On October 23, 2026, three local Jordanian gunmen drove to St. George’s Greek Orthodox Church in the village of Hamoud, in Karak Governorate, where mourners had gathered for a funeral. They opened fire from outside the church and continued shooting as people tried to escape. Nine people were killed and 34 were wounded. Three days later, Jordanian security forces found the suspects hiding in an abandoned house nearby. After a prolonged exchange of gunfire, all three were captured with serious injuries.

Jordan identified them as Jordanians, members of the same local family, and Jordan’s Public Security Directorate said they adhered to an extremist takfiri ideology. Officials initially said there was no evidence that the attackers belonged to an outside organization, but Jordan’s subsequent airstrikes on alleged militant targets in southern Syria, which Amman linked to the Karak attack, suggested authorities were investigating a broader cross-border network.

Christians are being murdered for their faith by Muslim so regularly that another nine bodies in another Middle Eastern church can disappear into the statistics. In Iraq, Syria, Nigeria, Mozambique, across the Sahel, and elsewhere, Christian communities have been bombed, burned out of their villages, kidnapped, enslaved, and driven from lands where some had lived for centuries before Islam even existed. So what are nine more dead Christians in Karak?

On the surface, this attack is just another day in the long retreat of Christianity across the Islamic world. But looking at this attack in particular this way would be a mistake.

What happened in Karak should set off alarm bells far beyond the Christians who were murdered there. It should alarm Jordan, every country in the region, especially Israel, and, ultimately, the wider world.

Fragile Patriotism

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Individually and collectively, we carry the capacity for both good and evil. Our beliefs, culture, and moral framework shape what we regard as acceptable and what we reject. What fits our ideal self, we embrace and display; what we consider shameful, primitive, or unacceptable, we suppress. Carl Jung called the hidden psychological realm into which individuals and societies push these rejected parts the shadow.

According to Jung, what is pushed into the shadow does not simply disappear. It remains psychologically alive and continues to demand expression. Eventually, it returns in another form. For example, a person who suppresses anger because he believes anger is immoral may still express it through sarcasm or passive aggression. A society that prides itself on being endlessly tolerant may suppress its own hostility, only for that hostility to reappear as intense hatred toward those it labels intolerant.

The difficulty is that when a repressed impulse reappears, it often contradicts the conscious beliefs and moral identity of the person or culture expressing it. That contradiction creates a need for justification. The impulse must be given a form that allows the person to act it out while still believing that he remains faithful to his ideals.

Christianity, according to Jung, suppressed pre-Christian violence in Europe and pushed it into the shadow by presenting an astonishingly demanding moral ideal that civilized Europe. Yet the shadow Christianity created was not the disappearance of violence, but its sanctification.

The aggressive impulse returned in a form that could coexist with the Christian moral ideal: holy war. Violence was no longer presented simply as conquest or revenge, but as obedience to God, defense of the faith, protection of the sacred, or punishment of evil. The shadow had found a religious form through which it could erupt while still appearing righteous.

The next great transformation came with the Enlightenment and modern rationalism. The Enlightenment attacked religion as superstition and rejected everything that could not withstand the scrutiny of reason. In doing so, it constructed its own ideal human being. Modern man was supposed to be rational, scientific, autonomous, educated, and disenchanted. He no longer needed God to give meaning to his life, nor did he need inherited religious stories to explain history. He had escaped the primitive, or so he thought.

By creating its own ideal, the Enlightenment created its own shadow as well. Modern man exiled the need for transcendence, sacrifice, belonging, ritual, collective identity, heroes, enemies, redemption, and ultimate meaning.

The sacred that the Enlightenment had exiled reappeared. The nation became holy, race or class became the chosen people, the party assumed the emotional function of a church, political rallies acquired the atmosphere of religious ritual, the leader became a kind of political savior, betrayal became heresy, political purification took the place of repentance, national rebirth or revolution became salvation.

Fascism and Nazism, with their torches, symbols, rituals, myths, and mass spectacles, were the manifestations of what modern rationalism had suppressed. The sacred returned in political form. New gods appeared in the form of political saviors, nations, races, and causes treated as worthy of the religious devotion that modernity had supposedly left behind.

Then Europe exploded. Two world wars tore across the continent, killing tens of millions and unleashing violence on an industrial scale. Mechanized warfare, mass bombing, genocide, and forced displacement.

The need for transcendence, belonging, sacrifice, and salvation returned in secular forms that could coexist with the modern rationalist ideal. Fascism, Nazism, and revolutionary political movements gave these displaced impulses new objects of devotion. The sacred had not vanished; it had found a political form through which it could erupt while still presenting itself as modern.

The Personality Europe Built After Auschwitz

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What should you do if you have back pain? You can do what many people did in the village where I grew up. Find an old religious woman, lie face down on the floor, and let her step on your back three times while she recites her prayers. Or you can do what my father used to do, throw away your mattress, put something solid like a tile under your back, and sleep on it until the pain gives up before you do. Or you can go see a doctor and get medication.

If you are Alexander Dugin, the author of The Fourth Political Theory, you will tell me the three methods are equal. You will tell me that the people who invented the third option, and dare to impose it on everyone else, are racist, imperialist and hegemonic. And you will tell me it is a colonization of consciousness.

Dugin rejects the assumption that all societies walk one road that ends in Western liberal, secular, individualist society. To him, that destination is a Western particularity, not a universal law. If he read my example, he would call me an idiot and reject my assumption that Western civilization is the doctor with the medication.

Dugin is free to call me whatever he wants. I am not in China or Russia. Western civilization taught me to respect opinions I despise, never to use violence against my opponents, and never to abuse whatever power I may have to punish dissent. Let him criticize Putin while living in Russia, or criticize the Ayatollah while living in Iran, and see what happens. But for Dugin and many other anti-Western ideologues, criticizing the West is the safest thing they can do. So they become experts at it.

In The Better Angels of Our Nature, Steven Pinker presents extensive quantitative evidence that Western civilization was both the womb and the driving force behind everything that made the modern world a better place. Read Pinker next to Joseph Henrich’s The WEIRDest People in the World and Tom Holland’s Dominion, and you will see how the Western Church spent a thousand years breaking the power of the clan, banning cousin marriage and polygamy, and pushing Europeans out of the tribe and into towns, guilds, and universities, where they learned to trust strangers and obey laws rather than fathers. You will also see that the very instincts many people now use to attack the West are themselves Western: the victim matters, the weak have rights, and the slave is equal to his master.

Made in the West

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Three years ago, on October 6, I went to bed after watching a newly released movie called Golda. It was the biography of former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir. Since I converted out of Islam and the package of hate and lies fell off my shoulders, I have become fascinated by the pioneers of the State of Israel.

And before I continue, let me just say to the useful idiots that I wasn’t paid $7,000 for this post by the Zionists. I was paid way more. If it weren’t for real Zionist generosity, I wouldn’t have been able to start the Ideological Defense Institute, an organization that, I wouldn’t be exaggerating if I said, in less than a year has contributed significantly to the culture surrounding the debate about Islam in the West.

Anyway, the pioneers of Israel fascinated me because they chose the hard path, and as a Christian, I came to realize that only a few people choose that path. They could have abandoned Yerushalayim. They could have found safety in a nation-state somewhere else. Their people could have settled for anything, but they chose not to. They dug into stones to make sure that “next year in Jerusalem” became a reality again for the people who have no identity without Zion.

Golda Meir once said that if the Arabs put down their weapons, there would be peace, and if the Jews put down their weapons, there would be no Israel. As an Arab and a former Muslim, I testify to the truth in that statement. Yes, we were raised to hate Jews, to hate any non-Muslims, but Jews in particular; to wait for the day when trees and rocks would call us Muslims to go find the Jew hiding behind them and kill him. We grew up chanting “Khaybar, Khaybar,” a reference to the massacres Muhammad committed against peaceful Jews who rejected his false prophethood.

After leaving Islam, I realized that Bibi Netanyahu was right to reject what Yitzhak Rabin and his naive school were seeking: fragile peace with people who are determined to end the Jews, not because of what Jews do, but because of who they are.

After leaving Islam, I became convinced that there will never be peace between Muslims and Jews, or Muslims and non-Muslims in general, until Muslims love their children more than they hate the infidels. And don’t be deceived by the so-called peace treaties between Muslims and Israel. This is peace between governments, people who identify as Muslims but are not faithful to it, dictators who silence their people so they won’t object to this arrangement.

I watched the movie that night and went to bed, only to wake up to videos of the barbaric Muslim terrorists of Hamas chanting “Allahu Akbar” as they massacred civilians, some of whom were peace advocates, people who used to drive the enemies of the Jewish people from Gaza to Israeli hospitals to provide them with health care; young men and women attending a festival; boys; dogs; raping women; beheading fathers in front of their children.

A week before that, Mohammed bin Salman gave an interview to Fox News in which he said that peace with Israel was possible and that he was in negotiations. So when I saw what Hamas did, I immediately realized that it was Iran sending its hound dogs in Gaza to destroy any hope of a fragile, cold peace between Israel and Saudi Arabia. Hamas, and the Muslim Brotherhood behind them everywhere, were happy to do so because a fragile, cold peace between Arabs and Israel, which could have become possible if Saudi Arabia sat at the table, would end their mission and render their existence irrelevant.

That day, I was filled with anger. I went to bed watching a hero fighting to save her people and woke up to the same old death cult killing these people who wanted nothing but to build the land of their ancestors; Jews who came not only from Europe, but also from the Arab world; Jews who were forced to leave their homes in Yemen, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco. Israel welcomed them with open arms and absorbed them, unlike what the Arabs did to the Palestinian refugees, whose misery, even though it was caused by the Arabs who waged war against the nascent State of Israel, was prolonged by those who manufactured a fake nation-state called Palestine out of thin air, left them in refugee camps for 80 years, and used their pain to hide their domestic failures, while globally begging for money and ransom to control the people whose grievances they themselves fuel.

A week after October 7, I was sitting on a bench at Millennium Park in Chicago, speaking on the phone with a friend in Arabic, when a woman and her children came and sat next to me. Within a few seconds, the woman grabbed her children and left abruptly. I wasn’t paying attention, but my wife told me that the woman had a Star of David necklace.

I realized that the monster I fled from in the Middle East had made its way to America ahead of me. A Jewish woman, in the heartland of America, was afraid of the same Islam that massacred her people 14 centuries ago and that has been attacking her people for the past 80 years for no reason except religious hatred.

That is when I realized that Islamic jihad had been fully rebranded in America. Jihad, the war that was declared on the entire world by Muhammad and his Allah, had now become, in America, “resistance to occupation” and a “response to imperialism.” That is when I made a decision that educating the American people about the truth of Islam, the Middle East, and this unholy alliance between Islam and the Left was my mission.

For two or three generations, the American people have been indoctrinated to hate America, the greatest nation on earth, and to abhor Western civilization, the greatest civilization in human history. The ideologues who want to destroy America keep trying to find a cause to use as a weapon against the West. In the 70s it was the anti–Vietnam War, in the 80s it was anti-nuclear movement, recently, it was BLM, and after October 7, it is Israel.

Israel, the root of the West and its extension, became the target because it is a symbol of what the West represents: a powerful, sovereign nation that rose from the ashes and built one of the greatest economies in the world, refused to settle into victimhood and grievances, and became the enemy of the Left. And that hatred, just as always, paved the way for smuggling Islam into the West, an ideology that erased the civilization of our ancestors in the Middle East and North Africa, under the banners of liberation and with the help of traitors.

Armed with a solid belief in the supremacy of Judeo-Christian civilization, because it was born out of the attributes of its God, and driven by anguish over what I witnessed on the streets of the West after October 7, I wrote my book Islam, Israel and the West, in which I laid out everything I believe Westerners need to learn, not only to understand Islam, not only to understand the nature of the conflict in the Middle East, but also to save this great civilization.

Islam, Israel and the West was released on October 7, 2025, and since then it has been among the bestsellers in four different categories, a very rare thing when it comes to self-publishing.

The word is my weapon, and as someone who is standing, and has been standing for 20 years, against an ideology that kills whoever disagrees with it, I believe that my weapon of truth is capable of crushing this ideology of lies.

Today, three years after October 7, I testify that October 7 changed my life. It changed the trajectory I was on, and while I used to be an evangelist in the Middle East before, I see the mission I am on today as no less important, because whether spiritually or tangibly, my job was and still is discipleship, just as my Lord commanded me.

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About 16,000 jihadists from the Middle East and North Africa went to fight with jihadist groups in Syria and Iraq. That region has about 414 million Muslims, 94 percent of its population. Western Europe, where Muslims number about 26 million, under 5 percent of the population, produced more than 5,000. That is one jihadist for every 25,000 or so Muslims in the Middle East and North Africa, and one for every 5,000 in Western Europe, more than four times the rate.

The gap widens in individual countries. Belgium, with about 860,000 Muslims, produced roughly 500 jihadists, one for every 1,700. France, with 5.7 million Muslims, produced about 1,700, one for every 3,400. Indonesia, with about 239 million Muslims, produced about 600, one for every 400,000. Belgium’s rate is roughly two hundred times Indonesia’s.

A study coordinated by Germany’s federal criminal police found that in 2025, 23.8 percent of Muslims in Germany called an Islamic theocracy the best form of government, up from 18.7 percent in 2021, and 25.1 percent put the rules of the Koran above German law. In France, 24 percent of Muslims told IFOP they sympathize with the Muslim Brotherhood, whose founder called restoring the caliphate an obligation on every Muslim.

Muslims in the West are a small minority in rich, safe, free countries. Muslims in the Islamic world are the majority, and Islam runs their courts, their schools and their calendars. The second group should be the more militant one. The first is, by a wide margin. So what is happening? Why does Islam in the West, at a fraction of the numbers, produce more jihad per head than the Muslim world does?

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The story of Abraham begins with a promise that could not be fulfilled by human means. God told Abram to leave his country and his father’s house and promised to make him “a great nation.” But a nation requires a son, and Abram had none. Genesis states that: “Sarai was childless because she was not able to conceive.” The promise was given to the one household that could not produce its own fulfillment.

Years passed without a child. When God appeared to Abram again, Abram said to him, “Sovereign Lord, what can you give me since I remain childless?” His heir, he said, would be his servant, Eliezer of Damascus. God rejected that possibility: “This man will not be your heir, but a son who is your own flesh and blood will be your heir.” Then God took Abram outside, told him to look up at the sky and count the stars, if he could, and said, “So shall your offspring be.”

After ten years in Canaan, Abram and Sarai still had no son, and after waiting that long, they began to think it was up to them to save themselves. So Sarai proposed a solution: “The Lord has kept me from having children. Go, sleep with my slave; perhaps I can build a family through her.” Genesis records his response in words that deliberately echo God’s charge against Adam: “Abram listened to Sarai.”

By the standards of the time, this was not scandalous. Contracts from the ancient Near East, including tablets from Nuzi, show arrangements in which a barren wife gave her slave to her husband so that the resulting child could legally belong to her household. By listening to Sarai, Abram tried to fulfill God’s promise by his own methods.

The book of Genesis describes what kind of man this son, who was named Ishmael, would be: “He will be a wild donkey of a man; his hand will be against everyone and everyone’s hand against him, and he will live in hostility toward all his brothers.” The Hebrew is pere adam, “a wild donkey of a man.” The son born from Abram’s own effort would live in permanent conflict with those around him.

This is what happens when people try to escape an impossible situation by their own power. Sarai could not have a son, and Abraham had no way to make it happen. That is precisely why God promised it. A son through Hagar required no miracle. It was within Abraham’s reach, and he would not have needed a promise from God to get it. The promise was attached to the impossible because only God could fulfill it.

Thirteen Centuries of Waiting

When the Arab armies took Syria, Iraq, and Egypt in the 630s and 640s, they conquered lands that were overwhelmingly Christian. Damascus, Antioch, Jerusalem, and Alexandria were among the great centers of the Christian world. Within a few years, the Christians who lived there became a subject population. They kept that status for roughly thirteen centuries.

Christians were dhimmis, non-Muslims who were allowed to live under Islamic rule and keep their religion in exchange for accepting the rule of Islam and paying the jizya. The payment was not only revenue, it was a public acknowledgment of inferiority, and a deliberate act of humiliation.

Christians agreed not to build new churches or repair old ones in Muslim areas. They agreed not to display crosses publicly, ring church bells loudly, or pray aloud where Muslims could hear. They agreed not to prevent any member of their community from converting to Islam, and not to try to convert any Muslim. They agreed to wear distinctive clothing, not to ride horses with saddles, not to carry weapons, not to build houses taller than those of Muslims, and to rise from their seats when a Muslim wished to sit.

A Christian’s testimony was not accepted against a Muslim. A Muslim is not to be killed for killing a Christian. Blood money for a Christian was set at half or a third of that for a Muslim. A Christian man could not marry a Muslim woman, while a Muslim man could marry a Christian woman and their children were raised Muslim. A Christian could become a Muslim at any time. A Muslim who became a Christian faced death for apostasy.

The result was a slow and steady subtraction. Egypt, Syria, and Iraq, which had been Christian majorities, became Christian minorities, and then small minorities. Coptic in Egypt and Syriac across the Levant and Mesopotamia gave way to Arabic, until the old languages survived mainly in the liturgy.

None of this means Christians were persecuted without pause for thirteen hundred years. There were long periods of relative calm. Christians served as physicians, translators, and financial administrators to caliphs. Nestorian scholars translated Greek philosophy into Arabic in Abbasid Baghdad. Copts ran much of Egypt’s tax bureaucracy for centuries. But that tolerance was granted by rulers, not guaranteed as a right, and what a ruler grants he can withdraw.

The Abbasid caliph al-Mutawakkil ordered Christians in the ninth century to wear yellow garments and to nail wooden images of devils to their doors. The Fatimid caliph al-Hakim ordered the destruction of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in 1009. Mob attacks burned churches across Mamluk Egypt in the fourteenth century. The periods of calm were real, but they depended entirely on the goodwill of whoever held power. A dhimmi was protected in the way property is protected. He had a guardian, not rights.

A Promise from Istanbul

On November 3, 1839, in the rose garden of Topkapi Palace, the Ottoman foreign minister Mustafa Reshid Pasha read a decree before the assembled officials of the Caliphate, foreign ambassadors, and representatives of the non-Muslim communities. It was issued in the name of the new sultan, Abdulmecid, who was sixteen years old. The decree promised all Ottoman subjects security of life, honor, and property, and fair and public trials, and it applied these guarantees to every subject “of whatever religion or sect.” It became known as the Edict of Gulhane, and it opened the period of reform the Ottomans called the Tanzimat, “the reorderings.”

For the first time since the conquests of the seventh century, an Islamic state had declared in law that a Christian’s life and property carried the same protection as a Muslim’s. Seventeen years later, the empire went further.

To understand why, one has to understand how desperate the empire had become.

By the early nineteenth century, the Ottoman state was losing. The Treaty of Kucuk Kaynarca in 1774 had ended a disastrous war with Russia, and Russia afterward claimed the right to speak on behalf of the empire’s Orthodox Christians. Millions of the sultan’s subjects now had a foreign patron with an army. Serbia won autonomy after a series of revolts. The Greeks rose in 1821 and, with British, French, and Russian help, won full independence in 1830. Christian subjects who felt they had no future under Islam would look for one outside it, and the great powers of Europe would help them.

The most dangerous threat came from within the Islamic world itself. Muhammad Ali, the Ottoman governor of Egypt, had built a modern army and turned it against his sovereign. In 1831 his son Ibrahim Pasha invaded Syria, defeated the Ottoman army, and marched into Anatolia. In June 1839, Egyptian forces crushed the Ottomans again at Nezib. Days later Sultan Mahmud II died, and the Ottoman fleet sailed to Alexandria and defected to Egypt. The empire had lost its army, its navy, and its sultan in a single summer. Only European intervention could save it, and Britain was prepared to intervene, but it expected reform in return.

The Edict of Gulhane was issued four months after Nezib. It was written by a man who had served as ambassador in London and Paris and understood what Europe wanted to hear. The following year, Britain and its allies forced Muhammad Ali out of Syria. The reform and the rescue came as a package.

Syria had already seen a preview. During the Egyptian occupation of the 1830s, Ibrahim Pasha loosened many of the restrictions on Christians. He allowed churches to be built and repaired, admitted Christians to local councils, and opened the country to European consuls and missionaries. American Protestant missionaries were already working in Beirut. Syrian Christians had tasted a different order, and so had Syrian Muslims, many of whom resented it bitterly.

The second and decisive step came after the Crimean War. The war began in 1853, partly over a dispute between Catholic and Orthodox clergy about control of the holy places in Jerusalem, and partly over Russia’s demand to act as protector of the Ottoman Orthodox. Britain and France fought on the Ottoman side. When the war ended, the sultan’s allies expected another reward. On February 18, 1856, weeks before the peace conference in Paris, the sultan issued the Reform Edict, the Islahat Fermani.

This edict went far beyond Gulhane. It declared Muslims and non-Muslims equal before the law. It abolished the jizya. It opened government office, military schools, and state employment to non-Muslims. It allowed Christian communities to repair churches and, under conditions, build new ones. It created mixed courts in which Christian testimony would count. It even forbade the use of insulting terms for non-Muslims in official language. On paper, the dhimma, the legal framework that had defined Christian life under Islam for twelve centuries, was over.

The empire’s motives were not religious. The sultan did not suddenly conclude that Christians and Muslims were equal in the eyes of God. The reforms were an act of survival. The Ottoman statesmen hoped that equality would do three things: keep Christian subjects loyal to the empire instead of to Russia or to nationalist rebels, remove Europe’s excuse for interfering in Ottoman affairs, and secure the European support the empire could no longer survive without. The ideology that grew out of this became known as Ottomanism: the idea that every subject, Muslim, Christian, or Jew, would be bound to the state by a shared Ottoman citizenship rather than divided by religion.

For the Christians of the empire, the motives did not matter. What mattered was the promise itself. After twelve centuries of living as a tolerated people, they had been told in law that they were equal. The jizya was gone. The restrictions were gone. Salvation, it seemed, was finally coming.

But many Muslims heard the same promise as a betrayal. The Ottoman statesman and historian Ahmed Cevdet Pasha recorded their reaction in his memoirs: they lamented that they had lost the sacred rights Islam gave them, and that the Muslim community that once ruled had been made equal to those it ruled over.

In 1850, a Muslim mob attacked the Christian quarters of Aleppo. After the Reform Edict, riots broke out in Nablus in 1856 and in Jeddah in 1858. In 1860, fighting in Mount Lebanon left thousands of Christians dead, and that July, mobs in Damascus burned the Christian quarter and killed thousands more while Ottoman troops stood by or joined in. The sultan could decree equality, but he could not make his Muslim subjects accept it, and Christians paid for the promise with their lives. They stood where Abram and Sarai had stood in Canaan: holding a promise of deliverance, watching it fail to arrive, with no power of their own to bring it about.

A Caliphate in Name Only

For thirteen centuries, the question of who should rule the Muslims had a religious answer. The caliph ruled because he was the successor to the Prophet’s political authority, the guardian of Islamic law, and the defender of the ummah. That was why Arabs in Damascus, Baghdad, and Cairo accepted rule from Istanbul. They were not governed by Turks as Turks. They were governed by the caliph as the head of the Islamic state.

The reforms did not only declare Non-Muslims equal. They brought European law into the heart of the Islamic state. A commercial code modeled on French law was introduced in 1850 and a penal code drawn from the French code in 1858. New state courts were created alongside the sharia courts and took over more and more of their work. Non-Muslims were admitted to state office. The hierarchy that Islamic law had placed at the center of society, with Muslims above and dhimmis below, had been abolished by the caliph himself, under pressure from Christian Europe.

For many Muslims, a state that did this was no longer a caliphate in anything but name. If the sultan had given up the supremacy of Islam, what right did he have to rule over Arabs?

Sultan Abdulhamid II tried to recover the lost legitimacy by emphasizing his title as caliph and presenting the empire as the shield of Islam. But after the Young Turk revolution of 1908, the men who took power in Istanbul began defining the empire by Turkish identity rather than Islamic identity. In the eyes of Arab Muslims, the sultan was no longer a caliph. He was the emperor of an un-Islamic empire. And if he was not ruling as a Muslim over Muslims, there was no longer any reason for Arabs to obey him.

Once that question was asked, Arabs began asking the next one: if not the Turks, then who?

The first answer came from men who were not ready to break with Istanbul. They wanted to keep the empire but win a place for Arabs inside it. In 1912, Arab activists in Cairo founded the Ottoman Decentralization Party, which demanded self-government for the Arab provinces under Ottoman sovereignty. In June 1913, some two dozen Arab delegates met in Paris for the First Arab Congress, presided over by Abd al-Hamid al-Zahrawi, a Muslim scholar from Homs. Their demands were modest: Arab participation in government, local autonomy, and Arabic as an official language in the Arab provinces.

Not only Istanbul did not accept this and Cemal Pasha hanged Zahrawi, but Arab Muslims rejected this solution because it treated the problem as administrative, when the problem was religious. Better representation in an un-Islamic empire was still submission to an un-Islamic empire. A Muslim did not owe loyalty to a state because it gave him a seat in parliament. He owed loyalty to a state that ruled by the law of God.

The second answer was the one that spoke to those Arab Muslims. If the Turks had forfeited the caliphate, it should return to the Arabs, the people through whom Islam had come into the world.

Abd al-Rahman al-Kawakibi, a writer from Aleppo, had made the case at the turn of the century. In Umm al-Qura, he imagined a secret congress of Muslims meeting in Mecca to diagnose the decline of the ummah, and concluded that the caliphate should be restored to a descendant of the Prophet’s tribe, Quraysh, seated in Mecca.

Rashid Rida, whose Cairo journal al-Manar was read across the Muslim world, argued in the same spirit that the Arabs were the natural leaders of Islam and that Arab self-rule was the path to Islamic revival.

The man who tried to make this real was Sharif Hussein bin Ali, the ruler of Mecca and a descendant of the Prophet. When he negotiated with the British during the First World War, he did not describe his revolt as a national uprising. He described it as a religious duty. He wrote that he had risen with the Arabs in response to a situation “dictated by religious feeling first.” To Ronald Storrs, the British envoy in Cairo, he said plainly that a caliphate no longer existed, because the Ottomans’ rule and deeds were contrary to religion. When he launched the Arab Revolt in 1916, he justified it by accusing the Young Turks of abandoning Islam. His aim was not to replace the caliphate with an Arab nation-state. It was to take the caliphate back and restore it under Arab leadership.

The third answer came from a small circle of educated nominal Muslim men who reached the opposite conclusion. They believed the Muslim world had not fallen behind because the caliphate had become un-Islamic, but because Islam itself was holding it back. Europe had risen through science, constitutional government, and secular law, and they believed the Arabs could rise only by following the same path.

In Egypt, Ahmad Lutfi al-Sayyid, founder of the Umma Party in 1907 and later the first rector of Cairo University, argued for a liberal Egyptian nationalism that rejected the caliphate. Qasim Amin argued for reforming the status of women along European lines.

These men read French and English philosophy, admired European institutions, and looked on the religious scholars of al-Azhar as obstacles to progress. They were a thin layer of society. Most of them came from wealthy families, had studied in European schools or under European influence, and lived in a world of newspapers, salons, and political clubs. They spoke for themselves far more than for the people around them. The limits of their influence became clear in 1925, when one of their number, an Azhar scholar named Ali Abd al-Raziq, published a book arguing that Islam did not require a caliphate at all. The religious establishment responded by stripping him of his title and expelling him from the ranks of the scholars. What the elite regarded as enlightenment, the majority regarded as betrayal.

So the Arab Muslim world entered the twentieth century divided against itself. On one side stood the faithful, who wanted the caliphate restored and Islamic law applied, and who saw the Ottoman collapse as a chance to return the leadership of Islam to the Arabs. On the other side stood the nominal Muslims of the elite, who wanted to escape the caliphate altogether and follow Europe into the modern world. Between them stood the compromisers, who tried to satisfy both and satisfied neither.

The Birth of Ishmael

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That description is false.

Sharia is a total legal and moral order. It does not recognize any division between mosque and state, private faith and public law, worship and government. It reaches into prayer, food, clothing, commerce, marriage, divorce, inheritance, testimony, criminal punishment, war, taxation, relations with non-Muslims, the structure of government, and the legitimacy of political authority.

It tells the Muslim what is obligatory, recommended, permitted, offensive, and forbidden. It tells the judge how to rule, the husband what rights he has over his wife, the ruler how to treat conquered non-Muslims, the army what to do with captives, and the state what to do with someone who leaves Islam.

The first thing a Westerner has to understand is that Sharia does not begin with the autonomous individual. It begins with the Lawgiver. In Islam, good and evil are not finally determined by unaided human reason. The standard is what Allah and Muhammad have commanded or forbidden. What the Lawgiver has indicated as good is good, what the Lawgiver has indicated as bad is bad, and reason is not the final measure.

A Western liberal order begins with the individual human being possessing rights that precede the government, the state is limited, law is supposed to protect citizens equally, religion can persuade, preach, organize, worship, and argue, but it does not possess the sword of the state simply because it claims divine authority.

Sharia thinks in a different direction. The law is already given, the question is not whether the citizen consents to it, but how the divine ruling applies to him. Human acts are classified legally as obligatory, recommended, permissible, offensive, or unlawful. Sharia, therefore, is not simply a collection of devotional suggestions; it is an architecture of duties and prohibitions in which violation can carry consequences in this world as well as the next.

That is why reducing Sharia to the hijab, halal food, or five daily prayers is absurd. Those things are part of it, but so are jihad, apostasy, jizya, the caliphate, amputation, stoning, unequal legal status between Muslim and non-Muslim, male guardianship in marriage, and a political order whose purpose is explicitly to uphold the religion.

Sharia governs worship, marriage, divorce, inheritance, commerce, criminal punishment, apostasy, jihad, the status of non-Muslims, and political authority. The disagreement is usually over how a rule is applied, not over whether these subjects belong to Islamic law in the first place.

Sharia Is Not Private Religion

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However, I believe that whil…

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We moved into a new house this week. I had forgotten to call ahead and arrange internet service before moving day, and when I finally applied, I was told the earliest installation date was ten days away. Both my wife’s work and mine depend almost entirely on being online. Our phone hotspots burned through their data almost immediately, so I texted our next-door neighbor, a white American Christian whom I had spoken with only briefly. I explained the situation and asked whether we could use his Wi-Fi until ours was installed. As a thank-you, I offered to pay his internet bill for the month. He apologized and said no.

As someone who grew up as a Muslim in the Islamic world, lived in several Muslim countries, and traveled to perhaps twenty more, I can say with confidence that I would be surprised to find a Muslim who would refuse that request from a new neighbor.

When I was ten years old, I lived in Jerash, Jordan, a city filled with Roman ruins because ancient Gerasa was one of the cities of the Decapolis. We saw tourists constantly. I still remember an Italian tourist who seemed lost. I found him a cab, explained where he needed to go, and paid the entire fare out of the small allowance I had, even though no one expected me to. Hospitality was simply something we were taught to do.

I doubt many cultures can compete with Arabs and Muslims when it comes to hospitality. Knock on the door of a Muslim family and, before they ask why you have come, there is a good chance they will invite you inside, offer you food and something to drink, and only then ask what brought you there. Stop a Muslim on the street and ask for help, and he will never brush you off the way people often do in the West. He may spend an hour with you if that is what it takes to make sure you find what you need.

Last week, during the CAIR summit, several speakers talked about the need for Muslims to spend more time with Americans so that Americans could see how nice Muslims are and thereby combat what they described as “Islamophobia.” I can see why they think that strategy will work.

Last year, I was invited to speak at a synagogue about Islam. Afterward, a Jewish woman objected to what I had said because, as she explained, her daughter had a very nice Muslim friend.

This is where many people in the West become confused. They hear Muslim clerics speak about Islam’s global ambitions, they see what Muslim terrorists do around the world, they remember the beheadings, the persecution of minorities, the grooming and rape gangs, and other acts committed by Muslims. At the same time, they personally know Muslims who are kind, generous, decent people. Faced with that contradiction, many resolve it by separating the Islam of their nice Muslim friends from the actions of violent Muslims and treating the latter as a fringe phenomenon with little or nothing to do with Islam itself.

When a Muslim man stopped two ISIS terrorists in Sydney, his religion was immediately emphasized. He was not “the human who stopped the Muslim terrorists” but “the Muslim who stopped the terrorists.”

The World Beneath the Surface

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I do not oppose the Islamic caliphate because it is Islamic. Yes, I left Islam and believe it is the most destructive ideology that has ever existed, but my objection to the caliphate is political. An Islamic government would never treat all men as equal citizens under a common law. It sorts people by religion and by sex, elevates religious law above private conscience, and gives the state enormous power over belief, family, law, and public life. Systems built this way shape people to be slaves, train them to obey, and eventually produce subjects who celebrate their submission as virtue.

But Islam did not invent this system. Throughout human history, this was simply the political order, the human default, not the exception. From the pharaohs to the kings of Mesopotamia to the Roman emperors, rulers repeatedly wrapped political authority in divinity, and European monarchs later claimed that their thrones rested on God’s appointment. When the modern world began pushing God out of politics, totalitarian movements kept the same structure and changed only the source of authority. The Party took God’s place, or the revolution, or the race, or the leader.

Under all of these systems, ordinary people were never truly free, never equal before the law, and never collectively prosperous. Rights, where they existed at all, were distributed according to class, religion, sex, caste, tribe, or proximity to power. Discrimination was built into the political order, dissent could be punished as disloyalty or heresy, and the individual possessed few protections against the ruler. Wealth might accumulate around courts, temples, armies, party elites, or ruling families, but the population as a whole remained politically subordinate, economically vulnerable, and dependent on those above them. Some empires were rich, some were powerful, and some produced great art, architecture, and learning, but none produced the combination of individual rights, equality before the law, religious liberty, political participation, social mobility, widespread prosperity, and longevity that emerged under the American constitutional order.

American Exceptionalism

Every other political order in history failed to deliver what the American political order delivered. Monarchies concentrated power in dynasties. Aristocracies made political privilege hereditary. Theocracies subordinated citizenship to religious status. Empires divided conqueror from conquered. Communist regimes abolished private concentrations of wealth only to create political elites with vastly greater power. Fascist regimes subordinated the individual to the state and murdered millions in the process. Even Europe’s liberal democracies did not grant their people the degree of political and religious freedom Americans enjoy. The French Revolution itself followed the American Revolution and drew on its language and ideals.

America became the largest economy in the world by the end of the nineteenth century and then the dominant industrial power of the twentieth. It became the destination of tens of millions of immigrants. It produced unprecedented levels of mass homeownership, consumer abundance, technological innovation, private philanthropy, higher education, and upward mobility. It created enough wealth not merely for kings or merchants, but for ordinary workers, forms of material abundance that would have been unimaginable luxuries throughout human history and that remain beyond the reach of much of the world today.

America’s superiority is not only economic. It is also political, legal, and personal. Americans enjoy protections for freedom of speech, religious liberty, political dissent, private association, due process, and protection from arbitrary government that are not found even in the other developed democracies.

America is a country where a citizen can insult the government, mock religion, denounce the president, start a movement, open a business, lose everything, fail publicly, and rise again. That freedom creates a kind of human dignity that cannot be measured by GDP alone. America built something people across the world still aspire to join. It is the envy of the world not only because of its wealth, but because of the kind of person its political order builds: free. Those of us who came here as immigrants understand this more than people who were born into it. We know what it is to live outside this order and then to be received into it, shaped by it, and made one of its own. For those who truly escaped to America both physically and culturally, that creates a debt of gratitude that lasts a lifetime.

A Brief Desperation

In 1929, the American economy began to fall apart. By 1933, millions of Americans had lost jobs, savings, homes, farms, or businesses. For a generation raised to believe in the basic tenets of the American political order, individual freedom, limited government, private property, free enterprise, personal responsibility, and the idea that people should largely be free to build their own lives, the Depression was more than an economic catastrophe. It shook their confidence in the system itself. For the first time, millions of Americans began to wonder whether the political and economic order that had produced so much freedom and prosperity could still keep its promises.

By the early 1930s, the Soviet Union was already showing the brutality of forced collectivization, repression, famine, and political terror. But the full historical record had not yet accumulated. Stalin’s purges, the Gulag on its later scale, Mao’s Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, and decades of economic failure were still ahead. To an unemployed American worker in 1932, socialism could still be sold as a glamorous promise.

That crisis of confidence became the central issue of the 1932 presidential election. The incumbent Republican president, Herbert Hoover, still believed that the American system could recover without permanently transforming the role of the federal government. His Democratic challenger, Franklin D. Roosevelt, argued that the scale of the collapse demanded a far more aggressive response from Washington, and proposed a much larger federal role in banking, labor, welfare, agriculture, and economic regulation.

Hoover described the election as something larger than a choice between two candidates; he called it a contest between “two philosophies of government.” What frightened him was the possibility that economic desperation would persuade Americans to surrender powers to Washington that would never fully be returned. He feared that once citizens began looking to the federal government for economic security, the relationship between the individual and the state would be permanently altered.

Roosevelt won overwhelmingly, and once in office he began expanding the federal government on a scale Americans had never seen before. Social Security created a permanent federal role in retirement security. Washington became more deeply involved in banking, financial markets, labor relations, unemployment relief, and agriculture. Even after the immediate crisis passed, much of this new machinery remained. To Hoover and many conservatives, this confirmed exactly what they had feared: measures introduced as emergency responses were becoming permanent institutions, moving responsibility away from individuals, families, communities, and states and toward Washington.

What Roosevelt called necessary reform, his opponents saw as the beginning of dependence on the federal government and a dangerous movement toward socialism that could eventually threaten the liberty the American system had been built to protect.

Roosevelt saw the danger differently. He understood that if millions of Americans came to believe that capitalism meant nothing more than the freedom to lose everything, socialism would become harder and harder to resist. You could not protect the American system simply by telling desperate people to trust it. You had to show that the system could correct itself. That is what Roosevelt tried to do. He was willing to experiment with policies that many conservatives considered socialist, but he never embraced the socialist project itself. He did not abolish private property, nationalize American industry, replace elections with one-party rule, or hand the economy over to central planners. He looked at the grievances that made socialism attractive and asked which of them were legitimate.

If an elderly man could work his whole life and still end up destitute, perhaps some form of old-age insurance made sense. If millions of men were unemployed because the entire economy had collapsed, perhaps unemployment was not always a moral failure. If a bank could gamble recklessly and wipe out the savings of thousands of families, perhaps banking needed rules strong enough to restore public trust.

Roosevelt was playing with fire, and Hoover was right to warn that fire can spread. But Roosevelt was also a product of the political order he was trying to save. The divide in America at that moment was not between one camp that loved America and another that saw America itself as evil. Roosevelt did not believe the Constitution had to be replaced, that the American founding was fundamentally illegitimate, or that capitalism had to be destroyed and replaced with a new political order. He believed America was great and worth preserving, and his reforms were intended to preserve it. That made experimentation with ideas drawn from another political order far less dangerous.

The Desperation of the Prosperous

Nearly a century later, America is again living through a crisis of confidence. But this crisis comes after generations of Americans have lived within an economic order that made levels of comfort once reserved for kings available to ordinary people. Entire generations have come to regard that abundance not as a historical miracle, but as the normal starting point of life. When a society has been prosperous for long enough, even a setback can feel like total failure, because people compare their lives not with the rest of human history, or even with most of the world today, but with the unusually favorable conditions enjoyed by the generation immediately before them.

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In New Jersey, Adam Hamawy won a crowded Democratic primary and is effectively headed to Congress from a safely Democratic district, regardless of years of association with Omar Abdel-Rahman, the Blind Sheikh, the Islamic cleric convicted for his role in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Hamawy met him, traveled with him, translated for him, shared a hotel room with him during a 1991 conference whose real subject was jihad, and later appeared as a defense witness at the sheikh’s trial. Hamawy also volunteered with the Benevolence International Foundation, which was later designated for providing logistical support to al-Qaeda.

Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate in Michigan is scheduled to appear at the Islamic Society of North America’s convention alongside Pakistani cleric Tariq Masood, a preacher who has publicly praised Hitler for killing Jews. Masood invoked the Qur’an while repeating the story that Hitler intentionally left some Jews alive so the world would eventually understand why he killed the rest.

Hasan Piker said that “America deserved 9/11,” called some Orthodox Jews “inbred,” declared that “Hamas is a thousand times better” than Israel, and said that reports of Hamas sexual violence on October 7 would not change his view of the conflict. He has said he has “no issue” with Hezbollah and has used his enormous platform to normalize the Houthis and other movements the United States designates as terrorist organizations.

Democratic leaders found themselves in front of a choice. They could resist the movement taking over their coalition and pay the electoral price, or go with it and keep their hold on power. They chose power.

The Democratic Party, at this point, absorbed an Islamo-left alliance that sees the Jewish people, the Jewish state, and the West’s civilizational inheritance as problems to be overcome. Anti-Zionism is the vehicle. Third-worldism, repackaged in the language of justice, provides the moral cover. The is a party that now poses an existential danger to America in general, and to Jews everywhere in particular.

A Loyalty That Outlived Its Purpose

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There is a simple reason for that limited footprint.

Before coming to the United States, I spent many years living and working in the Middle East. I was involved in Christian ministry and eventua…

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German psychologist Erich Fromm was born in Frankfurt in 1900 to Orthodox Jewish parents. He studied under Talmudic teachers and was active in Jewish student organizations and Zionist youth groups, advocating in his early years for Zionism and Jewish national restoration. The young Fromm was not drawn to Zionism as a secular nationalist project on the European model, a people simply wanting a state, a seat at a table of nations. He understood Zionism as restoration: the Jewish people reconstituting its own national life on its own soil, under its own law. It was national particularity.

But Fromm turned away from Zionism, because, according to him, it conflicted with what he called his ideal of a universalist Messianism and Humanism. A messianism, a hope for the final redemption of the world, that had simply stopped being about the redemption of a particular people and started being about the redemption of humanity as such.

Once Fromm’s highest moral commitment became the human being as such, not his people specifically, but humanity as a whole, every smaller loyalty started to look like a kind of theft. A person only has so much devotion to give, and if all of it is already owed to humanity in general, then giving any of it to one particular nation means taking something that belonged to everyone else and handing it to a part. Even one’s own people. That is what made national loyalty, for Fromm, a moral problem rather than a neutral fact of life.

Fromm called nationalism “group narcissism,” the mechanism by which a person’s sense of worth transfers onto his collective, and “idolatry,” the worship of something less than God, given the devotion only God is owed.

What possibly could have caused a passionate Zionist who once advocated for the restoration of the Jewish nation to become an enemy of nationalism itself?

Particularism vs. Universalism

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I clearly remember many times when, as a Muslim, I would enter the bathroom, take off my pants, and then realize that I was not sure whether I had entered using my left foot. In Islam, you are supposed to enter the bathroom with your left foot, or demons may remain there with you while you are defecating. So I would pull my pants back up if I knew there…

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Money told the parents that gender was plastic in the first years of life, that a child raised consistently as a girl would become one, and that the surgery should proceed. Bruce was castrated at twenty-two months and renamed Brenda. The family was instructed never to tell.

Money published the “twins case” in 1972 as an unqualified triumph: the genetically male child was developing a female identity, therefore nurture ruled and nature was negotiable. Time magazine carried the news, feminist theorists cited it, and textbooks canonized it for twenty years. The case seemed to demonstrate that the deepest fact about a human being, boy or girl, was not discovered but installed.

There was one problem.

Brenda tore off the dresses. She refused the dolls, fought the boys who mocked her, insisted on urinating standing up, and told her therapists year after year that something was wrong in a way she had no words for. By her teens she was suicidal. Money’s published papers described a happy, well-adjusted girl during the exact years the child was threatening to kill himself. When Brenda was fourteen, her father finally broke and told her the truth in a parking lot. Her reaction, recounted for the rest of her life, was relief. Everything clicked. For the first time, the child understood why the identity assigned by the world’s leading expert had never fit: it had been false from the first day, and the body had known all along.

The patient took a new name and lived as a man. In 1997, the researchers Milton Diamond and Keith Sigmundson tracked him down and detonated the case in the medical literature; the journalist John Colapinto then told the full story to the public.

The Nation on the Operating Table

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Do the Jews living today retain a distinct place within God’s purposes, or did that place expire with the coming of Christ? Does Christianity create any particular obligation toward the Jewish people and their state, or does the gospel eliminate every distinction between Israel and the nations?

The anti-Israel movement in the U.S. understood that American support for Israel does not ultimately rest upon AIPAC or intelligence cooperation. Tens of millions of Bible-reading Christians who open Genesis, read God’s promise to Abraham, and believe that the Jewish people still occupy a particular place in the biblical story.

Destroy that belief, and the political alliance will not survive another generation.

Christian Zionism is under attack as not authentically Christian at all, but a nineteenth-century invention created by John Nelson Darby, popularized through the Scofield Reference Bible, and later exploited by Zionists seeking Christian political support. I responded to that claim here.

The deeper attack, however, is the weaponization of a theological doctrine that argues the Church replaced Israel, that every covenant and promise given to the Jewish people was fulfilled spiritually in Christ and transferred to the Church, and that Jews today possess no continuing standing within God’s covenantal purposes. Until an individual Jew believes in Jesus, he is said to stand before God exactly as any other unbeliever does, with no remaining distinction inherited from Abraham, Isaac, or Jacob. The academic name for this school of thought is supersessionism, more commonly called replacement theology.

Unlike the crude conspiracies circulating through podcasts and social media, Replacement theology possesses a long ecclesiastical pedigree and many adherents who intend no hostility toward Jews. That is precisely why this essay will not be another catalogue of land promises, prophetic passages, or arguments over the rapture and the millennium. My purpose is not to defend dispensational theology. I intend to examine the premise beneath the entire dispute, the premise on which replacement theology rests its case against Israel.

Before I do, a word to each of my readers.

If you are a Christian, I am asking you to withhold your verdict until the final paragraph. Some of what follows may initially sound like heresy. Do not reach for the accusation before the argument has been made. I will defend every step from Scripture, but the evidence must be considered as a whole.

If you are Jewish, read this to understand what is being fought over inside Christianity right now. The fight is about you, but it is taking place without you. Its outcome may determine whether tens of millions of Christians continue to regard themselves as your allies or are persuaded that their support for Israel was founded upon a theological mistake.

And if you are neither Christian nor Jewish, stay anyway. You are about to watch a dispute nearly two thousand years old shape the geopolitics of the twenty-first century.

Faith In Whom?

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Protagoras, the most famous among them, advertised that he could make the weaker argument beat the stronger. He also taught that “man is the measure of all things,” a doctrine with obvious commercial advantages: if truth exists, the paying customer might be wrong. If truth is whatever persuades, the customer is always one purchased speech away from being right.

The sophist Gorgias of Leontini, in his Encomium of Helen, a showpiece in which he argues that the most condemned woman in Greek mythology bore no blame for running off to Troy, compares speech to a drug. As different drugs act on the body, he writes, different words act on the soul: some end grief, some produce courage, some poison and bewitch. The Greek word he chose, pharmakon, means both medicine and toxin. The Helen speech wasn’t really about Helen. It was an advertisement: watch me take the guiltiest name in Greece and dissolve the guilt with nothing but language.

In Plato’s dialogue, Gorgias tells a story from his youth. He used to accompany his brother, a physician, on house calls, and when a patient refused surgery, it wasn’t the doctor who changed the man’s mind. It was Gorgias. Put a rhetorician and a doctor before any crowd, let them compete for a medical post, and the rhetorician wins every time. The man who knows nothing beats the man who knows everything, provided the audience knows nothing too.

The trade paid. Gorgias grew rich enough to erect a statue of himself at Delphi, in gold.

Socrates charged no fees, wrote no books, built no following. He worked the same agora with the same instrument, dialogue, pointed in the opposite direction. His method was to question a man who claimed to know something, expose the contradictions in his answers, and leave both of them staring at their shared ignorance. He lost arguments gladly, because losing removed an error, and a man who discovers he doesn’t understand justice is closer to justice than a man whose eloquence conceals that he never did.

Everything separating the two trades fits into two questions. The philosopher asks: what is true? The sophist asks: what can I make this audience believe?

The New Sophists

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Even Athens, the birthplace of democracy and supposedly of free expression, had its limits. The playwright Aristophanes, the father of political comedy, was hauled into court by Cleon, the most powerful politician in the city, for the crime of making Athens look bad in one of his plays. And the same democracy that invented satire forced Socrates, its greatest philosopher, to drink poison, for disrespecting the gods of the city. Further east, the Great King of Persia required every man who approached him to perform proskynesis, to throw himself face-down on the ground, the posture of worship. When Alexander the Great conquered Persia and adopted the practice for himself, his own court philosopher, Callisthenes, refused to bow. He did not survive the refusal.

In 1579, an English writer named John Stubbs published a pamphlet objecting to Queen Elizabeth’s plan to marry a French Catholic prince. For that, the state laid his right hand on a block and severed it with a cleaver. Fifty years later, a lawyer named William Prynne wrote a book attacking the theater as immoral, at the very moment the Queen of England happened to be enjoying performing in court plays. Reading his book as an insult to her, the state cropped off his ears. And in France, a young writer was thrown into the Bastille, the royal prison, for circulating verses that mocked the man ruling the country. His name was Voltaire, the future giant of the Enlightenment, and his career in free thought began in a cell for the crime of a joke. Europe had a legal name for this crime: lèse-majesté, literally, “injured majesty.” To mock the ruler was treated as sacrilege, as violence against something holy.

Power has never feared the sword as much as it fears the joke. An assassin can kill a king, but the king dies a king, a martyr, even. A satirist makes the king ordinary. He drags the throne down to eye level, where everyone can see that the man sitting on it sweats, lies, lusts, and fears like everyone else. Armies can be defeated and replaced. Awe, once punctured, never fully reinflates.

This is why every despotism in history has criminalized laughter. Ridicule is a solvent. It dissolves the invisible substance that authoritarian power is actually made of, not tanks, not treasuries, but sanctity.

The Civilization That Sanctified No One

Around the tenth century before Christ, the king of Israel took another man’s wife, impregnated her, and arranged for her husband to be killed at the front to cover it up. This was standard behavior for a Bronze Age monarch; the pharaohs and the kings of Babylon did worse before breakfast, and their court scribes recorded only their glory. But into David’s throne room walked a prophet named Nathan, a man with no army and no title, and he told the king a story about a rich man who stole a poor man’s only lamb. When David burned with anger at the thief, Nathan pointed at him and said: “You are the man.”

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