed the film's assault on Clinton's record on fighting terror. "The 9/11 report details the Clinton's administration's response -- or lack of response -- to Al Qaeda and how this emboldened Bin Laden to keep attacking American interests," Nowrasteh told FrontPageMag's Jamie Glazov. "There simply was no response. Nothing."
A week later, ABC hosted LFF co-founder Murty and several other conservative operatives at an advance
screening of The Path to 9/11. (While ABC provided 900 DVDs of the film to conservatives, Clinton administration officials and objective reviewers from mainstream outlets were denied them.) Murty returned with a glowing review for FrontPageMag that emphasized the film's partisan nature. "'The Path to 9/11' is one of the best, most intelligent, most pro-American miniseries I've ever seen on TV, and conservatives should support
it and promote it as vigorously as possible," Murty wrote. As a result of the special access granted by ABC, Murty's article was the first published review of The Path to 9/11, preceding those by the New York Times and LA Times by more than a week.
Murty followed her review with a blast email to conservative websites such as Liberty Post and Free Republic on September 1 urging their readers to throw their weight behind ABC's mini-series. "Please do everything you can to spread the word about this excellent miniseries," Murty wrote, "so that 'The Path to 9/11' gets the highest ratings possible when it airs on September 10 & 11! If this show gets huge ratings, then ABC will be more likely to produce pro-American movies and TV shows in the future!"
Murty's efforts were supported by Appuzo, who handles LFF's heavily-trafficked blog, Libertas. Appuzo was instrumental in marketing The Path to 9/11 to conservatives, writing in a blog post on September 2, "Make no mistake about what this film does, among other things: it places the question of the Clinton Administration's culpability for the 9/11 attacks front and center... Bravo to Cyrus Nowrasteh and David
Cunningham for creating this gritty, stylish and gripping piece of entertainment."
When a group of leading Senate Democrats sent a letter to ABC CEO Robert Iger urging him to cancel The Path to 9/11 because of its glaring factual errors and distortions, Apuzzo launched a retaliatory campaign to paint the Democrats as foes of free speech. "Here at LIBERTAS we urge the public to make noise over this, and to demand that Democrats back down," he wrote on September 7th. "What is at stake is nothing short of the 1st Amendment."
At FrontPageMag, Horowitz singled out Nowrasteh as the victim. "The attacks by former president Bill Clinton, former Clinton Administration officials and Democratic US senators on Cyrus Nowrasteh's ABC
mini-series "The Path to 9/11" are easily the gravest and most brazen and damaging governmental attacks on the civil liberties of ordinary Americans since 9/11," Horowitz declared.
Now, as discussion grows over the false character of The Path to 9/11, the right-wing network that brought it to fruition is ratcheting up its PR efforts. Murty will appear tonight on CNN's Glenn Beck
show and The Situation Room, according to Libertas in order to respond to "the major disinformation campaign now being run by Democrats to block the truth about what actually happened during the Clinton years."
While this network claims its success and postures as the true victims, the ABC network suffers a PR catastrophe. It's almost as though it was complacent about an attack on its reputation by a band of political terrorists.
# posted by max blumenthal @ 5:21 PM 31 comments
Tuesday, September 05, 2006
For anyone wondering why I haven't been blogging recently, I have just returned from a two week long trip through the West. I don't even have time to write about what I saw there, but I'm hoping to in the coming days. In the meantime, I'm going down to the wire on a long investigative piece about the Washington Times that is scheduled to appear in the Nation during the third week of this month. And if you haven't seen my recent piece on George Allen's ties to the white supremacist Council of Conservative Citizens, you can check it out here.
# posted by max blumenthal @ 2:54 PM 0 comments
Thursday, August 17, 2006
Who the Righteous Gentiles Really Were
The lobbyist for Christians United for Israel, David Brog (not to be confused with my main man with the plan David Brock), has written a response to my article, "The Birth Pangs of a New Christian Zionism." His letter would have been unspectacular and totally forgettable were it not for his warped assertion that "Christian Zionists are the theological progeny of the religious righteous gentiles who saved Jews from the Holocaust." Luckily, Evan Derkacz of Alternet has saved me the time of having to explain to Brog who the righteous Christians of Third Reich-era Germany really were. Here is Evan's eloquent riposte to Brog:
In a response letter Brog takes issue with the portrayal of his organization as extremists, when in fact, Brog only cemented Blumenthal's point -- offending Christian/Jewish history in the process.
Blumenthal's original article only used the word "extremist" once, and that in reference to John Hagee's rhetoric. That Brog got the sense of extremism from the article is likely because the mirror he looked into reflected just that. Last month, CUFI founder, John Hagee, who has the ear of Republic National Committee Chair Ken Mehlman, demanded that:
"the United States must join Israel in a pre-emptive military strike against Iran to fulfill God's plan for both Israel and the West... a biblically prophesied end-time confrontation with Iran, which will lead to the Rapture, Tribulation, and Second Coming of Christ."
Extremist is a slippery term and most extremists don't fancy themselves such. But this view, by almost any definition, would rate. Perhaps Brog felt that the face he showed Blumenthal was so moderately contructed and didn't warrant any more than the kid gloves treatment Brog expects from most media.
But what I take issue with most strongly is his revisionist history, so prevalent in right wing circles. Here's Brog's quote:
Christian Zionists are the theological progeny of the religious righteous gentiles who saved Jews from the Holocaust, and true to their creed, they are seeking to stand with the Jews against current threats to their existence.
Sounds logical... too bad it's not true.
This deeply offensive sleight of hand fits into the movement to repackage the Founding Fathers, Abolition, and the Civil Rights Movement as right wing victories. In fact, they were not. These movements all fought against right wing orthodoxy.
The religious righteous gentiles, most of whom were Lutheran Evangelicals, were not right wing Christians and indeed would hardly be recognizable as coreligionists to today's conservative Evangelicals.
I'm not contending that they were liberal or progressive Christians either; just that they were mostly intellectuals who did not believe in the inerrancy of the Bible, promoted ecumenism, believed in science and the enlightenment, were for peace and against nuclear arsenals, abhorred authoritarianism and put no stock in eschatology -- or End Times mythology.
When Luther himself translated the Bible into German he was ambivalent about the Book of Revelation, eventually opting to include it only as an appendix.
The religious righteous gentiles were led by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was ultimately executed for his deeply conflicted participation in an attempt to assassinate Hitler. Bonhoeffer's and Barth's and Martin Niemoeller's Confessing Church bravely opposed the Nazi regime right from the start. Their theological basis for opposing Hitler and protecting Jews was rooted in the teachings of Jesus -- something the theology of Christian Zionism is most emphatically not. Brog's and Hagee's theology is born of apocalyptic passages of the New Testament which do not concern themselves with Jesus' words or ideas.
In fact, Conservative Christian efforts to merge with the government would put it much closer to the state-sponsored Evangelical Church of the German Nation which Barth, Bonhoeffer and the rest of the Confessing Church so vigorously opposed.
What is so important about Evan's rebuke of Brog and his paymasters is that he establishes a counterpoint to the narrative that people like Hagee and Falwell spin before their supporters. Hagee, Falwell and other right-wing evangelical leaders are nationalists; they openly concede that their goal is the integration of church with state. The Confessing Church on the other hand was initially dedicated to denouncing state interference in Protestant religious affairs -- specifically, against the so-called "Aryan paragraph," which forced Protestant churches to classify on strictly racial grounds some members of their congregations as Jews -- and ultimately, as the war came home to Germany, to speaking out against the Nazis' extermination of the Jews. They were conservatives to be sure, and they agonized over their decision to oppose Hitler, but nothing about their actions was motivated by a desire for power. The Christian right exists exclusively as a political bloc. If its leadership denounces the federal government, they do so from the position of courtiers, not cassandras. They will only condemn the state to the extent that the state obstructs their will to power. And they will cast any enforcement of first amendment protection of religious freedom as "anti-Christian discrimination." As cynical as Israel is for cultivating the support of the Christian right, I doubt Falwell or Hagee or any of their lot will wind up with plaques bearing their name beside those of Niemoller and Bonhoeffer at Yad Vashem's memorial to righteous Gentiles. To Israel, evangelicals are political assets and nothing more.
Another point worth making is that Bonhoeffer and company represented a minority within the Protestant church with respect to the Jewish question. Most of their colleagues in the German church saw Hitler's ascension as a blessing from God and collaborated enthusiastically with his regime. A documentary released last year called "Theologians Under Hitler", attempted to detail the German church's regrettable relationship with the Third Reich. Although it was edited in amateurish fashion and isn't the most exciting film, it recounts an important and under-examined historical episode that should serve as a warning about the fusion of the right-wing of the American church with the Republican party.
I wasn't able to discuss any of this during my Democracy Now appearance, but I did have time to explain how the Christian right uses Israel to weaken the political influence of American Jews on issues of Constitutional rights. You can watch me, listen to me or check out a transcript here. I'm followed by John Dean, who discusses his excellent book, Conservatives Without Conscience, which examines the prevalence of the authoritarian personality in modern American conservatism. Dean does not shy away from describing the Christian right and the right in general (see Rep. JD Hayworth's praise for Henry Ford's anti-Semitic "Americanization" concept) as an authoritarian movement disguised behind the patina of banal Christo-nationalist nostalgia. The bestselling status of his book shows the increasing appeal of this critique.