This article can be found on the web at
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20050919/blumenthal
Pat Robertson's Katrina Cash
by MAX BLUMENTHAL
[posted online on September 7, 2005]
Every cloud has a silver lining. Hurricane Katrina has
devastated New Orleans, leaving thousands dead and
hundreds of thousands homeless, and plunging the
entire city into chaos. In the hurricane's wake, the
Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and its
director, Michael Brown, forced out of his former job
at the International Arabian Horse Association, with
no credentials in disaster relief, have become targets
of withering criticism. Yet FEMA's relief efforts have
brought considerable assistance to at least one man
who stands to benefit from Hurricane Katrina perhaps
more than any other individual: Pat Robertson.
With the Bush Administration's approval, Robertson's
$66 million relief organization, Operation Blessing,
has been prominently featured on FEMA's list of
charitable groups accepting donations for hurricane
relief. Dozens of media outlets, including the New
York Times, CNN and the Associated Press, duly
reprinted FEMA's list, unwittingly acting as agents
soliciting cash for Robertson. "How in the heck did
that happen?" Richard Walden, president of the
disaster-relief group Operation USA, asked of
Operation Blessing's inclusion on FEMA's list. "That
gives Pat Robertson millions of extra dollars."
Though Operation USA has conducted disaster relief for
more than twenty-five years on five continents, like
scores of other secular relief groups currently
helping victims of Hurricane Katrina, it was omitted
from FEMA's list. In fact, only two non-"faith-based"
organizations were included. (One of them, the
American Red Cross, is being blocked from entering New
Orleans by FEMA's parent agency, the Department of
Homeland Security.) FEMA, meanwhile, has reportedly
turned away Wal-Mart trucks carrying food and water to
the stricken city, teams of firemen from Maryland and
Texas, volunteer morticians and a convoy of 1,000 boat
owners offering to help rescue stranded flood victims.
While relief efforts falter in the face of colossal
bureaucratic incompetence, the Bush Administration's
promotion of Operation Blessing has ensured that the
floodwaters swallowing New Orleans will be a rising
tide lifting Robertson's boat.
Robertson recently ignited a media firestorm when he
called for the assassination of Venezuelan president
Hugo Chávez during a broadcast of The 700 Club. He has
also blamed the 9/11 attacks on America's tolerance of
abortion and homosexuality and declared the Supreme
Court a greater threat to the United States than Al
Qaeda. Robertson assiduously cultivates his celebrity
with remarks like these, casting himself as a divisive
bigot to his foes and a righteous prophet to his
allies in Christian right circles. But there is much
more to Robertson than the headline-grabbing hothead
he plays on TV.
Far from the media's gaze, Robertson has used the
tax-exempt, nonprofit Operation Blessing as a front
for his shadowy financial schemes, while exerting his
influence within the GOP to cover his tracks. In 1994
he made an emotional plea on The 700 Club for cash
donations to Operation Blessing to support airlifts of
refugees from the Rwandan civil war to Zaire (now
Congo). Reporter Bill Sizemore of The Virginian Pilot
later discovered that Operation Blessing's planes were
transporting diamond-mining equipment for the African
Development Corporation, a Robertson-owned venture
initiated with the cooperation of Zaire's
then-dictator Mobutu Sese Seko.
After a lengthy investigation, Virginia's Office of
Consumer Affairs determined that Robertson "willfully
induced contributions from the public through the use
of misleading statements and other implications." Yet
when the office called for legal action against
Robertson in 1999, Virginia Attorney General Mark
Earley, a Republican, intervened with his own report,
agreeing that Robertson had made deceptive appeals but
overruling the recommendation for his prosecution. Two
years earlier, while Virginia's investigation was
gathering steam, Robertson donated $35,000 to Earley's
campaign--Earley's largest contribution. With Earley's
report came a sense of vindication. "From the very
beginning," Robertson claimed, "we were trying to
provide help and assistance to those who were facing
disease and death in the war-torn, chaotic nation of
Zaire."
(Earley is now president of Prison Fellowship
Ministries, an evangelical social-work organization
founded by born-again, former Nixon dirty-trickster
Charles Colson. PFM has accepted White House
faith-based-initiative money and is currently engaged
in hurricane relief efforts in Louisiana. Earley
remains a close ally of Robertson.)
Absolved of his sins, Robertson dug his heels back in
African soil. In 1999 he signed an $8 million
agreement with Liberian tyrant Charles Taylor that
guaranteed Robertson's Freedom Gold Ltd.--an offshore
company registered to the same address as his
Christian Broadcasting Network--mining rights in
Liberia, and gave Taylor a 10 percent stake in the
company. When the United States intervened in Liberia
in 2003, forcing Taylor and the Al Qaeda operatives he
was harboring to flee, Robertson accused President
Bush of "undermining a Christian, Baptist president to
bring in Muslim rebels to take over the country."
Robertson's scheming hasn't abated one bit. He is
accused of violating his ministry's tax-exempt,
nonprofit status by using it to market a diet shake he
licensed this August to the health chain General
Nutrition Corp. (Robertson continues to advertise the
shake on his personal website.) He has withstood
criticism from fellow evangelicals for investing
$520,000 in a racehorse named Mr. Pat, violating
biblical admonitions against gambling. He was even
accused of "Jim Crow-style racial discrimination" by
black employees who successfully sued his Christian
Coalition in 2001 for forcing them enter its offices
through a back door and eat in a segregated area
(Robertson has since resigned).
The Bush Administration has studiously overlooked
Robertson's misdeeds. In October 2002, just months
after he denounced the White House's faith-based
initiative as "a real Pandora's box"--and one month
before midterm elections--Robertson pocketed $500,000
in government grants to Operation Blessing. Since
then, with the sole exception of his criticism of the
US intervention in Liberia, Robertson has served as a
willing surrogate for the Administration. His Regent
University gave John Ashcroft a cushy professorship to
cool his heels after his contentious tenure as US
Attorney General. And Robertson's legal foundation,
the American Center for Law and Justice, is
spearheading the effort to rally right-wing Christian
support for Judge John G. Roberts Jr.'s confirmation
as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.
Now, as fallout from the President's handling of
Hurricane Katrina threatens to derail the GOP's
long-term agenda, Robertson is back at the plate for
Bush, echoing the White House's line that state and
local authorities--and even the disaster victims
themselves--are to blame for the tragedy engulfing New
Orleans.
The September 5 edition of The 700 Club included a
report by Christian Broadcasting Network correspondent
Gary Lane from outside the ruined New Orleans
Convention Center, which had housed mostly
impoverished black disaster victims throughout the
weekend. "A number of possessions left behind suggest
the mindset of some of the evacuees," Lane said. "They
include this voodoo cup with the saying, 'May the
curse be with you.' " A shot of a plastic souvenir cup
from one of New Orleans's countless trinket shops
appeared on the screen. "Also music CDs with the
titles Guerrilla Warfare and Thugs 'R' Us," Lane
stated, pointing out a pile of rap CDs strewn on the
ground.
The 700 Club's featured guest was Wellington Boone, a
black minister invited by Robertson to provide a
counterpoint to the ubiquitous Rev. Jesse Jackson.
Boone is a member of the Coalition on Revival, a
Christian Reconstructionist organization that
advocates replacing the US Constitution with biblical
law. Throughout his career, he has distinguished
himself from his black clerical colleagues with such
remarks as "I believe that slavery, and the
understanding of it when you see it God's way, was
redemptive" and "The black community must stop
criticizing Uncle Tom. He is a role model."
Though Boone's appearance on The 700 Club consisted
mostly of benign appeals for "laser-beam prayer," CBN
featured a separate interview with Boone on its
website in which he declared, "We need to consider the
culture of those people still stranded in New Orleans.
The looting of property, the trashing of property, et
cetera, speaks to the basic character of the people."
He added, "These people who have gone through slavery,
segregation and the Voting Rights Act are doing this
to themselves."
Boone's appearance on The 700 Club had been preceded
by an interview with Operation Blessing President Bill
Horan. Horan discussed his group's activities in
Biloxi, Mississippi, where it plans to set up a mobile
kitchen, and in Houston, Dallas and Beaumont, Texas,
where it is disbursing cash grants to numerous, mostly
unspecified mega-churches, purportedly to support
their work with evacuated hurricane victims.
As for the people still stranded in New Orleans who
"are doing this to themselves," as Boone said,
Operation Blessing has a special plan: avoid them like
the plague.
"I've actually heard reports that they [the people of
Mississippi] were in worse trouble" than those in New
Orleans, claimed Gordon Robertson, the son of Pat
Robertson and vice president of The 700 Club. "They
were actually harder hit."
"Oh, absolutely," agreed Horan.
At the segment's conclusion, Gordon Robertson asked
Horan, "What can people do today? If you were asking
for help today, what's the number-one need?"
"It's cash. Cash is what we need more than anything,"
Horan pleaded. "The more cash we get, the more good we
can do." And the Bush Administration, through FEMA, is
doing its best to insure that Pat Robertson is getting
that cash just as quickly as humanly possible.
______________________________________________________
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{Invite (mankind, O Muhammad ) to the Way of your Lord (i.e. Islam) with wisdom
(i.e. with the Divine Inspiration and the Qur'an) and fair preaching, and argue
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(Holy Quran-16:125)
{And who is better in speech than he who [says: "My Lord is Allah (believes in
His Oneness)," and then stands straight (acts upon His Order), and] invites
(men) to Allah's (Islamic Monotheism), and does righteous deeds, and says: "I
am one of the Muslims."} (Holy Quran-41:33)
The prophet (peace and blessings of Allah be upon him) said: "By Allah, if
Allah guides one person by you, it is better for you than the best types of
camels." [al-Bukhaaree, Muslim]
The prophet (peace and blessings of Allah be upon him) also said, "Whoever
calls to guidance will have a reward similar to the reward of the one who
follows him, without the reward of either of them being lessened at all."
[Muslim, Ahmad, Aboo Daawood, an-Nasaa'ee, at-Tirmidhee, Ibn Maajah]
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