by Andrew C. McCarthy

In 1993 I was a seasoned federal prosecutor, but I only knew as much about Islam as the average American with a reasonably good education—which is to say, not much. Consequently, when I was assigned to lead the prosecution of a terrorist cell that had bombed the World Trade Center and was plotting an even more devastating strike—simultaneous attacks on the Lincoln and Holland Tunnels, the United Nations complex on the East River, and the FBI’s lower Manhattan headquarters—I had no trouble believing what our government was saying: that we should read nothing into the fact that all the men in this terrorist cell were Muslims; that their actions were not representative of any religion or belief system; and that to the extent they were explaining their atrocities by citing Islamic scripture, they were twisting and perverting one of the world’s great religions, a religion that encourages peace.

Unlike commentators and government press secretaries, I had to examine these claims. Prosecutors don’t get to base their cases on assertions. They have to prove things to commonsense Americans who must be satisfied about not only what happened but why it happened before they will convict people of serious crimes. And in examining the claims, I found them false.

One of the first things I learned concerned the leader of the terror cell, Omar Abdel Rahman, infamously known as the Blind Sheikh. Our government was portraying him as a wanton killer who was lying about Islam by preaching that it summoned Muslims to jihad or holy war. Far from a lunatic, however, he turned out to be a globally renowned scholar—a doctor of Islamic jurisprudence who graduated from al-Azhar University in Cairo, the seat of Sunni Islamic learning for over a millennium. His area of academic expertise was sharia—Islamic law.

I immediately began to wonder why American officials from President Bill Clinton and Attorney General Janet Reno on down, officials who had no background in Muslim doctrine and culture, believed they knew more about Islam than the Blind Sheikh. Then something else dawned on me: the Blind Sheikh was not only blind; he was beset by several other medical handicaps. That seemed relevant. After all, terrorism is hard work. Here was a man incapable of doing anything that would be useful to a terrorist organization—he couldn’t build a bomb, hijack a plane, or carry out an assassination. Yet he was the unquestioned leader of the terror cell. Was this because there was more to his interpretation of Islamic doctrine than our government was conceding?

Defendants do not have to testify at criminal trials, but they have a right to testify if they choose to—so I had to prepare for the possibility. Raised an Irish Catholic in the Bronx, I was not foolish enough to believe I could win an argument over Muslim theology with a doctor of Islamic jurisprudence. But I did think that if what we were saying as a government was true—that he was perverting Islam—then there must be two or three places where I could nail him by saying, “You told your followers X, but the doctrine clearly says Y.” So my colleagues and I pored over the Blind Sheikh’s many writings. And what we found was alarming: whenever he quoted the Koran or other sources of Islamic scripture, he quoted them accurately.

Now, you might be able to argue that he took scripture out of context or gave an incomplete account of it. In my subsequent years of studying Islam, I’ve learned that this is not a particularly persuasive argument. But even if one concedes for the purposes of discussion that it’s a colorable claim, the inconvenient fact remains: Abdel Rahman was not lying about Islam.

When he said the scriptures command that Muslims strike terror into the hearts of Islam’s enemies, the scriptures backed him up.

When he said Allah enjoined all Muslims to wage jihad until Islamic law was established throughout the world, the scriptures backed him up.

When he said Islam directed Muslims not to take Jews and Christians as their friends, the scriptures backed him up.

You could counter that there are other ways of construing the scriptures. You could contend that these exhortations to violence and hatred should be “contextualized”—i.e., that they were only meant for their time and place in the seventh century.  Again, I would caution that there are compelling arguments against this manner of interpreting Islamic scripture. The point, however, is that what you’d be arguing is an interpretation.

The fact that there are multiple ways of construing Islam hardly makes the Blind Sheikh’s literal construction wrong. The blunt fact of the matter is that, in this contest of competing interpretations, it is the jihadists who seem to be making sense because they have the words of scripture on their side—it is the others who seem to be dancing on the head of a pin. For our present purposes, however, the fact is that the Blind Sheikh’s summons to jihad was rooted in a coherent interpretation of Islamic doctrine. He was not perverting Islam—he was, if anything, shining a light on the need to reform it.

Another point, obvious but inconvenient, is that Islam is not a religion of peace. There are ways of interpreting Islam that could make it something other than a call to war. But even these benign constructions do not make it a call to peace. Verses such as “Fight those who believe not in Allah,” and “Fight and slay the pagans wherever ye find them, and seize them, beleaguer them, and lie in wait for them in every stratagem of war,” are not peaceful injunctions, no matter how one contextualizes.

Another disturbing aspect of the trial against the Blind Sheikh and his fellow jihadists was the character witnesses who testified for the defense. Most of these people were moderate, peaceful Muslim Americans who would no more commit terrorist acts than the rest of us. But when questions about Islamic doctrine would come up—“What does jihad mean?” “What is sharia?” “How might sharia apply to a certain situation?”—these moderate, peaceful Muslims explained that they were not competent to say. In other words, for the answers, you’d have to turn to Islamic scholars like the Blind Sheikh.

Now, understand: there was no doubt what the Blind Sheikh was on trial for. And there was no doubt that he was a terrorist—after all, he bragged about it. But that did not disqualify him, in the minds of these moderate, peaceful Muslims, from rendering authoritative opinions on the meaning of the core tenets of their religion. No one was saying that they would follow the Blind Sheikh into terrorism—but no one was discrediting his status either.

Although this came as a revelation to me, it should not have. After all, it is not as if Western civilization had no experience dealing with Islamic supremacism—what today we call “Islamist” ideology, the belief that sharia must govern society. Winston Churchill, for one, had encountered it as a young man serving in the British army, both in the border region between modern-day Afghanistan and Pakistan and in the Sudan—places that are still cauldrons of Islamist terror. Ever the perceptive observer, Churchill wrote:

How dreadful are the curses which Mohammedanism lays on its votaries! Besides the fanatical frenzy, which is as dangerous in a man as hydrophobia in a dog, there is this fearful fatalistic apathy. . . . Improvident habits, slovenly systems of agriculture, sluggish methods of commerce, and insecurity of property exist wherever the followers of the Prophet rule or live. A degraded sensualism deprives this life of its grace and refinement; the next of its dignity and sanctity. The fact that in Mohammedan law every woman must belong to some man as his absolute property—either as a child, a wife, or a concubine—must delay the final extinction of slavery until the faith of Islam has ceased to be a great power among men.

Habitually, I distinguish between Islam and Muslims. It is objectively important to do so, but I also have a personal reason: when I began working on national security cases, the Muslims I first encountered were not terrorists. To the contrary, they were pro-American patriots who helped us infiltrate terror cells, disrupt mass-murder plots, and gather the evidence needed to convict jihadists. We have an obligation to our national security to understand our enemies; but we also have an obligation to our principles not to convict by association—not to confound our Islamist enemies with our Muslim allies and fellow citizens. Churchill appreciated this distinction. “Individual Moslems,” he stressed, “may show splendid qualities. Thousands become the brave and loyal soldiers of the Queen.” The problem was not the people, he concluded. It was the doctrine.

What about Islamic law? On this topic, it is useful to turn to Robert Jackson, a giant figure in American law and politics—FDR’s attorney general, justice of the Supreme Court, and chief prosecutor of the war crimes trials at Nuremberg. In 1955, Justice Jackson penned the foreword to a book called Law in the Middle East. Unlike today’s government officials, Justice Jackson thought sharia was a subject worthy of close study.  And here is what he concluded:

In any broad sense, Islamic law offers the American lawyer a study in dramatic contrasts. Even casual acquaintance and superficial knowledge—all that most of us at bench or bar will be able to acquire—reveal that its striking features relative to our law are not likenesses but inconsistencies, not similarities but contrarieties. In its source, its scope and its sanctions, the law of the Middle East is the antithesis of Western law.

Contrast this with the constitution that the U.S. government helped write for post-Taliban Afghanistan, which showed no awareness of the opposition of Islamic and Western law. That constitution contains soaring tropes about human rights, yet it makes Islam the state religion and sharia a principal source of law—and under it, Muslim converts to Christianity have been subjected to capital trials for apostasy.

Sharia rejects freedom of speech as much as freedom of religion. It rejects the idea of equal rights between men and women as much as between Muslim and non-Muslim. It brooks no separation between spiritual life and civil society. It is a comprehensive framework for human life, dictating matters of government, economy, and combat, along with personal behavior such as contact between the sexes and personal hygiene. Sharia aims to rule both believers and non-believers, and it affirmatively sanctions jihad in order to do so.

Even if this is not the only construction of Islam, it is absurd to claim—as President Barack Obama did during his recent visit to a mosque in Baltimore—that it is not a mainstream interpretation. In fact, it is the mainstream interpretation in many parts of the world. Last year, Americans were horrified by the beheadings of three Western journalists by ISIS. American and European politicians could not get to microphones fast enough to insist that these decapitations had nothing to do with Islam. Yet within the same time frame, the government of Saudi Arabia beheaded eight people for various violations of sharia—the law that governs Saudi Arabia.

Three weeks before Christmas, a jihadist couple—an American citizen, the son of Pakistani immigrants, and his Pakistani wife who had been welcomed into our country on a fiancée visa—carried out a jihadist attack in San Bernardino, California, killing 14 people. Our government, as with the case in Fort Hood—where a jihadist who had infiltrated the Army killed 13 innocents, mostly fellow soldiers—resisted calling the atrocity a “terrorist attack.” Why? Our investigators are good at what they do, and our top officials may be ideological, but they are not stupid. Why is it that they can’t say two plus two equals four when Islam is involved?

The reason is simple: stubbornly unwilling to deal with the reality of Islam, our leaders have constructed an Islam of their very own. This triumph of willful blindness and political correctness over common sense was best illustrated by former British Home Secretary Jacqui Smith when she described terrorism as “anti-Islamic activity.” In other words, the savagery is not merely unrelated to Islam; it becomes, by dint of its being inconsistent with a “religion of peace,”contrary to Islam. This explains our government’s handwringing over “radicalization”: we are supposed to wonder why young Muslims spontaneously become violent radicals—as if there is no belief system involved.

This is political correctness on steroids, and it has dangerous policy implications. Consider the inability of government officials to call a mass-murder attack by Muslims a terrorist attack unless and until the police uncover evidence proving that the mass murderers have some tie to a designated terrorist group, such as ISIS or al Qaeda. It is rare for such evidence to be uncovered early in an investigation—and as a matter of fact, such evidence often does not exist. Terrorist recruits already share the same ideology as these groups: the goal of imposing sharia. All they need in order to execute terrorist attacks is paramilitary training, which is readily available in more places than just Syria.

The dangerous flipside to our government’s insistence on making up its own version of Islam is that anyone who is publicly associated with Islam must be deemed peaceful. This is how we fall into the trap of allowing the Muslim Brotherhood, the world’s most influential Islamic supremacist organization, to infiltrate policy-making organs of the U.S. government, not to mention our schools, our prisons, and other institutions. The federal government, particularly under the Obama administration, acknowledges the Brotherhood as an Islamic organization—notwithstanding the ham-handed attempt by the intelligence community a few years back to rebrand it as “largely secular”—thereby giving it a clean bill of health. This despite the fact that Hamas is the Brotherhood’s Palestinian branch, that the Brotherhood has a long history of terrorist violence, and that major Brotherhood figures have gone on to play leading roles in terrorist organizations such as al Qaeda.

To quote Churchill again:  “Facts are better than dreams.” In the real world, we must deal with the facts of Islamic supremacism, because its jihadist legions have every intention of dealing with us. But we can only defeat them if we resolve to see them for what they are.

This article was originally posted at Imprimis.hillsdale.edu, and was adapted from a speech delivered on February 24, 2016, at Hillsdale College’s Allan P. Kirby, Jr. Center for Constitutional Studies and Citizenship in Washington, D.C., as part of the AWC Family Foundation Lecture Series.

Andrew C. McCarthy is a senior fellow at the National Review Institute. A graduate of Columbia College, he received his J.D. at New York Law School. For 18 years, he was an Assistant U.S. Attorney in the Southern District of New York, and from 1993-95 he led the terrorism prosecution against Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman and 11 others in connection with the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and a plot to bomb New York City landmarks. Following the 9/11 attacks, he supervised the Justice Department’s command post near Ground Zero. He has also served as a Special Assistant to the Deputy Secretary of Defense and an adjunct professor at Fordham University’s School of Law and New York Law School. He writes widely for newspapers and journals including National Review, PJ Media, and The New Criterion, and is the author of several books, including Willful Blindness: A Memoir of the Jihad and Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotages America.

Renowned Evangelical flagship Wheaton College has been embroiled in a controversy generated by the Facebook statement from associate professor of political science Larycia Hawkins that Muslims and Christians worship the same God. She made this statement when she announced that during the entire Advent season, she would wear a hijab, the traditional head-covering required of Muslim women when in public. Hawkins viewed this as an act of “embodied politics, embodied solidarity” as opposed to what she deems “theoretical solidarity.” Wandering around America wearing a hijab was Hawkins’ rather peculiar application of James 2:26: “For as the body apart from the spirit is dead, so also faith apart from works is dead.”

Hawkins also strangely believes that her claim that Christians and Muslims worship the same God is not a theological statement. Perhaps she didn’t intend it to be a theological statement, but it quite definitively is.

In a justifiable attempt to discern how closely Hawkins hews to the Statement of Faith that all Wheaton faculty sign, she was asked to clarify her theological beliefs and subsequently to clarify her murky “nuanced” clarification (Her clarifying theological statement has a curious explanation of the Eucharist), at which point Hawkins took umbrage, arguing that her annual signature on the Statement of Faith is sufficient. She has been suspended, and Wheaton is under attack from within and without the Wheaton College community.

Poisonous allegations have emerged from those who detest the biblical orthodoxy of Wheaton and the cultural beliefs that emerge from it that Wheaton administrators and/or trustees are treating Hawkins unfairly because of hidden or not-so-hidden racism. Less poisonous but problematic nonetheless are complaints that the culture of Wheaton restricts academic freedom and limits diversity.

Hawkins’ suspension and the debate about whether Christians and Muslims worship the same God reveal a troubling fissure created by a handful of Wheaton faculty members who tilt leftward on both theological and so-called “social issues.” This divide needs to be more comprehensively and clearly exposed to all Wheaton College stakeholders, including alumni donors.

With dancing-on-pinheads complexity, Wheaton urban studies associate professor Noah Toly, Princeton systematics professor Bruce Lindley McCormick, and Yale theologian Miroslav Volf have all assured the nation that there are strong (though abstruse) arguments to defend Hawkins’ theological view of the sameness of the god of Islam and the God of the Bible. But then there are others, like president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary Dr. Al Mohler, Moody Bible Church pastor Dr. Erwin Lutzer, theologian Peter Leithart, and Christian apologist for Ravi Zacharias International Ministries Nabeel Qureshi, all of whom, though acknowledging the complexity of the theological issue, argue that the god of Islam and the God of the Bible are not the same.

What is most interesting about the debate is that those Wheaton professors most ardently supportive of Hawkins’ liberal-ish theological views are also those professors most ardently liberal on social issues. Coincidence?

Two of the most prominent defenders of Hawkins are also likely sitting port-side on the flagship Wheaton: Michael Mangis and Brian Howell.

Professor Michael Mangis

Dr. Michael Mangis is a psychology professor who on Monday, the first day of the new semester, shivered around campus and to his classes wearing his academic regalia (i.e., cap, gown, hood) to signify solidarity with Hawkins and to show his commitment to “learning,” which he asserts Wheaton has lost as evidenced by their effort to ensure that Wheaton faculty affirm theological orthodoxy:

The academic robe has long been a symbol of learning. And learning requires humility and a willingness to be changed….[The] college as an institution is refusing to learn. I’m going to wear this robe as a reminder and a call to us to return to learning.

I wonder if Mangis is open to learning and willing to change.

Christian parents of Wheaton students, Wheaton donors, trustees, and administrators should be deeply troubled by the comment that Mangis left under Hawkins’ initial Facebook post: “If you get any grief at work give me a heads-up because I’ll be leading my spring psychology of religion class in Muslim prayers.” Even liberal supporter Mangis could see the problematic nature of Hawkins’ theological claim even before the imbroglio began.

A young pastor and friend who attended Wheaton for both undergraduate and graduate school asked the question that parents, trustees, and administrators should be asking: “In what universe should Christian instruction include Muslim prayers?”

In an interview about the controversy, Mangis shared that he’s volunteered to teach about “white privilege” at a student-organized “teach-in.” No need for Wheaton students to travel to the annual White Privilege Conference when they’ve got ever-learning, ever-changing psychology professor Mangis right there at Wheaton.

In a biased Chicago Tribune “news” story yesterday, Mangis whined about lack of diversity at Wheaton:

We have been entrenched in a white male evangelical groupthink for so long….We need to get out of that. It has come by bringing fresh voices and new perspectives. But when you have those fresh voices, you can’t say you don’t sound enough like a white male evangelical. [Hawkins] was not sounding enough like the old school way of doing things.

Yeah, you wouldn’t want any old-school, white, male perspectives on the nature of God to interfere with political science professor Hawkins’ fresh perspective on it.

But wait. I’m confused. Those arguing that, yes, indeedy, Christians and Muslims worship the same God explained that such a perspective is old, very, very old, and espoused by a boatload of men, many of whom had the distinct misfortune of being white.

It is true that the ideological diversity of faculty members is limited by Wheaton’s intellectual and moral commitments, just as the ideological diversity of faculty members at colleges that formally espouse liberal intellectual and moral commitments regarding homosexuality and gender dysphoria is limited. What liberals really desire is the eradication of institutional places for orthodox theological views and conservative moral views to be taught. If one exists, they seek to regulate it out of existence or infiltrate it and change it from within.

Professor Brian Howell

Mangis wasn’t alone on Monday. With his solidarity snazzily embodied, anthropology professor Dr. Brian Howell also sashayed about campus in his academic regalia. Howell first came to my attention following the resignation last July of Julie Rodgers, Wheaton College’s most recent and notable bad hire. (Interesting side note, Rodgers was standing behind Hawkins at her recent press conference.)

Rodgers is well-known for her self-identification as a “celibate gay Christian.” She was hired in the Fall of 2014 as a ministry associate for spiritual care in the Chaplain’s Office to counsel students experiencing same-sex attraction. When she was hired many people who love Wheaton College were deeply troubled because of Rodger’s perspective on and seeming flippancy about homoerotic attractions as revealed in statements like this:

When I feel all Lesbiany, I experience it as a desire to build a home with a woman that will create an energizing love that spills over into the kind of hospitality that actually provides guests with clean sheets and something other than protein bars…. This causes me to see the world through a different lens than my straight peers, to exist in the world in a slightly different way. As God has redeemed and transformed me, he’s tapped into those gay parts of me that now overflow into compassion for marginalized people and empathy for social outcasts

A year later, in July, 2015, Rodgers wrote that she had evolved and no longer opposes homoerotic relationships:  “I’ve quietly supported same-sex relationships for a while now. When friends have chosen to lay their lives down for their partners, I’ve celebrated their commitment to one another.” Rodgers then rightly resigned.

After her resignation, president of the Manhattan Declaration and Wheaton College alumnus Eric Teetsel wrote on his Facebook page that Wheaton College owed Wheaton students, their parents, and alumni an apology for hiring her. Howell arrogantly and hostilely replied both to Teetsel and to other commenters:

Eric, you are being a jerk here. Wheaton does not need to “apologize” for Julie. She did not “affirm” or counsel students into same-sex relationships. She SAYS, if you will READ it, that she assumes some, in their desire to follow Jesus, will find themselves in same-sex relationships. I knew this would happen. People who make a living stoking the fires of the culture war would throw this down. “See, told you so! Gay people! It’s how they are!” I just wish you could be better than that.…

Sometimes bad behavior needs to be called out, and this sort of culture warring is un-Christian and reprehensible. I’m not impugning [Eric’s] salvation. Yes, he is a Christian. I just don’t think he’s acting like it right now….[Eric’s] post is just a smug little victory dance and is, well, jerky.

…

For the record, Eric was a student of mine (for one class) when he was at Wheaton, so, yes, I may take a condescending tone, but I will always see him as a younger brother and former student. That’s just how it goes.

As a parent of two Wheaton grads (who married Wheaton grads), I wholeheartedly agree that the Wheaton administration owed students and their parents an apology for such a terrible hire. The problematic nature of Rodgers’ ideas about homosexuality was clear before Wheaton hired her.

Leftist arrogance is on display when Howell claims that “this sort of culture warring is un-Christian,” while apparently believing his sort of culture-warring is Christian. Howell’s implicit accusation that Teetsel is stoking the fires of the culture war is absurd. It’s pyro-“progressives” who started the fires and unashamedly fuel them. Every politically engaged conservative I know sincerely desires for the cultural conflagration to be extinguished posthaste but not at the cost of sacrificing marriage, truth, and the eternal lives of those trapped within false religions or destructive ideologies.

“Progressives,” on the other hand, seem to want the fires to die down only after they’ve engulfed the entire culture. They would like theologically orthodox men and women to pipe down while children, teens, and adults become entangled in deception and confusion. Far too many theologically orthodox Christians have been silent in response to the pernicious ideas torching the earth.

I spent some time on Howell’s Facebook page to see if I could figure out which “sort of culture-warring” is  Christian:

• He’s glad about InterVarsity Christian Fellowship’s controversial invitation to a representative from the far Left, homosexuality-affirming Black Lives Matter organization to speak at a recent conference.
• He wants America to stop talking about building a fence on the border with Mexico.
• He wants Nevada to go solar.
• He wants more persons of color in academia (I haven’t seen any posts yet about the dearth of conservatives—both colorless and colorful—in secular academia).
• He supports Bernie Sanders’ position on student debt.
• He opposes palm oil plantations that harm rainforests.
• He supports more government regulation of guns.

Since Howell posts a lot about injustice, I was eager to read his posts about the most egregious ongoing injustice in America—the genocide of the unborn—which became a huge national debate following the release of undercover videos that exposed the reality of abortionists’ view of humans in utero. I managed to find one post by Howell on this unspeakable American horror. He posted a piece from liberal Jesuit magazine America that he described as “a very careful and balanced perspective.” The article is an extended criticism of the Center for Medical Progress for what the writer believes is unfair, selective editing. The following day after intense criticism, the writer added a clarification that he opposes abortion. Howell posted his recommendation of the article prior to the clarification.

So, other than opposing unfair, selective editing of the undercover videos, Howell is silent on the legalized slaughter of the unborn.

Perhaps I overlooked them, but I also couldn’t find any posts about the gross injustice represented by the Obergefell travesty that imposed same-sex faux-marriage on the entire country—a decision with grave implications for children’s rights and the First Amendment.

I did notice a couple of Howell’s Facebook “likes” that are difficult to reconcile with theological orthodoxy. He “likes” Wild Gender, “an online art space born out of gratitude for the gift of full expression. Who would we be without those who walked so wildly before? As such, WG strives to provide a space for  queer and gender-variant art makers and purveyors to share work and praxis, aiming to amplify those with intersectional identities.”

He also “likes” Rainbow Moms which invites “Proud Rainbow Moms [and] parents of LGBTQ kids! We are proud of our kids, and we are here to support each other in our new community! What is NOT welcome: Intolerance, Religious rhetoric, Anti LGBT speech or links.”

While Wheaton is under scrutiny for the doctrinal beliefs of a faculty member and cultural application of those beliefs, perhaps it would be a good time to hear with clarity what Mangis, Howell and all other Wheaton faculty members believe about issues upon which theology directly appertains, like abortion, homosexuality, and gender dysphoria.

What is really revealed through this controversy is not hidden racism, white privilege, academic provincialism, or an institutional resistance to learning. What is revealed is spiritual warfare. The nature and intensity of the criticism directed at this small private college, which stands courageously for Christ and His Kingdom in the midst of an ocean of colleges and universities that stand arrogantly in opposition to Christ and truth, exposes nothing other than old-as-the-hills spiritual warfare. Make no mistake, doctrinal fidelity at Wheaton College matters.

Worldview Conference with Dr. Wayne Grudem

We are very excited about our second annual Worldview Conference featuring world-renowned theologian Dr. Wayne Grudem on Saturday, February 20, 2016 in Barrington. Click HERE to register today!

In the morning sessions, Dr. Grudem will speak on how biblical values provide the only effective solution to world poverty and about the moral advantages of a free-market economic system. In the afternoon, Dr. Grudem will address why Christians—and especially pastors—should influence government for good as well as tackle the moral and spiritual issues in the 2016 election.

We look forward to this worldview-training and pray it will be a blessing to you.

Click HERE for a flyer.

Written by Joseph Backholm

You may not know what dhimmitude is and hopefully you never experience it.

But you’ve probably heard of ISIS (the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria) and you’re almost surely aware of what Christians are.

Dhimmitude is an Islamic system that governs non-Muslims who have been conquered through Jihad by folks like ISIS.

If you surrender to Muslim control – though not Muslim – you are referred to as dhimmi.

Sounds fun, right?

If ISIS took over the town you live in, they might move door to door and give you three options: “convert to Islam, pay the jizya, or die.”

The jizya is a tax for not being Muslim.

It doesn’t apply to everyone, but paying it is seen as proof of your subjection to the Jihadist state and its laws. In return, non-Muslim subjects are permitted to practice their faith, to enjoy a measure of communal autonomy, to be entitled to the Muslim state’s protection from outside aggression.

Acknowledging the difference, there are parallels between the way Jihadists treat those who are in dhimmitude and the way the new sexual revolution in America seeks to treat those who disagree with their (religious?) beliefs about sexuality and marriage.

Once they have political power, they are giving businesses three options “convert, pay a fine, or die” (economically, not physically).

After Arlene’s Flowers was sued for declining to decorate for a same-sex wedding, Attorney General Bob Ferguson offered to settle (demanded the jizya) for $2,000 on the condition that she would “convert,” or agree to make business decisions according to the state’s new values.

Only a few days ago, a judge in Oregon fined a bakery $135,000 because they attempted to run their business according to their Christian beliefs about sexuality rather than the government’s. When they rejected the government’s demands that they convert or pay the jizya, the government opted for what amounts to the economic death penalty.

“Nonsense,” you argue. “They broke the law. Having penalties for breaking the law isn’t exactly innovative. Nor is it jihadist.”

Fair enough.

But the left’s new found impulse to be sticklers for the letter of the law misses the larger point.

The left is proposing a regime change that fundamentally alters freedoms that have been taken for granted for in America for centuries.

Christians, Jews, Muslims and others have been not participating in same-sex “weddings” for millennia.

But under the new regime, doing what has always been done is illegal.

Your choice. Convert, pay a fine if you refuse to convert and then convert, or experience economic death.

Like the jizya, the non-discrimination law discriminates.  It protects one person’s right to decline to participate in an activity they disagree with, but denies that right to others. 

The good news is that if you accept the terms of the new regime, you will still be allowed a measure of communal autonomy, and be entitled to other benefits from the state.

Imagine a new law compelling church attendance or pork consumption on the grounds that refusing to participate is discriminatory. (Which, of course, it is. But that’s the kind of discrimination lefties still like.)

Being indignant with the atheist who objects to compulsory church attendance would be stupid since he’s simply doing what atheists have always done.

“But it’s the law,” you say, self-righteously.

“But it shouldn’t be the law, and you should know better,” he says in response.

And of course he’s right.

The way non-discrimination laws are being interpreted right now is not a modification to the building code that frustrates some builders or a change in the speed law that catches unsuspecting drivers.

It is a regime change that seeks to fundamentally alter the way Americans have always lived. It seeks to create the kind of conformity that America was created in opposition to.

America doesn’t and shouldn’t have conquered peoples. We make room for the atheists, Christians, Muslims, or Jew to be who they are, not just in their preferred place of worship, but in the rest of their life as well. We respect the right for people to be who they are, even if we think they’re silly and ignorant. We understand that we’re different and we make room for that.

Dhimmitude is for jihadists, not for Americans.

This article was originally posted on the blog of the Family Policy Institute of Washington.

Written by Johnnie Moore

It seems that every day is met with a new atrocity stemming from the Islamic State. We’ve lost track of the executions, the crimes against women and children are incalculable and unconscionable, and it seems that every drop of innocent blood feeds a thirst for more.

Their particular taste for Christian blood is most alarming to many of us who’ve watched from afar at their unrelenting advance on ancient Christian communities that have –until now- thrived in Iraq and Syria for nearly two thousand years.

ISIS has displaced tens-of-thousands and burned their churches, targeted their pastors, sold their children as slaves, and murdered countless among them. One particular account I’ve documented in my book Defying ISIS describes how the terror group arrived in one Christian town along the Nineveh Plain waving daggers and swords as they screamed, “shall we start beheading women and children or start with the old and the disabled? … we will behead all of you unless you convert.”

Christianity was born in the east, not the west, and we are witnessing a once-in-a-thousand-year attempt at destroying it in the place of its birth; so, how should we as Christians in the west respond to the threat of ISIS against Christians in the east?

Educate Ourselves

A global lack of concern isn’t for a lack of information. Nearly every major news organization in the United States, and abroad, has given significant coverage to the threat of ISIS against Christians and other religious minorities. It’s time we pay attention to the news, and pay particular attention to those outlets based in Europe (like France 24, BBC, and Sky News) and in the Middle East (like Al Jazeera, and Rudaw). Follow reporters like Jane Arraf on twitter who are covering the situation from within the region, and follow non-profit organizations that give particular attention to the threats against religious minorities (like the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, Human Rights Watch, and The Institute for Global Engagement.).

When you know what’s happening, and know the stories of those in harm’s way, it gives you empathy, inspires you to action, and prepares you to rally others to the cause. It also helps prevent you from underestimating or oversimplifying this crisis. I wrote Defying ISIS precisely to serve as an introduction to the issue for those who want to know more. Thankfully, Harper Collins Christian Publishing made the remarkable decision to release the eBook early because of their own corporate concern for endangered Christians.

Read it and recommend it to others.

Churches and Christians Must Pray As Never Before

We are witnessing one of the most severe and unrelenting attempts at Christian persecution in church history. It’s happening in our time – in our modern era – and on our watch. This isn’t a time for churches to dedicate a Sunday a year to praying for the persecuted church, but a time when every single Christian church in every single place ought to be praying without pause for our brothers and sisters in Christ who sit in the path of ISIS. There should not be a single Sunday or a single church where this isn’t a topic of focused prayer every day. This type of crisis happens once in a millennium, and it demands that we pray as we never have before, and that we pray as we hope others would pray for us.

Churches must also do as the early church in Antioch did when the church in Judea was suffering through a famine. They generously gave to help their brothers and sisters survive. Churches in the west ought to be collecting tens of millions of dollars to help those in the east who’ve been displaced and who are under threat. The humanitarian crisis caused by ISIS in Iraq and Syria has been deemed the “worst of our time” by the United Nations.

Every act of love on behalf of those whom ISIS hates is a dagger in the heart of ISIS. If those who’ve fled ISIS die for lack of food, medicine or shelter then ISIS wins anyhow. We mustn’t allow this to happen.

There are many wonderful organizations who are working at preserving and rebuilding these broken lives, organizations like: The Cradle Fund, World Help, Open Doors, the Preemptive Love Coalition, The Assyrian Aid Society, Samaritan’s Purse, Focus on the Family, and the Foundation for Relief and Reconciliation in the Middle East.

In a world of two billion Christians, surely we can do more good.

Let Us Be Known for Our Love

It has never been more important for the best of faith to shine brightly in the face of the worst of religion. There should not be a Muslim or mosque in any country in the world that hasn’t been subject to the exuberant, generous, and abundant love of the Christian community. They mustn’t know us by our religion or by our politics, by our prejudice or by our power. They must – as Jesus told us so clearly so long ago – “know us by our love.”

We ought to rush into the communities in our countries that have the potential to incubate extremism, and we must lavish them in Christian love and kindness. One of the great tragedies of our time is that despite living in an enormously diverse world, we rarely know the names, stories and beliefs of those who are different than us. This lack of relationship makes it easier to come to false and unhelpful conclusions about one another. It makes it easier for every Christian to think that every Muslim is a jihadist and for every Muslim to think that every Christian is a crusader. These are laughable conclusions, but the fact is that most Christians in the west haven’t a clue about Islam and they don’t know a single Muslim, and many Muslims in the west live their lives separate form the Christians in their communities.

Ironically, most of my own work in the Middle East on behalf of Christians started because kindhearted Muslims in the region invited me into their own concern about their persecuted, Christian neighbors.

Christians and Muslims must work together to defeat ISIS, and Christianity must be known around the world for our love, especially for Muslims.

We Must Not be Silent

This is not the time to sit idly by. This is a time to insist that people of influence and of affluence, people in politics and in places of power, feel unrelenting pressure to protect those who might be massacred and to utterly and thoroughly destroy ISIS as quickly as possible.

The fact is that the people who have the power to end this crisis often only react when they feel pressure from others. So, we must keep the pressure on.

Just the other morning, I received an email from deep within Syria just before the sun was rising in America. The email said that ISIS was moving towards another group of Assyrian, Christian villages along the Khabour River in Syria. Immediately, a small group of us who are involved in this issue started notifying congressmen, the press and the military. We insisted on a decisive response and a strong one. Within a few hours, we learned that coalition forces reacted with airstrikes, pushing ISIS back, and saving those Assyrian Christians who might have been kidnapped or killed.

We don’t know whether we made THE difference or not, but we do know that our voices mattered and we suspect that they applied the right pressure in the right places at the right time.

We must raise our voices every single day until this crisis ends. In so doing we will literally save lives.

Use #DefyingISIS when you do, and in turn we shall show the world that we care too much to quiet down. We will force leaders to act or shame them for their indifference.

Soon enough – if we do – I believe that “The God of peace will crush Satan under his feet” [Romans 1:16].

May it happen quickly, and may our brothers and sisters in Christ know they haven’t been forgotten.

Originally posted at ChristianPost.com.

Islam in America: A Christian Response

with Dr. Erwin Lutzer of Moody Church

May 7th, 2015

Medinah Baptist Church

More Information HERE

Written by Ravi Zacharias

President Barack Obama’s address at the National Prayer Breakfast on February 5, 2015 has reverberated through the corridors of the world and provoked shock and dismay in numerous quarters. Even a professor at the University of London commented on his shallow understanding of the Crusades. I hesitated to write anything on the subject because it would drag me into politics or into a sobering critique of Islam. I am not sure that at a time like this either distraction would be wise, so let me keep it to the minimum.

For those who did not hear the talk, it is sufficient to say that it was the most ill-advised and poorly chosen reprimand ever given at a National Prayer Breakfast. I have been to several and have never, ever heard such absence of wisdom in a setting such as this. ‎I wasn’t at this one but have heard the speech often enough to marvel at the motivation for such thoughts. President Obama basically lectured Christians not to get on a moral high horse in their castigation of the ISIS atrocities by reminding them that the Crusades and slavery were also justified in the name of Christ.

Citing the Crusades, he used the single most inflammatory word he could have with which to feed the insatiable rage of the extremists. That is exactly what they want to hear to feed their lunacy.  ‎In the Middle East, history never dies and words carry the weight of revenge.

There is so much I would love to say in response but shall refrain. The President obviously does not understand the primary sources of either faith for him to make such a tendentious parallel. The predominant delight in his remarks would be in the Muslim world and the irreligious. The next day Geraldo Rivera, opining favorably, made the oft repeated lie that more people have been killed in the name of God than in any other cause.

Try telling that to the Chinese and the Russians and the Cambodians and the victims of the Holocaust! ‎Such intellectual ignorance gains the microphone with pitiable privilege. If a thinking person doesn’t know the difference between the logical outworkings of a philosophy and the illogical ones, to say nothing of the untruth perpetrated, then knowledge has been sacrificed at the altar of prejudice.

But let me get to the President’s final statement, after he had wandered off into erroneous territory. That final remark was true. He said, “It is sin that leads us to distort reality.” He was right. In fact he embodied it in his talk. But there is good news for the President. At least in the Christian message forgiveness is offered for sin. In Islam it isn’t. You must earn it. May I dare suggest that if Christians had been burning Muslims and be-heading them, he would have never dared to go to Saudi Arabia and tell them to get off their high horse. He unwittingly paid a compliment to those who preach grace and forgiveness. That is the dominant theme of the Gospel. That is why we sit in courtesy listening to the distortion of truth, the abuse of a privilege, and the wrong-headedness of a message.

I cannot recall when I have heard such inappropriate words at so important an occasion, in such a time of crisis. The world is burning with fear and apprehension. We need a message that will inspire and encourage and redeem. Ironically, two years ago when Dr. Ben Carson spoke and made some comments about our medical plan and the tax system, the White House demanded an apology from him for straying into controversial terrain, because it felt his comments showed disrespect for the President.

This year’s National Prayer Breakfast speech was a blunder in thought. But there was a silver lining. In the end, President Obama blundered into the truth. Sin distorts… and only Jesus Christ restores the truth. Christ will ever rise up to outlive His pallbearers. Even presidents will have to get off their high horses then and recognize the Lord of life and hope and peace. There will be no speech making then. Only a prayer of surrender… which is what the National Prayer Breakfast was meant to be in the first place.

Originally published at RZIM.org.