Diana West: Why Pat Buchanan Became The Grand Old Man of the "Christian Nationalism" Op Against America

By way of preface, I note that I am in whole-hearted agreement with every policy prescription Pat Buchanan sets forth in his 2006 book State of Emergency: The Third World Invasion and Conquest of America. I’m on board with the immigration moratorium, putting the kibosh on “amnesty” and building the border wall (he calls it a “fence”). I couldn’t agree more with ending provisions for “anchor babies,” “chain migration,” and dual-citizenship. I believe that removing what he describes as “magnets” of migration is essential.

As a personal aside, after I dubbed these same lures “the honey pot,” I got a gig as a pundit for immigration-patriot Lou Dobbs on CNN, which ran smoothly until one night, a couple of weeks before the 2008 election, I tagged the Obama agenda “socialist” and got a figurative death sentence for apostasy from the network (more on the real thing below). Additionally, could anything be more essential, more vital, to re-setting, if I might use the freighted term, 21st-century-America as a European-descended Western nation than Buchanan’s call for “remigration”? I support that, too.

Never mind it’s all too late now; these were always the means by which Americans could have swiftly reasserted control of our borders and protected our people, and destiny. Alas, the Powers That Be had other plans for us, which placed these simple measures always out of reach behind a force-field of “racism,” or “nativism” — force fields that best-selling, widely syndicated, network/cable-fixture Pat Buchanan could always overcome in terms of functioning as a rare, right-wing media celebrity.

In a funny way, it seems, looking back, Pat Buchanan could really do no “wrong,” whether defending US sovereignty against one-world-government, arguing “fair trade” not “free trade,” even standing up for the Confederate flag — all of which I happen also to agree with.

Buchanan could also crudely, harshly castigate Israel — and, particularly, Israel’s conservative party (Likud) leaders — and Jews in America as the main instigators, if not also the causus belli of “quagmires” and world wars always just on the brink of erupting in the Middle East. And when I say “could,” I mean without suffering the professional repercussions to be suffered over, say, discussing IQ differences among races, or, as noted above, even making the case on CNN in 2008 that Obama was a socialist. In the post-Oct 7 world, it is this, I submit, that gives him a certain currency on what you might call the post-Oct 7 (Qatar-influenced) Right.

The fact is, roughing up Israel/American Jews as war-mongers/war-causers did become a kind of Buchanan niche. From his columns to cable appearances, a recurring message was that Israel and Jews were continually “beating” the “drum” for war, while, naturally, “they” were in full control of the levers of power in Washington, D.C. — all familiar tropes of antisemitism, as they usually are labeled, but also of the Islamic mindset expressed in “dhimmitude.”

Never mind that Israel has fought only defensive wars against its surrounding Islamic neighbors commanded by Allah to destroy the Jewish state through offensive wars of jihad, also directed against the wider, infidel West. To Buchanan as to his contemporary admirers, it is Israel that is usually regarded as the Mideast thorn in the side of peace. (Note well this is a fulcrum of the Islamization process, a line of propaganda that started to enter Western dogma going back to the Soviet creation of Islamic terrorism in the 1960s.) As for Buchanan, this attitude goes back at least as far back as the Gulf War, which George HW Bush led on behalf of Kuwait against Iraq, and which — Buchanan’s Star-of-David-shaped-lens notwithstanding — had nothing to do with Israel.

Having recently perused a good sample of Buchanan’s work, I think I see more clearly what has always at least cushioned his place in the media. When it comes to matters of terrorism, Israel, and, above all, Islam, “hard-right,” “nativist,” “pro-Stars-and-Bars” Buchanan operated not against the Left but in concord with it. This becomes relevant amid the current drive to see that Buchanan, now 87 years old, receives a Medal of Freedom from President Trump — an augur, it would seem, of a more important effort: to make Buchanan the godfather of a “Christian nationalist” future in America. This, however, would not be a conservative American future at all.

Some or all of this may surprise readers, especially those who are mainly familiar with Buchanan’s best-of-Trump — or Trump’s best-of-Buchanan’s —immigration agenda. I think many would be shocked, as I was, to bone up on Buchanan’s years of defending, for example, Islamic blasphemy laws against criticizing Islam, or even drawing images of Mohammed. Perhaps they would also find Buchanan’s tortured rationale for capital punishment for leaving Islam disturbing, too.

Consider Buchanan’s reaction to the epochal clash between the West and Islam over what became known as the Danish Mohammed Cartoons. This was the free speech battle that picked up after 9/11 where the Salman Rushdie “fatwa” (death sentence) by Iran for his novel Satanic Verses left off.

I covered the Motoon battle for years, even reported on it from Denmark. As a reminder in brief, this struggle between the West and Islam ensued after a tiny Danish newspaper, Jyllands-Posten, published a set of cartoons and drawings of Mohammed in 2005 in order to demonstrate that the nation of Denmark had a flourishing free press and was not in any way obligated to follow blasphemy laws of Islam prohibiting the publication of images of Mohammed. As Western support for Denmark’s free speech failed to materialize or cratered, this turned out to be a pipe dream, and a sharia-blow to free speech all across the West.

But first, organized Muslim protests against the Danish cartoons would rock the world with violence, even killings, arson, boycotts of Danish goods, diplomatic crises. Terror plots would have to be tracked and uncovered for years. One of the Danish artists, Kurt Westergaard, was nearly hatcheted to death by a jihadist in own home while he was babysitting his granddaughter one New Year’s Eve. Where was American journalist Pat Buchanan on this terrible assault on free speech in the West, surely a contributing factor to what he would later call “The Death of the West”? Buchanan was there, all right, but he was pitching for Islamic blasphemy law.

This is what he wrote in February 2006: 
 
Does this sound like hot type from a feisty American columnist fighting for free speech — or a handout on Islamic blasphemy law from Al-Ahzar University, CAIR, or Steve Witcoff’s office?

He continued:
 
And:
 
If Buchanan is not, as he might say, a “Likudnik,” he is also not a Free-Speechnik. Back in 1989, it turns out, he was passionately defending Islamic sensibilities from a novel, Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie, a British writer forced into hiding after Iran put a death sentence and bounty on his head for his criticism of Islam — again in a Western country.

Buchanan on the fatwa’ed Rushdie in hiding?
 
NB: Westerners were that much braver in 1989 than in 2005:
 
Writers as felons? Yup — under Islam, that is.

In a subsequent column, Buchanan’s First Amendment “felons” become “moral barbarians” — an even stranger term, perhaps, for Western writers even as Muslims were calling and actively hunting for one of their heads. (As I recall, a Japanese translator of the Rushdie book was murdered, while Rushdie himself, quite recently, was partly blinded and crippled in a blade-jihad attack.) Even several years later, however, Buchanan was still smarting from Rushdie’s offense against Islam. “People of the Muslim faith had every right to feel wounded and insulted” by Rushdie’s novel, he wrote in 1993, bemoaning Rushdie’s visit to the Clinton White House.

We might say it gets worse, as I now turn to Buchanan’s peculiar apologia for the Islamic death penalty for leaving Islam. Commenting on the case of Abdul Rahman, one of a handful of Christians in US-occupied Afghanistan, whom Islamic authorities condemned to death after Rahman was found to possess a Bible, Buchanan wrote in 2006:
 
Christ was — what?? — crucified for being an apostate to Judaism?? Is Buchanan doing “hummus eaters” next? Sigh. Noting that Catholics in England burnt Protestants at the stake, and vice versa, he continues:
 
None of this is endorse killing in the name of God but …. Do my eyes deceive me or is Buchanan saying death for “apostasy” is only human?
 
OK. He is now veering off the rails, which brings this exercise to an end. We are to believe that a man who chooses to leave Islam (in the privacy of his home, btw) for, in this case, Christianity, is akin to communist spies who commit treason on behalf of a genocidal dictatorship that seeks the overthrow of our Constitution, not to mention religion, in order to enslave or kill us all. Someone has smashed his moral compass, no? What bleeds through here is the dark ink of moral equivalence, accommodationism, pandering, submission — dhimmitude.

A little more:
 
If Patrick Buchanan were not in retirement, he just might find a good sinecure as wazir for the new caliph of New York. That aside, is Islamic law the future of American conservatism? Whatever you do, don’t ask Tucker Carlson’s emirs, because they will say yes.

This column appears with the kind permission of Diana West, author of the must-read books The Red Thread: A Search for Ideological Drivers Inside the Anti-Trump Conspiracy and American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on Our Nation’s Character. For more from Diana West go to https://dianawest.substack.com/ Her latest book, Wake Up and Smell the Culture is now available on Amazon.

 

• Pat Buchanan
• Christian Nationalism
• Tucker Carlson
• Trump administration
• illegal immigration
• Lou Dobbs
• open borders
• racism
• Nativism
• Israel
• Gulf War
• Danish Mohammed Cartoons
• Sharia Law
• Kurt Westergaard

 

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