RUTHFULLY YOURS

Journalist and Philos Project contributor Ralph Dexter Van Zile takes to task Christians worldwide who “practice Christianity as if it were a submissive, anti-Semitic slave religion.” This assessment comes in his new book Submitted under Protest: Essays Written in Defense of Freedom, an insightful anthology documenting one Christian’s intellectual defense of religious freedom against jihad.

Van Zile examines how old discredited anti-Semitic sentiments have gained new vibrancy among Christians as the global “human rights community has promoted a pornographic obsession with the Arab-Israeli conflict.” Amongst America’s historically socially predominant Protestant denominations like the United Church of Christ in which the Catholic Van Zile grew up, “progressive mainline churches have become a storehouse of anti-Jewish invective.” Internationally, the “World Council of Churches [WCC] speaks about the modern state of Israel in a manner similar to the way Christians spoke about Jews in Medieval Europe—as a uniquely sinful nation.”

WCC materials, writes Van Zile, “portray Israel’s creation as a mistake or irredeemable injustice against the Palestinians.” In America, the “implicit message offered by mainline peace and justice activists” is that “maybe the world would be better off if the Jewish nation were banished from community of nations and ultimately dismantled.” Often this “anti-Zionism expressed by mainline churches is a consequence of disappointed millennial hopes” as Judaism’s historic encounters with a fallen, murderous world negate what he calls “messianic pacifism.”

Van Zile also analyzes surprising parallel developments among anti-Zionist Jewish groups like Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP). “If they were alive in the 1930s, JVP’s supporters and allies would argue that if only Herschel Grynszpan hadn’t killed that German diplomat on November 6, 1938, Kristallnacht would never have happened.” Van Zile disbelievingly writes that “maybe the Holocaust could have been averted through rational discussion.”

Such distorted biases result in “portraying Israel as if it has the human rights record of China and the security concerns of Canada,” writes Van Zile. Yet Israeli democracy “sets the gold standard for human rights in the Middle East,” while the region’s dictatorships and terrorist movements commit often ignored atrocities against which Israeli sins pale. Demands that Israel achieve peace with its Arab neighbors similarly ignores that “Israel has been attacked from every inch of territory from which it has withdrawn in the past two decades.” This reflects the security reality that “Israel was created in response to a mass killing of Jews in Europe in the twentieth century that part of Arab and Muslim world seem intent on repeating in the twenty-first century.”

Explaining the ideology behind threats to Israel, Van Zile writes that “Islamic doctrine about the Jewish people has been a central force behind the Arab-Israeli conflict since its beginning.” Under “traditional Muslim theology and jurisprudence, Jews are to live asdhimmis under Muslim rule,” the second-class status demanded of subjugated non-Muslim monotheists. “Moreover, any territory previously governed by Muslim rulers should not be acceded back to non-Muslims. Consequently, Jewish sovereignty and freedom is simply contrary to the Islamic nomos or sense of order.”

The Middle East’s largely defenseless Christian minorities face as fellow dhimmis even greater dangers than the well-armed Jewish state, Van Zile writes:

Christians in the region are now playing the role historically played by Jews in Europe, where they were nearly exterminated, and the Middle East, where they were driven from countries that they had been living in for centuries after Israel’s creation in 1948.

Ironically, Van Zile notes, because “Christians in the Middle East are afraid of Islam” they often refrain from calling attention to their plight. These “dhimmi communities, who have suffered terribly under various manifestations of Islamic supremacism over the centuries, have learned to downplay the suffering they have endured and remain silent about its causes.” He analogizes to how an “abused housewife learns not to say things that offend her violent, abusive husband for fear of provoking more violence.”

Yet in reality the “totalitarian and authoritarian impulse that manifested itself as Nazism in the twentieth century has found another ideological vehicle in the twenty-first—Islamism,” writes Van Zile. This “supremacism represents the greatest threat to human rights and world peace in the world today” and “has been a persistent aspect of the Muslim faith since its founding in the seventh century.” “When Islamists engage in acts of violence against non-Muslims, they make a straightforward and reasonable claim that they are following an example set for them by Mohammed,” Islam’s proclaimed founding prophet.

“Jesus Christ and Mohammed offered up two fundamentally different responses to the human condition,” Van Zile said. Jesus Christ “washed the feet of his followers, called on them to reconcile with their enemies, and asked God to forgive his killers even as he was on the cross.” Mohammed “conquered and subjugated his enemies and called upon his followers to do the same as he lay dying.”

Van Zile cannot overlook the paradox that such dangerous Islamic doctrines often escape condemnation. “[L]iberation theology—which was so readily used to highlight the suffering of blacks in the United States and Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip—has not been used by its adherents to highlight the suffering of Christians Muslim rule.” Additionally, the WCC invokes “fear of ‘Islamophobia’ to stifle honest discussion of Muslim mistreatment of non-Muslims throughout the world.” This “makes about as much sense as calling nineteenth-century abolitionists anti-white racists.”

In response to such theological disinformation, Van Zile demands that Americans and others “break the transmission belts of dhimmitude in our own society” in churches, academia, and media. He criticizes specifically the WCC, whose juxtaposed insouciance towards Islamic repression and condemnation of Western cartoons denigrating Muhammad “shows Christians worldwide how to scrape and bow before Muslim extremists.” “No more fake dialogue about the similarities between the two faiths,” he also writes of superficial Christian-Muslim interfaith encounters; “It’s time to get real.” Those who favor reality over such chicanery would do well to read Van Zile’s book about his important spiritual and political journey to religious freedom.