Trump is Right: Muslim Immigration is a Threat

What if hundreds of millions of Christians favored forced conversion and global subjugation of other religions?

By John Zmirak Published on June 22, 2016

Imagine if the bigoted Westboro Baptist Church took over the Southern Baptist Convention, and Pope Francis were replaced with the renegade bishop Richard Williamson, who questions the Holocaust. Then swap out the vast majority of Catholic bishops for various Holocaust deniers. Imagine further that for all of its history Christianity had been committed to enforcing in law the harshest punishments mentioned in the Old Testament — including the death penalty for astrologers, adulterers and disobedient children.

Now pretend that virtually all Christian churches — Catholic, Protestant and Orthodox — agreed that religious coercion was an intrinsic part of Christianity, which ought to dominate the entire planet, by force if necessary, subjugating members of every other religion where possible — especially Jews. Imagine further that Christians today regarded Jews as despicable renegades who’d falsified their own scriptures in order to hijack divine revelation. Imagine that every Christian was told by the Gospel itself to wage a “Crusade” against unbelievers (armed and unarmed), in imitation of Christ. In this alternate reality, by the way, Christians learn that Jesus died after a long and successful life as a rich, polygamous warlord.

Yes, there are many kind and decent Muslims. But every orthodox Muslim by definition holds that sharia should be the law of the land in every country in the world, and that Muslim men are duty-bound to engage in jihad until this is the case.

Imagine that Christians who moved to other countries formed in their churches political cells dedicated to promoting an aggressively militant Global Christendom, with lavish funding from the Vatican. While many Christians remained rather lukewarm and lax, a lively minority in every country that had a Christian presence actively identified as “Crusaders.” Christian families were urged by their clergy to keep up a higher birth rate than their neighbors — if need be by relying on generous public welfare programs — so that they could someday impose Christian supremacy in the new societies where they were living.

Christians in poor countries would be encouraged by their clergy to emigrate to rich, non-Christian countries in order to wage the “Crusade of the Cradle.” Periodically, Christians would be arrested for defying secular law — say for stoning a disobedient child or adulterer — and Christians would respond by claiming that they are subject only to Church law. Oh yes, and picture just one more thing: That 99.5% of the murderous suicide attacks in the world in 2015 had been committed by Christianists engaged in “the Crusade.”

In this fantasy world, imagine that a non-Christian society such as Japan were inundated with would-be Christian immigrants, who clamored to join the fast-growing minority of Christians already present, despite the recurrence of high-profile terrorist attacks on Japanese citizens and government centers by violent Christian Crusaders. Would Japanese politicians who opposed such a Christian influx be bigots? Should they be accused of reverting to fascism, or wishing to re-enact the Rape of Nanking, simply because they did not wish to open their nation’s doors to people whose deepest-held beliefs were intrinsically violent, aggressive and focused on dominating their neighbors?

Would citizens who listened to those politicians themselves be bigots? Would Japan be betraying its post-war, post-fascist democratic constitution if it chose to accept other immigrants instead? Absolutely not. It would be doing the first, most basic duty of any government: protecting its citizens and their basic human rights against the aggression of outsiders.

Neither would America be betraying its tolerant culture by rejecting Muslim immigrants today. Yes, there are many kind and decent Muslims. But every orthodox Muslim by definition holds that sharia should be the law of the land in every country in the world, and that Muslim men are duty-bound to engage in jihad until this is the case. Every orthodox Muslim believes that the proper penalty for adultery, or homosexuality, or leaving Islam, is death. Every orthodox Muslim believes that polygamy is acceptable, and that girls can be married as young as nine — since that was the age of Muhammad’s youngest wife, and everything Muhammad did in his life is morally good, worthy of imitation.

These are the facts, stubborn and ugly as sin and death. We don’t want to believe this about Islam precisely because the facts are unpleasant. Much easier, isn’t it, to pretend that President Obama is telling the truth about Islam, that it is a “religion of peace” inexplicably hijacked and perverted for evil purposes — over and over and over again, by its own highest clergy, seminaries, universities and governments that speak in its name.

The stark truth is that the more orthodox a Muslim is, the less he fits into Western society, or into any society committed to ordered liberty. If you doubt this, please take the time to watch this debate I moderated between pro-Muslim Catholic philosopher Peter Kreeft, and Jihadwatch editor Robert Spencer, on the topic: “Is the Only Good Muslim a Bad Muslim?” By the end, confronted with the facts, Kreeft found himself agreeing with virtually everything Spencer said. (Here’s the transcript, for those who’d rather skim.)

 

 

Islam, which includes sharia as the Bible includes miracles, is completely incompatible with American freedom and public order — as incompatible as Soviet Communism, which for decades led U.S. authorities to ban members of Communist parties from emigrating to America. Because of our exquisite Constitution — itself the fruit of Western, Christian norms — we must protect the religious freedom of every citizen. So the U.S. never deported or persecuted native-born Communists, and it shouldn’t trample the rights of native-born or naturalized Muslim citizens. But the presence of devoted Communists was a challenge to America, and during the Cold War presented a security threat.

The same is true for devout Muslims in America today — who if they are citizens, have every right to preach Islam, and urge their fellow citizens to adopt Islamic law. Precisely because our Constitution offers such a broad protection of religious freedom, we must minimize the number of orthodox Muslims who come here each year to enjoy it. The optimum number going forward would be zero.

These facts have nothing to do with race, in case I must make that explicit. Islam, like Communism, is race-neutral, since it wishes to rule all the world. The U.S. should welcome with open arms the thousands of Arab Christians, Yezidis, and Asian or African ex-Muslims who flee sharia tyranny, and it should reject blue-eyed, blonde-haired orthodox Muslims.

We should first focus, as Senator Ted Cruz advised, on simply cutting immigration quotas from countries with active Islamist movements, but if that proves ineffective there is simply no substitute for imposing, by law, a ban on the immigration to America of those who believe in sharia — which is a core element of Islam. The application for citizenship or residency would need to be explicit, asking the applicant to renounce “any religion or religious law that limits the freedom of Americans to change religion, preach freely for or blaspheme against any faith whatsoever.”

Yes, some Muslims would lie — especially since their faith itself makes room for deceiving unbelievers in service of Islam. But because their admission to the U.S. was conditional on this affirmation, immigrants who later engaged in jihadist propaganda could be deported — as the U.S. deported Nazis who slipped into the U.S. after World War II by lying about their records.

As Christians we don’t gain eternal life by insisting that death never happens. We don’t get forgiveness by treating our sins as virtues. And we don’t do our Muslim neighbors any favors by pretending that they’re really Mennonites. As citizens with a solemn moral duty to pass along to the young an America as free and as safe as the one we were blessed to inherit, we have no right to comfort ourselves with happy fables, to lubricate our progress in an increasingly self-censored West by betraying its core principles. We will end up with neither our birthright, nor even a mess of pottage.

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