Obama’s Carteresque Tendencies


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Barack Hussein Obama’s pro Israel credentials should receive more scrutiny from Jewish voters. One of his senior advisers on religious affairs is a proponent of “liberation theology”. His name is Shaun Casey, and he has signed a letter circulated by Ron Sider, a proponent of a movement to divorce evangelical Christianity from its support for Israel and from political conservatism in general. This is a clear warning sign that Obama is really a Jimmy Carter retread

Liberation theology seeks of course to harmonise Marxism and other strains of leftism with Christianity. Reverend Wright is one of the louder manifestations of this ideological strain.

According to the Sultan Knish blog , “Several dozen evangelical leaders have released a letter to President Bush in an effort to distinguish themselves from ardent pro-Israel evangelicals and to urge evenhandedness between Israel and the Palestinians.

The letter’s authors got the idea while visiting the U.S.-Islamic World Forum in Doha, Qatar, where, according to the New York Times, they “met Muslim and American diplomats who were shocked to discover the existence of American evangelicals who favored a Palestinian state.” The organizers plan to translate their letter into Arabic and distribute it internationally.

The letter repeated a common media-grabbing formula for liberal evangelicals. Demand action on climate change, denounce U.S. policies on “torture,” or insist on a less pro-Israel stance. The ostensibly surprising revelation that not all evangelicals are reflexively Republican is an almost guaranteed headline maker.

The signers insist that they share the evangelical perspective that God will bless all who bless the descendants of Abraham, a common biblical theme among pro-Israel evangelicals. But they assert that both Israel and the Palestinians have ”legitimate rights stretching back for millennia to the lands of Israel/Palestine,” and that a Palestinian state must include the “the vast majority of the West Bank.”

Ron Sider insisted that he and his fellow letter signers want “security” for Israel. But it’s difficult to know what he, as a professed pacifist, means by security. Many of the signers are skeptical about the U.S. war against terrorism and place greater hope in international mediation than do typical evangelicals. The letters signers assume that Middle East peace depends on pressuring Israel into more accommodations. Most evangelicals are more skeptical.

The movement to separate evangelicals from Israel is a cause that Jimmy Carter has championed in the past. The closeness of this movement to the Obama campaign certainly seems to presage a foreign policy in the Middle East that will resemble that of Jimmy Carter. John McCain’s statement  that Obama is “Measuring the drapes” in the Oval Office  as well as his flaunting of questionable friends such as Shaun Casey bespeaks a cockiness that will strike many as premature in the heated finale to the Presidential campaign  that still lies ahead of us.

Those who want to take Obama at his word and vote Democrat have ample reason to hesitate when looking at Obama’s inner circle.

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One Comment

  • Paul Zannucci says:

    I have a communist friend who actually was a student in a Sunday school class led by Jimmy Carter in Georgia.

    Needless to say, there is a strange, nearly incomprehensible mix of economics, Christianity and disdain for Israel from this group.

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