<![CDATA[DanBurmawi.com]]>https://www.danburmawi.comhttps://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!JeYU!,w_256,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fa2e3ff71-7cee-4c24-9022-8871874adccf_1280x1280.pngDanBurmawi.comhttps://www.danburmawi.comSubstackWed, 19 Aug 2026 15:42:03 GMT<![CDATA[Democrat Jews, It Is Time to Leave Egypt]]>https://www.danburmawi.com/p/democrat-jews-it-is-time-to-leavehttps://www.danburmawi.com/p/democrat-jews-it-is-time-to-leaveMon, 17 Aug 2026 03:04:38 GMTZohran Mamdani, whose wife loves Hamas and whose father hates America, went from DSA activist and founder of a Students for Justice in Palestine chapter to mayor of the city with the largest Jewish population outside Israel. He revoked the city’s use of the IHRA definition of antisemitism. He opened the door to BDS-aligned policy. He called AIPAC ‘monsters’ and spoke of ‘dark money’, an ancient accusation about hidden Jewish power, simply translated into the language of progressive politics.

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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]]><![CDATA[My Book In 5 New Languages]]>https://www.danburmawi.com/p/my-book-in-5-new-languageshttps://www.danburmawi.com/p/my-book-in-5-new-languagesSat, 15 Aug 2026 22:57:05 GMT

A bestseller for ten consecutive months,
“Islam, Israel and the West”
is now available on Kindle in
Spanish, French, German, Italian, and Portuguese.

]]><![CDATA[Who Is Danny Burmawi?]]>https://www.danburmawi.com/p/who-is-danny-burmawihttps://www.danburmawi.com/p/who-is-danny-burmawiThu, 13 Aug 2026 04:35:16 GMTSome online commentary has questioned my background, education, and years of work in the Middle East, noting the limited public information about me before 2023.

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 eventually served as a regional director for an international Christian organization, with responsibilities across the region. Because of the nature of that work and the environment in which we operated, maintaining a low public profile was a matter of security.

Here is an interview from when I was living in Lebanon. You can clearly see that I asked them to blur my face because I had to maintain a low profile for security reasons.

In 2008, after my conversion, I moved from Jordan to Lebanon seeking refuge. I eventually found myself at a Catholic monastery in southern Lebanon, in Saida, called Deir Al Mokhalles, where I lived for a while.

After that, I moved to Beirut to study at Mediterranean Bible College, where I enrolled in a bachelor’s program from 2009 to 2013. I later transferred my credits to an accredited institution, South African Theological Seminary, where I earned my bachelor’s degree in 2015.

The commentary also questioned whether I actually have a master’s degree in theological studies from an American university. So, before moving forward, here is a redacted copy of my Master of Theological Studies transcript. I have, of course, redacted identifying and sensitive information for security reasons.

Transcript
656KB ∙ PDF file
Download
Download

Between 2011 and 2015, I worked with a local Christian ministry called Perfect Home Lebanon. In 2015, I became a regional director with Every Home for Christ International, initially leading the ministry in Jordan and later overseeing its work across eight countries in the Middle East. During this time, I also founded 500Plus Publications, which later merged with the ministry I founded in 2019.

In 2019, I founded New Nation Ministries, where I led a team of 50 people through the Beirut explosion and the COVID-19 pandemic, serving thousands of families every month.

Here is an interview I gave to an American minister about the work our ministry was doing in Lebanon following the Beirut explosion in 2020.

My team in Lebanon 2021

My Team in Jordan 2017

Celebrating four years of New Nation Ministry 2023

As a Jordanian, and in Jordan children are registered under their father’s religion, and people who leave Islam cannot simply change their official religious designation. I therefore in 2022 traveled to Canada to ensure that my son would not be officially registered as a Muslim. I had access to the United States, but I respected U.S. laws and restrictions concerning birth tourism.

We returned to Lebanon after the birth of my son because I did not want to leave the Middle East. However, two serious security threats arose. The first occurred in Jordan, when Jordanian intelligence tried to recruit me to spy on Hezbollah and I refused—a long story that I will tell another time. The second arose in Lebanon, when people connected to the ministry, because of personal conflicts, decided to tell Hezbollah that I was a Jordanian spy.

At that point, the security of my family became my priority, and I decided to move to the United States.

My Wedding 2019 - Beirut, Lebanon

I arrived in the United States just three months before October 7. At the time, my plan was to finish my master’s degree and work in Christian ministry, reaching Arabs with the Gospel both in the United States and online throughout the Arab world.

However, after October 7, something happened, a change I describe in detail in my book. I began speaking publicly much more frequently, initially through videos in Arabic on TikTok. Toward the end of 2025, I expanded that work to X and founded the Ideological Defense Institute. That was when a much larger English-speaking audience began encountering my work.

My page on Tiktok

Since then, anyone can find extensive information about what I have been doing in the United States simply by Googling my name.

So there is no Israeli operation. There are no lies. There is nothing hidden. I am a very simple guy with a mission: to defend Western civilization from suffering the same fate as the civilization of my ancestors. I believe that if the West gets the war against Israel wrong, it will make itself vulnerable to the same forces that have erased other civilizations before it.

That is why you should support IDI and the more than 20 people, many of whom share stories similar to mine, who have joined me in what we believe is a moral obligation: defending Western civilization.

Here are some additional links about me from before 2023.

Here is an article that Key Life Ministries published about me and my ministry in Lebanon several years ago:

https://www.keylife.org/articles/we-love-try-harder-religion/

Here is an article that a Dutch ministry published about me and my ministry in Lebanon in 2020:

https://www.stichting-ismael.nl/nieuws/voortgang-project-hulp-via-kerken-in-beiroet/

Here is my old blog, where you can find articles I wrote in Arabic between 2014 and 2017:

www.dannyalnaser.wordpress.com

And here is the website of the organization I led in Lebanon:

www.new-nation.org

If you have any questions, please feel free to reach out to me. God bless you, and God bless the United States of America and Israel.

The White House
]]><![CDATA[Marx, Muhammad, and the War on the Nation]]>https://www.danburmawi.com/p/marx-muhammad-and-the-war-on-thehttps://www.danburmawi.com/p/marx-muhammad-and-the-war-on-theWed, 12 Aug 2026 04:57:05 GMT

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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]]><![CDATA[To Be a Christian, You Must First Become a Jew]]>https://www.danburmawi.com/p/to-be-a-christian-you-must-firsthttps://www.danburmawi.com/p/to-be-a-christian-you-must-firstSun, 02 Aug 2026 03:33:39 GMT

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 were other people in the house, or leave them down if there was no one there, go back outside, and then reenter using my left foot.

But there was another problem. Sometimes I would go out to reenter, only to realize that I had forgotten to pay attention to whether I had stepped out using my left or right foot.

I know this seems funny, but this is only one of hundreds, if not thousands, of things a Muslim must remember to observe throughout the day. Otherwise, there may be consequences. For example, Muhammad said that Satan urinates in the ears of the person who sleeps until morning without getting up for prayer. If you repeat “Glory be to Allah,” “Praise be to Allah,” and “Allah is the greatest” thirty-three times after every prayer, and then complete the hundred with the prescribed confession, your sins will be forgiven even if they are as abundant as the foam of the sea. If you recite Ayat al-Kursi before going to sleep, Allah will appoint a guardian to protect you, and Satan will not approach you until morning. If a man asks his wife to come to bed and she refuses, causing him to spend the night angry with her, the angels will curse her until morning.

Life can be difficult for someone who sincerely wants to observe everything Muhammad taught. But even after you do your best to fulfill all these requirements, which can completely overwhelm your life, you still cannot find peace in Islam because there is no guarantee that you will end up in Paradise or even that you will be protected in this life.

Islam teaches many arbitrary things and confuses Muslims who seek comfort in religion. For example, the Quran teaches that if a calamity strikes you, it may be from Allah as a consequence of your sins, but it also says that calamities may be tests from Allah. As a Muslim, you never know whether a calamity is Allah punishing you or testing you because you have strong faith (Quran 2:155; 42:30).

This arbitrariness extends to Paradise. On the Last Day, when you stand before Allah, there will be a scale. The two angels who lived on either side of you during your life will bring their records, and your good deeds and sins will be weighed against each other. There is no way to know which side will prevail on the scale.

Muhammad said that Allah might find the confession of faith among the pile of your good deeds and send you to Paradise. He also said that a person might say one word that displeases Allah and be cast into Hell because of it. Muhammad also said that on the Last Day, Allah will take the sins of Muslims and place them upon Jews and Christians, who will become their ransom from Hell.

There are literally thousands of hadiths like these that confuse Muslims to the point that they lose hope of ever having any assurance about their eternal destiny. That is why I wrote Sola Jihad, because dying in jihad is literally the only way a Muslim can guarantee Paradise.

But what if I told you that, six years after converting to Christianity, I realized I was still living as a Muslim? This was not mainly because Islam had programmed me. No, it was because much of the church had been severed from the Jewishness of the gospel.

In this article, I will try to help you understand why, to become a real Christian, you must first become a Jew. I pray that this truth will change your life and lead you into a deeper relationship with God, just as it changed my life fourteen years ago.

Addicted to the Law

There is a reason God remained largely silent about the afterlife in the Old Testament. There are basically no mention of Heaven or Hell throughout the Old Testament, except for a few indications, such as Isaiah 26:19 and Daniel 12:2. The reason is simply that God wanted to establish his relationship with Israel not on the basis of what he would do for them later, but on the basis of what he had already done for them in before.

There is something unique about the Hebrew Bible that distinguishes it from every other religious book in the world, and that is the order of salvation. Salvation took place before the demands of God were given. In every religion, the gods, religious systems, or philosophies require people to fulfill an enormous list of demands in order to have a chance of entering Paradise, avoiding punishment, being reborn into a better life, escaping the cycle of reincarnation, or achieving some other form of spiritual liberation. In the Bible, however, God saved Israel first. He brought them out of Egypt, and only after their liberation did he give them his law. Their salvation from Egypt was not contingent upon their obedience to the law.

God established a covenant with Israel. He did not merely sign a contract.

Four hundred years before God liberated Israel, God asked Abraham to perform a ritual that was known in antiquity. Entering into an agreement between two parties involved slaughtering an animal, dividing it into pieces, and passing between those pieces. The parties were symbolically declaring, “May what happened to this animal happen to me if I fail to uphold the terms of this covenant.”

God asked Abraham to slaughter the animals, but then God put Abraham into a deep sleep. God alone, represented by a smoking firepot and a flaming torch, passed between the pieces. God was declaring that the fulfillment of the promise ultimately rested upon him. He was taking the covenant oath upon himself and guaranteeing the promise made to Abraham and his descendants (Genesis 15:7–18).

That is why, when God sent Moses four hundred years later to tell the people enslaved in Egypt about his plan to liberate them, Moses was not preaching to them about a foreign God. He was preaching about the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the God of their fathers who made a covenant with them.

I am always astonished by a story the theologian D. A. Carson tells about two Hebrew men speaking on the night before God sent the angel of death to strike the firstborn of Egypt. After God sent nine plagues upon Egypt, he told Moses to instruct the Jews to slaughter a lamb and place its blood on the doorposts. One of the men had strong faith in God and had no doubt that his son would be spared. The other man was terrified by everything that had happened in Egypt and was not sure that God would spare his son. Yet both men followed Moses’ instructions and placed the blood on their doorposts. That night, when they returned home and the angel passed through Egypt, whose son was struck?

Neither.

Both were spared because the angel was not looking to see whose faith was stronger. He was looking for the sign. He was looking for the blood that identified who belonged to God and who did not. God had said, “When I see the blood, I will pass over you” (Exodus 12:13).

That is why, when God gave Israel the law and connected obedience to the law with life and death in Deuteronomy 30:15–20, he also declared in the very next chapter that Israel would not remain obedient. The Israelites would forsake him, follow other gods, and God would punish them in the future (Deuteronomy 31:16–21). But notice that obedience or disobedience to the law did not determine whether Israel was the family God had chosen. The consequences of disobedience to the law were real, but they were distinct from the promises upon which Israel’s identity rested. A Jew belonged to God’s covenant people on the basis of God’s promises, not on the basis of what that Jew did or did not accomplish.

Human beings are addicted to the law because the law allows us to remain in control. The law gives us a formula. It turns life into a manageable transaction. If the result depends upon our performance, then the power remains in our hands. Throughout history, many religious Jews turned the law into a de facto condition for belonging to God, and that is what made Jesus angry. The burdens they placed upon people’s shoulders were what Jesus fought against, not the nature of the law itself. God’s law is good. But when the law is turned into a tool for earning a place in the family of God, people gladly accept it because it makes their standing with God a reward instead of a gift. It becomes something we accomplish, a tool that turns our relationship with God into a transaction.

David, just like many Jews, understood that his relationship with God was not based upon how well he kept the commandments. If you examine his life, you will find that he spent years on the run, living among society’s outcasts. He lied. He committed adultery. He murdered Uriah and caused other soldiers to die with him. His son raped his daughter. Another son attempted to kill him and died during the rebellion. This is not the life of someone who could claim to have a good standing before God. Yet David understood that he possessed God’s favor. He understood that it was God’s grace, not the works of the law, that granted him this favor. He was a true Jew, a true Israelite, because he understood the covenantal grace of God.

Gentile Christians

Although the early church consisted mainly of Jews who believed in Christ, it was only a matter of time before Gentiles became the majority. Gentiles had little knowledge or understanding of God’s covenantal grace. In this sense, they were worse than the religious Jews whom Christ condemned. The religious Jews had the covenant, even if they had distorted the purpose of the law, but law was all the Gentiles had ever known. Their gods and religions operated through transactions, sacrifices, obligations, and systems of reward and punishment.

On the other hand, after the destruction of the Temple, Jews had to adapt Judaism to a radically new reality. During this development, firmer boundaries were established between Jews who followed Jesus and Jews who did not. Therefore, Christianity was increasingly severed from its Jewish roots.

That is why it was inevitable that Marcionism would appear. Marcionism was a second-century heresy associated with Marcion of Sinope. Marcion argued that the God of the Hebrew Bible, the Creator and the God of Israel, was not the same God as the loving Father revealed by Jesus. He rejected the Old Testament and removed from the New Testament writings or passages that he believed were too Jewish.

Even though the church condemned Marcionism, Christianity was soon transformed into a religion based heavily upon obedience to religious rules. Religious Jews had taken the specific law given by God and used it as a tool to control the people. Religious Christians, who had been given the fluid law of love, possessed the additional privilege of being able to improvise and add almost anything they wished to the list of laws that supposedly determined whether someone belonged to God’s family.

Depending on the church and the period, these man-made laws have taken different forms. In some eras, they included complete abstinence from alcohol, prohibitions against dancing, wearing makeup or jewelry, listening to certain music, cutting one’s hair, wearing particular styles of clothing, smoking, using profanity, and so on. Some of these things may be wise or unwise depending upon the circumstances. But none of them determines whether someone belongs to the family of God.

The Protestant Reformation rediscovered the covenant, the message of the gospel, and rejected a works-based system. However, it was only a matter of time before the covenant was forgotten again and laws once more controlled everything. That is why Martin Luther said that we need to hear the message of the gospel every day because we forget it every day.

Throughout much of church history, and even today, the gospel has been treated as the gate through which you enter a relationship with God. After you enter, however, it is supposedly your works, the works of the law, that determine where you really stand. This false gospel reminds me of an old story from the Arabian Peninsula about a man whose camel was constantly giving him trouble. The camel would run away, and the man would have to spend days trying to find it. One time, the man swore to God that when he found the camel, he would sell it for two dinars. When he finally found it, he became upset because he now had to fulfill his oath. His wife was clever and devised a plan. She said, “Tie a cat to the camel, take them both to the market, and announce: ‘The camel is for sale for two dinars, and the cat is for sale for two thousand dinars, but you must buy them together.’”

Religious Jews before the time of Christ tied the law to God’s covenant and said, in effect, “The covenant is free. You belong to God’s family for free. But the law is what keeps you in.” The church did the same thing. It tied the gospel to performance: “You are granted salvation for free, but if you want to keep it, or prove that you really possess it, then you must perform.”

This Christianity is a non-Jewish Christianity. It is a Christianity that looks more like paganism, or more like whatever religion the Pharisees were selling during the time of Christ. It is not Jewish Christianity. It is not the Jewish covenant that Jesus came to globalize.

Sin and Sins

“For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened” (Romans 1:18–21).

Listen: You commit sins because you are a sinner. You are not a sinner merely because you commit sins.

The sins you commit and the good works you perform are both filthy rags when you offer them as the basis of your righteousness before God. You perform both for your own sake, and God looks to neither as the ground of your justification. You are dead not because of what you do, you do what you do because you are dead. Death reigned from Adam to Moses even though the Mosaic law had not yet been given to measure and expose sin in the form in which Israel later received it (Romans 5:14).

When Jesus confronted religious Jews and exposed the true depth of God’s demands, their response was: “Who then can be saved?” The disciples explicitly asked this question in Matthew 19:25 after Jesus’ encounter with the rich young ruler.

What prompted this kind of question? It was the standard Jesus proclaimed throughout his ministry as the true meaning of the Mosaic law.

“You have heard that it was said to those of old, ‘You shall not murder; and whoever murders will be liable to judgment.’ But I say to you that everyone who is angry with his brother will be liable to judgment; whoever insults his brother will be liable to the council; and whoever says, ‘You fool!’ will be liable to the hell of fire.... You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lustful intent has already committed adultery with her in his heart” (Matthew 5:21–22, 27–28).

God does not merely want you to refrain from committing adultery. He wants you not to look at another person with lust. He does not merely want you to refrain from murder. He wants you not to hate your brother or destroy him with your words. Actually Jesus was repeating what the book of Proverbs had already said: “The devising of folly is sin” (Proverbs 24:9). Basically, Jesus was saying: You think you can obey the law, but you cannot. So stop trying to determine whether you belong to God on the basis of what you accomplish or where you fall short. Trust in God, who is your Father, rather than trusting in your performance.

By his death, Christ justified us from sin even though we were guilty of committing it. But he gave us more than that. He lived in our place the life we should have lived. He obeyed all the commandments of God that we were supposed to obey. Christ came and paid our debt when he died. Just as condemnation fell upon us through the act of Adam, Adam’s fallen nature and corruption were also transmitted to us, leaving us incapable of obeying God as we ought. Christ lived a righteous life before God, and the righteousness of the life he lived was credited to our account. Before God, therefore, we stand as though we had obeyed.

The love of God overwhelmed us and gave us all the privileges that belong to Christ. God took the condemnation we deserved and placed it upon him. Christ stood before God as though he were us, and we stand before God as though we were Christ.

“Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us, for it is written, ‘Cursed is everyone who is hanged on a tree’” (Galatians 3:13).

Dear Christians, Be Real Jews

Of course, I am not asking you to convert to Judaism. I am asking you to become Jewish Christians, people of the covenant. You belong to God not on the basis of what you achieve, but on the basis of what God freely gives. The concept of choosiness is what strikes me most when I listen to Jewish rabbis. They speak as Christian preachers should speak. They speak about God, their Father, who chose them not because of anything good in them, but because of his grace.

Dear Christians, if you are in Christ, then God has grafted you into Israel’s covenantal family. You have become Abraham’s offspring and an heir according to the promise (Romans 11:17–24; Galatians 3:29). Love God’s law because it is based upon his character. But never associate your score in keeping the law with God’s fatherhood or with your belonging to his family. If you do, you will live your life as a pagan.

Without the Hebrew Scriptures, we cannot understand God, Christ, redemption, the nature of the law, righteousness, justification, or imputation. Christianity becomes a pagan religion. To be a Christian, you must first become a Jew. You must belong to God on the basis of a covenant that was established throughout the sacred history of God’s work with Israel. Without the Jewish roots of Christianity, we will become like what I used to be: terrified because we cannot remember which foot we used to enter the bathroom.

Embrace the Jewishness of our gospel because it is the only way to fully comprehend what grace is.

]]><![CDATA[The Transgendering of America]]>https://www.danburmawi.com/p/the-transgendering-of-americahttps://www.danburmawi.com/p/the-transgendering-of-americaSun, 26 Jul 2026 05:23:03 GMTIn the summer of 1967, a farm-machinery repairman and his wife drove their infant son from Winnipeg to Baltimore, to the most famous sex researcher in the world, because a circumcision had gone catastrophically wrong. The boy’s name was Bruce Reimer. He had an identical twin brother, Brian. The doctor waiting for them at Johns Hopkins was John Money, and when he saw the twins he understood what fortune had delivered to his clinic: a perfect experiment. Two boys, one genome. Raise one as a girl, keep the other as the control, and see whether our nature is given or assigned.

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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]]><![CDATA[The Final Nail in the Coffin of Replacement Theology]]>https://www.danburmawi.com/p/the-final-nail-in-the-coffin-of-replacementhttps://www.danburmawi.com/p/the-final-nail-in-the-coffin-of-replacementSun, 19 Jul 2026 00:54:50 GMTThe question of what God thinks of the Jewish people has moved from seminary classrooms into podcast studios with audiences in the millions. The answer now shapes how Christians interpret the wars of the Middle East, and whether the alliance on which the Jewish state has depended for generations survives the next decade.

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.

If the Jewish people retain any standing within the world described by the Bible, then Israel cannot be framed merely as a foreign settler project that appeared without ancestry, history, or covenantal memory. But if Israel can first be severed from the God of the Bible and reduced to a colonial enterprise wrapped in stolen religious language, the moral and political case against it becomes much easier to construct.

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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]]><![CDATA[The New Sophists]]>https://www.danburmawi.com/p/the-new-sophistshttps://www.danburmawi.com/p/the-new-sophistsFri, 17 Jul 2026 03:18:47 GMTIn the fifth century before Christ, a new kind of professional appeared in Athens. The Greeks called him a sophist. Athens had become a city where every dispute was settled by speech in front of a crowd, which meant the man who could persuade the crowd could defeat the man who understood the subject.

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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]]><![CDATA[How to Save the West from Islam]]>https://www.danburmawi.com/p/how-to-save-the-west-from-islamhttps://www.danburmawi.com/p/how-to-save-the-west-from-islamSun, 12 Jul 2026 19:41:06 GMTThe founding legal code of Rome, the Twelve Tables, made mockery of high-status individuals a capital offense. When Augustus became Rome’s first emperor, he went further and turned insulting the ruler into treason. Under that law, a famous orator named Cassius Severus was forced to watch his books burned in public before being banished to a barren island for the rest of his life. Under the next emperor, Tiberius, a historian named Cremutius Cordus was put on trial for calling Brutus, Julius Caesar’s assassin, “the last of the Romans.” He starved himself to death while the Senate ordered every copy of his work destroyed. Even Ovid, the most celebrated poet of the age, the Shakespeare of Rome, was banished to the edge of the known world for writing a poem.

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.

Any figure protected from criticism, satire, and ridicule becomes, in practice, a god. It does not matter what the figure is called, king, führer, general secretary, supreme leader, prophet. The moment mockery of him becomes dangerous, he has crossed the line from the human to the divine. Sanctity is not an attribute. It is an enforcement mechanism. Nothing is sacred except that which you are punished for profaning.

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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]]><![CDATA[The West’s Deadliest Misdiagnosis]]>https://www.danburmawi.com/p/the-wests-deadliest-misdiagnosishttps://www.danburmawi.com/p/the-wests-deadliest-misdiagnosisSun, 05 Jul 2026 17:49:37 GMT

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]]><![CDATA[Garbage Packaged in Garbage: How Islam Rents the Left's Vocabulary]]>https://www.danburmawi.com/p/garbage-packaged-in-garbage-how-islam-42ahttps://www.danburmawi.com/p/garbage-packaged-in-garbage-how-islam-42aSun, 05 Jul 2026 00:45:44 GMTIn 1962, an Iranian sociologist named Ali Shariati sat in Paris translating Frantz Fanon’s “The Wretched of the Earth” into Persian. He made one deliberate mistranslation: where Fanon wrote of the “damnés”, the damned, the wretched, Shariati rendered it ‘“mostazafin”, a Quranic term for the downtrodden whom God promises to make inheritors of the earth (28:5). With one word choice, the entire apparatus of Third-World Marxist liberation theory was grafted onto Shi’a eschatology. Sixteen years later, Khomeini, a jurist who despised Marxism as atheist filth, built his revolutionary rhetoric on “mostazafin versus mostakbarin”, the oppressed versus the arrogant.

Michel Foucault went to Tehran in 1978 and described the revolution as “political spirituality,” the first great insurrection against the global order. The Iranian left, the Tudeh communists, the Fedayan, the secular nationalists, supplied the street muscle that brought Khomeini to power, confident that the mullahs were a phase, a vehicle, a temporary ally against the Shah and the Americans. Between 1981 and 1988 the Islamic Republic hanged, shot, and tortured them nearly out of existence, culminating in the 1988 prison massacres. The useful idiots were exterminated by the movement they had translated into respectability.

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]]><![CDATA[Could Islam Be God’s Gift to the American Church?]]>https://www.danburmawi.com/p/could-islam-be-gods-gift-to-the-americanhttps://www.danburmawi.com/p/could-islam-be-gods-gift-to-the-americanThu, 02 Jul 2026 04:31:26 GMT

For most of the twentieth century Yellowstone National Park had no wolves. They had been hunted and trapped out by the mid-1920s. As a result, the elk, with nothing left to hunt them, grew numerous and calm. They no longer had reason to move. They stood along the rivers and in the open valleys and ate at their leisure, year upon year.

The willow and aspe…

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]]><![CDATA[Islam Is a Culture That Kills Excellence. Don't Import It.]]>https://www.danburmawi.com/p/islam-is-a-culture-that-kills-excellencehttps://www.danburmawi.com/p/islam-is-a-culture-that-kills-excellenceMon, 22 Jun 2026 01:44:38 GMTFor most of the history of the FIFA World Cup, the Arab world has barely been present at it. When they did break through, a win over a serious footballing nation was the rare exception, remembered for years precisely because it was so unusual. This year was supposed to be different. The tournament expanded to forty-eight teams, and a record eight Arab nations qualified, the largest Arab presence the World Cup has ever seen. The results have been the same story. Spain put four past Saudi Arabia, who lost 7-0 a decade ago and are being dismantled again today. Sweden beat Tunisia 5-1, Japan beat them 4-0, and Tunisia were eliminated having conceded eight goals in two matches. Algeria lost 3-0 to Argentina, Messi scoring all three. The lone bright spot is Morocco mainly because twenty-four of their twenty-six players are based abroad, raised, coached, and formed inside European clubs.

The reflex is to blame money, infrastructure, the Jews. Yes, I am not kidding, many videos circulated in Arabic of people explaining how the Jews control FIFA and that is why Arab countries always lose.

I grew up inside that world, Israel was not merely blamed for the wars and the politics. Israel was the explanation for the failure of everything. The economy, the corruption, the broken health system, the broken education system, somewhere behind each one stood the Jew, arranging our humiliation. It was the master key. It unlocked every door, and so no other door ever had to be examined. The failure was never ours. It was done to us.

In a culture organized around that grievance, success becomes the real treason. The moment an Arab country decides to actually walk away from this sad state of affair, to normalize with Israel, to build with the West, to stop performing the role of the eternal victim and start producing something genuine, it is not celebrated. It is attacked. It becomes a Zionist puppet, a traitor, a sellout, bought. Breaking the model of grievance is treated as a crime. Because the grievance is load-bearing. Remove it and the entire architecture of excuse-making collapses.

The Minimum Necessary & The Maximum Possible.

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]]><![CDATA[Christian Zionism Is Not Enough]]>https://www.danburmawi.com/p/be-a-zionist-not-just-a-christianhttps://www.danburmawi.com/p/be-a-zionist-not-just-a-christianSat, 20 Jun 2026 02:41:18 GMTFor decades, Muslim scholars sold their followers a particular way of reading the Quran. Unlike the Bible, they said, the Quran is not to be read in its historical context. It is a book that agrees with modern science completely, and where the two appear to conflict, the Muslim holds to the Quran and waits for science to catch up. Science changes its mind every generation, the argument goes. The Quran never does.

To make the case, the scholars handed ordinary Muslims a set of “scientific miracles”, verses said to contain knowledge a 7th-century man could not possibly have had. The most famous is how the Quran describes the creation of the embryo: God makes the lump into bones, and then “clothes the bones with flesh.” For decades Muslims were taught that this was miraculous, how could an illiterate man in the Arabian desert have known the stages of embryonic development unless the knowledge came from God?

Then came the internet.

It turns out the verse describes something that does not happen. Bones are not formed first and then wrapped in muscle. Bone and muscle grow from the same tissue, at the same time, there is no stage in which a little skeleton sits waiting to be clothed. Worse, the “bones then flesh” sequence wasn’t new knowledge at all. It matches what the Greek physician Galen taught five centuries before Muhammad. The “miracle” was a recycled error.

Verse after verse that had been sold as scientific prophecy, the sun setting in a muddy spring, the mountains as pegs holding the earth steady, the sky as a solid canopy, turned out to be the cosmology of late antiquity, not the voice of God.

The ordinary Muslim did not have the option of quietly letting the claim go. He had been told his faith depends on it. So he had to defend the indefensible, even when defending it made him look foolish. There is a clip that went viral a few years ago of an imam standing before a hall full of people, trying to prove the earth is flat and motionless. He told the audience that if a helicopter rises and hovers over Saudi Arabia for a few hours, he said, China does not come around underneath it, so the earth cannot be turning. Millions laughed at that clip, but what they were watching was simply a man defending what he sincerely believes is true, cornered into absurdity because his scholars built his faith on a claim that could not survive contact with reality.

The Christian Zionist’s Dilemma

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]]><![CDATA[The New Versailles Agreement]]>https://www.danburmawi.com/p/the-new-versailles-agreementhttps://www.danburmawi.com/p/the-new-versailles-agreementThu, 18 Jun 2026 01:56:55 GMTTrump signed the Iran memorandum over dinner at the Palace of Versailles, the same place where the modern world learned how expensive a bad peace can become. The treaty signed there in 1919 was presented as the agreement that would end the war to end all wars. Instead, it left the central question of European security unresolved. Twenty years later, Eur…

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]]><![CDATA[Allah at the Service of Muhammad]]>https://www.danburmawi.com/p/allah-at-the-service-of-muhammadhttps://www.danburmawi.com/p/allah-at-the-service-of-muhammadTue, 16 Jun 2026 03:15:10 GMTWhen people leave Islam and are asked why, they usually talk about the violence, the treatment of women, Muhammad’s marriages. All of it is true, and any one of these is reason enough to walk away from Islam. But if you ask me what finally broke my faith twenty years ago, I wouldn’t point to any of these. In fact, I don’t condemn Muhammad and his companions for living the life that was the norm in their time, if anything, I condemn the sanctification of that life, and its transmission down through the ages as religion.

It wasn’t any of these that made me throw the Quran, literally, into the garbage in my parents’ house that night. It was something called the occasions of revelation. Islam has an entire science devoted to it, a respected branch of scholarship called asbāb al-nuzūl, the genre that helps Muslims understand the context in which each verse of the Quran was revealed. And thanks to generations of Muslims, those circumstances were preserved as carefully as the Quran itself.

By the end of this article you will understand why this is the most damning evidence against Islam there is. Honestly, I can’t fathom how anyone can read what follows and remain a Muslim.

Come on, menstruate already!

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]]><![CDATA[In Islam, the Truce Is Not the End of War. It Is a Phase of It.]]>https://www.danburmawi.com/p/in-islam-the-truce-is-not-the-endhttps://www.danburmawi.com/p/in-islam-the-truce-is-not-the-endMon, 15 Jun 2026 01:04:39 GMTIn the year 628, Muhammad marched toward Mecca with some 1,400 followers, intending to perform a pilgrimage. The Meccans, who controlled the city, blocked him. Rather than fight from a position of weakness, Muhammad negotiated. The result was the Treaty of Hudaybiyyah, a ten-year truce, and on its face the Muslims got the worse end of it. The terms were…

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]]><![CDATA[Dear "Moderate" Muslims, Stay Out of the Way]]>https://www.danburmawi.com/p/dear-moderate-muslims-stay-out-ofhttps://www.danburmawi.com/p/dear-moderate-muslims-stay-out-ofSun, 14 Jun 2026 16:19:22 GMTAfter every Islamic terrorist attack, after every push to bend the West a little further, the endless demands for accommodation, the steady imposition of Islamic custom onto the societies that took these communities in, the calls to take over the West, the so-called ‘moderate’ Muslims overwhelm the world: ‘this has nothing to do with Islam, Islam is a religion of peace, these men have hijacked our faith.’

The problem is that the men who commit these acts, and the men who issue these demands and calls, do not invent their justifications. They cite the Quran, the hadith, the biography of the Prophet, the centuries of jurisprudence built on all three, and they say, with textual precision, that what they are doing is divinely commanded. The “moderate” then steps forward to condemn the “Islamist” while pronouncing the very texts he quoted holy, perfect, and beyond revision.

The “moderate” is telling us that the source code is flawless and that everyone who reads it as a mandate for violence and Islamic hegemony has simply misread it, century after century, across every school and every continent. More than 60,000 Islamic terror attacks have taken place in the last few decades. At some point the claim that the text is innocent and only the readers are guilty must be rejected. When a document is read the same dangerous way by enough people for long enough, the problem is no longer confined to the readers.

If your son runs with a gang and you cannot control him, you have two options. You can hand him over to those who will stop him, or you can step aside while they do. What you cannot do, not without becoming part of the problem yourself, is stand in the doorway defending the gang’s code, the very code that keeps producing more thugs like him.

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]]><![CDATA[The Images of Muhammad]]>https://www.danburmawi.com/p/the-images-of-muhammadhttps://www.danburmawi.com/p/the-images-of-muhammadSun, 07 Jun 2026 05:18:45 GMTTake almost any consequential figure in history and you will find that his admirers and his critics, however bitterly they disagree, are still describing the same man. They quarrel over judgment, not identity. The facts remain largely fixed while the verdict changes. The people who admire Hitler and the people who despise him do not describe two different Hitlers. One side emphasizes Germany's recovery, the other the crimes of the regime, but neither denies the concentration camps, the war, or the dead. The argument is over whether any achievement can outweigh the horror. The man himself remains recognizable.

The same is true of Genghis Khan. Some see a brilliant empire-builder, others a butcher on horseback. Yet both camps describe the same brutal conqueror.

Even Jesus, perhaps the most disputed figure in history, produces a remarkably narrow range of disagreement. Christians worship him as God incarnate. Others regard him as a moral teacher, a prophet, a reformer, or a failed messianic claimant. But even the Jews who reject his divinity do not accuse him of cruelty, conquest, massacres, or personal corruption. The dispute is about who he was, not about what he did.

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That narrowness is how historical judgment works for Napoleon, for Caesar, for Stalin, for every consequential figure we argue about. However, When the Muslim and the critic describe Muhammad, they seem to be describing entirely different human beings. The range becomes very wide.

On one side stand more than a billion people for whom he is the perfect man, the mercy sent to all the worlds, the human being whose every gesture is the template for how a life should be lived, so beloved that his name cannot be spoken without a blessing, so exalted that to insult him is a capital crime. On the other side stand his critics, who draw their portrait not from hostile invention but from the Muslim sources themselves, the Quran, the sahih hadith, the sira that Muslims hold to be the most reliable records ever compiled, and from those same texts assemble a warlord and a blood-thirsty pedophile.

How can the gap be so vast when both sides are reading the same sources?

The Original Image

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]]><![CDATA[Defensive Jihad: Turning Expansion into Self-Defense]]>https://www.danburmawi.com/p/defensive-jihad-turning-expansionhttps://www.danburmawi.com/p/defensive-jihad-turning-expansionFri, 05 Jun 2026 04:54:52 GMTIslam divides armed jihad into two categories: the first is offensive jihad: the war to expand the territory of Islam, to carry the faith into the lands of unbelief and bring them under the rule of Allah. The jurists classified this as fard kifaya, a collective obligation. A collective obligation rests on the community as a whole, not on each person, and it is discharged when a sufficient number fulfill it on everyone’s behalf.

Offensive jihad worked the same way. It was a standing duty of the Muslim state, not a personal duty of the Muslim man. And because it was the state’s war, it could be declared only by the state’s legitimate authority, the caliph, the imam, the holder of public power. An individual could not wake up and launch the expansion of Islam any more than a private citizen can declare war on a neighboring country.

The second category is defensive jihad: the war to repel an enemy who has invaded Muslim land. This the jurists classified as fard ayn, an individual obligation. When the unbeliever crosses into Muslim territory, the duty to fight falls personally on every able Muslim in the vicinity.

Defensive jihad, being a personal emergency like the duty to pray or to put out a fire in your house, requires no permission from anyone. No caliph need declare it or authorize it. The attack itself is the authorization.

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