From The TelegraphBy Damian Thompson
Sarah Palin is at the centre of a furious battle behind the scenes of the US election between conservative Christian tribes who want to claim her as one of her own. "Paleocons" and "theocons" are shrieking: "She's ours!" while the Republican campaign looks on in horror, hoping they will go away.
I stumbled across this drama by the unlikeliest of routes. I noticed that the Society of St Pius X (SSPX) - anti-Zionist Catholic rebel traditionalists - are backing Palin because of her uncompromising stance on abortion. But then a link on an SSPX website led me to Patrick Buchanan, the hard-Right, anti-Israel scourge of the neocons whom Palin has been accused of supporting in the past.
Buchanan, a Catholic hero of the SSPX, said this week that "the lady is no neocon". But, clearly, he's worried that the Zionist lobby is getting to his girl:
"Will the neocons who tutored George W. Bush in the ideology he pursued to the ruin of his presidency do the same for Sarah Palin? Should they succeed, they will destroy her. Yet, they are moving even now to capture this princess of the right and hope of the party.
"In St. Paul, Palin was told to cancel a meeting with Phyllis Schlafly and pro-life conservatives. McCain's operatives said Palin had to rest for her Wednesday convention speech. Yet, on Tuesday, Palin was behind closed doors with Joe Lieberman and officials of the Israeli lobby AIPAC. There, according to The Washington Post, Palin took and passed her oral exams."
The neocons are not a religious movement. But their born-again Christian allies, the theocons, passionately support Israel because they believe that it will be attacked by the forces of the Antichrist, as predicted in the Book of Revelation. And Palin has a foot in this camp, too.
She was born a Catholic but raised a Pentecostalist. Her former church, the Wasilla Assembly of God, takes the standard fundamentalist line that the apocalypse will begin in the Middle East. Indeed, the liberal Huffington Post claims that Alaskan fundamentalism (yup, there is such a thing) may have influenced Palin's view that the US is doing God's work in Iraq.
Not so fast, says Buchanan. His CNS article quotes Palin's reaction to the "surge" in 2007: "I heard on the news about the new deployments, and while I support our President, I want to know that we have an exit plan in place." That's not the language of "benevolent global hegemony", he says.
Meanwhile, bible-prophecy.com, a leading resource for America's 10 million or so hard-line fundamentalists, is rapidly turning into a Sarah Palin fansite. That's not what the vice-presidential candidate needs to attract swing voters – but then, neither is the support of isolationist paleocons who think Jewish money will determine the result of the election.
Even more than most candidates, Palin has to think twice before saying anything with even the slightest religious resonance. Because, as Pat Buchanan puts it, "the battle for Sarah's soul is not over".
I stumbled across this drama by the unlikeliest of routes. I noticed that the Society of St Pius X (SSPX) - anti-Zionist Catholic rebel traditionalists - are backing Palin because of her uncompromising stance on abortion. But then a link on an SSPX website led me to Patrick Buchanan, the hard-Right, anti-Israel scourge of the neocons whom Palin has been accused of supporting in the past.
Buchanan, a Catholic hero of the SSPX, said this week that "the lady is no neocon". But, clearly, he's worried that the Zionist lobby is getting to his girl:
"Will the neocons who tutored George W. Bush in the ideology he pursued to the ruin of his presidency do the same for Sarah Palin? Should they succeed, they will destroy her. Yet, they are moving even now to capture this princess of the right and hope of the party.
"In St. Paul, Palin was told to cancel a meeting with Phyllis Schlafly and pro-life conservatives. McCain's operatives said Palin had to rest for her Wednesday convention speech. Yet, on Tuesday, Palin was behind closed doors with Joe Lieberman and officials of the Israeli lobby AIPAC. There, according to The Washington Post, Palin took and passed her oral exams."
The neocons are not a religious movement. But their born-again Christian allies, the theocons, passionately support Israel because they believe that it will be attacked by the forces of the Antichrist, as predicted in the Book of Revelation. And Palin has a foot in this camp, too.
She was born a Catholic but raised a Pentecostalist. Her former church, the Wasilla Assembly of God, takes the standard fundamentalist line that the apocalypse will begin in the Middle East. Indeed, the liberal Huffington Post claims that Alaskan fundamentalism (yup, there is such a thing) may have influenced Palin's view that the US is doing God's work in Iraq.
Not so fast, says Buchanan. His CNS article quotes Palin's reaction to the "surge" in 2007: "I heard on the news about the new deployments, and while I support our President, I want to know that we have an exit plan in place." That's not the language of "benevolent global hegemony", he says.
Meanwhile, bible-prophecy.com, a leading resource for America's 10 million or so hard-line fundamentalists, is rapidly turning into a Sarah Palin fansite. That's not what the vice-presidential candidate needs to attract swing voters – but then, neither is the support of isolationist paleocons who think Jewish money will determine the result of the election.
Even more than most candidates, Palin has to think twice before saying anything with even the slightest religious resonance. Because, as Pat Buchanan puts it, "the battle for Sarah's soul is not over".
1 comment:
"Palin's view that the US is doing God's work in Iraq"
Palin's actual words: "Let us pray that the US is doing God's work in Iraq"!!
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