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Ivory Coast leader – a Christian – is the real election winner and not Muslim rival Alassane Ouattara, claim key evangelicals
While Laurent Gbagbo, the besieged Ivory Coast leader, has been largely isolated in the wake of the brutal attacks on civilians by forces loyal to him, one influential group is doggedly continuing to support him: the Christian right.
In the US, several key evangelical leaders have been flying the flag for Gbagbo, claiming that he was the rightful victor of the November election and billing him as a Christian bulwark against the spread of Islam.
Foremost among those is Oklahoma senator Jim Inhofe, an evangelical Christian with close links to the Gbagbo regime. He has been lobbying Hillary Clinton, the US secretary of state, arguing in a letter to her that "it is mathematically impossible for President Gbagbo to have lost the election by several hundred thousand votes."
Other commentators have made much of the fact that Gbagbo and his wife, Simone, are evangelical Christians and that his rival, Alassane Ouattara, who won the internationally monitored election, is Muslim. On Fox News, Glenn Beck contrasted the "current Christian president" with the "Muslim" Ouattara, whom he said was responsible for all the recent killing.
The televangelist Pat Robertson went further, calling Gbagbo a "very fine man". He described Ivory Coast as a "country run by a Christian that is going to be in the hands of a Muslim, so it's one more Muslim nation building up the ring of sharia law."
Robertson's words chimed with those of the French far-right politician Jean-Marie Le Pen, who said that Ouattara's victory would put Ivory Coast "under Muslim influence". He accused France's president, Nicolas Sarkozy, of launching "an act of international piracy" against Gbagbo out of a desire for oil.
