By their fruits you will know them

In the months in which God was speaking to me before I became a Christian, I had a theory: All good things come from God, and all bad things from the devil. One thing I hadn't taken into account: the devil is a deceiver, transformed at times into an angel of light.

The Lord Jesus Christ, second person of the Trinity and the Saviour of the world, gave an infallible measure to those who would avail themselves of it: By their fruits you will know them. A good tree, He said, cannot bring forth bad fruit, nor can a bad tree bear good fruit.

Says Bill Muehlenberg, writing about Islam:

 A political ideology which sees as its goal the overthrow of the West and the establishment of a universal caliphate is always going to be a worrying sort of religion. 

It was spread by bloodshed, maintains power by bloodshed, and intimidates its opponents by bloodshed. Most things that we greatly value in the West are held in contempt by Islam, things such as freedom, democracy, Christianity, the dignity of women, and pluralism.

Throughout its 1400-year history we find these core values trampled upon in Muslim-majority nations, and wherever Islam gets a solid foothold in the West. Examples of this are simply the stuff of daily newspaper headlines. Here I offer four new cases of Islamic intolerance, hate, and contempt for so much which is good.

Perhaps the worst case comes out of Yemen. It is horrific, but tragically far too typical in Islam. Here is how one Arabic source presents this shocking story: “Al Nahar, Lebanon, has reported that an eight year old child bride died in Yemen on her wedding night after suffering internal injuries due to sexual trauma. Human rights organizations are calling for the arrest of her husband who was five times her age. The death occurred in the tribal area of Hardh in northwestern Yemen, which borders Saudi Arabia. This brings even more attention to the already existing issue of forced child marriages in the Middle Eastern region.”

As I said, this is not uncommon. “It is reported that over a quarter of Yemen’s young girls are married before the age of 15. Not only do they lose access to health and education, these child brides are commonly subjected to physical, emotional and sexual violence in their forced marriage”. . .

Muhammad, the ideal example of humanity. . . married Aisha for example at age six, and consummated his relationship with her at age nine. So Muslim men are encouraged to do the same, often with the same tragic results as this poor girl.

But as I mentioned, the West is not immune from the wrath of Islam. While churches are burning in Egypt and Syria, they are also burning in places like Sweden. In Muslim areas there, churches are not altogether safe, with one Pentecostal church destroyed by an arson attack just recently, although police investigations are still ongoing.

Meanwhile back in Syria the anti-Christian rebels there have declared that Bibles are worse than chemical weapons. Says one report, “A video apparently made by some of the Islamists fighting and killing each other and the population in Syria reveals quantities of Bibles and biblical materials, such as the Book of John, as a narrator describes them as being ‘more dangerous than chemical weapons.’

“The video appeared yesterday, just as reports were coming out of Syria about how the Islamist rebels fighting President Bashar al-Assad’s army were ‘liberating’ villages, and then forcing Christians there to convert to Islam or be beheaded.”

And these are the rebels being supported by Obama. As Thomas Sowell comments, “Whatever the Obama rhetoric, the reality is that his policies in Egypt and Libya have led to replacing stable regimes, at peace with Israel and the West, and tolerant of their own Christian minorities, with chaotic regimes in which fanatical anti-Western terrorists have played a large and growing role, with hostility to Israel and murderous attacks on Christians in their own country.”

Syria offers us more of the same. But Australia too has its issues. Consider Sydney, where the name Muhammad is becoming one of the most common names given to newborn baby boys. As one news item states, “In a sign of the state’s cultural and religious diversity, Muhammad is now officially one of our most popular baby names". . .

As I have discussed elsewhere, when Muslims reach a critical mass in any given Western nation, the demands for sharia law and a two-tiered society increase exponentially. The demographic revolution usually precedes the stealth jihad revolution.

So problems we witness elsewhere increasingly become our problems. Thus these trends need to be monitored closely, and we need to be aware of what is taking place in other countries. While we are always to love, pray for, and share our faith with individual Muslims, none of us should be ignorant of or naive about political Islam, and all the damage, destruction and death that occurs whenever it is given free rein.