Out of Zion

Guest (Male): Welcome to the Israel Answers series, connecting Israel, the Bible, and you. Join Susan Michael as she explores timely issues and current events from a scriptural perspective to equip the Christian world with a balanced and biblical response. Be sure to subscribe for future episodes, which will ignite your faith and bring the Bible to life in your everyday world. Now let's join Susan with your Israel answers.

Shelley Niece: Welcome to the Out of Zion podcast. I'm Shelley Niece, filling in for Dr. Susan Michael, and I have with us today a special guest, Dexter Van Zile. He is a research fellow at the Middle East Forum.

Dexter Van Zile: Hi. Unfortunately, I'm not a doctor. I just got a master's degree, but that's close enough. We can say that I'm a doctor of Western civilization as opposed to being a doctor of the church. We're all right. Actually, my great-grandfather got an honorary doctorate from Trinity in Connecticut, and I've been waiting for my alma mater to give me one. I don't think it's coming, unfortunately.

Shelley Niece: In my opinion, you have your doctorate in Western Islamism. For our audience, will you explain what is Western Islamism? How is that different than just Islam?

Dexter Van Zile: There are going to be people who disagree with it, but the Middle East Forum has basically asserted since its founding, as a result of the writings of Daniel Pipes, our founder, that radical Islam is a problem and moderate Islam is a solution. He's defined Islamism as essentially an ideology that erupted out of the early 20th century, largely in response to the collapse of the caliphate and the humiliation that Muslims endured as a result of the rise of the West.

Essentially, what people have tried to do is to promote an ideology of Muslim male supremacism in the modern era that is completely contrary to the way people are expected to be able to live in the 21st century. Essentially, what that means is that the medieval rules that were associated with Sharia are now being applied in the 21st century. It's not going to fly, and it's going to create a tremendous amount of controversy, conflict, and unfortunately, probably some violence in the years ahead as people try to impose this ideology even on Western democracies.

We see that it's advanced quite substantially in places in Europe. Ayaan Hirsi Ali wrote a book about this, noting that women are no longer safe in public areas in Europe, when in fact just a few decades ago they enjoyed a lot of rights and protections. Now we see instances in which women are very badly treated, largely abused by men from Muslim-majority environments who think that it's okay to treat women badly and also do the same thing to Jews. There are Islamist imams that are encouraging them to do these things.

That's really what we're dealing with: an ideology of Muslim male supremacism that people have been using historical Islamic scriptures, traditions, and sources to justify, even as there's a growing number of people like Mustafa Akyol who are trying to update how the faith is practiced in the 21st century.

Shelley Niece: Are you of the opinion—there's a lot of people that just feel like radical Islam has already taken over Europe, that Europe is already lost, but it's not too late for America. Do you think that's true? Is it too late for Europe?

Dexter Van Zile: I don't know. I'm not going to pretend that things are good in places like England, France, and Belgium. I think the real question at this point that we're going to have to ask is: what type of countries do Muslims want to live in when they come to the West? If they want to essentially replicate the circumstances that they fled from in the Middle East and in South Asia, then we're going to have a real fight on our hands.

I think we're starting to see, particularly in England, essentially a serious pushback on the part of the populace there. In large part, this is driven by the rape gang crisis. I don't like using that word; I'd rather use the term "grooming gang." Unfortunately, the grooming gang moniker is not accurate. These were rape gangs. These were men from rural Pakistan that essentially regarded British women as easy meat because that was the language. I think that controversy is going to cause an awful lot of people to wake up.

Shelley Niece: There's a lot of Christians and Westerners in general that are fearful of criticizing Islam at all, or the spread of Islam in America, because they're worried about being called Islamophobic. How can Christians apply criticism when necessary while making that distinction?

Dexter Van Zile: One of the things that we have to understand is that Christianity was subjected to ferocious criticism in the years after the Holocaust. Between 1914 and 1945, essentially Western civilization went through tremendous trauma, and it culminated in the Holocaust. People said, "Look, we're going to have to rework how we practice our faith." The World Evangelical Alliance issued a statement condemning antisemitism. The Catholic Church issued the *Nostra Aetate* during the Second Vatican Council.

Essentially, Christians said that we have to update and change how our faith is practiced. That's one of the reasons why the ICEJ is around, because ultimately they don't want their faith to be used as a tool to justify the oppression of the Jewish people. The question facing Muslims is whether or not they want their faith, which propounds the existence of a compassionate, loving, and merciful God, to be used as a tool of oppression to justify the oppression of non-Muslims and put Muslims in a position of dominance and supremacism over non-Muslims.

I think that's the dichotomy. Once you say, "Look, you tell us that you worship a compassionate, loving, and merciful God, and yet we see these terrible acts of violence perpetrated in the name of your faith," we don't accept that. There's a contradiction here, and what are you going to do about it? Doing that does not render you an Islamophobe. It doesn't render you an Islamophobe any more than condemning Christian antisemitism makes you an anti-Christian bigot.

Islamic religious and political leaders are going to have to get used to the idea that their faith is going to be interrogated with the same ferocity that Christianity has been interrogated since the 1800s. The Christians went through the higher criticism. I'm not sure that I like everything that came out of higher criticism, but the interrogation is coming and the change is coming. We should be optimistic that there are going to be people within the Muslim world who will say it's time for a change and that they are the people who will have to take the lead. The role that non-Muslims can play is that we can speak irenically and yet at the same time forcefully about the threat of Islamism.

Shelley Niece: Dexter, so many of us know you as a media analyst for 15 years, and now you're in this second career as a research fellow. How do these two interests overlap? How do you see the media representing what's happening in the Middle East—wars in Syria and Iran? Is the media scared to approach this when they seem so comfortable with criticizing Israel?

Dexter Van Zile: One of the reasons why people love to criticize Israel is that if you offend the Jewish community, you get a letter from the ADL. You get letters from people like me saying you got it wrong. If you offend Islamists or jihadists, you might get death threats. They may actually drive you underground and force you to hire security the way that they did with Salman Rushdie. Intimidation works, and it affects how the media covers issues related to how Islamism affects the world.

It's frankly cowardice. Also, they know their market. Journalists know that an awful lot of people want a narrative that they can use to basically say, "I'm on the right side of history." A lot of people embraced an anti-Zionist narrative, so they would promote a story in which Israel was guilty of genocide, which is a fundamental, outrageous lie.

But when it comes time to talk about the Iranian regime's murder of thousands of people in the streets of Tehran and all of the major cities, if they were to tell that story, a lot of people would have to wonder. We were outraged when Israel defeated Hezbollah with the pagers, and Hezbollah was a proxy for Iran, which is now murdering its citizens. If I pay too much attention to that narrative, I'm not going to be able to think of myself as being on the right side of history.

Journalists know their market and they know the story that their market wants to hear. So they might actually soften or downplay the outrageous things that the Iranian regime does because they don't want to alienate their market. The story of what's going on in Iran is so complex because before, all of the Arab regimes regarded Iran as a dangerous rival.

Now all of a sudden, right now it's not so clear. They're not the threat that they used to be with the destruction of Hezbollah. Hamas has taken a beating even though it hasn't been wiped out completely. So the other Arab regimes are saying, "Look, we don't need Israel and the United States to keep Iran on the back foot anymore, so we can go back to demonizing Israel." The Middle East Forum, on February 13th, did a roundtable discussion about Saudi Arabia pivoting against Israel and the United States.

Saudi Arabia was definitely afraid of Iran getting the bomb. Now it doesn't look like Iran's going to get the bomb, so they can go back to beating up on Israel because that's what they do, and their efforts to modernize are not going as well. They're still dependent on oil. One of the things that I want to say, and I think that Christians should understand, is that the Israeli Jews who were killed on October 7th were martyrs to the cause of Arab modernity.

The United Arab Emirates said, "Look, we're tired of this, we're going to come up with the Abraham Accords." Iran and Hamas said they couldn't let that happen. They couldn't let the region achieve peace with Israel because that's going to leave them behind because they cannot adapt to the modern world. The UAE wants to go into the future; they want a new world for themselves. They worked with Israel to send a probe to Mars.

That's modernity. They've abandoned hostility towards Israel as a unifying political agenda. The thing is that the other countries can't live up to that challenge, in large part because that's going to require allowing their people agency. That's going to require educating their people and bringing them into the modern world, which would require them to take on the Islamists in their countries as well.

That's not something they want to do. So they're going to go back to the old order of things, which is beating up on Israel, which is why the ICJ is so important.

Shelley Niece: It is amazing. I just find it so fascinating that during the Gaza war, the media was more than happy to report the death numbers that Hamas was feeding it. Now what's happening in Iran, the media is saying they can't report on it because they can't verify the numbers of dead. Just the hypocrisy that's embedded within those two discrepancies is super shocking to me.

Dexter Van Zile: Right. A lot of it has to do with the notion that Israel is a settler-colonialist nation. One of the things that I saw early on in my career was that the same methods that were used to demonize Israel are now being applied to the West, and have been for a long time. They were deployed to delegitimize the United States and Western democracies in general. We're all settler colonialists, we're all evil, and the people in the Middle East were victims of that.

Now, if you want to talk to me about a settler-colonialist ideology, Islamism is it. But they don't want to talk about that largely because they have viewed those folks as members of the oppressed third world and they were the people that they could stand up for. Now to suggest that they had it wrong all along is a difficult thing for them to have to accept.

That's why the Gaza genocide narrative was like heroin for these folks. It was exactly the shot in the arm that they needed to basically get the high that they were looking for. "We're on the right side of history, Israel is evil, and by the way, they're no longer the victims of a genocide but they're the perpetrators of a genocide." The high that that gives to somebody is just phenomenal for them. That's why we saw college campuses being upended. The people who were funding Students for Justice in Palestine knew exactly what they were doing. They were going to take these young kids who are addicted to notions of moral superiority and give them the stuff that they need. They were like drug dealers in many respects.

The thing is that if you don't have a Christian faith to keep you away from that stuff, or if you don't have a worldview that says you have to look at the world for what it is, you're vulnerable to it.

Shelley Niece: Dexter, so you don't have the normal profile, maybe, of most pro-Israel evangelical Christians. You're Catholic. Tell us your story.

Dexter Van Zile: This is the way it was. I started doing this work, and one of the things that I would tell evangelical audiences is that I'm a former liberal Protestant who converted to Catholicism, who works for a Jewish organization that speaks to evangelical audiences about the mistreatment of Orthodox and Catholic Christians in Muslim-majority countries. It would make my head spin. I was speaking at one evangelical school and I said, "I know that there's a huge theological divide between the Orthodox and Catholic Christians who were suffering in the Middle East and the evangelicals that are advocating for them." And a woman said to me, "Tell them that they're dying for the name of Christ."

One of the things that I have discovered is that the evangelicals in the United States are the greatest defenders of modern Western civilization than largely any other community I've met. To equate evangelicalism with modernity is something a lot of people say is not true, but in fact it's true. Who were the people that helped bring about the Abraham Accords but American evangelicals?

The Abraham Accords were a step into modernity for people in the Middle East. Because everybody is still watching *Inherit the Wind*, they think that all evangelicals are basically anti-modernist and anti-intellectual. They don't understand that when they support Israel and the Abraham Accords, they're not only acting out their biblical commitments, but they're also essentially becoming a great force for modernity.

As a Roman Catholic, when I talk to people in the Catholic Church, a lot of them understand that their allies are essentially in the evangelical community. They may have some theological differences. The question at this point is whether we can work. There was a book written many years ago called *Protestant, Catholic, Jew*. That detailed the consensus about how American society was going to address its challenges post-World War II. Now the question is going to be Protestant, Catholic, Jew, Muslim, Hindu, maybe atheist.

The evangelicals that I've worked with and talked with are capable of dealing with that. They are capable of helping to bring that about. Charlie Kirk talked to people in a manner that was very open. He was not hostile. He was not a caricature of *Inherit the Wind*. He was not an Elmer Gantry. I think that was one of the reasons why they attacked him so aggressively, because they could not tolerate the notion that evangelicalism could adapt to modernity and was actually a force for good in the modern world. They couldn't accept that.

Shelley Niece: Dexter, from this evangelical to my Catholic ally friend, thank you so much for the work that you do and please just continue to keep writing, researching, and sharing your ideas.

Dexter Van Zile: I will. Thanks for having me on the Out of Zion podcast.

Shelley Niece: Hey, just give me one more minute. I want to offer you one of our free resources. We have wonderful resources in our show notes, and if you go to our website at icejusa.org/shownotes, you'll find links for a number of our free offers. We have downloadables to help root you in scripture, help you to understand the issues surrounding Israel, and the importance of Christian support for Israel. And don't forget, please, follow us on Facebook, YouTube, and LinkedIn and stay connected. Thank you and God bless.

Guest (Male): We hope you have enjoyed this episode of Out of Zion with Susan Michael. Be sure to subscribe to Out of Zion now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, pray.com, Salem1Place, Salem Life Audio. Out of Zion with Susan Michael is a production of ICEJ USA. All rights reserved.