A View From Pakistan

Why would al Qaeda support McCain-Palin? I'm not sure the endorsement by a few loons means anything, and I don't think we should allow these murderous fanatics to have any input into a democratic election. But it tells you something about our p.r. problem that in Pakistan, a female columnist would associate al Qaeda with "the base" of the Christianist right. There is no moral equivalence, of course. But there are some thematic overlaps between people who divide their own populations into the sinners and the saved, people who expect an imminent Apocalypse, people who see no distinction between religion and politics, and people prepared to believe anything their great religious leaders tell them. Christianism and Islamism are not different in kind; they are different in degree. It's a big difference, but the logic of theocracy is powerful.