Lieberman: Christians for Israel are "Agents of Destiny"

Senator Joseph Lieberman spoke yesterday to Christians United for Israel, an organization led by the controversial Pastor John Hagee.

Lieberman's speaking engagement drew heavy fire from left-wing partisans, but the Connecticut Senator thanked the organization for its support:

On Tuesday, Lieberman told the group's members they were agents of destiny, and the cause was seeing successes. In Iraq, he said, Saddam Hussein has been replaced by "a growing, sometimes cantankerous Iraqi democracy that is overcoming the terrorists and the surrounding countries that wish to destabilize it, slowly taking its place among the family of responsible and democratic nations."

The senator also fell upon his frequent theme — the threat of Iran. "A nuclear Iran is a mortal danger to all our allies in the Middle East, Israel and Arabs, and it is a threat to us. A nuclear Iran would transform the balance of power in the region in the worst possible way. As Iran continues to expand the reach of its missiles, it will soon not just be the Middle East that is threatened, but Europe as well, and the United States."

Note that Paster Hagee has apologized for his earlier controversies.

Also, here's Rabbi Shlomo Riskin, of Efrat, Israel, on Hagee:

Pastor John Hagee is a towering leader in the Evangelical Church who has dedicated a great part of his enormously successful ministry to reaching out in love and loving-kindness to the Jewish people and the State of Israel. He has admirably defended our right to our historic homeland even when our enemies have attempted to disgorge us from our homes and drive us into the sea; he has praised the Lord for having imbued us, the "post-Holocaust dry bones of Ezekiel," with renewed life and vigor even when our arch-enemy and the arch-enemy of the free world has called us a "stinking corpse." He has organized Christian lobby groups for the only true democracy in the Middle East across the length and breadth of the United States even when a former American President and professors from Harvard and Chicago Universities have denounced our own lobbying efforts as un-American and anti-Democratic....

We are living in a world divided between those who believe in a God of love and peace, and those who believe in a Satan of Jihad and suicide bombers. Any attempt to marginalize and slander leaders of the camp of the former will only serve to strengthen the camp of the latter, with the future existence of the free world perilously hanging in the balance. And so I continue to proudly shout from the rooftops that this rabbi in Israel stands firmly alongside -his beloved friend, a true friend of Israel and the free world, Pastor John Hagee.

Lieberman himself is an orthodox Jew, and as the top supporter of Israel in American government, his appearance at Christians United is a powerful endorsement of the organization's good faith toward the Jewish state.

The lefties, of course, want to whip up a Wright-style scandal from Lieberman's relationaship to Hagee. See : Think Progress, Firedoglake, and Matthew Yglesias.