Tornado Alley (PROG)

[F6]

Call to kill fuels hatred, worries U.S.

Evangelist triggers furor

By RON HUTCHESON
Knight Ridder Newspapers

Posted on Wed, Aug. 24, 2005

WASHINGTON — Christian broadcaster Pat Robertson’s call for the assassination of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez caused heartburn in Washington and consternation in Latin America on Tuesday.

“I think we really ought to go ahead and do it. It’s a whole lot cheaper than starting a war,” Robertson, 75, said in Monday evening’s broadcast of “The 700 Club,” his news-talk television show. “We have the ability to take him out, and I think the time has come that we exercise that ability.”

It was not the first time that Robertson has captured international attention with an eyebrow-raising comment — a prominence that also reflects his clout, now ebbing, among Christian conservatives.

Robertson’s comments added new tension to the strained relationship between the United States and Venezuela, the nation’s fourth-biggest supplier of foreign oil. The Bush administration scrambled to distance itself from the talk of assassination. The Venezuelan government expressed outrage.

“Our department doesn’t do that kind of thing. It’s against the law,” Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said Tuesday.

State Department spokesman Sean McCormack called Robertson’s comments “inappropriate” and out of step with U.S. policy.

Chavez has become increasingly vocal in his criticism of the United States. He spent the weekend in Cuba with his ally, Cuban President Fidel Castro.

The two leaders teamed up for a six-hour television show that highlighted their mutual admiration. Chavez’s anti-American views are particularly troubling to the White House because Venezuela supplies more than 10 percent of U.S. oil imports.

Robertson said that Chavez should be killed to keep him from turning Venezuela into a “launching pad for communist infiltration and Muslim extremism.”

He said: “We don’t need another $200 billion war to get rid of one strong-arm dictator. It’s a whole lot easier to have some covert operatives do the job and get it over with.”

Venezuelan Vice President Jose Vicente Rangel said Tuesday that the U.S. response to Robertson would be a test of its anti-terrorist policy, and that Venezuela was studying its legal options.

“The ball is in the U.S. court, after this criminal statement by a citizen of that country,” Rangel said. “It’s a huge hypocrisy to maintain this discourse against terrorism and at the same time, in the heart of that country, there are entirely terrorist statements like those.”

Rangel called Robertson “a man who seems to have quite a bit of influence in that country,” adding sarcastically that his words were “very Christian.” He said the comments “reveal that religious fundamentalism is one of the great problems facing humanity in these times.”

Although Robertson’s influence has waned since his days as the acknowledged leader of Christian conservatives in the late 1980s, he remains influential, political analysts say.

After what he has said was a religious awakening in a Philadelphia restaurant in the mid-1950s, Robertson built a Christian empire that includes the Christian Broadcasting Network, Regent University, an international charity called Operation Blessing, and the American Center for Law & Justice, an advocacy group that is at the center of the push for a more conservative judiciary.

The 700 Club claims 1 million viewers a day.

Robertson’s peak political influence came as the head of the Christian Coalition, an organization that he founded shortly after his failed campaign for the 1988 Republican presidential nomination. Robertson is no longer connected to the group, which has lost much of the clout it once had.

At the Bush White House, Robertson is handled with caution. Sometimes he is an ally. Sometimes he is an irritant. White House aides have publicly contradicted Robertson’s statements at least three times.

Last year, White House spokesman Scott McClellan denied Robertson’s assertion that Bush told him that “we’re not going to have any casualties” in Iraq.

Still, Robertson had openly supported Bush at a crucial phase of the 2000 presidential primary campaign.

“Any evaluation of Robertson would be fairly mixed,” said John Green, a political science professor at the University of Akron and a leading expert on the Christian conservative movement. “If you’re in the White House, you wouldn’t want Robertson on his TV program attacking you. On the other hand, you probably wouldn’t want to be closely aligned with him.”

On Tuesday, some of Robertson’s fellow evangelicals sought to distance themselves from his latest remarks.

“Everybody recognizes he is not a representative voice. He is a TV pundit and personality who is a Christian,” said Ted Haggard, president of the National Association of Evangelicals and senior pastor at New Life Church in Colorado Springs, Colo. “Pat doesn’t speak for evangelicals any more than Dr. Phil speaks for mental health professionals.”

The Rev. Rob Schenck, president of the National Clergy Council, a conservative advocacy group in Washington, issued a statement saying that he has always held Robertson in the “highest esteem” but that the evangelist “must immediately apologize, retract his statement and clarify what the Bible and Christianity teaches about the permissibility of taking human life outside of law.”

----------

A history of inflammatory statements

Previous comments by Pat Robertson:

— From a 1992 fund-raising letter: The “feminist agenda” is a “socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians.”

— Aug. 2, 2001: On “The 700 Club,” Robertson proclaimed that gay groups had better stop flying flags celebrating Gay Pride Month at Disney World’s Magic Kingdom in Orlando, Fla. — or else. “I would warn Orlando that you’re right in the way of some serious hurricanes,” Robertson declared on the air. “It’ll bring about terrorist bombs. It’ll bring earthquakes, tornadoes and possibly a meteor.”

— On the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks: On “The 700 Club” two days after the attacks, Robertson said “I totally concur” when his guest, the Rev. Jerry Falwell, suggested that “the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way — all of them who have tried to secularize America” helped cause the attacks. Both men later apologized.

— Oct. 13, 2003: Robertson, after reading a book on the State Department, said: “If I could just get a nuclear device inside Foggy Bottom (the area of Washington where the department’s office is), I think that’s the answer. I mean, you get through this, and you say, ‘We’ve got to blow that thing up.’ ”

— May 1, 2005, on ABC’s “This Week,” about federal judges:

Robertson: “I think they are destroying the fabric that holds our nation together. There is an assault on marriage. There’s an assault on human sexuality, as Judge Scalia said, they’ve taken sides in the culture war...”

Interviewer: “How can you say that these judges are a more serious threat than Islamic terrorists who slammed into the World Trade Center?”

Robertson: “It depends on how you look at culture. If you look over the course of a hundred years, I think the gradual erosion of the consensus that’s held our country together is probably more serious than a few bearded terrorists who fly into buildings.”

----------

— Knight Ridder Newspapers Christopher Toothaker of The Associated Press contributed to this report. To reach Ron Hutcheson, send e-mail to [e-mail].

----------

© 2005 Kansas City Star and wire service sources.

http://www.kansascity.com/mld/kansascity/news/nation/12459064.htm