Views » October 14, 2008
Demons Out!
Building on doubts some white Americans have about electing a black president, the neocons strategy is to stoke fear that Sen. Barack Obama is the Antichrist.
The neocons who sold Americans the Iraq War are working hand in hand with the Christian Right to make sure that a McCain-Palin administration will take up where Bush-Cheney leaves off.
Building on doubts some white Americans have about electing a black president, their strategy is to stoke fear that Sen. Barack Obama is the Antichrist. Google it and you will find more than 1.3 million Web entries that discuss Obama and Anti-Christ.
In early August, the McCain campaign released an online ad titled “The One,” that suggests Obama could be the Antichrist. McCain campaign officials denied they were trying to draw parallels, but many Christian fundamentalists understood. The ad portrayed images that are only found in the 16 books of the “Left Behind” series – 63 million copies sold to date.
Tim LaHaye, the series’ co-author, is a key strategist of the Christian Right. He is also the founding president of the Council for National Policy (CNP), a secretive organization that brings together leaders of the American right to coordinate political strategy. Prior to the Republican National Convention, the CNP met in Minneapolis, where members watched Gov. Sarah Palin on the stage with Sen. John McCain as she accepted his choice of her as his running mate. According to a CNP member in attendance, “That room in Minneapolis watching on the television screen was electrified. I have not seen anything like it in a long time.”
LaHaye, for one, doubts that Obama is the Antichrist. He told Christian Newswire, “I can see by the language [Obama] uses why people think he could be the Antichrist, but from my reading of Scripture, he doesn’t meet the criteria.”
Of course, if there’s anything scarier than the Antichrist, it’s a Muslim. In July, Fox News conducted a poll, asking: “Some people believe Barack Obama, despite his professed Christianity, is secretly a Muslim. … What do you believe?” The results: 10 percent of respondents said he was Muslim and 27 percent said they didn’t know.
In September, New York’s Dutchess County GOP Chairwoman Corrine Weber forwarded this e-mail to party members: “The Antichrist will be a man, in his 40s, of MUSLIM descent, who will deceive the nations with persuasive language, and have a MASSIVE Christ-like appeal. … Do we recognize this description?? … I refuse to take a chance on this unknown candidate who came out of nowhere.”
If you have doubts about the dangers Muslims pose, watch Obsession: Radical Islam’s War Against the West. Tom Trento, director of the Watch Obsession Citizen Education Program, is traveling the country promoting this documentary. “The Muslim faith has been hijacked by extremists who want to destroy every culture but their own,” he told Christian Newswire.
In September in 14 battleground states, 28 million DVDs of Obsession were sent to the subscribers of 70 local and national newspapers, including the New York Times and Wall Street Journal.
The mass distribution was coordinated by the Endowment for Middle East Truth. The group’s advisory board includes four neoconservative luminaries who helped sell Americans on the need for the Iraq War: Meyrav Wurmser of the Hudson Institute, Daniel Pipes of the Middle East Forum, Frank Gaffney of the Center for Security Policy and former CIA Director James Woolsey. Gaffney and Woolsey are both associated with the CNP and have addressed the group’s secret conventions.
Let’s hope that this time around their machinations are less successful.
ABOUT THIS AUTHOR
Joel Bleifuss, a former director of the Peace Studies Program at the University of Missouri-Columbia, is the editor & publisher of In These Times, where he has worked since October 1986.
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Reader Comments
The notion of an anti-Christ juxtaposed with Christian fundamentalism deserves no comment from The Left, Joel. Focusing on it, however, does provide amusement for those of us who remain convinced that , while religion as the opiate of the masses may have been among Karl Marx’s most revolutionary of sentiments, that narcotic of today’s dumbing down of America is television content, secular and non-sectarian alike. Even last evening’s Frontline program “Decision 2008” deferred to the respect for religious belief without making clear which of the two presidential candidates poses the worst risk to those of us who believe that our constitution’s references to what we term separation of church and state is sacrosanct. As long as religious matters are permitted to be included in the civic debate, we are, as a people whose currency credits trust in a superbeing, like children in catechism class: dumbfounded and fearful that our doubt, while intellecturally graceful, is inherently out of sync with a majority view. While the Christian Right has yet to reveal itself as a Taliban-like fanaticism, there can be no doubt that the teachings pertaining to the story of Christ, like those pertaining to the stories of Abraham and Mohammed, lend themselves to devolutions of politically empirical thought. We on The Left are well aware, thanks to the efforts of writers like yourself, of the threat from The Right. While the Democratic presidential candidate who enjoys our support appears ready to defer to faith as fundamentally purposeful and useful, with particular emphasis on “faith-based initiatives,” we eagerly anticipate that his victory can be expected to make platitudes for religious purveyance less numbing to civic sensibilities than do the outrageous and outlandish commentaries, policies and programs advanced by those who, with messianic zeal, make the mistake of presuming that intolerance is emblematic of democratic ideals. Thank you for this sidebar to necon machinations of coalition with The Religious Right. It adds to the abundance of evidence that good news for the religious is often of ill import to those of us who find such dalliances with faith as convoluting as the intrigues of the military-industrial complex. Those claiming to have their gods on their side may not be able, it appears, to distinguish a candidate from an icon, suggesting myopia, if not delusion, as the nature of their mindsets. Twenty-eight million free DVD’s of “Obsession” to newspaper subscribers is an interesting bit of news; but better yet would be a report that reveals how the subscribers’ mailing lists were placed in the hands of those who would distribute such mindlessness to unsolicited victims. Go get ‘em, Joel. They deserve it.
Posted by Bud Wizer on Oct 15, 2008 at 11:18 AM
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