Mark Tapson writes a combination review of a book and a promotion
for speaking engagement. The combo relates to Nonie Darwish, a former Muslim
that converted to Christianity. The book is entitled “Wholly Different: Why I Chose Biblical
Values Over Islamic Values”.
The speaking engagement has passed as it was scheduled for April 6, 2017.
You can tell from the book
title that Ms. Darwish provides a very effective contrast between
Christian-Biblical values and Islamic values. I haven’t read the book yet, but
it sounds like an excellent tool for a Christian to have to combat Muslim
Apologists and Multiculturalist Leftists.
JRH 4/7/17
*************
NONIE DARWISH DEMOLISHES
FALSE EQUIVALENCE BETWEEN CHRISTIANITY AND ISLAM
Her new book clarifies
which is the real “Religion of Peace.”
By Mark Tapson
April 5, 2017
For readers in the
Southern California area, Nonie Darwish will be speaking on her new book Wholly Different: Why I Chose Biblical
Values Over Islamic Values this Thursday, April 6, at
the Four Seasons in Beverly Hills from 11:30 a.m. to 2 p.m. Get more
information on the event and your tickets here.
Several years ago I was
expressing to a friend of mine what I assumed was the undeniable fact that the
world has an Islam problem. Her kneejerk response, ingrained by years of
Progressive indoctrination, was, “But don’t you think Christianity is just as
bad?”
Tragically, this continues to
be the instinct among the multiculturalist multitudes in the West: a reflexive
defense of Islam and an equally swift condemnation of Christianity. As jihad in
all its forms – violent, cultural, legal – advances in the West, willfully
blind defenders of Islam keep insisting that it is one of the world’s great
Abrahamic religions, that all religions have extremists, and that, if anything,
the colonialism and intolerance of the Christian West is the bigger problem.
Our cultural elites demonize and fear-monger about the Christian right in ways
they would never dream of characterizing Muslims.
Meanwhile Islam’s presence
multiplies across the West as Christianity’s diminishes. To cite just one example:
Giulio Meotti at the Gatestone Institute reports that since 2001, London alone
has lost 500 churches of all denominations, with 423 new mosques springing up
to replace them. As we face the momentum of an Islamized West in the future,
the question “Isn’t Christianity just as bad?” has become one of paramount,
existential importance.
Nonie Darwish, a former
Muslim and now Christian convert, demolishes that moral equivalence in her new
book Wholly Different: Why I Chose Biblical
Values Over Islamic Values. She has proven in the past with her
books Now They Call Me Infidel, Cruel and Usual Punishment, and The
Devil We Don’t Know that she is a fearless crusader for truth against
the apologists of Islam and the enemies of Christianity, and this book is her
most forceful testament yet.
Ms. Darwish begins Wholly
Different by noting that it wasn’t until she emigrated from Egypt to
America that she began to get a clear perspective on the Islamic values she had
accepted unquestioningly for the first thirty years of her life – values that
she came to see “are diametrically opposed to Biblical moral values.” Her life
under Islam “was a constant struggle to survive and placate a system that was
unforgiving and unaccepting of anything less than total surrender of my
humanity, dignity, and privacy – in other words, my life, liberty, and pursuit
of happiness.”
But her introduction to
Christianity was transformative. “When I became Christian and heard for the
first time that we human beings were made in the image of God, I wept. I was in
awe at the honor, after being given shame and little value under Islam,” which
is “not about transforming hearts and renewing minds; it is about conquering
lands and enslaving minds.”
“While the overriding theme
of the Bible is the redemption and happiness of believers,” she adds, “the
overriding theme of Islam’s holy book is punishing non-believers.”
Her new life where those
principles life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness were at the center of the
American Way showed her that “the differences between moral and immoral, good
and bad, honor and dishonor, and success and failure were totally different”
here. “In the West I found my peace and humanity…
because of Biblical values that are the foundation of Western society”:
Not
too many people notice that Biblical values are everywhere in America, even
among those who call themselves secular, non-religious, or atheist. But I see
Biblical values everywhere here. There is no other explanation for how
different life in America is from life in the Islamic world.
[…]
It
is unfortunate that many Americans take Biblical values for granted, assuming
that kindness, honesty, and joy are the norm, with or without the Bible. Those
of us who grew up in the parts of the world beyond the influence of the Bible
know better. Biblical values are the product of the Bible, and they cannot be
preserved separate from the Bible.
Darwish goes on to enumerate
a list of differences between Biblical and Islamic values that she has
personally witnessed. She breaks down these and literally dozens of other
dichotomies throughout the book:
We
Are All Sinners vs. They Are All Sinners
Life is Sacred vs. Death is Worship
Guided by the Holy Spirit vs. Manipulated by Human Terror
God the Redeemer vs. Allah the Humiliator
Jesus Died for Us vs. We Must Die for Allah
The Truth Will Set You Free vs. Lying is an Obligation
Faith vs. Submission
Life is Sacred vs. Death is Worship
Guided by the Holy Spirit vs. Manipulated by Human Terror
God the Redeemer vs. Allah the Humiliator
Jesus Died for Us vs. We Must Die for Allah
The Truth Will Set You Free vs. Lying is an Obligation
Faith vs. Submission
Darwish proceeds to hold up
the two sets of religious values as mirror-opposites of each other, with
virtually no common ground. She makes no attempt to whitewash Islam, which she
refers to as “a cult of death,” and she pulls no punches in presenting it as
Christianity’s mortal enemy. “Everything God tells us in the Bible that He
loves, Islam has set out to destroy. Islamic values are backward, the opposite
to what every Jew and Christian holds dear… The Koran represents
a negative power, a dark and subversive force that relentlessly challenges the
authority of the Bible and God Himself.”
“The flame of the Islamic
rebellion against the Bible has been burning for fourteen hundred years,”
Darwish continues. “It is fueled by terrorism, but also by intentional
misinformation, propaganda, and lies.”
From praising versus cursing,
from creating wealth versus seizing it, from seeking humility versus seeking
power, from the example of Jesus to the example of Muhammad, to the differing
takes of Christianity and Islam on the seven sins and the Ten Commandments, on
reality and mental health, and on family values and feminism, Darwish draws a
detailed picture of an incompatible pair of value systems embroiled in a
worldwide culture clash. And one of them falls short in every respect: “Islam
has failed to provide its followers with a comprehensive and well-integrated
value system or with examples of true holiness and godliness. The behavior and
character of Muhammad certainly do not qualify.”
“Islam lacks confidence in
itself,” Darwish asserts, and thus “the mere existence of a freely chosen
competing faith threatens Islam at its very core…
Thus the Bible has become the number one threat to Islam’s ability to prevail.” That is
why a book like Wholly Different is such a vital reminder in
our time of the vast gulf between the two religions’ sets of values. As Islam
wages genocide against Christians in the Middle East and pursues cultural jihad
throughout the West, Christianity wrestles internally with a paralyzing
identity crisis. There is no more time for self-doubt, no more time for
“Coexist” bumper stickers and wishful thinking, no more time for appeasement.
What our choice comes down to, Ms. Darwish’s book reminds us, is this: “The
values of the Bible lead to peace, prosperity, life, liberty, and happiness.
Islamic values will take any society to Hell.” Time to make our choice.
____________
Mark Tapson, a Hollywood-based
writer and screenwriter, is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz
Freedom Center and the editor of TruthRevolt.org.
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