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Pat Robertson: Assassinate Hugo Chavez

By STAFF
The most recent comment was made in the context of Chavez's longtime friendship with Cuba's Fidel Castro and Chavez's recent decision to block the supply of oil from Venezuela to the U.S.

Reuters, Washington, D.C., Aug. 23, 2005


Photo: Pat Robertson

Conservative U.S. evangelist Pat Robertson's call for the assassination of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez was the most recent example of controversial remarks made by the televangelist and founder of the Christian Coalition.

'We have the ability to take him out, and I think the time has come that we exercise that ability,' Robertson said of Chavez in Monday's broadcast of The 700 Club. 'We don't need another $200 billion war to get rid of one, you know, strong-arm dictator. It's a whole lot easier to have some of the covert operatives do the job and then get it over with.'

Robertson once declared that feminism 'encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians.'

Among his other notable quotations:

'If they look over the course of 100 years, I think the gradual erosion of the consensus that's held our country together is probably more serious than a few bearded terrorists who fly into buildings,' he said in May of this year in response to a question during an A.B.C. interview about whether activist judges were more of a threat to the United States than terrorists.

'Maybe we need a very small nuke thrown off on Foggy Bottom to shake things up,' he said in criticism of the State Department during a 700 Club interview in October 2003.

'It's clear from the teachings of the Koran and also from the history of Islam that it's anything but peaceful,' Robertson said in 2002. 'Of course there are peace-loving Muslims. But at the same time, at the core of this religion . . . is jihad, and it is to subject the unbelievers either to forced conversion or death. That's what it teaches.'