Wholly Different by Nonie Darwish: Book Review

Nonie Darwish's 2017 Regnery Faith book, Wholly Different: Why I Chose Biblical Values over Islamic Values, is a wide-ranging, reader-friendly view into the thinking of an Egyptian, Muslim woman who immigrated to America at age 30 and began to compare and contrast the values she was steeped in to those found in Judeo-Christian-influenced, Western culture.

Darwish was born in 1949 in Cairo, Egypt. She grew up in Egypt and Gaza. Her father, Mustafa Hafez, created and oversaw an anti-Israel terror group. When Darwish was eight, her father was assassinated by Israel. Egyptian President Nasser praised Darwish's father as a shahid, or martyr. Darwish immigrated to the US in 1978, and she has lived here ever since. She converted to Christianity.

Wholly Different is part memoir, part sociological observation, and part prophetic clarion. Darwish's style is cozy and conversational. Her sentences are short and easy to read. Darwish paints a vast, impressionistic landscape comparing the Muslim world to the West. She makes a series of thought-provoking points in a rapid style. She quotes relevant passages from Islamic scripture and shows how that scripture plays out in modern societies. In contrast, she quotes important Biblical passages and demonstrates how those have influenced the West.  

Darwish combines the maternal love one might find in a wise grandmother, the kind who bakes cookies and contains a storehouse of folkloric wisdom, with the stripped-to-the-bone truth-telling and no-time-to-waste urgency of an Old Testament prophet. With every sentence, Darwish conveys the deep care she feels for every reader with an insistence on being heard, and heard for every last syllable.

As is often the case, this book by a former Muslim is more fearlessly blunt than many a counter-jihad statement by someone who has never been a Muslim. "Islamic values versus Biblical values is a bloody collision waiting to happen. The West must be warned," she writes. Darwish has seen jihad up close and personal. She knows what is at stake, she has taken the measure of the wolf at the door, and her call bursts forth like a trumpet. Just one example of the kind of unique insights she can offer: in thirty years of living as a Muslim in the most populous Arab state, she never heard anyone question why Mohammed, at over fifty years old, took a six-year-old as his wife.

"A fish doesn't know it is in water," goes the old saying. Perhaps nothing dramatizes this point so vividly as Western women who marry Muslim men, travel with those men to their natal countries, and are shocked to discover that rights they took for granted as universal ceased to exist once they stepped across a border and put their Western homeland at their back. One can see one such woman, Stephanie, sobbing in a 2016 EXMNA video. "I was certain that I was going to find a way to bring my daughters back, so I bought them a bunch of clothes, but they haven't had a chance to wear them yet," Stephanie says, with unbearable poignancy. The camera shows Stephanie's slender fingers fondling princess dresses she had purchased for her daughters, dresses that her daughters will never wear.

Stephanie was born in Canada and married a Muslim man. She had two children by him. She convinced herself that she and her Libyan husband could create a Canadian version of Islam. She could prevent her husband from forcing hijab on her daughters, allow the girls to listen to music, and take gymnastics. "We can mix both and be happy," she thought. Islam, though, she said, demanded that her husband "protect" his children from Stephanie; indeed, to protect Stephanie from herself. Her husband, over the course of eighteen months, hatched a plot to convince Stephanie to put her daughters on a plane so that he could attend grad school in Europe. This was a lie. He had no plans for a European PhD. He lured Stephanie into Libya, at which point she had no rights whatsoever. Stephanie says that in Islamic terms, her husband was kind – because he had the right to kill her, and he did not. It's five years later, and Stephanie has not seen her children since. She may never see them again.

Why did Stephanie make decisions that doomed her to a life of heartache and regret? Especially given the bestselling 1987 book, Not Without My Daughter? And numerous websites dedicated to warning Western women about the potential pitfalls in marrying a Muslim man, websites like this one, this one, this one, this one, this one, and too many others to list? Maybe this is why. Maybe Stephanie had politically correct teachers who told her that the West is an oppressive, racist, sexist place. They told her, further, that Islam is a religion of peace. These fonts of politically correct ideology emphasized cultural relativism. All religions are the same, they told young Stephanie. All religions are about love.

Wholly Different is a three-alarm wake-up call from Nonie Darwish. Darwish informs her reader that it's not just when it comes to terrorism that Western and Muslim worldviews conflict. Rather, in a thousand little ways, daily life is different. Darwish lists fifty-three features that, for her, differentiate the Western worldview from the Muslim one. Darwish, as a trained journalist and speaker of Arabic, cites canonical Islamic sources to support her points. "Islam and democracy are contradictory and absolutely incompatible," she writes. These are not her words. She is quoting an imam. 

Darwish says that every feature is grounded in the foundational texts that inform each culture. The West is inspired by the Judeo-Christian Bible. God is a father who affirms his creation and wants to love us. God is rational. God wants so badly to save us that he sacrificed his only son to die for us. In contrast, the Muslim world is founded on and inspired by the Koran and the life and sayings of Mohammed. Allah is not loving and he is not a father. Allah announces that he does not need humans; if he wanted to, he could wipe humanity out and choose to create some other lifeform. Allah is not only not rational, he is the "greatest deceiver" who can grant or withhold an afterlife paradise as he sees fit. Allah demands that humans not love him, but submit to him, as slaves submit to their masters, and to sacrifice their lives for him.

Darwish is a Christian, but an observant Atheist might have written a similar book. Atheist Richard Dawkins said "I am not aware of any Christian suicide bombers … I have mixed feelings about the decline of Christianity, in so far as Christianity might be a bulwark against something worse." Atheist Bill Maher said, "The values of Western civilization are not just different, they're better. I know a whole generation has been raised on the notion of multiculturalism … Rule of law is better than autocracy and theocracy. Equality of the sexes, better," and "Islam is not like other religions. It is a unique threat. Christians do not believe that if you leave the religion you should be killed for it … If they were beheading people in Vatican City … don't you think there would be a bigger outcry? This is the soft bigotry of low expectations that we have with Muslim people." Atheist Sam Harris has been criticized for saying things like, "The truth is that Islam is quite a bit scarier and more culpable for needless human misery than Christianity has been for a very, very long time. We have to point this out. To be evenhanded … is to misconstrue the problem."

Western rights did not emerge ex nihilo. They are founded on Judeo-Christian religion and Ancient Greek civilization. Thus the Supreme Court building, for example, is modeled on the Parthenon, and while the building's frieze depicts lawgivers from various cultures, the figure at its center and apex is Moses, the Jewish lawgiver. He holds two tablets, representing the ten commandments. The rights we in the West take for granted are not universal, but rather are specific to the West, and based on our unique history. When we give up our foundations, we give up our rights.

Darwish, no wilting violet, brings the hammer down with her first sentence: don't you dare, she warns, replace the word "Judeo-Christian" with the politically correct neologism "Abrahamic," meant to elevate Islam to Judeo-Christian status as a co-foundation for Western civilization. She links the term "Abrahamic" to a Muslim Brotherhood document instructing followers to "present Islam as a civilizational alternative" and "destroy the Western Civilization from within." The West's capitulation to this agenda, she says, "is undermining the Biblical values of the West." As proof, she cites the Army's disciplining of a soldier who attempted to rescue a boy sex slave from an Afghan police commander, who kept the boy chained to his bed. She says that when she worked in Egypt, there were no prayer rooms or foot faucets at her workplace. Now, Muslims demand these perquisites in Western workplaces. This is part of civilizational jihad, she says.

Darwish describes Islam as a religion driven by a sense of competition with Jews and Christians. Sixty-four percent of the Koran, she maintains, is devoted to denigrating commentary about kafirs, or non-Muslims. "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you" is totally alien to Islam, she says. "Islam has nothing to do with Abraham and Biblical values. In fact, it awards the highest esteem to Muslims who kill the children of Abraham, the Jews."

Darwish charts her intellectual and spiritual journey from simple observations of quotidian reality and larger trends. "Why is it that people in the West stand in line to wait for their turn while in the Muslim world people step on each other to get to be first? Why is it that in the West government leaders leave their office at the end of their term peacefully while in the Muslim world their term ends with either natural death or assassination?" Even in asking these questions, she writes, she was violating cultural expectations. "Asking questions and doubting is taboo in Islam."

Another factor, she says, impeded her maturation in Egypt. "I came from a culture where openly talking about one's true feelings, inadequacies, and vulnerabilities was taboo." That kind of repression prevents personal growth.

Darwish's focus on her natal society's suppression of her self-awareness and admission of vulnerability segues into the portion of the book that excited me the most. Darwish argues that Allah encourages Muslims to hide sin, seeing public admission of sin to be a sign of weakness, while the West encourages individuals to acknowledge and come to terms with their own faults. When Muslims sin, Allah covers those sins to allow the Muslim to avoid public censure. Muslims are forbidden to expose each other's weaknesses to non-Muslims. "Keeping up a good front" becomes a religious obligation. Darwish writes, "Islamic logic does not see confession of sin by Jews and Christians as a virtue or as the starting point to redemption and an attempt to be better people. In Islam self-criticism, admitting sin, praying for forgiveness, and openly exposing one's vulnerabilities and imperfections in a search for the truth is worthy of punishment." Darwish quotes Mohammed, "All of my community shall be pardoned, save those who commit sins openly." If followers of a sheikh witness the sheikh committing a sin, the follower should say, "it is my eyes that committed the sin" for having witnessed a power figure do wrong. The Islamic view of public exposure of sin feeds a culture based on pride and shame. The Koran is replete with references to "shame," "disgrace," "humiliation," and "losers." There is no comparable mention of "losers" in the Bible. In the Koran, in addition to being labeled "losers," Christians and Jews are also called "pigs," "apes," and "unclean."

This emphasis on hiding sin fuels honor killing, and Turkey's refusal to acknowledge the Armenian Genocide, Darwish argues. As a contemporary, concrete example of this advice to conceal sins, Darwish cites Islamweb's 2012 Fatwa number 184937. A woman wrote to report that her husband sexually assaulted their fourteen-year-old daughter. She asked what she should do. The religious expert responded that the daughter should cover herself with hijab and the wife ought to "conceal his sin" and continue to live as his wife.

Islam on Demand, a YouTube channel, features a 2011 lecture by respected sheikh Hamza Yusuf. Yusuf reflects Darwish's words. Islam demands that an individual suppress urges, he says. In the West, Yusuf says, the attitude is "don't harm anyone." In the Islamic worldview, he says, there is a harm when forbidden behavior "emerges into the public space." "What people do behind their closed doors is their own business." Yusuf cites the example of alcohol. If people make and consume wine at home, "that's between them and God. The minute they step into the public space, then that is where sharia says no."

I wrote about this aspect of the difference between Islamic worldviews and the West in 2001:

"Ritualized, religiously mandated confession generated, in the West, a culture-wide valorization of self-examination, subjectivity, individuality, and change … Confession caused believers to examine themselves, admit their errors, work for self-improvement and to develop a linear / teleological mindset – to believe that the future could be better than the past … This absence of ritualized, valorized, narration of sin and redemption to one's fellows does not provide the Muslim with the same cognitive, social or cultural exercise." I hope that others pick up on this theme.

Darwish cites many of the Koran verses and Hadith that call for jihad. One hadith promises that killing a Jew or a Christian offers a Muslim a chance to be redeemed from ever having to go to Hell. Darwish comments on the public relations attempt to redefine "jihad" as peaceful self-improvement. In Islamic texts, she says, jihad plainly means "war with non-Muslims to establish the religion."

Wholly Different will be a rewarding read for those interested in a big-picture comparison of the Muslim world and the West, from an educated observer who has lived decades in both worlds and can support her points with key texts and contemporary examples.

You can read this review at FrontPage magazine here

Is It "Racist" To Criticize Islam?

This piece first appeared in FrontPage Magazine here

Is It Racist, Xenophobic, and Imperialist to Criticize Islam?

"You may not criticize Islam. You do not speak Arabic. You don't come from a Muslim society. You are a white supremacist, imperialist xenophobe and you don't like foreign, brown people." So Islam's apologists insist.

Brooklyn activist Linda Sarsour epitomizes this strategy for suppressing critique of Islam. "My hijab is my hoodie," she insisted, in a 2012 CNN op-ed. With the "hoodie" reference, Sarsour explicitly linked herself with Trayvon Martin, a young black male who scuffled with, and was shot by George Zimmerman in February, 2012. Sarsour's implication is that white supremacy motivated Zimmerman's shooting of Martin. By extension, Sarsour insists that white supremacists want to hurt her because she wears hijab. Sarsour also linked herself to Shaima Alawadi, an Iraqi-American who was beaten to death in her own home in March, 2012. Sarsour insisted that Alawadi's murder was a hate crime committed by white supremacists who don't like foreign, brown people.

Sarsour knows that Americans feel guilty and sad about slavery and Jim Crow, and that they tiptoe to avoid any racist comment. She knows that Americans fear being called "racist." A parasite of unearned pity, Sarsour lifts the mantle of protection cast over speech about African Americans, and worms her way beneath it. Rachel Dolezal can only weep with envy at this Caucasian woman's success at positioning herself as a victim of white racism. That Sarsour parades as the same kind of victim as the descendants of slaves is an extraordinary coup, given the outsize historical role of Arab Muslims in the enslavement of not just of Africans, but of Europeans and Americans as well, and given Arab racism against blacks, whom they label "abid," or slave.

Sarsour's rebranding of her hijab as a feminist symbol is also a fabulous marketing coup, one that really should be taught in business schools. In many Muslim-majority countries, women can be harassed, tortured, raped or murdered for not wearing hijab.

UC Riverside creative writing professor Reza Aslan agreed with Sarsour. In a March, 2012 tweet, Aslan blamed "Islamophobic f - - - s" for Shaima Alawadi's death. Other activists mounted "A Million Hijabs for Shaima" and "Hoodies and Hijabs for Justice" demonstrations and Facebook pages.

Investigation revealed that Shaimi Alawadi had been bludgeoned to death by her husband. Kassim Alhimidi faked an Islamophobic hate crime to cover his own, misogynist, tracks. One can find compilations of such faked hate crimes here, here and here. It is impossible not to conclude that concentrated effort has been exerted to demonize any honest critic of Islam as a white supremacist xenophobe who is likely to commit a hate crime against Muslims.

There are several problems with Islam-apologist dogma that any criticism of Islam is motivated by white supremacy and xenophobic hatred of foreign, brown people, and their insistence that criticism of Islam is linked to hate crimes against Muslims. The most obvious problem: America and the West host millions of foreign, brown Hindus, Buddhists, and Confucians. There is no real threat of "Hindu-phobia," "Buddhist-phobia," or "Confucian-phobia." Rather, Hindu guru Deepak Chopra, Buddhist reincarnate Dalai Lama, and Confucius-inspired Tiger Moms are beloved. Mahatma Gandhi has achieved virtual saint status – indeed Gandhi's image graces the cover of Robert Ellsberg's All Saints, a Catholic publication.

Clearly, Islam is different from Hindusim, Confucianism, and Buddhism. Clearly, the problem is not the foreign-ness or brown-ness of Muslims. There is a villain, an antagonist, a bad guy here, and that bad guy is not a white supremacist.  

Former and current Muslims, many of them foreign and brown, have produced a library of critiques of Islam that agree in every respect with non-Muslim critiques of Islam. There is a significant enough body of literature by those raised in Muslim cultures thoroughly to indict Islam on every count raised by non-Muslim critics. Both Muslim-raised critics of Islam and non-Muslim critics of Islam speak as one voice. Both groups agree that jihad and gender apartheid are problematical aspects of Islam. Both Muslim-born and non-Muslim critics point to the exact same Koran verses, hadiths, history and cultural trends. These facts are not racist, nor are these facts dependent on the culture of the speaker for their truth value.

Ibn Warraq was born in India; his Muslim family joined the mass exodus to Pakistan after its founding in 1947. Local educational options were limited to madrassas, so Warraq's father sent him to the UK for schooling. He studied Islam at the graduate level with the influential scholar William Montgomery Watt. The 1989 fatwa ordering the death of author Salman Rushdie was a turning point for Warraq. Even nice Muslims insisted to him that Rushdie must be killed, and even Westerners who were quick to criticize Christianity refused to critique Islam or defend Rushdie. Warraq, who had been a shy child, and an apolitical teacher and businessman, began to publish Islam-critical articles. In the three decades since; his activity has been wide-ranging, and it includes publishing Why I Am Not a Muslim in 1995.

Ali Sina was "raised in Iran, educated in Pakistan and Italy and now lives in Canada." He has run Faith Freedom since October, 2001. This website is an exhaustive, fully documented indictment of jihad and gender apartheid. He describes himself as "probably the biggest anti-Islam person alive." He challenges anyone to debunk a single one of his claims. If his detractors can prove him wrong on any point, including that Mohammed was "a narcissist, a misogynist, a rapist, a pedophile, a lecher, a torturer, a mass murderer, a cult leader, an assassin, a terrorist, a mad man and a looter," he will pay them $50,000 and remove his website. His website remains up, and his prize remains in the bank, because no one can refute Ali Sina on the facts. Rather, they attack him as a person. "People have to dismiss me some way, they have to put me down in one way or another. I'm a Jew, I'm a Christian, I'm a Hindu. I'm whatever people want to say in order to discredit me. But they can't ignore my questions."

Wafa Sultan is a Syrian-American psychiatrist. As a child, she witnessed the heartbreaking mistreatment of her formidable grandmother, mistreatment that was sanctioned by Islamic gender apartheid. As a doctor, Sultan had a front-row seat to horrors, including encountering a female patient who had been raped by men who used a drinking glass as a prophylactic. Sultan's niece killed herself after she, at age 11, was married off to a 40-year-old. Sultan cites Koran verses and hadiths that support gender apartheid in her 2009 book, A God Who Hates.

Nonie Darwish is the loving, salty, no-nonsense, Egyptian grandmother we all might wish we had. She lived her first thirty years as a Muslim in Egypt, the daughter of Colonel Mustafa Hafez. Hafez founded and oversaw the fedayeen group who killed Israeli civilians between 1951 and 1956. When Darwish was eight years old, her father was assassinated by Israel. She grew up hating and blaming Israel. "No one can escape the overwhelming anti-Semitic propaganda and the venomous hatred that my culture of origin advocated against Jews," she says. How did a girl who grew up hearing lurid folklore of how Israelis would entertain themselves by killing pregnant Arab women become a critic of Islam? The seeds of change were sown in her childhood. She got used to mosque sermons that called for death to Christians and Jews. One day, over a loudspeaker, she heard such a sermon in the presence of a Christian friend. "May God destroy the infidels and the Jews, the enemies of God. We are not to befriend them or make treaties with them," the amplified imam raged. "My friend looked scared, and I was ashamed," Darwish reports. She immigrated to the US. "I owe my change to America." 9-11 was a turning point for Darwish. "When I pledged allegiance to the flag of the United States I took this pledge to heart and I decided to speak out of respect for the 3,000 Americans who died on that day." Darwish is the author of many books, including Wholly Different: Why I Chose Biblical Values Over Islamic Values.

Mosab Hassan Yousef is the son of a founder of Hamas. He was first arrested at age ten for throwing rocks at Israelis. As the eldest son, he was expected to carry on in his father's footsteps as a leader of terror attacks against Israel. He was arrested many times. He developed doubts about Islam when, in prison, he witnessed Hamas members' sadistic and irrational treatment of each other. He converted to non-denominational Christianity and published Son of Hamas in 2010.

Nabeel Qureshi's parents were Pakistani. He has an MD and two MAs in Christian apologetics and religion. In his 2016 memoir, Seeking Allah; Finding Jesus, Qureshi describes his excruciating spiritual crisis. As a college student, Qureshi was a devout Ahmadiyya Muslim dedicated to, and confident in, defending Islam against any criticism. His friend David Wood informed Qureshi that Mohammed ordered his followers to rape war captives even as their husbands witnessed their wives' violation. Qureshi had been extensively educated in Islam and he was certain that this accusation could not be true. Qureshi writes, "The mere suggestion was outrageous. He was implying that the Koran condoned rape … That was not the Islam I knew … My Mohammed was a liberator of slaves and a commander of saints, not a conquering captor leading an army of rapists. Islam would not allow such an atrocity. It could not … I lashed out at David, rebuking him for trying to drag my prophet through the mud. This was lower than low … I was taught that he (Mohammed) fought to elevate the status of women." Later, he writes, "I lay prostrate in a large Muslim prayer hall, broken before God … tears blurred my sight." Eventually Qureshi confronted the Muslim sources he had not been exposed to, and realized that Wood was correct. Qureshi's 2016 book No God But One details his theological reasons for converting from Islam to Christianity.

Hamed Abdel-Samad is from a small village in Egypt. He is the son of a Sunni imam. Between ages four and twelve, he spent six hours a day memorizing the Koran. While in university, he joined the Muslim Brotherhood, who ordered him to walk in the desert heat for hours while carrying one orange. When exhausted, he was ordered to peel the orange, bury it in the sand, and eat the peel. He recognized this absurdist exercise as an attempt to break his will. "This is how you make terrorists," he says. After he stated that Islam has fascist tendencies, a cleric issued a fatwa against him on Egyptian TV. In an appearance on German TV, citing canonical texts, Abdel-Samad argued for the Islamic basis of ISIS. He says that Mohammed can never be a role model for people in the twenty-first century. "He made his living from war, selling slaves, the tax he was imposing on unbelievers, and assaulting tribes' caravans. I cannot consider a man a role model who was married to nine women at the same time. I cannot have someone as a role model who executed hundreds of prisoners of war who surrendered to him. I cannot have somebody as a role model who married a six-year-old girl while he was over fifty years old." Further, he says, "I don't believe in the reform-ability of Islam … You cannot screw the Koran till it fits our time. As long as they (Islamic ideas) are from God, who am I, who are you, to correct God?" Rather, he argues, we must look anew at Islam as a human creation, and regard Muslims, as human beings, as capable of reform. Abdel-Samad published Islamic Fascism in 2016; he has his own YouTube channel.

Sara Azmeh Rasmussen was born in Damascus, Syria in 1973, and raised as a Sunni Muslim. She immigrated, alone, to Norway to seek asylum. She converted to Christianity and now is a secular humanist. In one video she said she would consider Islam again if she could enter the mosque through the front door, rather than through a side, women's entrance, and if she could enter that front door alongside her husband, and without hijab. "I have forsaken the faith," she says, "because I couldn't feel a sense of belonging in Islam as a young woman … I prayed the five prayers. I recited the Koran. But when I was 16, 17 years old, I felt that a God that doesn't give me worth and dignity and who asks me to cover a body that he himself has created is not my God that I loved as a child." In March, 2009, after Oslo's International Women's Day ceremony, Rasmussen burned a hijab on camera. In 2012, in response to the cartoon crisis, she posted her own hijab-protest cartoon of Mohammed on her blog. In a 2013 video, Rasmussen, displaying her graduate-school knowledge of Islam and her respect for Muslims, begs Islamic leaders to consider women's God-given dignity. She asked, "What happens to a body when it is paralyzed on one side? What happens when opportunities for half the population is limited? … Women do not need to look like mobile, black tents." She demands to know what Koranic support there is for hijab, pointing out that no one knows the exact meaning of the Arabic words used in the one Koran verse that refers to women's garments or anatomy. Rasmussen argues that Islamic scholars have updated Muslim traditions in order to accommodate modern commerce, but they have not updated Muslim traditions in order to accommodate women's lives. "My only goal" she says "is that our Muslim communities move toward welfare and freedom." She opposes any bigotry against Muslims, and she has participated in all-night "watches" around mosques to guarantee Muslims' safety.

Nowadays one can turn to YouTube for videos starring twenty-and-thirty-something Islam-critical, Muslim-born commentators. Cairo-born, former Muslim, Hussein Aboubakr fearlessly critiques jihad in a Prager University production. "I left Islam because it's misogynistic," says a Pakistani-born lawyer who cites the Koran, a book she largely memorized. Muhammad Syed, Sarah Haider and Ghada cite Islam's treatment of women as reasons for leaving Islam.

Many more such Muslim-born critics of Islam could be mentioned. 2015 saw the publication of Somali-born Ayaan Hirsi Ali's Heretic: Why Islam Needs a Reformation Now, Albanian-American cartoonist Bosch Fawstin's The Infidel and Inside Jihad by Egyptian former extremist Dr. Tawfik Hamid. There are many more, including Sandra Solomon, Abdullah Sameer, Aynaz Anni Cyrus, Isik Abla and Walid Shoebat.

Indeed, those raised as Muslims in Muslim-majority societies, including speakers of Arabic and persons who have memorized the Koran, have produced such an outpouring of criticism of jihad and gender apartheid that if you archived all their books, print and online articles and public talks, these works would fill a library. These critics are young and old, male and female, urban professionals, former village dwellers, and prisoners, from nations across the Muslim world. Some converted to Christianity. Others are outspoken atheists. A few continue to identify as Muslim. They include former jihadis themselves. As for that charge that critics of Islam suffer from white supremacy and don't like brown, foreign people? Muslim-born critics of Islam range in skin tone from the strawberry blond Bosch Fawstin to the equatorial African Ayaan Hirsi Ali.

And there's more: there are non-Muslim critics of Islam who were born in majority-Muslim countries and who speak Arabic. Bat Ye'or, author of the 1985 book The Dhimmi: Jews and Christians Under Islam, was born and grew up in Egypt; her family was Jewish. Brigit Gabrielle is a Lebanese Christian. Her 2006 book, Because They Hate vividly describes what it is like to be at the receiving end of jihad terror. Sam Shamoun, prolific contributor to "Answering Islam," was born in Kuwait to an Assyrian Christian family. Raymond Ibrahim was born in the US to Coptic Christians; he is fluent in English and Arabic. These critics, too, cite the same two problematic aspects of Islam: jihad and gender apartheid. They, too, cite the same canonical material as their fellow critics.

The above-listed critics of Islam must go to extreme measures to protect their very right to life. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, for just one example, participated with filmmaker Theo Van Gogh in the creation of a 2004, ten-minute TV movie, Submission, that addresses Islamic gender apartheid. For that act of courage and conscience, on a public street, in broad daylight, Mohammed Bouyeri shot van Gogh over ten times, cut his throat, attempted to decapitate him, and impaled him with a knife stuck in his chest.

The above-listed critics of Islam, if parents, must go to bed every night praying that no new Mohammed Bouyeri finds their children. Their children may not grow up with grandparents, aunts, uncles, or cousins, since families typically break off contact with apostates. No honest, rational person could argue that these critics converted as part of a search for gain. In contrast, Islam's apologists compete for hefty thank you checks from funders like Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal, who has an estimated net worth of $17 billion.

What of Christian converts to Islam? They agree as well. Converts to Islam also see jihad and gender apartheid as significant features of Islam. John Walker Lindh is merely one of many converts to Islam who rapidly, after their conversion, joined active jihad combat. Katherine Russell, Tamerlane Tsarnaev's widow, converted to Islam, married a man who cheated on her, beat her, and called her a "slut" and a "prostitute." Russell covered herself with hijab and fantasized about the rewards granted to wives of jihad martyrs. After singer Cat Stevens converted to Islam, he voiced approval for the assassination of Islam-critical author Salman Rushdie.

Before his conversion to Islam at age 17, Hamza Yusuf grew up as Mark Hanson, the Christian son of American academics in Northern California. Today, as one of the world's most influential scholars of Islam, Yusuf has insisted that jihad is an act of mercy – if everyone were a Muslim, there would be peace. Two days before 9-11, Yusuf said "America has a great tribulation coming to it." Yusuf justified violence in response to criticisms of Islam, saying, "If you push buttons … see what happens." Yusuf embraces the Islamic teachings that women are deficient, that women constitute the majority of the denizens of Hell, and he counsels against women playing sports. Yusuf performs a fandango worthy of a Cirque du Soleil contortionist to justify the Koran 4:34 instruction to husbands to beat their wives. His verbal contortions include him careening from English to Arabic to pop psychology – "codependency!" – to references to 1930s films. When husbands, in obedience to the Koran, strike their wives, Yusuf counsels, it "is just a way of bringing them back into their body." Mohammed is fair in everything and Allah wants this (wife beating.) "What Allah wants, we accept." To not allow wife beating, Yusuf says, would "humiliate" Arabs; "These are men. They are Arabs. They are proud," he says.

Scholar, author, and activist Ingrid Mattson, a Christian convert to Islam, praises the work of a Muslim scholar who advances jihad. When asked about the Taliban's treatment of women, Mattson said, "In their minds, they are protecting women." Of Koran 4:34, which states that men are superior to women and men should beat women they suspect of disobedience, Mattson says, "The husband takes these steps to try to bring their relationship to where it's supposed to be."

Some Christian converts to Islam reach the breaking point when they can no longer stomach defending jihad or the teaching that Muslim men can rape war captives in the presence of their husbands. This very teaching is what drove Brother Ismail, an American convert to Islam, out of Islam. So, yes, Christian converts to Islam, as well as Muslim-born critics of Islam, see Islam as a religion that calls for and justifies jihad, and that "protects" women by beating them.

Have Islam's apologists acknowledged that Muslim-raised, brown and foreign critics of Islam speak as one voice with white, American, non-Muslim critics of Islam?

No, they have not. Rather – believe it or not – Islam's apologists call brown people "white supremacist;" they call women working against female genital mutilation "patriarchal misogynists;" they call those who work with indigenous freedom fighters "imperialists." In short, Islam's apologists don't care how much they lie, as long as their rebranding, marketing campaign succeeds, and as long as critical examination of and free speech about Islam are as squelched as if Stalin himself were controlling the discourse. Or, indeed, as if Mohammed himself were controlling the discourse. Mohammed ordered the assassination of poets who criticized him in their verse.

Lawan Hawizy, a Kurd born in Iraq, now lives in San Francisco. He criticized hijabs as symbols of "subjugation." Leftists called him "Islamophobic … some kind of Uncle Tom … You are a white person criticizing Islam."

"They get annoyed at me because I am not as angry at the West as I should be to fit their narrative. That blinds them into a black hole … I was born in the Middle East. I studied Islam" for twelve years. "No set of words infuriates me more," Hawizy says, than when Islam's apologists say, "This isn't the true Islam" in response to coverage of terror attacks.

In a recent video, Muslims called Ayaan Hirsi Ali a white supremacist, oppressor, colonizer, and representative of the patriarchy. The comments under their video are even more colorful. One post refers to Hirsi Ali as "a zionist slave full of lies." In a March 8, 2011 tweet, Linda Sarsour said that she would like to "whip" Ayaan Hirsi Ali and take away her vagina. The woman Sarsour wants to "whip," the woman another Muslim referred to as a "slave," is black; please remember that the word for "black" and "slave" is the same in contemporary American Arab insults. Hirsi Ali is a survivor of female genital mutilation – and Sarsour wants to remove her vagina.

The Linda Sarsours and Reza Aslans who play the "white supremacist, xenophobic, Islamophobia" game want to erase the reality of objective facts, facts whose truth value does not depend on the identity of the speaker. No one needs Arabic language skills to criticize jihad. We know how Muslims interpret given lines in the Koran because Muslims publicly state their interpretations. Osama bin Laden's "Letter to the American People" quoted extensively from the Koran to justify terror. Muslim societies, no less than Christian ones, are subject to sociological analysis of objective data. Maps of sex ratios, for example, show us that women and girls have a harder time surviving to adulthood even in wealthy Muslim countries than in those countries, even poor ones, most influenced by the Judeo-Christian tradition. Using facts like life expectancy and literacy rates, news sources and aid agencies regularly compile lists of the worst countries to be a woman. There's a reason those lists disproportionately include Muslim-majority societies. See here, here, and here. There's a reason why, in this year of the refugee crisis, most of the countries sending refugees into overcrowded rubber rafts on perilous seas are Muslim countries whose inhabitants are desperate to reach non-Muslim territory – see here for a list of refugee-producing nations. Pew research shows that significant majorities of Muslims across the Muslim world agree that "A wife must always obey her husband." Opinion polls show distressingly large numbers of Muslims, worldwide, who express support for various terror attacks.

Yes, there are such things as white supremacists. Yes, there are bigots who don't like Muslims. But when it comes to responsible criticism of Islam, criticism that adheres to scholarly rigor, the words "Islamophobe," "white supremacist" and "imperialist" must be recognized for what they are: propagandistic smokescreens whose only goal is to protect an edifice, Islam, from the same necessary and cleansing intellectual sunlight that is permitted to illuminate every other belief system. Jihad and gender apartheid hurt real, live human beings – most of them Muslims. Every day another little girl like Ilham Mahdi al Assi, who was raped to death at age 13, is forced to "marry" an adult man. Another Mallali Nurzi, trapped by an arranged marriage and no civil rights, burns herself to death in Afghanistan. Another Iqbal, a fifteen-year-old Pakistani dancer, is attacked with acid. There are more Sarahs and Aminas, two Texas teens who were honor-murdered by their father. There are more like Mayar Mohamed Mousa, a 17-year-old Egyptian girl who died from complications during an FGM procedure. Every day another boy is lost to dreams of bringing on the caliphate by shedding the blood of innocents – or his own blood. These human beings deserve the truth. Those who squelch the truth about jihad and gender apartheid aid the fist, the bomber, the hand holding the razor. Those courageous enough to tell the truth bring closer the day dreamed of by lovers of freedom and dignity, heroes like Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Sara Azmeh Rasmussen, and Hamed Abdel-Samad. 

The Promise 2017: Sumptuous, Epic, Moving, Important

This review first appeared at FrontPageMag here

Powerful people are deploying every trick to prevent you from seeing The Promise, director Terry George's 2016 film starring Oscar Isaac, Christian Bale and Charlotte Le Bon. Their insistence that you not see the film rouses suspicion. After all, Terry George is a something of a cinematic social justice warrior and critical darling. He's known for taking on righteous themes, including the English imperial abuse of Irish prisoners in his 1993 film In the Name of the Father, nominated for seven Academy Awards. His 2004 film, Hotel Rwanda, received three Academy Award nominations. The Promise's script is by George and Robin Swicord, who also has an Academy Award and a Golden Globe nomination under her belt.

George's Hotel Rwanda depicted the Rwandan genocide. Rwandans died in that signature African phenomenon: tribal violence. Hutus rose up with machetes and murdered their neighboring Tutsis in the world's fastest genocide. Hotel Rwanda tells a different story. Rwandans died because white people don't care about black people. In the film, Nick Nolte, playing a UN general, "explains" the genocide to Don Cheadle, playing the real-life hero and rescuer Paul Rusesabagina. "You're dirt. We think you are dirt. You're dung. You're worthless. You're black. You're not even a n - - - - -. You're an African … They're not gonna stop the slaughter."

Hotel Rwanda never explains how white people living thousands of miles away could stop a million killings-by-machete occurring over a hundred days. Rwanda is remote, landlocked, and mountainous. There were no airports, train tracks, or installations to bomb. Getting troops into Rwanda would have taken months and given the volatility of the area, the insertion of American or European troops would have sparked separate conflagrations. Witness the horrific fate of the humanitarian mission in the Battle of Mogadishu in October, 1993 – a mere six months before the Rwandan genocide. No matter. It's whitie's fault. That movie, the powers that be want you to see.

The powers that be don't want you to see The Promise, though it stars Oscar Isaac, previously praised for the box office smash, Star Wars: The Force Awakens and the critical smash Inside Llewyn Davis, by the hipster Coen Brothers. What, then, is the problem with The Promise and why don't powerful people want you to see it?

The Promise dramatizes the 1915-1923 Armenian Genocide. An estimated 1.5 million Armenians were murdered by Ottoman Turkey and its successor, the Republic of Turkey.

The victims of the Armenian genocide were Christians. The perpetrators were Muslims.

Armenians are not just any Christians. They are an indigenous Middle Eastern people. They have lived on their land, as recognizable, autonomous Armenians, for over two thousand years. In 301 AD, Armenians were the first to adopt Christianity as their state religion. The Edict of Thessalonica did not make Christianity Rome's state religion until 380 AD. Etchmiadzin Cathedral, whose construction began the year Armenians adopted Christianity, is the oldest cathedral in the world. Armenians began fighting jihadi invaders over a thousand years ago, significantly at the 1071 Battle of Manzikert. In 1400 Tamerlane, the Sword of Islam, buried 4000 Armenians alive. The Armenian Kingdom of Cilicia supported the Crusades. That's right – indigenous people of the Middle East supported the Crusaders against jihadis. Theirs is a narrative that will rankle any number of powerful opinion-makers.

The first notorious genocide of the bloody twentieth century was not Hitler's. It was the Turks'. Hitler was quite impressed with how the Turks got away with years of expulsions, selective assassinations, starvation and literal, not metaphoric, crucifixions. In an August, 1939 speech, just days before beginning his assault on Poland that would spark World War II, Hitler uttered his notorious "Armenian quote." "I have placed my death-head formation in readiness … with orders to them to send to death mercilessly and without compassion, men, women, and children of Polish derivation and language … Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?"

I am Polish, and thanks to this quote, I feel myself to be an honorary Armenian. Playwright William Saroyan produced an "Armenian quote" of his own, saluting a "small tribe of unimportant people, whose wars have all been fought and lost, whose structures have crumbled … and prayers are no more answered. Go ahead, destroy Armenia … Send them into the desert without bread or water. Burn their homes and churches. Then see if they will not laugh, sing and pray again. For when two of them meet anywhere in the world, see if they will not create a New Armenia." With this quote, Saroyan is an honorary Pole.

The Armenians' would-be annihilators are also part of the reason that one must not speak of the Armenian Genocide. Turkey is part of NATO. Turkey hosts the Incirlik Air Base. Those are reasons why US presidents may refrain from using the word "genocide" and, as John Oliver put it, resort to diplomatic doublespeak in phrases like, "Armenia's terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day."

The politically correct don't use the same thesaurus as US presidents. Let's spell out their concern. In the first notorious genocide of the Twentieth Century, Muslims murdered Christians. Further: Muslims murdering Christians and taking over their territory was not an aberration. These murders were not committed in disobedience to scripture or tradition or even trends. The Turkish genocide against Armenian Christians was in accordance with scripture, tradition, and trends. These traditions began with Mohammed himself, who ordered the expulsion of Arab Christians and Jews from the Arabian Peninsula. Arabs who vacillated in their commitment to Islam were brought to heel in the Ridda Wars. For the past 1400 years, the Middle East's Christian populations have been shrinking. The Armenian Genocide is not an isolated event. It's part of a chain of events we are not to be aware of or discuss.

Politically correct opinion-makers don't want you to know that Christianity began in the Middle East. They want you to think of the fault line between terror and its victims as a line between dispossessed, swarthy, colonized, Third World peasants practicing their "indigenous" religion and Christianity, the tip of the colonizers' spear. They want you to think that some very pale person named Smith or Jones marched into the Middle East with a Bible and under the color of a colonizer's flag. It astounds me but it's true – semester after semester I ask university students to plot on a timeline the founding dates of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Most of them think that Islam was founded first, and Judaism and Christianity somehow branched off. Really. Really.  

This politically correct narrative is nonsense. By PC's standards, the first Christians were swarthy, colonized, peasants in the Middle East. Swarthy Middle Eastern peasants were the first victims of jihad, and the first to fight back against jihad. Muslims were the colonizers. Some populations have been fighting continuously for over a thousand years. They've been saying mass, erecting crosses, and surviving in Egypt, Iraq, and Armenia. Their numbers, and their territory, grow smaller year after year. Asking why those borders and demographics shrink is an awkward question for the politically correct.

Take Egypt in the fourteenth century. Egypt, the most populous Arab nation, had a majority-Christian population long after the Arab Conquest. Persecution reduced their number. Christians were freely robbed, murdered, their churches were closed, and Muslim sermons demanded hostility to them. At times Christians had to wear a five-pound cross. At other times, in other places, Christians had to wear a patch on their clothing in the shape of a pig; Jews had to wear a donkey-shaped patch, or bells. Historians cite these patches as precursors to the patches Nazis forced their victims to wear. Christians could save their lives by converting to Islam, but even then they were forced to prove the sincerity of their conversions by attending mosque. They could not will their money to any Christian relatives – only those relatives who converted to Islam could inherit. Those lines around Christian territory, those tallies of Christian populations, didn't shrink because someone read a pamphlet, compared and contrasted the theological claims of each faith, and made a decision out of his free conscience. Populations shrank because of persecution. Those persecutions interfere with politically correct history.

Assyrian Christians speak a variety of Aramaic, a Middle Eastern language that predates Arabic. Copts' liturgical language is late stage Egyptian. Egyptian has the longest documented history of any language and predates Arabic in Egypt by thousands of years. The mere existence of Armenians, Copts, and Assyrian Christians poses an awkward question for Middle Eastern Muslims. A group of Middle Eastern Christians ask, on their website, "Why were you born in Islam?" Your ancestors were not Muslims, this website insists. They converted to Islam. Why? Is it because of the kind of pressure Islam brought to bear on the Armenians? Muslims, if you watch a film like The Promise, do you imagine that this is what it was like for your non-Muslim ancestors? Do these persecutions, dramatized onscreen, provide a missing link in your family tree? I think it would be impossible for a Muslim to reflect on how Muslims pressured non-Muslims to convert or die and not to think about his or her ancestors. When did the ancestors cave in, and what did it take for them to leave their natal faith? A massacre? Oppressive taxation? The violation of female family members? Or was it a promise of wealth if they joined in the looting? These are uncomfortable questions.

And those persecutions raise even more awkward questions. If this is what jihad has done to Christian, Jewish, and Zoroastrian populations in the Middle East, what will it do to us? The Byzantine Empire and states like Armenia once felt as secure in their Christianity as American Christians might feel today. Do we, as they did, have a target on our backs? Are our civilizational timelines, as were theirs, shrinking?

Now you know why powerful people don't want you to see The Promise. Why 57,000 people flooded the International Movie Database to give the film one-star ratings long before it even opened.

University of Haifa Professor Stefan Ihrig is the author of Justifying Genocide: Germany and the Armenians from Bismarck to Hitler. Ihrig insists that the Armenian Genocide and the Holocaust are connected, and one cannot understand one without the other. But even publishing on the Armenians has cost Ihrig. Writing in Forbes, Ihrig reports: "Speaking out on the Armenian Genocide means taking a huge risk. At the very least, it will be an exhausting experience, getting harassed online, trolled, threatened, down-rated on Amazon and publicly vilified. Until now, this was true mainly for individuals – academics, artists and activists. Now, it seems to apply to Hollywood movies, too."

The Promise has a low rating at the review aggregate site, RottenTomatoes. Oscar Isaac's Coen Brothers' film Inside Llewyn Davis has a 94%, certified fresh rating. Hotel Rwanda, Terry George's previous genocide film, has a certified fresh 90% rating. Hmm.

I am a diehard movie fan. As such I place aesthetics above message. I am here to tell you that The Promise is a darn good movie. It's not a great movie. When it comes to genocide movies, it's not Schindler's List, In Darkness, or Europa Europa. The Promise just misses being a great movie. It moves too fast. The film should have lingered more, let us get closer to its characters. There is a scene where a man admires a woman's sketch book. That scene should have showed us more of her sketches. There should have been at least one paragraph more explaining the genocide to the audience. Armenians were Christians in a majority-Muslim state. They were a middleman minority – often better educated and wealthier than their neighbors. Turkey was fighting a war, and feared Russia, a neighboring, Christian nation, and its outreach to Armenians. Christians in a Muslim-majority state were accused of divided loyalty. The film could have benefitted from a deeper explication of these factors. But The Promise is a very good movie, and for that reason, not for any political message, you should see it.

Oscar Isaac's performance as Mikael, an Armenian medical student, is mesmerizing. Had this been a film about a more PC-friendly genocide, Isaac would receive an Academy Award nomination, and possibly win. His presence is the soul of the movie. His performance may as well have been wordless. He is all eyes as he takes in, in the opening scenes, his beloved natal village, then Constantinople, the big city he must travel to to study medicine, his heart-stopping first encounter with the woman he, in spite of himself, loves, and, finally, the evisceration, torture, and fight-to-the-death of his beloved people. He is the blank slate on which history writes. He is so pure that the world's darkness splatters across his features as ink titrated from human tears and the black ashes of Hell.

Christian Bale is a brilliant actor who is perhaps genetically incapable of making a bad move onscreen. To his smaller role as an American reporter covering the genocide, Bale brings all of his craft. He can and does communicate pages of unspoken soliloquy into a couple of understated gestures. As part of a triangle involving Isaac, Bale must communicate a love that is consuming, possessive, and that supports great sacrifice. Bale inhabits his role so thoroughly he wrung tears from this viewer.

Charlotte Le Bon is the lovely love interest, an Armenian who was raised in France and picks a very bad time to explore her roots. The supporting cast consists of world-class actors. Jean Reno, Tom Hollander, Shohreh Aghdashloo, James Cromwell, Rade Serbedzija and Marwan Kenzari command the screen in small, vital roles.

The Promise has been called the most expensive independently financed film. Kirk Kerkorian, an Armenian-American businessman, provided funding for a film that politics would have liked to suppress. Kerkorian was born in Fresno in 1917, as the genocide was taking place. He died at 98 years old, before he could see the completed film. His investment is all over the screen. If you like big, sweeping, sumptuously-produced historical epics, you will love this movie. I would like to watch it again on video just to freeze the frame and linger over the set and costume details. The Promise was shot in Spain, Portugal, and Malta, which do manage to look like Turkey.

Critics have faulted the film for including a love story in a movie that dramatizes a genocide. This criticism is uninformed. Read enough memoirs, and talk to enough survivors. Yes, people do fall in love under the most challenging circumstances. Auschwitz hosted a famous love story. Mala Zimetbaum, a Jewish prisoner, fell in love with Edek Galinski, a Polish one. Their story is legendary and inspired many of their fellow prisoners. Poet John Guzlowski's parents met while his father was on a death march out of Buchenwald. The Nazis marched Guzlowski's father past the camp where his mother was interned. Their marriage lasted for over fifty years. Guzlowski himself was conceived and born in a post-war UN DP camp.

The Promise is neither an anti-Muslim nor an anti-Turkish film. Perhaps its most poignant performance is that of Tunisian-Dutch Marwan Kenzari as Emre Ogan. Ogan is a pretty, young party boy who just wants to have fun. It's purely an accident of fate that he is a Turk during a genocide. Ogan is a complex, sympathetic, human character. We can identify with his moral quandaries. There are other Muslim Turks in the film who clearly oppose the genocide and support the Armenians. Wikipedia quotes many Turks who, at the time of the genocide and not long after, condemned it. I've been lucky enough to travel to Turkey, and I've loved few destinations more. There is nothing I would like more to see than a new, enlightened Turkey acknowledge the sins of the past, and repent for them. I hope and pray for that day, for the Armenians, for Turkey and the Turks, and for the world.

One last word. I refer, here, to the Armenian Genocide as part of a trend of jihad's encroachment on, and elimination of, non-Muslim, indigenous populations. Some will insist that the Nazi genocide of the Jews is comparable, and that it proves that Christianity is a genocidal religion. I disagree. Yes, Christians have frequently failed to act according to Christian scripture, none of which command anything like jihad or genocide. Yes, Christians have often persecuted Jews. But, Nazism, not Christianity, was responsible for the Holocaust. For support I defer to books like Richard Weikart's Hitler's Religion. My review of Weikart's book can be found here. My piece, "Against Identifying Nazism with Christianity" can be found here.

Jonathan

I rushed out of my morning class. I had to get on the road and drive someplace I have never been. I get lost easily and I went a long time without driving so when I do get lost I'm *really* lost. I may be in the state I was born in but I may as well be wandering around the North Pole.

I got lost about halfway there. Are route 23, route 202, and the Newark-Pompton Turnpike all the same road? It seemed that way. The GPS kept insisting I was on route 202, and the signs all said I was on route 23.

I stopped at a gas station, holding the printout of the google map directions in my hand. The black guy pumping gas asked the old, white guy in the expensive car to tell me where to go. The white guy got out of the car and insisted that he knew exactly where I needed to go. He grabbed the google map instructions out of my hand and started reading them to me! Really!

I didn't want to grab them back – that would be rude – but I needed them so I grabbed them back and walked over to a scruffy-looking white guy working on some chewing tobacco who talked like Quint from Jaws – a verified local. He told me where to go.

I got to St Joseph's Church just in time for the start of Jonathan Shanoian's funeral. It was a good turnout. Nice to see young and older men in formal suits so early on a weekday morning.

My work colleague Tony Krucinski had kindly invited me to attend the wake yesterday. I couldn't go then; had to work. Too, wakes require small talk and as verbal as I am, I really suck at small talk. My idea of small talk is to walk up to a complete stranger and ask, "So, what do you think of the bombing of Syria?"

I'm Catholic and I wanted to pray for Jonathan at mass. I was surprised that he was Catholic. I thought being Armenian he would be some exotic Middle Eastern branch of orthodoxy. Armenia was the first nation to adopt Christianity as the state religion – which is the kind of thing I'd say if I had attempted to make small talk at the wake. Too, I knew Jonathan from work only, and I didn't know his family at all, so, being a stranger, I'd be doubly relieved from having to make small talk.

I wondered if, during mass, as sometimes happens – as happened at my sister Antoinette's funeral – the priest would ask those of us in the pews if we had any reminiscences we wanted to offer. If he did that, I knew exactly what I wanted to say.

When it came time for the sermon, the officiating priest, who, if Google is not misleading me, is named Fr. Thomas Mangieri, did something I'd never before seen a priest do at a funeral. He came down from the altar (St Joseph's is an intimate church so he didn't have far to go), and he stood in front of two women in the front pew, and held one woman's hand in one of his hands, and the other woman's hand in his other hand, and he never let go. The obituary mentions mother Barbara and sister Alexis. I have to assume those are the ladies whose hands the priest held, and never let go of, throughout his sermon.

Before father began his sermon, he looked at the woman and his wordless look said it all. There was no excuse in this look. No platitudes. No attempt to escape from the gravity of death. Father could have stopped right there and he would have done better than many another person attempting to address a too-early death to a mother who has lost her son. I know. My mother lost two sons, Phil and Mike, and I saw people struggle with saying the right thing to my mother. Father said the right thing this morning with that brutally honest, deeply compassionate look on his face.

But then he did more. He gave a sermon, and it was fine. He talked about Jonathan as a person. Father mentioned that Jonathan's job title was "support." Father remarked that that word said so much about Jonathan's character. Father used the word "sweetness" and it was *just* the right word.

Father's sermon had a narrative arch. It began with the desolation of death. It moved through the molasses-thick memory of what is lost. It promised the effulgence of heavenly reunion. Father's facial expressions fully reflected each moment in the journey of grief. And he never let go of the grieved ladies' hands.

Tears flowed silently down my face throughout this sermon.

One of the things I like about being Catholic: the mass is the same. Someone just died: the mass is the same. Someone was just born: the mass is the same. You are in the US or Africa or Poland or Nepal: the mass is the same. Yes, the songs vary, and the readings. I attended a high holyday mass in Poland that lasted for what felt like two hours. People were kneeling in the aisles and beating their breasts, which really doesn't happen in the US; the fire marshals wouldn't allow it. But the basic structure is the same, as the world spins around you.

During mass, this weird thing kept happening inside my head. It's as if my mind replayed all my Jonathan tapes. I never realized how much attention I had paid to him. I was noting his facial expressions and habitual body language and word choice. Hearing, again, things he would say. This didn't feel emotional – not happy, not sad, not yearning – just my mind saying, "This is him, the person you are saying goodbye to."

That happens with my sister regularly. I will hear her voice, conjure up her reaction to this or that. Given that she was my sister, it often happens when I hear my own voice sounding like hers, or feel my own lips form a facial expression she often used, my head tilt at the same angle her head would tilt, at a similar moment.  

It's as if we contain holograms of each other.

As the mass was ending, I felt that feeling I'd been looking for since I first heard the news: this isn't a prank or a dream or one of my bigger dyslexic errors. This is real. I get that now. I won't go to the library and expect to see him there. There is nothing I can do to fix this. Now it's over and done, and I am resigned to one more sad thing in the world.

Father did wait at the door of the church to greet everyone as we exited. I was sure to say to him, "Great sermon." He shook my hand. I hope he realizes how sincere my comment was, and how rare – this is the first time I've said this to a priest.

So, there was no moment at the funeral where we were asked for comments, so here is my comment.

I live alone and have no family and because of this I am more or less invisible. If you have no one, you are not seen.

And yet.

The other morning I had just parked and a uniformed officer began walking toward me. She was an African American woman. I just was not in the mood. I parked legally! She wasn't there to give me a ticket, though. She yelled at me, "So! You're all right!"

"Yes," I said. "I'm all right." I had no idea what was going on.

"The guy at the gas station has been worried about you!"

Whoa.

I walk daily. People see me walk. One of the people who sees me walk is a Syrian guy, Imad, who pumps gas at Faisal's in Paterson. I found a better route and I haven't walked past Faisal's in a while.

The point of this story: some woman I've never met, somehow knew that I'm the woman that a guy at a gas station was worried about, because I hadn't walked past his gas station in a while.

In other words, we may feel invisible, we may be invisible, but we don't know what impact we are having on others.

I know Jonathan solely through work. As many of us have said since he got his diagnosis, Jonathan was a quiet and private guy. At one point, he had been out of work for a while, and I was feeling sad about that and wishing I could help in some way, and one of the librarians (the one who smokes on the bench outside – for God's sake quit!) said to me that he cared about Jonathan, too, but Jonathan was a very private person.

I knew Charlene back in the 1990s before I went to grad school. I gave her my bulky goat-hair Nepali blankets to store, thinking I'd be back in New Jersey in a year or two. Little did I know I'd be gone over a decade, and Charlene would have to keep those itchy monsters much longer. God bless her.

When I returned to Jersey, Charlene and I reunited. I used to hang out in her office at the library, and she, Tony, Jonathan and I would chat.

Chatting with these folks was one of the highlights of my day. There would often be leftover cookies or other snacks on the table from this or that office party or campus event. But I wasn't there for the food.

I'm a woman and I'm a writer and my words are out there for all to see. People have told me that they love me for what I write – if they like what I say – and people (sometimes the same people) – have told me that they hate me for what I write – if they don't like what I say. No one has ever told me that they love me because I write. That grief that women get for being verbal is unavoidable.

I reflected that Jonathan and I have been chatting with each other since I returned to Jersey in 2004, I think, and he *never* gave me a hard time for voicing an opinion that was different than his. And that is special and wonderful and unique. Jonathan, thank you.

And here's an "I'm sorry."

The past few years have been tough for me. I broke my arm, was diagnosed with cancer, was diagnosed with a chronic illness, my sister was diagnosed with cancer, and she died. I have retreated a bit, fearing that the heavy stuff I've been going through was just too much for others to hear about or be exposed to. There were times when I could have interacted with Jonathan more – I was in the library, I needed to be in his office – but I chose not to, thinking, people don't want to be around me. I'm Miss Catastrophe.

I remember the last conversation I had with Jonathan. It never finished, and I kind of melted into the metal shelves back there, and didn't seek him out to say goodbye that day. That was the last day I ever saw him. And I wish I could have that moment back to say, "I know you only from the library, but I cherish you for what you have offered to my life, and, truly, no one will replace you."

I'm sorry, and I wish I had known how bad it had gotten for you, and I wish I had been supportive, and thank you.

And I tell this little story to say what people always want to say when they just get in from a funeral – let people know that you value them.