What Christian non-voters don’t know about Islam may end up enslaving them or worse. Of course, not all Muslims are Jihadists, but more than 300 million are. Jihadist strategists do not believe they can militarily destroy the United States, so they target its social, economic, and political foundations to cause internal collapse.
There are too many Christians who avoid politics to fight Islam, a revival of Communism, Socialism, and materialism for a variety of reasons they believe are biblical:
• Jesus didn’t get involved in politics. (He also didn’t marry or have children.)
• The rapture is around the corner. (There is no such event. No single verse in the NT says the church will be taken off the earth before, during, or after seven years.)
• Politics can’t save us. (Whoever said it could?)
• Christians should not be involved in politics because it’s dirty. (Does this mean you’re OK with politicians pushing their dirty politics on us and taking away our freedoms?)
• We can’t impose our view of morality on other people. (Are you OK with letting non-Christians impose their morality on all of us? There’s no neutrality.)
• The Christian’s Citizenship is in Heaven. (This didn’t stop Paul from appealing to his Roman citizenship.)
• There is a separation between Church and State (There is a jurisdictional separation as the Bible teaches, but it does not teach separation of God and civil government.)
I discuss excuses like these and many more in my book Myth, Lies, and Half-Truths. Islamists take advantage of our nation’s freedoms and use them against us and exploit Christian quietism and defeatist eschatology.
Myths, Lies, and Half-Truths
Like the Bereans of Paul’s day (Acts 17:11), Christians should check the veracity of all opinions against the only reliable standard of authority that God has placed in our hands: the Bible. This may mean a change in belief systems for some. There is no novelty in this. God confronted Peter directly about the inclusion of Gentiles into the household of faith (10:9–16). Paul confronted Peter “to his face” on a similar matter (Gal. 2:11–14). There are times when we all need to be knocked off our horse of mistaken opinions (Acts 9:4). “Testing” is a biblical mandate (2 Cor. 13:5; 1 John 4:1).
Buy NowIf the people do not embrace Islam and implement the Sharia on their own accord, it becomes an obligation upon the Muslims to fight and implement Islam. In countries such as Britain and America, their people have clearly rejected to embrace Islam and will never choose to live by the Sharia. Therefore, the only two ways in which these countries can become under the domain of Islam is by the last two options, a group of Muslims rise and overthrow the government, or an Islamic state is established elsewhere and comes to conquer these nations. (Source)
Our Founders understood the dangers of Islam and acted on it. For example, Thomas Jefferson studied the Koran. He owned a two-volume English translation that was published in 1734. He understood that the Koran’s peace initiatives were double-talk and one-sided. Peace meant the absence of any religious or political opposition. Historian Paul Johnson confirms this judgment:
Koranic teaching that the faith or “submission” can be, and in suitable circumstances must be, imposed by force, has never been ignored. On the contrary, the history of Islam from Arabia was followed by the rapid conquest of North Africa, the invasion and virtual conquest of Spain, and a thrust into France that carried the crescent to the gates of Paris. It took half a millennium of reconquest to expel the Moslems from Western Europe. The Crusades, far from being an outrageous prototype of Western imperialism, as is taught in most of our schools, were a mere episode in a struggle that has lasted 1,400 years and were one of the few occasions when Christians took the offensive to regain the “occupied territories” of the Holy Land.[1]
As early as 1786, Jefferson, serving as the ambassador to France, and John Adams, the Ambassador to Britain, met in London with Ambassador Abdrahaman, the Dey of Tripoli’s ambassador to Britain, to negotiate a peace treaty based on Congress’ vote to fund it. Peace would come at a price. The United States initially paid tribute to the Regency of Tripoli under the Treaty of Tripoli signed in 1796 and ratified in 1797 to protect American merchant ships from Barbary corsairs. This agreement required a one-time payment of $66,000 in goods and cash, including 40,000 Spanish dollars, watches, and cloth, and explicitly stated that neither party would make any periodic tribute or further payments. See my book The Case for America’s Christian Heritage for the fascinating story about our early nation’s war with Islam.
The Case for America's Christian Heritage
There’s much work before us to reset the foundation stones of a firm reliance on Divine Providence. We need to heed the words of Benjamin Franklin who quoted Psalm 127:1 during the drafting process of the Constitution: “except the Lord build the house they labor in vain that build it,” and “that without His concurring aid we shall succeed in this political building no better, than the Builders of Babel.” The principles that were true and necessary centuries ago for building nations are equally true and necessary today.
Buy NowHowever, in 1801, the Pasha of Tripoli, Yusuf Qaramanli, demanded increased tribute and declared war on the United States when payments were delayed, initiating the First Barbary War. The conflict ended with the Treaty of 1805, which abolished the practice of annual tribute entirely in exchange for a one-time ransom payment of $60,000 for the release of American prisoners.
Jefferson and Adams argued in vain that the United States was not at war with Tripoli and had no part in the Crusades. In what way had the U.S. provoked the Muslims, they asked? Ambassador Abdrahaman went on to explain “the finer points of Islamic jihad” to Jefferson and Adams. In a letter to John Jay, Jefferson wrote the following:
The Ambassador answered us that it was founded on the Laws of their Prophet, that it was written in their Koran, that all nations who should not have acknowledged their authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon them wherever they could be found, and to make slaves of all they could take as Prisoners, and that every Musselman [Muslim] who should be slain in battle was sure to go to Paradise.[2]
Abdrahaman was paraphrasing the Koran’s “rules of engagement” found in the 47th Surah:
“Whenever you encounter the ones who disbelieve [during wartime], seize them by their necks until once you have subdued them, then tie them up as prisoners, either in order to release them later on, or also to ask for ransom, until war lays down her burdens.” Unless a nation submitted to an Islamic nation, whether it was the aggressor or not, that nation was by definition at war with Islam. Jihad means “to submit.” A non-aggressing nation is at war with Islam as long as it hasn’t embraced Islam. Islam’s goal is to conquer the world, either by the submission of one’s will or by Allah’s sword.[3]
The Muslims financed their wars and terror operations by enslaving and then selling captured seamen. From 1500 to 1830, one million European and American seamen and passengers were captured by Muslim pirates in the Mediterranean and the Atlantic.
Miguel de Cervantes (1547-1616), author of Don Quixote, was enslaved in the dungeons of Algiers for five years before he was ransomed by his parents and the Trinitarians. By 1795, America’s “peace” payments to Muslim terrorists comprised 16 percent of the entire federal budget!
The 1797 Treaty with Tripoli was written to assure the Muslims of Tripoli that America would not impose its Christian views on Islamic nations in any treaty transaction, “as it has in itself no character of enmity against the law, religion or tranquility of Musselmen [an archaic English term for a Muslim or follower of Islam].”
A November 3, 1784 letter to Benjamin Franklin from America’s agent in Morocco, the Italian Francisco Chiappe, Secretary of his Imperial Majesty for Foreign Affairs in Barbary, stated, “His Majesty the Emperour of Marocco (whom God preserve) commands me to write to your Excellency that he is in good Friendship and Peace with all the Christian Nations.”[4] This letter shows that, according to the Emperor of Morocco, the newly formed United States was considered a “Christian Nation,” along with Great Britain and other European countries.
[1] Paul Johnson, “‘Relentlessly and Thoroughly’: The Only Way to Respond,” National Review (October 15, 2001).
[2] Quoted in Joseph Wheelan, Jefferson’s War: America’s First War on Terror, 1801-1805 (New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers, 2003), 40-41.
[3] Robert Spencer, The Truth about Muhammad: Founder of the World’s Most Intolerant Religion (Washington, D.C.: Regnery, 2006) and Robert Spencer, The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades) (Washington, D.C.: Regnery, 2005).
[4] “To Benjamin Franklin from Francesco Chiappe: Two Letters, 3 November 1784”: https://bit.ly/3OpbNUB. Hitchens adds the following: “Let us not call this view reductionist. Jefferson would perhaps have been just as eager to send a squadron to put down any Christian piracy that was restraining commerce. But one cannot get around what Jefferson heard when he went with John Adams to wait upon Tripoli’s ambassador to London in March 1785. When they inquired by what right the Barbary states preyed upon American shipping, enslaving both crews and passengers, America’s two foremost envoys were informed that ‘it was written in the Koran, that all Nations who should not have acknowledged their authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon whoever they could find and to make Slaves of all they could take as prisoners, and that every Mussulman who should be slain in battle was sure to go to Paradise.’”