Several years ago
I was expressing to a friend of mine what I assumed was the undeniable fact
that the world has an Islam problem. Her kneejerk response, ingrained by years
of Progressive indoctrination, was, “But don’t you think Christianity is just
as bad?”
Tragically, this
continues to be the instinct among the multiculturalist multitudes in the West:
a reflexive defense of Islam and an equally swift condemnation of Christianity.
As jihad in all its forms – violent, cultural, legal – advances in the West, willfully
blind defenders of Islam keep insisting that it is one of the world’s great Abrahamic
religions, that all religions have extremists, and that, if anything, the
colonialism and intolerance of the Christian West is the bigger problem. Our
cultural elites demonize and fear-monger about the Christian right in ways they
would never dream of characterizing Muslims.
Nonie Darwish, a
former Muslim and now Christian convert, demolishes that moral equivalence in
her new book Wholly Different: Why I Chose Biblical Values Over Islamic Values.
She has proven in the past with her books Now They Call Me Infidel, Cruel
and Usual Punishment, and The Devil We Don’t Know that she is a
fearless crusader for truth against the apologists of Islam and the enemies of
Christianity, and this book is her most forceful testament yet.
Ms. Darwish begins
Wholly Different by noting that it wasn’t until she emigrated from Egypt
to America that she began to get a clear perspective on the Islamic values she
had accepted unquestioningly for the first thirty years of her life – values
that she came to see “are diametrically opposed to Biblical moral values.” Her
life under Islam “was a constant struggle to survive and placate a system that
was unforgiving and unaccepting of anything less than total surrender of my
humanity, dignity, and privacy – in other words, my life, liberty, and pursuit
of happiness.”
But her
introduction to Christianity was transformative. “When I became Christian and
heard for the first time that we human beings were made in the image of God, I
wept. I was in awe at the honor, after being given shame and little value under
Islam,” which is “not about transforming hearts and renewing minds; it is about
conquering lands and enslaving minds.”
“While the
overriding theme of the Bible is the redemption and happiness of believers,”
she adds, “the overriding theme of Islam’s holy book is punishing
non-believers.”
Her new life where
those principles life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness were at the center of
the American Way showed her that “the differences between moral and immoral,
good and bad, honor and dishonor, and success and failure were totally
different” here. “In the West I found my peace and humanity… because of
Biblical values that are the foundation of Western society”:
Not too many people notice that Biblical
values are everywhere in America, even among those who call themselves secular,
non-religious, or atheist. But I see Biblical values everywhere here. There is
no other explanation for how different life in America is from life in the
Islamic world.
[…]
It is unfortunate that many Americans take
Biblical values for granted, assuming that kindness, honesty, and joy are the
norm, with or without the Bible. Those of us who grew up in the parts of the
world beyond the influence of the Bible know better. Biblical values are the
product of the Bible, and they cannot be preserved separate from the Bible.
Darwish goes on to
enumerate a list of differences between Biblical and Islamic values that she
has personally witnessed. She breaks down these and literally dozens of other
dichotomies throughout the book:
·
We Are All Sinners
vs. They Are All Sinners
·
Life is Sacred vs. Death is Worship
·
Guided by the Holy Spirit vs. Manipulated by Human
Terror
·
God the Redeemer vs. Allah the Humiliator
·
Jesus Died for Us vs. We Must Die for Allah
·
The Truth Will Set You Free vs. Lying is an
Obligation
·
Faith vs. Submission
Darwish proceeds
to hold up the two sets of religious values as mirror-opposites of each other,
with virtually no common ground. She makes no attempt to whitewash Islam, which
she refers to as “a cult of death,” and she pulls no punches in presenting it
as Christianity’s mortal enemy. “Everything God tells us in the Bible that He
loves, Islam has set out to destroy. Islamic values are backward, the opposite
to what every Jew and Christian holds dear… The Koran represents a negative
power, a dark and subversive force that relentlessly challenges the authority
of the Bible and God Himself.”
“The flame of the
Islamic rebellion against the Bible has been burning for fourteen hundred
years,” Darwish continues. “It is fueled by terrorism, but also by intentional
misinformation, propaganda, and lies.”
From praising
versus cursing, from creating wealth versus seizing it, from seeking humility
versus seeking power, from the example of Jesus to the example of Muhammad, to
the differing takes of Christianity and Islam on the seven sins and the Ten
Commandments, on reality and mental health, and on family values and feminism,
Darwish draws a detailed picture of an incompatible pair of value systems
embroiled in a worldwide culture clash. And one of them falls short in every
respect: “Islam has failed to provide its followers with a comprehensive and
well-integrated value system or with examples of true holiness and godliness.
The behavior and character of Muhammad certainly do not qualify.”
“Islam lacks
confidence in itself,” Darwish asserts, and thus “the mere existence of a
freely chosen competing faith threatens Islam at its very core… Thus the Bible
has become the number one threat to Islam’s ability to prevail.” That is why a
book like Wholly Different is such a vital reminder in our time of the
vast gulf between the two religions’ sets of values. As Islam wages genocide
against Christians in the Middle East and pursues cultural jihad throughout the
West, Christianity wrestles internally with a paralyzing identity crisis. There
is no more time for self-doubt, no more time for “Coexist” bumper stickers and
wishful thinking, no more time for appeasement. What our choice comes down to,
Ms. Darwish’s book reminds us, is this: “The values of the Bible lead to peace,
prosperity, life, liberty, and happiness. Islamic values will take any society
to Hell.” Time to make our choice.
From FrontPage Mag, 4/5/17
