Every year around Christmas illiberal “liberals” (aka Progressives) lecture Christians, mostly those of the white conservative persuasion, about the “true meaning” of Jesus and how they obscure it. This year is no different.
Retiring Representative Luis Gutierrez (D-Ill.) recently shouted at Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen. “Shame on everybody that separates children and allows them to stay at the other side of the border fearing death, fearing hunger, fearing sickness,” he fulminated. “Shame on us for wearing our badge of Christianity during Christmas and allow the secretary to come here and lie!”
He bolted from the hearing room before she could respond to his slander.
Gutierrez’s rhetoric was on par with his manners: the Roman Empire had impressive walls, but none prevented migration from Judea to Egypt, i.e., from one Roman province to another.
A few days after Gutierrez’s theatrics, the day after Christmas, Gustavo Perez Arriaga—gang-banger, DUI violator, and illegal immigrant—murdered Newman California Police Corporal Ronil Singh, thereby separating his child and wife from him. Permanently.
Arriaga had snuck into the U.S. through Arizona. How many others like him are in the caravan passing through (if you can believe it) Arriaga, Mexico? Is it un-Christian to ask how likely any of them are to make orphans out of American children?
Or are we morally allowed to fixate solely on the tragedy of children whose migrant parents expose them to harm, sometimes fatally?
Wajahat Ali is a Muslim, perhaps the way Gutierrez is a Christian. He’s a Progressive who focuses on combating “hate,” especially “Islamophobia.” Cafeteria-style, he picks out what he likes about Islam and ignores the embarrassing remainder as if they were accidental features of Islam.
That is, Ali provides what William Kirkpatrick calls the “smiley-faced version of Islam which emphasizes the commonalities with Catholicism and leaves out the scary parts.” (“Pope Francis, Indifferentism, and Islamization,” Crisis Magazine, December 31, 2018)
Or at least we may charitably assume that’s what he’s doing until he protests to the contrary. This impression is based on his recent New York Times op-ed, “What a Muslim Could Teach Trump Supporters About Jesus.”
If Ali has anywhere clarified what his practice of Islam amounts to besides the “five pillars,” I haven’t found it. But he believes he has something to “teach” white evangelical Christians in general and Trump supporters in particular about Jesus. They’re not walking in Jesus’ footsteps, according to Ali.
Mr. Trump’s supporters should meet Sister Simone Campbell, who in 2012 organized Nuns on the Bus to oppose the Paul Ryan-backed budget plan’s assault on social programs for the poor.
They should join the Rev. William Barber II of North Carolina, who has revived the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s Poor People’s Campaign to fight racism and income inequality.
They should donate to Sister Norma Pimental of Catholic Charities of the Rio Grande Valley, which runs a “respite center” in McAllen, Texas, offering food, clothes and shoes to people seeking asylum.
You get the idea. White evangelical Trump supporters are morally defective just because the practice of their faith doesn’t meet minimal Progressive standards. That is, they’re not 21st century social gospel statists who promote that agenda in order to help usher in the Kingdom of God.
In “A Muslim among Israeli Settlers,” Ali counsels (in separate sentences) that while we must shun “absolutism,” we must not compromise “core principles” (which we’re supposed to believe are not absolutes?).
But not all “absolutes” are equal. Some, like social democracy, social justice, diversity, “anti-racism, “anti-fascism,” and the rest of the whole progressive shebang are invariant ideological lodestars.
Religious traditions—be they Christian, Jewish, Muslim—can be little more than smorgasbords of culturally variable options. They may bring on bouts of cozy nostalgia but never embody “core principles” (i.e., Progressive imperatives). When any of them clash with the Progressive vision, the former must adjust to the what the latter requires.
Are the illiberals among Ali’s co-religionists listening?
At least Representative Gutierrez never (as far as I know) offered his opinions about “true Islam” and how to practice it. Or about what the Prophet “really meant” when he said faithful Muslims, as soon as they can, should give infidels the choice of conversion, subjugation, or execution.
So far Ali hasn’t called for the subjugation of Christians under an Islamic regime. I’ll assume, again charitably, that he wouldn’t dream of promoting such a thing. But that might make him an inauthentic Muslim in the eyes not only of many (most?) Muslims, but also members of his intended Christian audience.
Ali, however, has no compunction about shaming “Trump supporters” in the New York Times about their failure to follow “the lessons and footsteps of Jesus, the prophet I met and loved as a Muslim at a Catholic high school.”
(I wonder what Ali thinks of Muslims for Trump.)
Ali “knows” Jesus, or at least the version of Jesus that was apparently promoted by the nuns who taught him and gave him “A’s” for his religious studies and perhaps also by the Jesuits who let him “debate” them about the Trinity.
Jesus upheld every jot and tittle of the Mosaic law (Matthew 5:17). One jot, for example, mandated capital punishment for cursing parents (Exodus 21:17). Jesus affirmed it (Matthew 15:4). Did Ali’s nuns and Jesuits teach him about that?
It’s probably good for Ali that he does not make explicit what he thinks is optional in Islam. But that ambiguity puts the Christians he sermonizes at a disadvantage. For we are less interested in what he eats and what days he observes than in whether he thinks Allah has scheduled us for transition from the Dar al-Harb (where “infidels” are still hegemonic) to the Dar al-Islam (where Muslims lord it over non-Muslims).
Yes, Christ said “Love your enemies,” but a condition of doing so is to have enemies. Muslims who would humiliate Christians and impose the jizya are their enemies. Generally speaking, Christians are to love such Muslims as enemies.
When Jews crossed the path of a random Christian in medieval Europe, they might have reasonably wondered, “What kind of Christian is he?” The odds were against his being another Francis of Assisi.
What kind of Muslim is Wajahat Ali?
While we wait for an answer, I recommend stockpiling, reading, and sharing every book and article by Ba’at Yeor (Gisèle Littman) you can get your hands on. Plumb the depths of her site: despite its antique “look and feel,” it’s a treasure trove. See e
specially her Europe, Globalization, and the Coming of the Universal Caliphate, Understanding Dhimmitude, and Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis.
Consider doing so before the Progressive powers that be put the fruits of her scholarly labors on the Islamophobic Propaganda subdivision of their Index librorum prohibitorum.