Witchcraft again - Aiona, Hawaii Candidate For Gov., Tied to Witch-Fighting Evangelicals

[Joanne98]

"If you have any idols in your home, we're gonna burn 'em! If you have any witchcraft items in your home, we're gonna burn 'em!" -- Cindy Jacobs, faculty member, International Transformation Network
It's like something out of the Spanish Inquisition or from the depths of the European Medieval period, mysteriously transported to sunny Hawaii of 2010, at the height of a hotly fought campaign for governor no less. As the Associated Press reported yesterday, on a scandal roiling the Hawaii gubernatorial campaign, Republican candidate for governor James "Duke" Aiona is lashing out at the campaign of his Democratic rival Neal Abercrombie for allegedly promoting a video I've compiled which begins with a clip of Aiona, in July 2008, enthusiastically stating that he was a member of Transformation Hawai'i, which is a local chapter of the International Transformation Network.

Introduction: I first started covering the story of Lt. Governor James "Duke" Aiona and the International Transformation Network/Transformation Hawai'i last April, 2010, in a two part series, Transforming Hawaii In late April and early May 2010 I made two radio appearances on 1080 AM in Hawaii, on the Carroll Cox Show to talk about Aiona and the ITN/Transformation Hawai'i. Shortly after the May 2nd show, Carroll Cox filed a state ethics charge against Duke Aiona for accepting over $7,000 for a personal trip Aiona and his wife made in late 2006 to Ed Silvoso's 16th International Institute on Nation Transformation in Mar del Plata, Argentina, where Aiona was filmed praying with the 1st Lady of Uganda Janet Museveni. The story, below, continues my coverage of this issue.

I will again be appearing on the Carroll Cox Show, Sunday October 24, at 8-9AM HST on 1080 AM. Free podcasts of the show will afterward be available at the Carroll Cox Show website podcast page - Bruce Wilson

As the AP describes,

"The video was produced by Bruce Wilson, who co-founded a blog about religion and politics. It includes clips of Aiona at a 2009 meeting in Hawaii of the International Transformation Network, an evangelical Christian group, and its local arm, Transformation Hawaii.
Other clips are of ITN's 2008 meeting in Argentina in which a pastor calls on followers to collect idolatrous objects to be burned, and of Aiona urging viewers to attend a 2005 ITN meeting in Hawaii...

Wilson said ITN leaders appear to believe gays are possessed by demons and native art should be destroyed.

http://www.talk2action.org/story/2010/10/21/9445/8568/Front_Page/Witchcraft_again_Aiona_Hawaii_Candidate_For_Gov_Tied_to_Witch_Fighting_Evangelicals

[Shallah Kali]

1. the NAR *literally* Demonizes people who don't believe as they do

they believe people get infected with demons of everything from homosexuality to dandruff. they think that the land itself is demon inhabited and needs a good dose of wesson oil and prayer

Soldiers of Christ: Insider America's Most Powerful Megachurch
Harper's Magazine/November 2, 2006
By Jeff Sharlet
http://www.rickross.com/reference/fundamentalists/fund196.html

So Pastor Ted did. First, he started a church in his basement. The pulpit was three five-gallon buckets stacked one atop the other, and the pews were lawn chairs. A man who lived in a trailer came round if he remembered it was Sunday and played guitar. Another man got the Spirit and filled a fivegallon garden sprayer with cooking oil and began anointing nearby intersections, then streets and buildings all over town. Pastor Ted told his flock to focus their prayers on houses with FOR SALE signs so that more Christians would come and join him. Once Pastor Ted and another missionary accidentally set off an alarm and hid together in a field while the police investigated. It was for a good cause, Pastor Ted would say; they were praying for the building to be taken off the market so it could someday be purchased for a future ministry. (It was.)

He was always on the lookout for spies. At the time, Colorado Springs was a small city split between the Air Force and the New Age, and the latter, Pastor Ted believed, worked for the devil. Pastor Ted soon began upsetting the devil’s plans. He staked out gay bars, inviting men to come to his church; his whole congregation pitched itself into invisible battles with demonic forces, sometimes in front of public buildings.

One day, while he was working in his garage, a woman who said she’d been sent by a witches’ coven tried to stab Pastor Ted with a five-inch knife she pulled from a leg sheath; Pastor Ted wrestled the blade out of her hand. He let that story get around. He called the evil forces that dominated Colorado Springs—and every other metropolitan area in the country—“Control.”

Sometimes, he says, Control would call him late on Saturday night, threatening to kill him. “Any more impertinence out of you, Ted Haggard,” he claims Control once told him, “and there will be unrelenting pandemonium in this city.” No kidding! Pastor Ted hadn’t come to Colorado Springs for his health; he had come to wage “spiritual war.”

[awoke_in_2003]

3. "inviting men to come to his church"

sure, that is the only reason he was going to gay bars. I mean, why else would he go? :)

[opihimoimoi]

5. Icehead = airhead....

[Hekate]

2. Kick for sheer bizarreness. I read that the GOP in Hawai'i was taken over by nutbags

Further, at the same time I read that the religious wingnuts had tried to co-opt candidates on both sides of the aisle.

This is a good time for the scandal to break. Christianity is strong in the Islands, but so is Buddhism, with at least one large temple on Oahu and many neighborhood shrines. There is a major Mormon Temple in Laie. The Old Religion never really died out. Even those who are not of Hawaii's old religion regard the so-called idols as precious irreplacable artworks.

So the wingnuts want to declare war on all these religions and burn their "idols" and books?

I'm surprised to hear (on the second video at the link) that the evangelicals and Catholics have "joined hands to speak as one voice" -- I wonder what that means, given that these folks have sworn enmity to Catholic statues and pictures.

edited to say: :wtf: WTFD is a Jewish rabbi doing there?

Hekate

[Shallah Kali]

4. evangelicals and catholics - maybe they promise to burn catholic idols last?

Sam Brownback is paling around with New Apostolitc Reformation too esp. Lou Engle ( http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/lou-engle-and-sam-brownback-roommates ) in spite of their hatred for catholic beliefs.

Killing Mother Teresa with their Prayers
Rachel Tabachnick
The New Apostolics' Spiritual Warfare against Catholics and the Amish (or Rick Santorum's Close Call)

Palin's Churches and the Third Wave Series


http://www.talk2action.org/story/2008/10/20/195730/89

It began as a plan for a secret mission that would take place high in the Himalayas. Twenty six people traveled from locations around the world including, Mexico, Costa Rica, Colombia, Vietnam, and the United States, and met for the mission in 1997. For three weeks the teams split and made preparations at base camps at 13,000 and 18,000 feet on Mt. Everest. Then the teams began the last dangerous ascent to make an assault on their target.

"Our assignment from God was to take down the foundations of The Great Babylon, the harlot over many waters, who supported the false systems of the world. God clearly showed us where we should go for our main prophetic act by revealing a large, brown stone formation, completely surrounded by walls of ice resembling a castle and shaped exactly like an idol of the Queen of Heaven! This seat of the Mother of the Universe was 20,000 feet high, and to get there we had to cross the ice fall, the most dangerous par of the Everest ascent, with no guide but Him and no help from anyone else other than the angels."

Quote from Ana Mendez, Special Task Coordinator, World Prayer Center
C. Peter Wagner, Confronting the Queen of Heaven, Colorado Springs, Wagner Publications, 2001. p.51



After the mission they reported that they barely escaped with their lives.

God told us to leave the camp before 11am, because it was going to be destroyed. We left the camp at 10:30. When we had all reached safety, one of the largest avalanches on record occurred on all three mountainsides around the camp - Everest, Loh-La and Nuptse. The camp was completely destroyed, and the climbing season had to be cancelled. The only flag left on Everest was for Jesus, the King of Kings.


He not only is in the family he is in Opus Dei - http://web.archive.org/web/20080302184819/http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/9178374/gods_senator

[AnnieBW]

6. I'm sure that some Kahunas would be interested to hear that...

I'm sure that there's some practitioners of Traditional Hawai'ian Religion (Huna) would be veeerrrry interested in hearing about that!