John Hagee needs a new PR firm.

Hagee heads a mega-church in Texas and an organization called CUFI (Christians United for Israel)

Few paid this Texas independent fringe preacher any mind (other than his followers) until John McCain accepted his endorsement in his presidential bid.

Hagee’s Texas Cornerstone Church and CUFI (Hagee Cdn headquarters are housed at Charles McVety’s Canada Christian College which sponsors Christians United for Israel events) employ the PR firm 5WPR. The PR firm also represent Agriprocessors, the company mentioned in this recent post.

After blogs released information on Hagee’s beliefs and traditional media began to notice, McCain dropped Hagee. Hagee said he quit.

Then it became known that the CUFI conference was hosting a couple of guys that claim to be former terrorists and who have been making the rounds of a religious speaker circuit and Senator Joe Lieberman. The exposure of the two former terrorist guys led to them being dropped from the Washington conference. Lieberman still plans to attend but a 43 thousand signature petition is being delivered to the capitol to have Lieberman removed from his position on the Democrat steering committee.

Next a CUFI Jerusalem director got himself embroiled in controversy and ditched.

Now it turns out the firm is in trouble for putting a fake Rabbi comment up on a blog critical of Agriprocessors. (The Rabbi is real) the comment is not, the Rabbi’s name is spelled wrong and the comment was traced to the home of Juda Engelmayer - head of 5WPR. The explanation is:

The JTA tells us that an intern has confessed that he sent the comment from Engelmayer’s apartment without his knowledge during a get-together; however, it also reports the president of 5WPR as saying that “A senior staff member failed to be transparent in dealing with client matters. He has taken full responsibility”. Other fraudulent postings came from IPs belonging to 5WPR.

The Jerusalem Post has interesting details about this Agriprocessor PR fakery including the fact one of 5WPR’s clients is Joe Francis of Girls Gone Wild. So is Benny Hinn and Pat Robertson’s Regent University.

However ‘the intern did it’ is looking quite shaky.

Back to Hagee and CUFI. The first of the month 120 videos deemed critical of John Hagee disappeared off YouTube, which acquiesced to Hagee lawyers claiming copyright infringement. Sam Stein at The Huffington post broke the purge YouTube campaign and confirmed it was Hagee lawyers behind the removals. Of course the Hagee/CUFI PR firm initially denied this.

Since the Washington CUFI conference begins in a week and some of these videos don’t even have footage from Hagee CD’s or broadcasts it appears a serious attempt an news suppression is occurring. By the time YouTube gets around to looking at the purged video maker’s counter-claims, the CUFI conference will be over.

This legal bullying over videos is backfiring for Hagee, people do not take kindly to having their work which does not have anything to do with third party copyright laws removed from the internet.

PS: It’s a convoluted and bumbling trail with a lot of links to follow - but take time to watch the Max Blumenthal 2007 CUFI conference video at The Huffington Post link. They’ll never let him into their Washington conference again, pictures are worth a thousand words. Put the coffee cup down first.

John Hagee - wiki
CUFI - wiki
Canadian connections - Marci McDonald: Steven Harper and the Theo- cons