Ishmael's Fury

It had to be confusing for him.  He was thirteen years old, the only son of a rich and powerful man, a man who doted on him, who lavished time and attention on him, a man who talked to God.  His mother was his father's slave which wasn't unusual for the time but it didn't seem to matter, his father loved him all the same, spending time with him and teaching him things as fathers do with their sons.  He was shocked and frightened when his father announced that he had to circumcise him because of some promise that God had made to him, and it was painful, but the old man - he was 99 years old! - underwent the same trial, feeling the same pain that his son felt, binding them even closer together than before.  So when his father said that God had promised him another son by his wife, that God would establish a special covenant with this boy to bless him and his descendants forever and not with him, he had to have been bewildered.  What had he done?  Why wasn't he good enough?  Why couldn't God favor him instead of this new kid?  True, he had sometimes been unruly, disobedient, picking fights with other kids, but his mother had told him that was his nature, that God predicted he would be wild yet his father loved him anyway, so again, why wouldn't God choose him?

His father told him that he would be the father of a great nation, the father of twelve princes, but such promises fell short.  He was the oldest!  He was the first!  God should have promoted him, not someone else, and when his father gave a great banquet to celebrate the baby's weaning, he couldn't help but tease the little kid.  After all, what was he supposed to do, just sit quietly while someone stole his inheritance?  But then the old woman retaliated, demanding that his father throw him out, with his mother, right into the desert, like they were trash.  Where were they supposed to go, with just the clothes on their backs and only the food and water that they carried?  As I said, it had to be confusing for him.

Ishmael and his mother, Hagar, survived their journey into the desert, with God's help, and God kept His promise to make him a great nation.  He indeed fathered twelve sons and lived to the ripe old age of 137, the great-grandfather of all the Arab people.  But it wasn't enough.  That God would deliberately subordinate him to Isaac, giving him favored status, that he would be deliberately passed over and then exiled into the wilderness, kindled a bitterness that burns in his descendants to this day.  Year after year, century after century, the anger and envy and resentment seethed and bubbled and boiled until one of his number invented a religion to channel that rage, an ideology that rejected his younger brother's ascendancy and justified his destruction.  Ishmael was God's heir, not Isaac!  The Arabs were God's Chosen People, not the Jews!  The Jews and their cousins the Christians had it all wrong, in fact, Abraham was a Muslim and they were all infidels!  "We will subjugate the entire earth and force you to recognize us as your superiors, you infidel dogs!" they shouted, or words to that effect, and the slaughter of fourteen centuries began.

We face people who worship death, who gas children, who poison children, who behead and crucify children.  The Chechen thugs who machine-gunned children in Beslan, Russia, while they ran for their lives are kin to the Boko Haram thugs who burn children alive in Nigeria, who are kin to the Taliban thugs in Pakistan who shot Malala Yusufzai in the face for the crime of going to school, and are kin to the ISIS thugs who sawed James Foley's head off in Syria.  From Mohammed's first bleary vision, Muslims have killed and butchered and drowned and crushed anyone who resisted them, anyone who refused to convert to their bloody religion, anyone who just wanted to be left alone, anyone who wasn't exactly like them.  They reject our ideas of morality, individual worth and dignity, freedom of expression and democracy.  The concept of separating government from religion is absurd to them, as is independent thought and action.  They aren't students of postmodernism; they hijack airliners and fly them into the World Trade Center.  They espouse the anithesis of Western, Judeo-Christian values:  Rigid, autocratic control of all human activity, the enslavement of the human soul and the dissolution of the self, and thus are our mortal enemies.

Priest-King doesn't believe this.

Priest-King believes that Islam's war against the rest of the world is our fault, meaning America.  We've antagonized them, exploited them, occupied their lands, interfered in their political affairs, supported Israel, invaded Iraq and waged war against them for over thirteen years.  We consistently disregard their complaints and impose our values on them, so his approach is to apologize vehemently for our past actions and then disengage from Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Somalia, Yemen and Nigeria and anywhere where decisive American leadership is needed.  He always seems surprised when American withdrawal is followed by brutal Muslim violence, and the fact that he absented himself from the rally of world leaders in Paris after the Charlie Hebdo massacre yet went out of his way to commune with the Saudi princes following King Abdullah's death speaks to his character and his worldview:  Opposing Islam is bad, embracing Islam is good.  Thus we have precisely the wrong man in charge at the moment Muslim savagery is escalating, a man who sympathizes with the perpetrators and who despises the very country he leads, the only country capable of destroying these sociopaths once-and-for-all.

But as I have said, the seething hatred that fuels jihadist atrocities predates Israel and the United States and even the West as we know it.  Muslims have been attacking and burning and pillaging since Emperor Heraclius first confronted them from the New Rome, so democracy and Hollywood movies have nothing to do with their anger.  This relentless drive to destroy has its root not just in a sense of impotence against Western scientific, technological, economic and military superiority but in the insane jealousy Ishmael had for his brother, the outrage at being considered illegitimate, inadequate, cast aside and forgotten.  His descendants want to build a new civilization on Isaac's bones, a civilization that exalts depravity and the subjugation of the human spirit, a civilization that denies freedom and grace and hope and offers bondage, tyranny  and despair instead, a civilization for whom Afghanistan ruled by the Taliban is a model society.  Regardless of ISIS terror and Priest-King's fecklessness, we must resolve to resist this onslaught, to defend ourselves by ourselves, to defend the freedom so dearly bought by our ancestors and lift up the Name of Jesus, by whom all things are possible.  God grant us the wisdom and the strength to do it.