When I watch what’s unfolding in Israel, with Hamas to the southwest and Hezbollah to the north, I think of two books I’ve read. One on Islam I picked up in a Southeast Asia airport — Malaysia and the Club of Doom: The Collapse of Islamic Countries. The other, the Tanakh (Old Testament), was being placed into the unbuttoned shirts of Israeli paratroopers as they were commissioned in a nighttime ceremony at Jerusalem’s Western (Wailing) Wall. 

On that occasion, I was one of nine Gentiles on tour with a half-dozen Jewish members of the FIDF (Friends of the Israel Defense Forces). Over the course of a week, we’d met with IDF personnel at such venues as the electronic listening post atop Mount Hermon, the high-rise Israeli “Pentagon” in Tel Aviv, the Palmachim Airbase on the Mediterranean Coast, a Gaza Brigade unit, and the Iron Dome launch sites near the ancient Philistine cities of Ashdod and Ashkelon. (Incidentally, the word “Palestine” derives from the early Hebrew, Greek, and Roman words for “Land of the Philistines.”)

Club of Doom was surprising in that a Muslim wrote it and it was published in Kuala Lumpur, whose Petronas Towers (taller that New York’s former World Trade Center) evoke minarets and incorporate structurally the Islamic eight-pointed star. You’d expect a fatwa on the author, Syed Akbar Ali, since he rehearsed a range of Muslim failures. Many others have done so, but they were infidels (e.g., Winston Churchill, Bernard Lewis, Theodore Dalrymple, Samuel Huntington, and Maureen Dowd, who, as a woman, ran afoul of car renters and restaurant hosts in Saudi Arabia). No so Mr. Ali. But he redeemed himself by saying that the nations engaged in self-destruction were benighted because they weren’t sufficiently Muslim; they’d fallen short of the wise counsel and glory that was Islam.

To raise the alarm, Syed noted that 57 Muslim countries combined fielded only 600 universities, compared to India with 8,407 and the U.S. with 5,758; that 1.4 billion Muslims had produced only eight Nobel Laureates, while 14 million Jews could claim 167 winners; that only 1 percent of Arabs owned a computer; and that 60 percent of Muslims were illiterate. 

Such disparities track with my own experience in North Africa and the Middle East. When I first visited the region in 1966 (the summer before the Six-Day War), Jerusalem was a divided city, with the Mount of Olives in Jordan. Up north, the Golan Heights, then in Syrian hands, offered vantage points for artillery aimed at Jewish settlements in the Jezreel Valley. Though I’m grateful for sightseeing and exchanges on both sides of the line (including contact with Arab Christians), I couldn’t help but notice that the passage into Israel felt somewhat like a shift from Bible times to the 20th century. 

Decades later in Amman, I read a Jordan Times appeal from Queen Noor that the citizens stop the honor killings. Apart from the murder of young women who dared to date non-Muslims, there was a logistical problem — the jails were filling up with girls in protective custody. Then, not long after, our seminary bike team rode up the Nile from Luxor to Aswan with cross-incorporating school logos on our jerseys. Accordingly, the government assigned us a full-route, jeep-mounted security unit brandishing AK-47s. It was basically a matter of Egyptian economics, for the flow of sightseers from abroad was drying up in the wake of massacres in Cairo (claiming nine Germans) and the Valley of the Kings (with 58 visitors killed, including 36 from Switzerland and 10 from Japan). That was the trip where I slept in $2 and $4 hotels, suffering a rat bite while in the latter, and where we passed two dozen women, robed head to toe in black, crouching on the roadside. Eerie. To be sure, I’ve have had a host of gratifying experiences, with comfortable hospitality, in Muslim-majority countries. But I was always aware that Toto and I were not anywhere near Kansas (or Israel) anymore. 

So, what gives? A range of answers have been proffered from both inside and outside the Muslim camp (or, more properly, camps, what with Sunni, Shia, and Sufi brands and regional variants, whether “Desert”/Saudi or “Island”/Indonesian). All turn to the Quran, which sends mixed messages, leaving the door open for slaughter. Though Surah 5 says that killing an innocent is tantamount to killing all mankind, Surah 9 urges Muslims to “ambush the idolators.” Perhaps the obsession with honor and shame has driven them to wipe out those who’ve embarrassed them, notably the Israelis, who’ve bested them repeatedly in combat. Maybe it’s the persistent tribalism that trumps devotion to humane universals. Maybe Muslim states haven’t needed their own R&D, since, as “a religion of peace,” they’ve managed to poach on the STEM work of cultures they’ve invaded. (Yes, I know that “algebra” and “algorithm” are Arabic words, but not so “calculus” and “probability.”)

Within 100 years of Mohammed’s death, his marauders had surged all the way to modern-day India, Spain, Turkey, and Egypt. The violent expansion continued over the centuries, bringing Muslim forces to the outskirts of Paris and Vienna, where, thanks to Charles Martel and Jan Sobieski, they were turned back, but not so far back as to liberate the Seven Churches of Revelation (Ephesus, Smyrna, Pergamum, Thyatira, Sardis, Philadelphia, and Laodicea) and sites of the early Church councils (Chalcedon, Nicaea, and Constantinople) from Muslim rule.

Markers, and lovely ones at that, are positioned at the reaches of their invasions — the Mughal Taj Mahal in Agra and the Andalusian Alhambra in Grenada. Drawing on local cultures, they were hybrids of sort. But today’s “Muslim” architectural marvels are products of foreign ingenuity. For instance, the world’s tallest building, the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, was designed by the Chicago firm of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, with Adrian Smith as project manager. In short, you don’t need advances in conception and manufacture if you have prevailing military force backed today by oil money. Who needs a Muslim-engineered vehicle (of which there is none) if you can buy a German Mercedes-Benz truck to blow up the Marine barracks in Beirut. And it’s no surprise that ISIS publicity photos feature the Japanese Toyota Hilux truck, outfitted with a twin-barreled, anti-aircraft, Russian ZU-23-2.  Not a Somali or Moroccan truck in sight.

I submit that the prime culprit for “doom” is Islam itself. This is a religious issue, not a genetic, geographical, or historical one. Arabs are made in the image of God, capable of being wonderful, awful, or mediocre. The same goes for the Jews. I’m grateful for the work of Moses Maimonides, Jonas Salk, Jonathan Sacks, Marc Chagall, and, of course, Dov Fischer, who contributes regularly to this journal. But not so much the work of such ethnic Jews as Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, George Soros, Sam Bankman-Fried, and Harvey Weinstein. As for Arabs (broadly defined, to include the Lebanese) and Muslims, I’ve appreciated the work of Anwar Sadat, John Sununu, King Hussein, al-Kindi, Michael DeBakey, Danny Thomas, Rami Malek, and Najeeb Halaby. But woe are we for the terrible deeds of such latter-day Muslims as Osama bin Laden, Yasser Arafat, Bashar al-Assad, Muammar Qaddafi, Idi Amin, and the Ayatollah Khomeini. Of course, professedly Christian Westerners such as the Lutheran Dennis Rader (BTK Killer), Baptist Jesse James, and Catholic Cardinal Theodore McCarrick have done terrible things, even as Lutheran J.S. Bach, Baptist Billy Graham, and Catholic Antonin Scalia acquitted themselves well. Every group features bad actors and regrettable, corporate deeds.

In 2017, I was asked to write on the question: “If Christianity is so good, why are Christians so bad?” As I addressed it, I noticed that while religions and ideologies have enabled and committed bad things, some have had the capacity and disposition to reform themselves; others haven’t. The former have antibodies working within, blood proteins that recognize and destroy the antigens. William Wilberforce of the Evangelical Clapham Sect led Parliament to abolish the English slave trade. Catholic Francisco de Vitoria and Protestant Hugo Grotius contributed to the just-war tradition, taught through the Geneva Accords in the U.S. military and as Purity of Arms protocols for Israeli forces. Within this culture — our culture — Lt. William Calley of My Lai infamy found himself in the stockade and not celebrated back home. 

Moved by the Bible and the Holy Spirit, Christians enjoy the wisdom and power of self-correction. Not so devotees of Japan’s state-Shintoism in the 20th century. It took violent, outside force to stop the madness that countenanced the face-to-face slaughter of 200,000 Nanking innocents in 1937. It took the likes of men like Chester Nimitz and Douglas MacArthur to defeat and subsequently govern the Japanese for a season. Similarly, Islam sometimes needs allopathic medicine to arrest its contagion, whether through radiation by economic sanction, the cauterization of terrorist tunnels, or the excision of murderous tyrants. Sad to say, as we’ve learned in Kabul, Baghdad — and, yes, Gaza City — when left outside the doctor’s care of Judeo-Christian influence, they revert to the sickness that prompted a house-call or quarantine in the first place. (For this reason, I call the Iran–Iraq wars an epistemic victory since we learned once again than an unattended Islamic state cannot keep up juridically or economically with the West; the upheld, purple-dyed fingers of smiling, Iraqi women voters were passing fancies.) 

In this connection, we also should speak of spiritual, acquired auto-immunodeficiency syndrome (convictional AIDS). A harsh analogy, but consider the self-destructive behavior that scuttles the growth of science by the practice of dhimmitude and the demeaning of women (whereby infidels, male and female, like Pierre and Marie Curie, would be suppressed). And where would we be without godly homemakers like Susannah Wesley, steeped in dignity and life-giving Scripture, unafraid that a husband’s other three wives and their offspring might be favored, or that an unattached female friend might catch her husband’s eye to fill an open slot on the team of four? No wonder that such formerly Muslim women as Nonie Darwish, Brigitte Gabriel, and Ayaan Hirsi Ali are so bold in their calls for escape in the direction of Christianity. (Hirsi Ali recently noted that the British Bertrand Russell remained unscathed when he penned “Why I Am Not a Christian” in a traditionally Christian nation while counterparts in Islamic nations would be toast if they came out with “Why I Am Not a Muslim.”) The same would go for an Islam-critical newspaper in the land of the “mother church,” Saudi Arabia. There’s no journalistic antibody “speaking truth to power” there. 

In closing, let me move to the other book I mentioned at the start — the Old Testament. I have two particular passages in mind. In Genesis 1:28, the Lord tells us to “subdue” the earth and “exercise dominion over” its creatures. We’re to make the most of it for honorable human ends, to be grateful, industrious, prudent, moral stewards of its God-given resources. Woe to stupid us if we deify the material world or fail to explore and righteously employ the treasures of Creation for all they’re worth — economically, industrially, medically, educationally, philanthropically, militarily, recreationally, and, yes, aesthetically.

Israel’s gotten the message, having drained the fever swamps of the Huleh Valley above Galilee, marshland clogged up for centuries under Ottoman rule.  Thus, Israelis saved 8 billion gallons of water a year lost to evaporation and opened up 19 square miles of rich farmland at the foot of the Golan Heights. Subsequently, they reestablished wetlands in one sector, a nature preserve where migratory birds between Europe and Africa can find respite during their journey. 

In the south, they’ve shown amazing ingenuity in making the Negev Desert bloom. When, for instance, they drilled down a half-mile for irrigation purposes, they found only brackish water, so they decided to draw it up into newly constructed tilapia beds and then appropriate the fish dung for fertilizer. And today, scientists travel from around the world to study at the Arava International Center for Agricultural Training, named for the 100-mile stretch between the Dead Sea and the Gulf of Aqaba. All around, you see rows and rows of flowers blooming under translucent plastic sheeting, and, on the western edge of the desert, Israel has planted the 7,000-acre Yatir Forest. 

Another Hebrew passage (1 Kings 3:16–28) concerns a famous demonstration of Solomon’s wisdom. Two women claimed to be a child’s true mother, so the king said they’d settle it by cutting the child in two, giving each mother half. One woman said, “Go ahead.” The other objected, “No, give the baby to the other woman,” showing that she was the one with the child’s best interests at heart. The phony mom was jealous and petulant, indifferent to the child’s well-being, unfit for the parental control she coveted. On this model, when I look at Israel, I see the heart of the first mother; when I look at Hamas, I see only seething resentment and murderous spite. 

Commenting on the current conflict, former President Barack Obama condemned the attack by Hamas but then played the moral equivalency card:

And you then have to admit nobody’s hands are clean, that all of us are complicit to some degree…. What Hamas did was horrific, and there’s no justification for it. And what is also true is that the occupation and what’s happening to Palestinians is unbearable.

Well, he’s right to say he’s complicit, as is his understudy, President Joe Biden, and the partisans who’ve placed and sustained them in power — but not in the way they think.

Both men have championed the murder of unborn babies and the normalization of sexual perversity. Recall, for instance, the gay-pride flag flying over our U.S. embassy in the United Arab Emirates and the appointment of “Admiral” Rachel (Richard) Levine, a Jewish man in drag, to serve as assistant secretary of health. Through such madness, we’ve enhanced the narrative that Western civilization is hopelessly degenerate, begging and ripe for displacement. We’re rightly incensed by the flow of arms from Iran to Gaza, but we must not forget to also call out those in our midst whose contemptible behavior supplies ideological ammunition to Hamas and its Muslim friends.