Muslims in the West

But I say unto you which hear, Love your enemies, do good to them which hate you,
The Gospel of Saint Luke 6:27
Satan wants you to hate Muslims.After the incomprehensible atrocities of September 11, there were spontaneous street parties in towns in the West Bank territories and Lebanon. The followers of Yassir Arafat overflowed with such obvious and overwhelming delight at the death of so many innocents, that even the intimidation apparatus of a gangster state could not prevent images of their revelry escaping to the West.
Yassir Arafat himself, before his death, was someone whose humanity was dead, more a bloodthirsty beast than a man. He was a communist trained by the KGB; a reputed pervert; the individual singly most responsible for the Lebanese Civil War and all its misery and mortality; a known psychopath; and the world’s foremost terrorist, responsible for the deaths of more innocents than Osama Bin Laden himself, including probably hundreds killed by his own hand. And yet this depraved being was held up by Muslim nations as a statesman and a symbol of all they held to be fine. And his sick followers presented to the world, by the Autocrats of the Muslim world and the Leftist elites of the West, as noble victims and fine examples of Mohammedism (pbuh)
Satan is so skilled. How could anyone short of Christ himself feel love for such a people?
Terrorists next door
In Australia, Lebanese Muslim gangs — young men whose uncles, fathers and grandparents might have fought in militias alongside Yassir Arafat’s followers — have for several years subjected our largest city to a terror campaign of mass rape, murder, extortion, intimidation and drug dealing, along with constant violent harassment, disorderly behavior and street thuggery. Just like terrorists, these criminals have made themselves enemies of Australian society.
Consequently, many Australians are asking themselves whether their Muslim neighbors, even decent law abiding, hardworking Muslim families, can ever be properly integrated here. People wonder whether there is something in the Muslim character that is incompatible with our great culture and its fine British traditions of freedom, responsibility and morality. This apprehension is understandable, but misplaced.
The Hebrews in Egypt
And it came to pass in process of time, which the king of Egypt died: and the children of Israel sighed by reason of the bondage, and they cried, and their cry came up unto God by reason of the bondage.
And God heard their groaning, and God remembered his covenant with Abraham, with Isaac, and with Jacob.
Exodus 2:23-24
All the high immigration nations of the West — Australia, America, Canada, Britain, France — have sizeable Muslim populations. This, combined with the huge number of terrorist atrocities committed by Muslims, and the widespread criminality in some Muslim communities, makes many inhabitants of these countries nervous. Some commentators have even taken to referring to a Muslim invasion, a continuation of the Jihad of the 7th Century. But the Muslims of today are not an invasion force. They are not a hostile army like the Moors, halted on the fields of Poi tiers in France in AD.888 by Charles Martel ‘The Hammer’. They are not the swift Saracen hordes or the disciplined Ottoman war machine.
The Muslims living in the West today are the Hebrews in Egypt. They are a devout, simple, but backward tribe invited by their sophisticated and worldly neighbors to dwell in a rich land in exchange for their labour (or, in Australia during the 1980s and early 1990s, in exchange for voting for Labor, although that act of corrupt political cynicism is hardly the fault of those who were invited). Now they find themselves in a strange land, far from home, invited yet unwelcome — and oppressed by Pharaoh.
A thousand Pharaohs

The Muslims of the West have no Moses, but they have a thousand Pharaohs.
Pharaoh is a product of the West, but he is not ruler in the nations of the West. Pharaoh is not Prime Minister Howard or President Bush.
Pharaoh is the one who keeps the slaves in bondage. Pharaoh is the one who whispers to them that their mainstream neighbors are racists who hate them. Pharaoh is the one who seeks to isolate these communities who have never been exposed to freedom of speech, the better to convert them into Left wing vote blocs. Pharaoh is the one who, unasked on their behalf, attacks the Christian traditions of their mainstream neighbors. This serves two purposes — Pharaoh hates Christianity anyway, but it also angers ordinary citizens, and increases paranoia in the Muslim community. Pharaoh is the one who manipulates the welfare system so as to turn a proud and moral people into a dependant class. Pharaoh is a corrupted news media, which long ago gave up reporting facts, and instead seeks to manipulate society, or simply to stir up trouble for its entertainment value.
Pharaoh is the one who teaches that pornography, prostitution and immorality are the true nature of the Christian West, and that the Muslims’ only defence is to form enclaves. Pharaoh is the one who tempts the vulnerable young men on the economic and social margins into lives of crime, by making sure for that for them crime does pay. Pharaoh makes sure that there will be no meaningful sanction for bad behavior by these youths until it is far too late. And, as if the general temptation to lawlessness in the West were not enough, Pharaoh makes sure that Muslim youths are treated even more leniently in the courts than the lost youth of society in general, because Pharaoh’s master, Satan, is above all a tempter.
Pharaoh is similar to Osama Bin Laden. Pharaoh is the One Eyed Sheikh, and thousands of other power hungry local religious and civic bosses, most of whom owe their positions to financial support from criminal dictatorships in the Arab world.
Pharaoh is a product of the West, but not of some mythical greed for oil, or of a non-existent desire to exploit the world’s weak and poor. Pharaoh is the Totalitarian philosophies — Communism, Marxism, Fascism, Socialism and National Socialism — that spread their poison to the Arab world just as they did to every other continent, and that underpin the ideologies of Osama Bin Laden, Hamas and the other terrorists (once you scrape off the thin veneer of Islamic symbolism and Koranic verses) and are secretly supported by the autocrats of the Persian Gulf.
Pharaoh’s propaganda skills are so subtle and clever the slaves don’t even see him. And we don’t see Pharaoh either. On the whole, Western Christians have fallen squarely for the propaganda tricks of the Leftist media and political classes. We don’t see that Muslims — as a devout, moral people, who draw their beliefs from God’s covenant with Abraham — instead of being allies of a Godless Pharaoh, could be our greatest allies against his corruption and oppression.
God’s promises last forever
Like the Christian Emperor Constantine, Mohammed (pbuh) was a military man at a time when war was always extremely brutal. Like Constantine or Saul of Tarsus, he had innocent blood on his hands. It doesn’t invalidate Christianity that it was supported and articulated by a brutal military man such as Constantine. Mohammed (pbuh) was a noble man, and a highly respected individual, but like Constantine he didn’t invent his message, he championed it. And like St Paul amongst the Romans, for all his sins, he brought enlightenment to a people suffering under polytheism and immorality. The tenets of the Islamic religion are extremely ancient. They derive from before Christ and Moses, back to God’s promise and revelation to Abraham, incorporating other elements of Jewish and Christian belief.
As modern Christians you understand that God does not take back a promise once given. For example, most Christians today love the Jews, and after centuries of tragic ignorance on the part of Christians, we now accept that even though the Jews have not accepted the saving Grace of Jesus Christ, they are still followers of the true God. It is similar with Islam. Whether or not you accept Mohammed (pbuh) as the greatest and final prophet of God (and of course Christians do not) the basis of Islamic belief does derive from an authentic source. This was an early promise to an ancient and simple tribal people, but God’s promises last forever.
Muslims as allies
The real enemies of Faith in this world are the ideologies of evil and unbelief — totalitarianism, Communism, Fascism, militant atheism, materialism. Christians ought to seek out Muslims as allies on the moral issues that concern us both — like pornography, prostitution, crime, and abortion. Closer relations like this would benefit Muslims hugely, since many of those who are hostile to the ways of the West are good people simply making bad decisions on the basis of decades of totalitarian propaganda.
This doesn’t mean we should support the elimination of Israel, the abandonment of Iraq, the removal of Christianity from the public sphere, or other fashionable grievances supposedly held by Muslims. Let the Left sympathise with these fraudulent political causes of their own invention.
The propaganda picture of the the extreme and irrational Islamic moral fundamentalist, brutally enslaving his womenfolk is no more true than the equally absurd stereotype of the Christian zealot in a long black coat half crazed with fire and brimstone. Our positions on public and private morality are not identical, but we have a lot in common with our Muslim brothers and sisters. None of us want to raise our children in a society overrun with sleaze, vice and lawlessness. Every citizen in a democratic state has a right to influence the society they live in. But when it comes to public morality, an undeclared alliance of extreme Leftists and extreme libertarians are trying to deny that to us.
The isolation of and insulation of communities is not natural for Muslims. It is largely a reaction to the presence of so much immorality. Christians have been surrounded by it for so long that, like the Pharisee walking past the dying Samaritan, we have just accepted that this is the way things are. We could learn from the moral outrage of the Muslims. Sleaze and vice are not just free choices that people make, they are paths of destruction down which the young are tempted.
By understanding this, you can help our Muslim brothers and sisters to assimilate — in other words to feel at home in their adopted countries — and gain some valuable and loyal allies.
Peace

The Muslims of the Arab world have had a very troubled history since time of the Ottoman Empire (the Ottomans were horrific tyrants, not unlike the depraved Roman Empire), but underneath it all they are very much like us.
They are not natural Fascists and they don’t like to fight. Like Hitler and Mussolini, Nasser of Egypt was a hybrid of Socialism and Nationalism who indoctrinated and militarised his country. He had billions of dollars of advanced Soviet military equipment, and a large professional army. He was beloved and admired by his people and throughout the Arab world, the archetypical messianic dictator. But would they fight and die for him? Not willingly. His officers lacked aggressive spirit, and his army was one of the best equipped but most poorly motivated of the 20th Century. When the battle got fierce, they turned around and walked home. If only every dictator had troops with such good sense!
The Muslims are a peace-loving, philosophical people who greet each other with ‘Peace’, and when speaking of future events remind themselves that things will only happen ‘if God wills it’. Like the Protestant world, they have a history of being merchants and traders. The Muslims even love and adore Jesus — they regard him as one of the greatest of their prophets.
Like the Hebrews in Egypt, the Muslims are yoked, but not broken. Too often as Christians, we see their bondage and think it is their nature. We see them as terrorists when the terrorists themselves are a Totalitarian creation. The deceiver is using the same ideological tools and tricks he used to turn the 20th Century in history’s worst horror, and despite a century of bitter experience, God’s gift of multiple victories, and the wisdom that should have brought us, we are acting in the face of our old adversary like we haven’t learnt anything.
Muslims have suffered under dictators for centuries, but in their history and in their consciousness is the fond memory of cosmopolitan and enlightened rule. Look at the wonderful people of Iraq, brave, peaceful, and determined.
That is the Muslim character released from bondage.
These are your fellow citizens, your friends and spiritual cousins.