Revenge of the Smear Bund
Posted on March 16th, 2009
by Patrick J. Buchanan |
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During Nixon’s historic trip to China in 1972, his interpreter and I, free for a few hours, conscripted a driver to take us on a tour of Beijing. Somewhere in my files are photos from that day we toured the grim city of Chairman Mao in the time of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.
The interpreter: Charles Freeman — the same Charles Freeman Adm. Dennis Blair chose to chair the National Intelligence Council that prepares National Intelligence Estimates on critical national security issues such as Iran’s nuclear program.
Educated at Yale and Harvard Law, Freeman has served his country in Delhi, Taipei, Bangkok, and Beijing. He was Ronald Reagan’s deputy assistant secretary of state for Africa and Bill Clinton’s assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs. George Bush I named him ambassador to Saudi Arabia. Freeman was our man in Riyadh when Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf and 500,000 U.S. troops arrived to evict the army of Saddam Hussein from Kuwait.
In 1997, Freeman succeeded George McGovern as president of the Middle East Policy Council — and he began to speak out.
He opposed the bombing of Serbia and said aloud what few privately deny: Reflexive support for Israel’s repression of the Palestinian people is high among the reasons America is no longer seen as a beacon of liberation in the Arab and Muslim world.
Freeman echoed the Obama of yesterday, who bravely blurted, “Nobody is suffering more than the Palestinian people.”
At MEPC, however, Freeman committed a great crime. He published The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy by Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer, which went onto the New York Times best-seller list — and put Freeman on AIPAC’s enemies list.
Hence, when his name surfaced as Blair’s choice to chair the NIC, the Israel Firsters went berserk, with Steven Rosen declaring him to be a “textbook case of the old-line Arabism” that infected the Department of State when Gen. George Marshall was secretary.
And who is Rosen?
A former fixture at AIPAC, Rosen faces imminent federal criminal prosecution under the Espionage Act for transferring top-secret Pentagon documents to the Israeli Embassy. Rosen’s accomplice, Larry Franklin, is serving a 12-year sentence.
Picking up the Rosen dog whistle, the neocommentariat came howling. To Gabriel Schoenfeld, late of Commentary, Freeman is a “China coddling Israel basher.” Tom Piatak of Chronicles found no fewer than five blogs from National Review Online, in two hours, savaging Freemen, two by Jonah Goldberg and two by Michael Rubin.
Rich Lowry of NR calls Freeman “Chas of Arabia,” a diplomat of “odious” views, a “lap dog” and “blinkered ideologue” who enjoys “pandering to and making excuses for the world’s dictators and terrorists.”
To The New Republic’s Jonathan Chait, Freeman is a “fanatic.” To Jeffrey Goldberg of Atlantic, formerly of the Israeli Army, Chait’s piece was dead on.
To TNR ex-publisher Marty Peretz, Freeman is a “bought man.” To Michael Goldfarb of The Weekly Standard, Freeman is a “shill for the Saudis,” who defends “corrupt Arab states that foment and support terror.”
Freeman is denounced as a shill of Saudi Arabia — by people who have spent careers shilling for the Israeli lobby and Likud.
Within this smear bund (Murray Rothbard’s phrase), who has given America a tenth of the patriotic service and loyalty of Chas Freeman?
What were the specific charges? That, in private life, Freeman advised a Chinese company. Would the Israel Firsters have used that argument against Al Haig or Henry Kissinger?
Saudi contributions to MEPC should disqualify Freeman, they say. But what did they say when Douglas Feith, Richard Perle, David Wurmser and the rest with inextricable ties to Israel stove-piped to the press the cherry-picked War Party propaganda lies about a “Prague connection” between Mohammed Atta and Iraqi intelligence, yellow cake from Niger, Saddam and al-Qaida, Saddam and the anthrax attacks, “mushroom clouds,” “aluminum tubes” and WMD?
Who among them questioned State’s decision to hand the Iran portfolio to Dennis Ross of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a creation and front of AIPAC?
Realizing the assaults would not end, Freeman last week withdrew, saying, “I do not believe the National Intelligence Council could function effectively while its chair was under constant attack by unscrupulous people with a passionate attachment to the views of a political faction of a foreign country.”
The foreign country is Israel; the political faction Likud.
Nor did Freeman shrink at naming the source of the noxious campaign of slander against him.
“The tactics of the Israel lobby plumb the depths of dishonor and indecency and include character assassination, selective misquotation, the willful distortion of the record, the fabrication of falsehoods and an utter disregard for the truth.”
“A lobby,” Steve Rosen confided in an AIPAC internal memo, “is like a night flower; it thrives in the dark and dies in the sun.”
Yes, and long ago, Al Smith addressed the age-old problem of the Rosens within: “The best way to kill anything un-American is to drag it out into the open, because anything un-American cannot live in the sunlight.”
Well done, Ambassador Freeman.
COPYRIGHT 2009 CREATORS SYNDICATE INC.
Filed under: Foreign policy
Fine, Mr. Buchanan. Suppose everything you wrote here is true. How do you reconcile it with supporting the Republican Party? How do you continue an alliance with the Rapture-seeking “Christian” fundamentalists in the South who want us to support Israel to the hilt in order to perpetrate Armageddon and incite the Second Coming of Jesus? Is this your policy or not? And if it is not, then how do you continue to associate yourself with the Republicans in spite of such a glaring and fundamental, nay, definitive, difference on foreign policy? You essentially are in favor of no foreign adventurism, no land wars in Asia. They are in favor of two, three, and eventually, the end of the world as we know it. How do you work this out in your head? Address the domestic politics of what is written here, if you can. Or failing to do so, make the inevitable break.
All this talk about how Freeman got wrongly bashed and etc. is well and good but it is nevertheless still talking about matters of process and it’s interesting that such a huge proportion of our foreign affairs discussions do indeed concern themselves with same instead of the bigger substantive picture.
In sum I wonder if too much focus on means doesn’t just wrongly keep us on the same wrong substantive tracks we’ve been on. After all by definition when we concern ourselves with, say, who is going to be Clinton’s advisor on Israel or Iran or etc. it just somewhat unconsciously accepts the reigning, status quo understanding that those issues. That, for instance, they are indeed of central importance or at least as important as they’ve been viewed in the past, and that there’s no way of seeing them and dealing with them otherwise either.
But all such issues are really just trees in the larger forest of what America’s posture is in the world. And I think that without any sense of what that should be you’re just left adrift in a sea of ad hoc temporizing trying to come up with what our policy should be as to any specific issue. In essence, your choices about those issues isn’t then anchored by anything, and you are susceptible to being blown to and fro by all kinds of pressures, pursuing mutually incompatible policies, having incoherent efforts and etc. and so forth. And you are susceptible to having America’s long-term major interest being subordinated to (if not entirely obliterated) by far lesser ones, if indeed those lesser ones are in America’s interest at all.
This might be a huge tragedy in the making it seems to me, with it being possible that in 50 years time or so historians will look back and wonder how in hell the U.S. got itself involved in an utter mish-mash of intractable and contentious global affairs (if not wars) not only without a trace of coherence underlying its reasons, but when the U.S. couldn’t even afford to do so.
And it will be a senseless tragedy especially because I think that any discussion of what America’s posture in the world ought to be in the foreseeable future would have to accept that there is tremendous validity in it severely contracting itself from what it has been and still is. Communism is dead, there is no credible, implacable anti-democratic threat to us or our vital friends, and yet we still are acting like every little conflict in every little spot on the globe is of immediate, crucial importance to us.
I think Leon Hadar’s diagnosis of Obama’s approach so far as an ad hoc one is precisely on point and indeed understandable and even acceptable given how early it is. But it seems to me to be a big danger of him—like us—getting too drawn into the minutia of means and personalities and forgetting that in the long run the bigger picture ought to determine the smaller and not vice-versa. And that bigger picture to me would seem to suggest that rather than investing ever more effort into just somewhat changing the status quo, a radical shift away from the status quo entirely might be the far better interest.
Cheers,
Mr Panfile, I live 60 miles out of Tulsa, Oklahoma. Your absolute lies about “rapture-seeking christian fundamentalists” show a basic misunderstanding of many things christian. First, most of us don’t feel that God gave us the job of effecting the timing of some “end of the world”. That would, in fact, be in direct contradiction of the mandate most of us have been given.
Secondly, the sneering insult that believers in a diety will “blindly follow” any person or faction, is to promote the fallacy that there can be no truely intelligent Christians. A majority of Catholics, the largest single Christian denomination, voted for Obama. Go figure. I sure didn’t.
Consider the fine line that separates us. Some believe in a chaos that is not fully understandable by the human mind. Others, because of personal experience, or maybe purely as a decision, believe in a diety that is impossible to understand by the human mind.
The “hate religion” media has successfully planted the falsehood that believers in a diety are dangerous and stupid. A corollary is that any tendency to see Israel as a friend is part of that same blind stupidity.
Can’t we discuss AIPAC without the insults that arise from your religious (lack of religious) dogma?
How to explain conservatism? It is NOT about BIG or LITTLE government. Central planning depends upon two lies:
#1 - that certain people naturally belong to an elite class, and they are more moral and know better what is good for us than the masses.
#2 - their social contract cannot depend upon any diety, who might give equality to all individuals, as this would argue against their right to impress their values upon unwilling members of the “lower class masses”. They MUST believe in a superiority of the few.
But there are 3 things wrong with this “central planning” model:
#1 - removing the possibility of “winning big” as the result of one’s own efforts has shown to kill individual incentive, and often has a rotting effect on society in general.
#2 - central planning often has “unintended consequences”, because of the distance between where the plan is formed, and the location where it is implemented. A human arm with no feeling will constantly be injured. Where one group rules another, inequities ALWAYS arise. Government protection of UNIONs will cause that industry to rot. Government takeover of medicine and banking will cause those industries to rot.
#3 - for central planning to rule, there must be a fundamental denial of religious freedom, in order to counter the social view that our rights are derived from “above”. Whether this is done by passing laws, or by corrupting a free press, the goal must be to trivialize sacred things. Expect it to become popular to “swear” and popular to be unpatriotic. Expect people to make comments like, “…Rapture-seeking “Christian” fundamentalists in the South who want us to support Israel to the hilt in order to perpetrate Armageddon and incite the Second Coming of Jesus…”.
So then, why not just give absolute power to the “little government” folks? Well, a couple quick reasons why not:
#1 - without a functioning press, politician corruption will grow unchecked, where there is “absolute power”.
#2 - government corruption will allow private business corruption. Consider: federal laws have been passed to support MICROSOFT, when they force ALL WINDOWS XP users in the world to agree to hold Microsoft blameless if they take anything off your machine, and use it for ANYTHING they wish, without compensating you. ALL XP users have agreed to this, most without realizing it.
We seem to need a fundamental conservative primer for some of these “big vocabulary”, “well-read”, self-styled conservatives.
And we need to clearly articulate our points of view to the sneering “elite, tree-hugging, anti-religious, holier-than-thou, liberals”.
TomT,
Nice piece, but I’m afraid you’re not going to reach Greg. The view from a studio apartment in the West Village reveals the South (ie the backwards hinterlands of America) as a wasteland of religious fanatics. These frightening zealots are the enablers of a US government that is bent on American Zionism. Forget this site’s excellent and thorough dissecting of the influence of foreign lobbyists on American policy. When you know something, you just know.
Tom T, your entire post seems to be based on the belief that by “Christian fundamentalists” Greg meant people who, well, aren’t.
So, given that people like Pastor Hagee *do* call themselves that, and that in general others like the Catholics you mention don’t, what would *you* call them?
I also think it’s disingenuous in the extreme for folks to defend people like Falwell and Hagee and his ilk—and you know damn well who they are—by saying that any attacks or criticisms of them are attacks on all people of faith.
First of all by their own terms those attacks and criticisms aren’t directed at anyone else, and so either one recognizes that the charge is a red herring or one is too dumb to so recognize same.
And, secondly, it’s been those same “Christian fundamentalists” like Falwell and Hagee and etc. who above all have so starkly differentiated themselves from and indeed essentially spit upon people of all other religions. Don’t have to search hard to find any number of their leaders deriding Mohammed as a “terrorist,” or the Catholic Church as the “Great Whore” of Revelations, or whacking Martin Luther as a “whore-monger,” and then wrapping it up to say that jews are blighted too for turning their backs on Jesus Christ. And don’t even ask what they say about Mormonism.
If people who aren’t like Hagee and company consider themselves “Christian fundamentalists” and object to the term then their primary gripe ought to be against those people like Hagee and etc. who have adopted the label so prominently and proudly and successfully. Everyone here knows the kind of people Greg meant by the term.
And those who say they don’t in order to try to hide behind the robes of other religious believers who aren’t being criticized or attacked are just making plain either their hypocrisy or their inability to grasp the obvious.
Cheers,
As I commented before, every time Pat Buchanan writes something, the anti-Republican mania boils over. Pat’s strong stand contra-Bush during the past 8 years just can’t buy him any slack from certain quarters.
“TomB, on March 17th, 2009 at 11:40 am Said:
Tom T, your entire post seems to be based on the belief that by “Christian fundamentalists” Greg meant people who, well, aren’t. ”
From a previous post:
“Greg Panfile, on March 15th, 2009 at 6:06 am Said:
…I am a Democrat… …Now the question is… how does one reconcile this point of view with the vast number of ‘Christian’ Republicans awaiting the Rapture and unconditionally supporting anything the Israeli Likud faction and its American agents promulgate? What candidate can run for President and be elected with a platform that reconciles what Giraldi has written here with the intense, religion-based prejudices of the Republican base? It says here that it is impossible, and conservatives need to stop identifying with the Republican party, period. It is over. You cannot be in a coalition with those people.”
TomB - I bow to your good judgement. So much has changed since I heard us Catholics called “fundamentalists” in the 50’s, while wearing my “I like IKE” button. I see now how Greg was limiting his invective only to Falwell followers. …maybe.
Jack Tracey - Thanks for the encouragement. I think it is more important to declare onesself, than to attempt to persuade an angry Bill Maher of the absurdity of positing the insanity of 80% of Americans, because one fails to perceive anything outside one’s own understanding.
Would I put a Catholic bank robber in jail? You bet.
Does the Muslim holy scripture say not to hassle “people of the book?” You bet.
Does the Jewish scripture say not to hassle foreigners in their midst? You bet.
The same Bill Mahers who say “nearly all wars are fought for religious reasons”, would also say that a discussion of AIPAC is a religious discussion.
…maybe not.
I would defend my post against the gross distortions and misinterpretations engaged in by some, but since TomB seems able to read English and reason soundly, I’ll have his statement do that for me, it’s better than what I would have written. Clearly I was not discussing, impugning, or otherwise mentioning people who are let us say Bible-based Christians of either Protestant or Catholic affiliation who are not in the ‘Left Behind’ televangelist extremist support Israel to hasten the Apocalypse camp. I was discussing those who are, and the obvious fact that what Buchanan wrote here, and the principled nationalist stand many paleconservatives take, which I share despite being a reviled ‘liberal,’ is irreconcilable with them. And they are a large, loud, and influential part of the Republican party as it now stands, and of its electoral successes since the 1980s. Period. End discussion, or burn the dictionary.
The point I have been trying to make here several times and in several ways is that there is no justification for any Republican party that includes people who agree with Buchanan on this matter, and those who agree with Falwell, Hagee, and their ilk. Zero, zip, nada, none. Similarly, there is no way that small government can regulate big business… that is a recipe for theft… and so one must either grow government or shrink business to have a balance of power. Conservatives need to deal with this as a substantive issue, not avoid it with platitudes.
And that’s without even addressing the conundrum that having the law enforce socially conservative values is a recipe for more and bigger government intrusion, which sort of squares the circle here.
The reason I make these points is out of respect, intellectual and otherwise, for soundly reasoned arguments such as those Buchanan makes here… and my opinion that in the interests of this nation, it would be best for people of this quality to take some other path than the Republican one, given the dominance of that party, and its unviability electorally, with the Apocalyptic, government-enforced-morality, small-government/big business approach to matters, which if anyone has been paying attention, is, as they say, ‘toast.’ Over with. Done. Fuggedaboudit.
So we should ignore the fact that Freeman is a paid agent of Saudi Arabia (and China conveniently ignored by Buchanan) because the “Israel Lobby” is being hypocritical.
So much for conservatism or nationalism. Evidently for some people their dual loyalty, if not primary loyalties are either atavistic hatred of Israel or grievence mongering about neoconservatives. Whatever it may be, it sure isn’t America First.
Referring to someone as a paid agent of a foreign government is libelous. Unfortunately as a public figure Freeman would never be able to collect. I wonder how many of the more obscure members of the Israel First crowd could safely stand an investigation as to whether they are in fact unregistered agents of a foreign government? We need to follow the money.
When Buchanan starts calling for the US nuclear arsenal to be brought to bear on Israel, we can talk about his “atavistic hatred” for it. Lewenbergs over-the-top reaction is a poor reflection on the pro-Israel cause.
I daresay there are good prudential reasons both for and against the US relationship with Israel. Perhaps people should confine themselves to discussing them instead of calling each other traitors.
And considering the smoking ruin the neocons have made of the Republican Party, it would help they could learn a little unaccustomed humility for once.
Does no one recall that PJB tried the third party thing once?
It didn’t work out too well and we’re left with the same two gangs of miscreants. Someone in Pat’s position probably thinks it would be cowardly not to make a choice between the two miserable options.
Pat…great job…I suppose this means your next…when will they charge you with being anti-semitic? Ambassador Freeman is a man of honor and a patriot, AIPAC is a foriegn nation front and close to being treasonous! God bless you Pat!
PRETRIB RAPTURE DISHONESTY
by Dave MacPherson
When I began my research in 1970 into the exact beginnings of the pretribulation rapture belief still held by many evangelicals, I assumed that the rapture debate involved only “godly scholars with honest differences.” The paper you are now reading reveals why I gave up that assumption many years ago. With this introduction-of-sorts in mind, let’s take a long look at the pervasive dishonesty throughout the history of the 179-year-old pretrib rapture theory:
Mid-1820’s - German scholar Max Weremchuk’s work “John Nelson Darby” (1992) included what Benjamin Newton revealed about John Darby in the mid-1820’s during his pre-Brethren days as an Anglican clergyman:
“J. N. Darby was a very subtle man. He had been a lawyer, or at least educated for the law. Once he wanted his Archbishop to pursue a certain course, when he (J.N.D.) was a curate in his diocese. He wrote a letter, therefore, saying he had been educated for the law, knew what the legal course would properly be; and then having written that clearly, he mystified the remainder of the letter both in word and in handwriting, and ended up by saying: You see, my Lord, such being the legal aspect of the case it would unquestionably be the best course for you to pursue, etc. And the Archbishop couldn’t make out the legal part, but rested on Darby’s word and did as he advised. Darby afterwards laughed over it, and indeed he showed a copy of the letter to Tregelles. This is not mentioned in the Archbishop’s biography, but in it is the fact that he spoke of Darby as ‘the most subtle man in my diocese.’”
This reminds me of an 1834 letter by Darby which spoke of the “Lord’s coming.” Darby added, concerning this coming, that “the thoughts are new” and that during any teaching of it “it would not be well to have it so clear.” Darby’s deviousness here was his usage of a centuries-old term - “Lord’s coming” - to cover up his desire to sneak the new pretrib idea into existing posttrib groups in very low-profile ways!
1830 - In the spring of 1830 a young Scottish lassie, Margaret Macdonald, came up with the novel notion of a catching up [rapture] of Spirit-filled “church” members before Antichrist’s “trial” [tribulation] of non-Spirit-filled “church” members - the first instance I’ve found of clear “pretrib” teaching (which was part of a partial rapture scheme). In Sep. 1830 “The Morning Watch” (a journal produced by London preacher Edward Irving and his “Irvingite” followers, some of whom had visited Margaret a few weeks earlier) began repeating her original thoughts and even her wording but gave her no credit - the first plagiarism I’ve found in pretrib history. Darby was still defending posttrib in Dec. 1830.
Pretrib promoters have long known the significance of her main point: a rapture of “church” members BEFORE the revealing of Antichrist. Which is why John Walvoord quoted nothing in her revelation, why Thomas Ice habitually skips over her main point but quotes lines BEFORE and AFTER it, and why Hal Lindsey muddies up her main point so he can (falsely) assert that she was NOT a pretribber! (Google “X-Raying Margaret” for info about her.)
NOTE: The development of the 1800’s is thoroughly documented in my book “The Rapture Plot.” You’ll learn that Darby wasn’t original on any chief aspect of dispensationalism (but plagiarized the Irvingites); that pretrib was initially based on only OT and NT symbols and not clear Scripture; that the symbols included the Jewish feasts, the two witnesses, and the man child - symbols adopted by Darby during most of his career; that Darby’s later reminiscences exaggerated his earliest pretrib development, and that today’s defenders such as Thomas Ice have further overstated what Darby overstated; that Irvingism didn’t need later reminiscences to “clarify” its own early pretrib development; that ancient hymns and even the writings of the Reformers were subtly revised to make it appear they had taught pretrib; and that after Darby’s death a clever revisionist quietly made many changes in early Irvingite and Brethren documents in order to steal credit for pretrib away from the Irvingites (and their female inspiration!) and give it dishonestly to Darby! (Before continuing, Google the “Powered by Christ Ministries” site and read “America’s Pretrib Rapture Traffickers” - a sample of the current exciting internetism!)
1920 - Charles Trumbull’s book “The Life Story of C. I. Scofield” told only the dispensationally-correct side of his life. Two recent books, Joseph Canfield’s “The Incredible Scofield and His Book” (1988) and David Lutzweiler’s “DispenSinsationalism: C. I. Scofield’s Life and Errors” (2006), reveal the other side including his being jailed as a forger, dishonestly giving himself a non-conferred “D.D.” etc. etc.!
1967 - Brethren scholar Harold Rowdon’s “The Origins of the Brethren” quoted Darby associate Lord Congleton who was “disgusted with…the falseness” of Darby’s accounts of things. Rowdon also quoted historian William Neatby who said that others felt that “the time-honoured method of single combat” was as good as anything “to elicit the truth” from Darby. (In other words, knock it out of him!)
1972 - Tim LaHaye’s “The Beginning of the End” (1972) plagiarized Hal Lindsey’s “The Late Great Planet Earth” (1970).
1976 - Charles Ryrie”s “The Living End” (1976) plagiarized Lindsey’s “The Late Great Planet Earth” (1970) and “There’s A New World Coming” (1973).
1976 - After John Walvoord’s “The Blessed Hope and the Tribulation” (1976) brutally twisted Robert Gundry’s “The Church and the Tribulation” (1973), Gundry composed and circulated a 35-page open letter to Walvoord which repeatedly charged the Dallas Seminary president with “misrepresentation,” “misrepresentations” (and variations)!
1981 - “The Fundamentalist Phenomenon” (1981) by Jerry Falwell, Ed Dobson, and Ed Hindson heavily plagiarized George Dollar’s 1973 book “A History of Fundamentalism in America.”
1984 - After a prof at Southeastern College of the Assemblies of God in Florida told me that the No. 2 man at the AG world headquarters in Missouri - Joseph Flower - had the label of posttrib, my wife and I had two hour-long chats with him. He verified what I had been told. But we were dumbstruck when he told us that although AG ministers are required to promote pretrib, privately they can believe any other rapture view! Flower said that his father, an AG co-founder, was also posttrib. We also learned while in Springfield that when the AG’s were organized in 1914, the initial group was divided between posttribs and pretribs - but that the pretribs shouted louder which resulted in that denomination officially adopting pretrib! (For details on this and other pretrib double-mindedness, Google “Pretrib Hypocrisy.”)
1989 - Since 1989 Thomas Ice has referred to the “Mac-theory” (his reference to my research), giving the impression there’s no solid evidence that Macdonald was the real pretrib originator. But Ice carefully conceals the fact that no eminent church historian of the 1800’s - whether Plymouth Brethren or Irvingite - credited Darby with pretrib. Instead, they uniformly credited leading Irvingite sources, all of which upheld the Scottish lassie’s contribution! Moreover, I’m hardly the only modern scholar seeing significance in Irvingism’s territory. Others in recent years who have noted it, but who haven’t mined it as deeply as I have, include Fuller, Ladd, Bass, Rowdon, Sandeen, and Gundry.
1989 - Greg Bahnsen and Kenneth Gentry produced evidence in 1989 that Lindsey’s book “The Road to Holocaust” (1989) plagiarized “Dominion Theology” (1988) by H. Wayne House and Thomas Ice.
1990 - David Jeremiah’s and C. C. Carlson’s “Escape the Coming Night” (1990) massively plagiarized Lindsey’s 1973 book “There’s A New World Coming.” (For more info, type in “Thieves’ Marketing” on MSN or Google.)
1991 - Paul Lee Tan’s “A Pictorial Guide to Bible Prophecy” (1991) plagiarized large amounts of Lindsey’s “The Late Great Planet Earth” (1970).
1991 - Militant Darby defender R. A. Huebner claimed in 1991 to have found new evidence that Darby was pretrib as early as 1827 - three years before Macdonald. Halfway through his book Huebner suddenly admitted that his evidence could refer to something completely un-rapturesque. Even though Thomas Ice admitted to me that he knew that Huebner had “blown” his so-called evidence, prevaricator Ice continues to tell the world that Huebner has “positive evidence” that Darby was pretrib in 1827! Ice also conceals the fact that Darby, in his own 1827 paper, was looking for only “the restitution of all things” and “the times of refreshing” (Acts 3:19,21) - which Scofield doesn’t see fulfilled until AFTER a future tribulation!
1992 - Tim LaHaye’s “No Fear of the Storm” (1992) plagiarized Walvoord’s “The Blessed Hope and the Tribulation” (1976).
1992 - This was when the Los Angeles Times revealed that “The Magog Factor” (1992) by Hal Lindsey and Chuck Missler was a monstrous plagiarism of Prof. Edwin Yamauchi’s scholarly 1982 work “Foes from the Northern Frontier.” Four months after this exposure, Lindsey and Missler stated they had stopped publishing and promoting their book. But in 1996 Dr. Yamauchi learned that the dishonest duo had issued a 1995 book called “The Magog Invasion” which still had a substantial amount of the same plagiarism! (If Lindsey and Missler ever need hernia operations, I predict that the doctors will tell them not to lift anything for a long time!)
1994 - In 1996 it was revealed that Lindsey’s “Planet Earth - 2000 A.D. (1994) had an embarrassing amount of plagiarism of a Texe Marrs book titled “Mystery Mark of the New Age” (1988).
1995 - My book “The Rapture Plot” reveals the dishonesty in Darby’s reprinted works. It’s often hard to tell who wrote the footnotes and when. It’s easy to believe that the notes, and also unsigned phrases inside brackets within the text, were a devious attempt by someone (Darby? his editor?) to portray a Darby far more developed in pretrib thinking than he actually had been at the time. I found that some of the “additives” had been taken from Darby’s much later works, when he was more developed, and placed next to or inside his earliest works! One footnote by Darby’s editor, attached to Darby’s 1830 paper, actually stated that “it was not worth while either suppressing or changing” anything in this work! If his editor wasn’t open to such dishonesty, how can we explain such a statement?
Post-1995 - Thomas Ice’s article “Inventor of False Pre-Trib Rapture History” states that my book “The Rapture Plot” is “only one of the latest in a series of revisions of his original discourse….” And David Reagan in his article “The Origin of the Concept of a Pre-Tribulation Rapture” repeats Ice’s falsehood by claiming that I have republished my first book “over the years under several different titles.”
Although my book repeats a bit of the Macdonald origin of pretrib (for new readers), all of my books are packed with new material not found in my other works. For some clarification, “The Incredible Cover-Up” has photos of pertinent places in Ireland, Scotland, and England not found in my later books plus several chapters dealing with theological arguments; “The Great Rapture Hoax” quotes scholars throughout the Church Age, covers Scofield’s hidden side, a section on Powerscourt, the 1980 election, the Jupiter Effect, Gundry’s change, and more theological arguments; “The Rapture Plot” reveals for the first time the Great Evangelical Revisionism/Robbery and includes appendices on miscopying, plagiarism, etc.; and “The Three R’s” shows hypocritical evangelicals employing occultic beliefs they say they have long opposed!
So Thomas Ice etc. are twisting truth when they claim I am only a revisionist. Do they really think that my publishers DON’T know what I’ve previously written?
Re arguments, Google “Pretrib Rapture - Hidden Facts” and also obtain “The End Times Passover” and “Why Christians Will Suffer ‘Great Tribulation’ ” (AuthorHouse, 2006) by media personality Joe Ortiz.
1997 - For years Harvest House Publishers has owned and been republishing Lindsey’s book “There’s A New World Coming.” During the same time Lindsey has been peddling his reportedly “new” book “Apocalyse Code” (1997), much of which is word-for-word the same as the Harvest House book - and there’s no notice of “simultaneous publishing” in either book! Talk about pretrib greed!
1997 - This is the year I discovered that more than 50 pages of Dallas Seminary professor Merrill Unger’s book “Beyond the Crystal Ball” (Moody Press, 1973) constituted a colossal plagiarism of Lindsey’s “The Late Great Planet Earth” (1970). After Lindsey’s book came out, Unger had complained that Lindsey’s book had plagiarized his classroom lecture notes. It was evident that Unger felt that he too should cash in on his own lectures! (The detailed account of this Dallas Seminary dishonesty is revealed in my 1998 book “The Three R’s.”)
1998 - Tim LaHaye’s “Understanding the Last Days” (1998) plagiarized Lindsey’s “There’s A New World Coming” (1973).
1999 - More than 200 pages (out of 396 pages) in Lindsey’s 1999 book “Vanished Into Thin Air” are virtually carbon copies of pages in his 1983 book “The Rapture” - with no “updated” or “revised” notice included! Lindsey has done the same nervy thing with several of his books, something that has allowed him to live in million-dollar-plus homes and drive cars like Ferraris! (See my Google articles “Deceiving and Being Deceived” and “Thieves’ Marketing” for further evidence of this notably pretrib vice.)
2000 - A Jack Van Impe article “The Moment After” (2000) plagiarized Grant Jeffrey’s book “Final Warning” (1995).
2001 - Since 2001 my web article “Walvoord’s Posttrib ‘Varieties’ - Plus” has been exposing his devious muddying up of posttrib waters. In some of his books he invented four “distinct” and “contradictory” posttrib divisions, claiming that they are either “classic” or “semiclassic” or “futurist” or “dispensational” - distinctions that disappear when analyzed! His “futurist” group holds to a literal future tribulation and a literal millennium but doesn’t embrace “any day” imminency. But his “dispensational” group has the same non-imminency! Moreover, tribulational futurism is found in every group except the first one, and he somehow admitted that a literal millennium is in all four groups! On the other hand, it’s the pretribs who consistently disagree with each other over their chief points and subpoints - but somehow end up agreeing that there will be a pretrib rapture! (See my chapter “A House Divided” in my book “The Incredible Cover-Up.”)
2001 - Since my “Deceiving and Being Deceived” web item which exposed the claims for Pseudo-Ephraem” and “Morgan Edwards” as teachers of pretrib, there has been a piranha-like frenzy on the part of pretrib bodyguards and their duped groupies to “discover” almost anything before 1830 walking upright on two legs that seemed to have at least a remote hint of pretrib! (An exemplary poster boy for such pretrib practice is Grant Jeffrey. To get your money’s worth, Google “Wily Jeffrey.”)
FINALLY: Don’t take my word for any of the above. Read my 300-page book “The Rapture Plot” which has a jillion more documented details on the long-hidden but now-revealed history of the dishonest, 179-year-old, fringe-British-invented, American-merchandised-until-the-real-bad-stuff-happens pretribulation rapture fad. If this book of mine doesn’t “move” you, I will personally refund what you paid for it!