Gaddafi’s Evangelical Advocate: Ray Comfort

Muammar Gaddafi doesn’t exactly remind you of Jesus. So you can imagine my surprise when I opened up my inbox on April 4 and saw that Ray Comfort, a star in the evangelical world as co-host of The Way of the Master with Kirk Cameron, sent out a short piece titled, “What You May Not Know About Gaddafi.” What followed was what amounted to a press release for that lovable, grandpa-like Libyan dictator who, Comfort apparently believes, is being given a bad shake.

“He [Gaddafi] then promoted non-violent protests and said he believed that if a leader lost the popularity of his own people, he should peacefully step down. He also considered himself to be one of the people, and that’s why he preferred to be called ‘colonel’ rather than ‘general,’” Comfort writes.

With spin like that, Comfort could make a nice living as a freelance propagandist for every rogue leader around the world. Every single headline out of Libya since February 15 discredits this characterization of Gaddafi. He is a dictator, though Comfort does not call him that, and he has decided that it is worth subjecting his country to civil war and destruction to continue being one. The only way he has “promoted non-violent protests” is by instigating them with his bloodthirsty and power-hungry rule.

Facts absent from Comfort’s piece include Gaddafi’s role as a leading state sponsor of terrorism in the 1980s that included killing Americans, most notably in the 1988 Lockerbie bombing and the 1986 bombing of a disco in Berlin. He has ruthlessly slaughtered his own people at home and has sent assassins to hunt down his enemies abroad. He reacted to this year’s popular uprising with brutality — even  machine-gunning mourners at his victims’ funerals. “Peacefully stepping down” is not an option for him. The U.S. alone has frozen $33 billion of his regime’s assets, money that could have helped alleviate the poverty of his people but instead went to fund the lavish lifestyle of Gaddafi and his inner circle.

The only negative fact Comfort includes in his article is that “in 1971, he offered to merge Libya with Sudan, but the Sudanese President refused, saying that Gaddafi had a split personality — ‘both parts evil.’” This sentence seems out of place in the article and it is unclear what point Comfort is trying to make. It’s possible that he’s trying to make Gaddafi seem like some sort of diplomat; an effort certain to fail given Gaddafi’s declaration of jihad “with all means” against Switzerland. Then there was his son’s statement “If I had an atomic bomb, I would wipe Switzerland off the map” and his preaching of radical Islam, including violent jihad.

Comfort’s closing statement is so detached from reality that it is hard to even comprehend:

The U.S. is now embroiled in a third war — this time with this man, trying to clean up his nation — while we have the holocaust of abortion (over 50 million murdered in the womb) in our own. Pray for America.

The U.S., because of its legalization of abortion, has no moral standing to judge the admirable Muammar Gaddafi, who is “trying to clean up his nation”? Right, that’s what all those bombs and mercenaries are for. When he was on the verge of massacring the rebels at Benghazi, he said his forces “will come house by house, room by room” and “we will find you in your closets. We will have no mercy.” I guess Gaddafi meant that his military was determined to find the rebels so they could be scrubbed free of germs.

Since reading this article, I’ve thought long and hard as to why Comfort would want his readers to view Gaddafi so innocently and I have yet to come to an explanation. Maybe it’s that he views Gaddafi’s death toll as so small in comparison to the number of babies aborted that the Libyan dictator looks tame by comparison. Maybe Comfort views President Obama as so morally corrupt that he instinctively embraces the man he stands against. Whatever the case is, the lack of a negative reaction from the evangelical community is disappointing. I have yet to find a single article by a Christian taking Comfort to task.

It is fine to oppose the war in Libya. It is not fine to act as the publicist for Muammar Gaddafi. Jesus would not stand by idly as someone who preaches in His name glorifies a mass-murderer. Neither should we.