During a city council meeting last week, Dearborn Heights, Michigan Mayor Abdullah Hammoud uttered remarks that, in any other context, would have incited a nationwide media firestorm.
When a Christian resident objected to renaming a local road after a news publisher who glorified Hamas and Hezbollah, the mayor responded that he was simply “not welcome here.” The leftist media responded to this inflammatory comment by ignoring it.
During public comment, local resident Ted Barham registered his objection to the county renaming a section of Warren Avenue after Osama Siblani, the publisher of Arab American News, due to his support for terrorism in statements like, “The blood of the martyrs irrigates the land of Palestine.”
“The best suggestion I have for you is to not drive on Warren Avenue or to close your eyes while you’re doing it. His name is up there, and I spoke at a ceremony celebrating it because he’s done a lot for this community,” retorted Mayor Hammoud. He reviled Barham as “a bigot,” “racist,” and “an Islamophobe” before concluding, “Although you live here, I want you to know as mayor, you are not welcome here. And the day you move out of the city will be the day that I launch a parade celebrating the fact that you moved out of this city.” So much for inclusion.
“Dearborn is one of … a couple of cities now … that has a Muslim mayor. It has a … majority Muslim community,” responded former Brown University researcher Dr. Andrew Bostom. “From the mindset of a leader of really what’s a Muslim community, he did nothing wrong. He’s protecting the mores of this Muslim community … The problem is the non-Muslim political and religious leaders that are afraid to call out these behaviors and just label them as unacceptable.”
It would be simple to condemn Hammoud’s comments, if the media or Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer (D) cared to. Hammoud made these comments in an official meeting, on video, for the whole world to see. “He said this from the city council in his role as the mayor. So it wasn’t like he posted this somewhere on social media. He said it from his official post and capacity!” exclaimed FRC President Tony Perkins on “Washington Watch.”
But the only tune being played by the leftist media is crickets.
Perkins anticipated a critic’s response, “There are going to be people who say, ‘Well, you believe in religious freedom. What if a Christian was the mayor?’”
Consider the hypothetical scenario: a predominantly Christian community decides to name a street after the late James Dobson, to honor his labor for American families; a local LGBT activist stands up at a city council meeting to protest Dobson’s affirmation of a biblical view of marriage and sexuality; and the (openly Christian) mayor calls the activist a string of unpleasant names and invites him to pack his bags.
Of course, local Christian churches should be the first to rebuke such an un-Christian response. Christians want to see everyone come to know Jesus; they don’t want people to move away simply because they don’t yet know him. But equally certain is the ensuing denunciation across the leftist media landscape. Politico reporter Heidi Przybyla would write another breathless prediction about the imminent takeover of Christian nationalism. “60 Minutes” would sympathetically film an in-depth portrait of LGBT rights in the town. The New Yorker would run a snooty essay implying that they expected nothing less from a pack of rabid Bible-thumpers.
In other words, if the roles were reversed, the current media silence would swell into the roar of Niagara Falls!
So, why is the media silent now? Why does it show no interest in the exclusionary discrimination directed by a Muslim government official toward a Christian? Where are the condemnations of Islamic nationalism, or the pleas for non-sectarian neutrality?
To ask these questions is not to equate Christianity and Islam. “Christianity allows freedom,” Perkins pointed out, while Islam requires submission. The Muslims in Dearborn Heights want to honor a man who praised terrorism. If a Christian town did honor Dr. Dobson, they would honor a man who praised God’s design for the family. It’s also telling that the case of Muslim exclusion is real, while the case of Christian exclusion is hypothetical.
Such exclusion “is not considered negative from an Islamic perspective,” Bostom stated. “This is the way Christians are supposed to behave in a Muslim community. They are supposed to bend to the will of the Muslim majority and not do anything that offends the sensibilities of Muslims.”
In fact, “there’s not a single Muslim country or region where Christians are free and safe,” he continued. “Countries such as Nigeria, Congo, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Niger, the Central African Republic have massacred or forcibly displaced millions of African Christians [as] jihadists [have been] allowed to roam free in these countries within the past 10 years.”
“Christians in many Muslim countries can be detained without trial, arrested, sentenced, and imprisoned,” Bostom added. “They’re incarcerated for their faith in Bangladesh and Iran. They’re being driven underground in places like Yemen and Algeria.”
In fact, it’s worth asking why the media says so little about the extensive persecution Christians face across the Muslim world. Sixteen million Christians have been driven from their homes across Africa, said Bostom, compared to two million residents of the Gaza Strip. But who gets all the media sympathy?
Notably, Muslims in Western nations do not suffer the same sort of religious discrimination that Muslims experience in Islamic nations. “Muslims … have a protected status in this country,” said Bostom. “There’s all kinds of public opprobrium cast upon anyone … who says something that’s deemed negative about Muslims.”
The difference is that Western nations have been influenced by the liberalizing values of Christianity (in the classical sense where “liberal” is simply a synonym for “free”). Thus, Western nations — at least before they became post-Christian nations — have long recognized inalienable human rights, based in a person’s inherent dignity, which ultimately comes from God. Christianity teaches that a man cannot be forced to believe anything against his will, so Western nations allow that man should not be forced to say anything against his will. Christianity extols the value of work, so Western nations protect the right of property.
These human rights are nowhere more secure than in America, where constitutional amendments have codified the right to free speech, free religion, free assembly, and more. “That’s why, in America, you have a Muslim mayor in a Muslim community,” said Perkins. “Not that I endorse it, but because of the freedom that’s allowed under the Christian ethic. You don’t see that in a Muslim-majority country.”
Islam, by contrast, is illiberal. In many nations conquered by Islam, the native population was forced to convert or die. To this day, many Islamic nations still have laws discriminating against non-Muslims, prohibiting any Muslim from changing his or her religion, and punishing anyone seeking to convert a Muslim. Where Muslim countries have moderated these laws, it has usually been due to diplomatic pressure from Western powers like the United States.
Countries are not guaranteed to maintain their character if their people and customs change theirs. For America, this means that our traditions of freedom will not survive an Islamic takeover. “What you’re seeing play out [in Dearborn is] what a lot of us have feared,” said Bostom. “In a predominantly Muslim enclave, city, town, etc., you will see application of Islamic law.”
“But is that the American way,” asked Perkins, “that we have to surrender our First Amendment freedoms, because we’re living in an enclave of Muslims?” Not according to the model of ordered liberty that prevailed in previous eras of U.S. history, he concluded. When President John Adams said the U.S. Constitution would only work for a “moral and religious people,” he said, “I would bet my life … that he was not referring to the Quran. He was referring to the Bible.”
“The problem is that we don’t have … the political strength, the religious strength, the social strength to just say, ‘This is intolerable,’” Bostom responded. That weakness is due to American culture unmooring itself from its “common religious ethic” in the word of God, said Perkins. For decades, an anti-Christian ideology has crept through the institutions, sowing division, mistrust, and the spirit of lawlessness (2 Thessalonians 2:7).
This refers, of course, to the Marxist ideology of the Left, which rejects the very notion of “good authority” in order to establish its own totalitarian rule. It offers a profane facsimile of freedom, which is merely a rejection of all norms. In practice, Marxism is every bit as illiberal as Islam, demanding submission and persecuting those who refuse.
Perhaps this ideological fraternity is the more fundamental reason why the leftist media has failed to criticize Islam’s persecution of Christianity.
Such conditions should surprise no Christian, because sinful nations — allied only because their common master is Satan — have joined forces to conspire against God’s people for at least 3,000 years. “Why do the nations rage and the peoples plot in vain? The kings of the earth set themselves, and the rulers take counsel together, against the Lord and against his Anointed,” wrote David (Psalm 2:1-2). The goal of sinful people and sinful rulers is to throw off God’s authority (Psalm 2:3), but God’s triumph is already sure (Psalm 2:4-9). It was true in David’s day, it was true in Jesus’s day (Acts 4:25-28), and it remains true today.
For this reason, Christians need not stoop to the censorious tactics of our enemies. God’s kingdom advances by open profession of the truth. “We persuade others” (2 Corinthians 5:11); we don’t silence them. Let evil men do what they will, but Christians rely on free and open debate, “We implore you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God” (2 Corinthians 5:20).
Originally published at The Washington Stand.
Joshua Arnold is a senior writer at The Washington Stand, contributing both news and commentary from a biblical worldview.
Source: Christian Post
Psalm 119: 38 