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Kristof compares Christians to jihadists in New York Times

Jul 17, 2004 7:36 pm By Robert Spencer

A young man from Vanderbilt University asked me what I thought of this ludicrous New York Times op-ed by Nicholas Kristof, in which he compares the popular Left Behind series to the murderous statements and actions of jihadists.

If the latest in the “Left Behind” series of evangelical thrillers is to be believed, Jesus will return to Earth, gather non-Christians to his left and toss them into everlasting fire:

“Jesus merely raised one hand a few inches and a yawning chasm opened in the earth, stretching far and wide enough to swallow all of them. They tumbled in, howling and screeching, but their wailing was soon quashed and all was silent when the earth closed itself again.”

These are the best-selling novels for adults in the United States, and they have sold more than 60 million copies worldwide. The latest is “Glorious Appearing,” which has Jesus returning to Earth to wipe all non-Christians from the planet. It’s disconcerting to find ethnic cleansing celebrated as the height of piety.

If a Muslim were to write an Islamic version of “Glorious Appearing” and publish it in Saudi Arabia, jubilantly describing a massacre of millions of non-Muslims by God, we would have a fit. We have quite properly linked the fundamentalist religious tracts of Islam with the intolerance they nurture, and it’s time to remove the motes from our own eyes….

As my Times colleague David Kirkpatrick noted in an article, this portrayal of a bloody Second Coming reflects a shift in American portrayals of Jesus, from a gentle Mister Rogers figure to a martial messiah presiding over a sea of blood. Militant Christianity rises to confront Militant Islam.

This matters in the real world, in the same way that fundamentalist Islamic tracts in Saudi Arabia do. Each form of fundamentalism creates a stark moral division between decent, pious types like oneself “” and infidels headed for hell.

No, I don’t think the readers of “Glorious Appearing” will ram planes into buildings. But we did imprison thousands of Muslims here and abroad after 9/11, and ordinary Americans joined in the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib in part because of a lack of empathy for the prisoners. It’s harder to feel empathy for such people if we regard them as infidels and expect Jesus to dissolve their tongues and eyes any day now.

I am not a fundamentalist and do not believe in the theology that the “Left Behind” series expresses, but Kristof has (as usual) missed a fundamental distinction: a depiction of Jesus killing people at the Last Judgment, no matter how glorious a reader may find it, is not even remotely equivalent to an explicit and repeated call for believers to wage war against unbelievers. Calls like that go out from mosques worldwide with numbing regularity. One would be hard pressed to find a church making the same kind of call on the other side. No one who reads “Left Behind” is going to kill you because of it. He might be waiting for Jesus to do it, but that is not a call to action.

Traditional Christianity and traditional Islam both believe in Judgment and Hell. Kristof’s analysis suggests that if you believe that those things exist, you must want to kill people. He completely ignores the fact that the two religions actually have quite developed teachings about how to behave in this world that don’t depend at all on their eschatologies. Kristof has, I am sure, no clue of the fact that Christianity actually doesn’t have and never has had a doctrine mandating warfare against non-Christians; Islam, on the other hand, has now and has always had a doctrine mandating warfare against non-Muslims. (Taqiyya artists and dhimmis please see, just to name a few, Qur’an 9:29 and hundreds of other verses, Sahih Muslim 4294, Umdat al-Salik o.9.8, plus the writings of all the major Islamic jurists. I have quoted them many times and you can find it all in Onward Muslim Soldiers.)

I am not saying that Christians have never behaved in a beastly manner. I am saying that they didn’t do it because of their ideas of what was going to happen at the end of the world. Whatever you want to tell me about the Crusades and the Inquisition, you will never find a New Testament verse commanding that Christians go out and kill people. But jihadists who kill today are doing so because of teachings of Islam to which I referred above, and others. Muslims who do not kill don’t have different teachings; they just ignore these.

This is, of course, the one thing that people like Nicholas Kristof can never and will never admit, because it would explode the foggy multiculturalism and relativism that passes for a world view in their minds. But it is simply a fact. Prove me wrong.

For Kristof to term this set of novels “militant Christianity,” which is somehow equivalent or becoming equivalent to militant Islam, shows that he has not the remotest idea of what the jihadists are really saying, why they are saying it, and how it differs from what Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell are saying. This kind of theological equivalence is the idiot stepchild of the moral equivalence that the learned pundits used to preach regarding the U.S. and the Soviet Union. And just as moral equivalence played into the bloody hands of the Communists, so theological equivalence plays into the hands of the jihadists, attempting as it does to blunt the force of the moral argument against them. Yeah, sure, they preach murder, but hey, look at these novels!

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