"We Are All Muslims" is No Way to Love Your Neighbour

As mixed messages go, this is a beauty.

Christian minister Bishop Karen Oliveto decided to campaign against “Islamophobia” by declaring that “We are all Muslims”.

The photo, from 2015, is going viral all over again this week.

Bishop Oliveto’s stance is typical of those who enjoy the comfort of opinion, without the discomfort of thought.

Half the reason the world is so imperilled right now is that too many people think with their feelings and reason by way of their emotions.

Take the Palestinian issue as an example …

Palestinians are not suffering because they are Muslim. Palestinians are suffering because they voted for an Islamic terrorist organisation to rule over them.

Elections have consequences, as people like to say.

And that organisation, Hamas, has brought untold suffering on both the Palestinians and the Israelis by following the dictates of Islam - you know, the apocalyptic worldview of … Muslims.

Awkward.

Are we empathetic towards the suffering of the innocent? Of course we are. We share a common humanity.

We do not - thank God rather than Allah - share a common religion.

You would think, of all people, a Christian minister would know the Muslim Jesus is not Jesus, and the Muslim ‘Allah’ is not Our Father Who Art in Heaven.

To share each other’s suffering and pain is not to share each other’s worldviews.

Jesus said we were to love our enemies. He did not say we were to love our enemy’s ideas and take on their religion.

The progressive left and Islamists make strange bedfellows.

Some find the alliance so ridiculous that they insist a movement called Queers for Palestine could not be real. It might actually be a massive troll initiated by the Jews, they say.

True Muslims, after all, would be outraged to see the LGBTQ flag flying proudly - it’s always proudly - alongside the flags of Palestine and Hezbollah.

I don’t think it’s Jewish trolling, as comical and as clever as that would be. I think, rather, that it is a classic case of that old adage - the enemy of my enemy is my friend.

Marxists and Islamists hate the God of the Jews and of the Christians. And so there is a marriage of convenience until Israel and, more particularly the West, is destroyed.

And after that … the divorce will be epic.

But back to our misguided Bishop.

She, and others like her, would do well to remember that Jesus said

‘No greater love has a man than to lay down his life for a friend.’

He never said …

‘No greater love has a man than to lay down the truth for a friend.’

We are to lay down our lives for others while holding fast to what we know is true.

That is faith. And that is love.

But abandoning truth in order to show empathy is a kind of narcissistic madness that gives a one a momentary illusion of virtue whilst ensuring that same person is eternally unhelpful.