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Our Christian Son-of-a-Bitch
Far from Falluja there's another battle raging that's just as vicious and even more dangerous in its implications. But the American press is for the most part ignoring the civil war in West Africa's Ivory Coast, since it involves nobody, really, just Africans and the French. Which is why Douglas Farah's overview of the conflict in The Washington Post is especially welcome. Farah notes the anti-Muslim fervor of much of the violence -- the homes of Post employees who were Muslim were attacked while police looked on -- and the cynical exploitation of anti-colonialist sentiment by Ivory Coast's president, Lauren Gbago, a thug cut from the same cloth as that of Rwanda's genocidaires. But Farah neglects another aspect of Gbago's strategy: mobilization of evangelical Christian support, in Ivory Coast and abroad.

Gbago has framed the conflict as a holy war, with Ivory Coast "native" Protestants on one side, and foreign Muslims and godless French Catholics on the other. One evangelical preacher took to Ivory Coast state radio to declare that French President Chirac is "inhabited by the spirit of Satan", after French peacekeepers destroyed the Ukrainian gunships Gbago's forces had used to terrorize Muslim civilians and attack the peacekeepers, as well as American aid workers.

Even more disturbing is the support Gbago is finding among American evangelicals. World Evangelical Alliance frames the fight as a "decisive hour" in a battle between Christians and "demonic" Islamists. Mega-site Crosswalk focussed only on Christian victims of violence. And even Christianity Today, home to fine and respectable journalism, spun the story, at its beginning at least, as one primarily of anti-Christian persecution, with no mention that the government in power is "Christian," at least to the extent that such a claim helps it mobilize mobs to attack Muslims. ...