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NEW YORK — Christian leaders with conservative and liberal constituencies have lambasted the Rev. Pat Robertson for his televised call for the assassination of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez.
Robertson’s remarks are “appalling to the point of disbelief,” National Council of Churches General Secretary Robert Edgar said on Aug. 23 after Robertson’s statement was broadcast by the Christian Broadcast Network.
“We have the ability to take him (Chavez) out, and I think the time has come that we exercise that ability,'” Robertson, a former Republican Party presidential candidate, said on his Aug. 22 TV show, The 700 Club, of the Venezuelan president, who has often been at loggerheads with the administration of President George W. Bush.
“We don’t need another $200 billion war to get rid of one, you know, strong-arm dictator,” he said. “'It’s a whole lot easier to have some of the covert operatives do the job and then get it over with.”'
In response, Edgar, a former Democratic congressman who served from 1976-79 on the House Select Committee on Assassinations that investigated U.S.-sponsored political killings, said it “'defies logic that this self-proclaimed Christian leader could so blithely abandon the teachings of Jesus to love our enemies and turn our cheeks against violence.”
“It defies logic that a former candidate for the presidency could skirt the brink of international law to call for the assassination of a foreign leader on the grounds that he might some day be a danger to us,” Edgar said. “It defies logic that this so-called evangelist is misusing his media power not to win people to faith, but to encourage them to support the murder of a foreign leader.”
The Rev. Rob Schenck, president of the National Clergy Council in Washington, DC said: “I have always held Pat Robertson in the highest esteem, but his remarks today about Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez were at best indiscreet and probably crossed a serious moral and ethical line. Reverend Robertson must immediately apologize, retract his statement and clarify what the Bible and Christianity teaches about the permissibility of taking human life outside of law.”
Schenck, a minister in the Evangelical Church Alliance, has in the past worked closely with Robertson’s Christian Broadcasting Network. He was a paid consultant to the American Center for Law and Justice, a legal institute set up by the 75-year-old Robertson.
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