On Jan. 21, at a so-called Presidential Inaugural Prayer Breakfast — to which WorldNetDaily editor Joseph Farah was invited, disinvited, re-invited, then ultimately didn’t bother to attend — Farah buddy Jonathan Cahn gave a pretty standard right-wing, evangelical Christian, Obama-bashing speech, tying in his book “The Harbinger,” which claims that the 9/11 attacks were a judgement from God. Weirdly, it took two weeks for WND to write up an article summarizing the speech.
Now, WND is trying to promote Cahn’s months-old speech by creating a mystique about it. From a Nov. 30 article:
Given the moral and spiritual state of the nation, some have called it “the most important speech given in modern American history.”
It was delivered by Jonathan Cahn, author of the best-selling book “The Harbinger,” Jan. 21, 2013, the morning of Barack Obama’s second presidential inauguration, at the Presidential Inaugural Prayer Breakfast. The unofficial gathering, which included members of Congress, government leaders and Christian ministers, took place just one hour before Obama took the oath of the presidency.
“[The address] was a prophetic exposé of America’s fall from God, a revealing of the biblical signs of judgment manifesting in America, and a call to return,” said Joseph Farah, producer of “The Isaiah 9:10 Judgment,” the No. 1 faith movie of 2012 and 2013 based on Cahn’s teachings.
The speech became pointed when Cahn addressed his words to Obama: “Can you lay your left hand upon His Word and then with your right hand enact laws against it? Can you invoke the name of God to assume the presidency and then use the presidency in any way to endorse that which clearly wars against the ways of the God you invoke? … Can you utter the words ‘so help me God’ if you should in any way take part in helping to lead a nation away from the God whose help you invoke?”
Those who were present described Cahn’s address as electrifying, a prophetic clarion call and nothing short of a historic moment. At the speech’s end, the gathering erupted into what one observer described as “a near riot.”
Soon after the speech, a recording of it began spreading across the Internet like wildfire. At the same time, viewers began noticing that as quickly as it was being posted, it was being taken down.
Thousands of viewers began noticing that as they tried to repost it and send it to others, the links to the speech were going dead. Confusion and speculation spread through social media.
WND even received threats for trying to air it.
Note that not a thing WND alleges happened has any documented evidence to back it up:
- Who called the speech “the most important speech given in modern American history”?
- Who described Cahn’s speech as “electrifying, a prophetic clarion call and nothing short of a historic moment”? (We know Farah didn’t, because he couldn’t be bothered to attend.)
- Who was the “observer” that called the after speech scene a “near riot”? What were they “near rioting” against? The audience was cheering Cahn’s words at the end of the speech, which is not the definition of “near riot.”
- Who was taking down copies of the speech from the Internet?
- Who threatened WND for “trying to air” the speech? What did those threats say?
WND provides no answers for these questions, which raises the question of whether any of it happened at all and WND is just trying to create a controversy in order to generate clicks.
The dishonesty extends to the headline. It reads, “the speech you were never supposed to see” in quote marks, but nobody is quoted in the article as saying that.
If this was such a big, important speech, why did WND fail to write about it until two weeks later? And why did WND fail to post a video of it until now, months after the fact?
We don’t care whether or not WND posts a video of Cahn’s speech. We do care, however, that WND appears to falsely trying to inflate its importance by creating a myth around it by making claims WND won’t document.