I’m sure you’ve already seen the unfolding controversy. It seems that country singer Toby Keith agreed to sing for a gathering of the Christian group Promise Keepers. It’s an all-male group. In the name of fostering “comradeship,” the organization planned to restrict attendance to men. That’s what sparked the outrage.

Major articles appeared in Vanity Fair and the New York Times. They denounced the concert as “misogynist” and “transphobic.” Feminist groups condemned Promise-Keepers as “patriarchal woman-haters” who “use the rhetoric of theocracy and male control over women’s bodies.” The National Organization for Women threatened to launch a boycott of the state of Alabama.

Leading Alabama legislators asked state regulators to look into prohibiting the conference. The state’s Chamber of Commerce chimed in to support a ban. It warned of the need to “protect the business atmosphere here for future jobs and investment.”

Priests from the local Jesuit college, Springhill, sponsored a campus-wide “teach-in.” The topic? Female empowerment and the need for more headline female country singers, plus women in the Catholic priesthood.

Spin magazine ran a piece by the head of Toby Keith’s record label. It warned of canceling Keith’s upcoming album.

At last, within 48 hours of the concert being announced, Keith pulled out and apologized. Organizers might cancel the conference itself. Antifa protestors from colleges across the country and leaders of Black Lives Matter warned on social media that they would show up and “disrupt Promise Keepers, disrupt Trump!” Several prominent business leaders on the board of Promise Keepers have withdrawn from membership. Social media protests had targeted their companies’ shareholders and customers.

Okay, Kidding!

Now, strictly speaking, none of the above is true. Not a word.

But did you find it implausible? Or didn’t it seem exactly the way that cultural coercion plays out in today’s America — when conservatives or Christians are involved?

In fact what is happening is this: Mr. Keith is performing at an all-male concert, all right. But it is in Saudi Arabia. The concert coincides with Donald Trump’s state visit to that theocratic absolute monarchy. CNN reported on the concert. It didn’t even mention that women can’t attend. Excluded. CBS News did note the ban on both women and beer. But it didn’t seem to consider either exclusion controversial. It just noted the female ban deadpan, as if reporting on the weather. Spin magazine weighed in, but only to snark about Keith’s apparent fondness for Donald Trump.

I was only able to find one prominent voice criticizing the concert for keeping out women. Washington Post blogger Alyssa Rosenberg wrote a piece. She complained that the concert is “segregated.” She noted briefly that the Saudi government oppresses women. But even she spent more than half her column sniping at Keith for his right-leaning views.

Strict Scrutiny for Westerners, Whites, and Christians

Isn’t that funny? Why are mostly white, Western or Christian institutions subject to the strictest scrutiny? Progressives weigh their every policy against the latest list of tender sensibilities. Their every choice goes under a microscope. Does it offend one of an ever-expanding (updated hourly) list of “marginalized” groups? Any violation will be punished with maximum savagery, innocent bystanders be damned.

Muslim Autocracies Are Just Exotic and Cool

But whole countries like Saudi Arabia get a pass. Meanwhile, their record of abusing women is staggering and inhuman. Rape victims in Saudi Arabia can be flogged for committing adultery. The only loophole? If they can produce four adult male witnesses to testify that the sex was non-consensual. There is no law forbidding marital or statutory rape.

Saudi women miss out on a lot more than Toby Keith concerts. They cannot drive cars. The reasons I’ve seen listed for that vary according to the Islamic cleric cited. They range from dangers to women’s reproductive systems, to that well-known side-effect of riding over bumpy roads: insatiable sexual arousal.

Saudi Arabia regularly executes homosexuals. And Muslims who announce they are leaving Islam. Indeed, that country is one of the most aggressive on earth in employing the death penalty for a wide variety of offenses. Child marriage is common. Likewise forced marriages imposed on women by their fathers and brothers.

Christian churches, bibles, and symbols are totally prohibited. They’re even denied to the thousands of enserfed foreign workers who toil in Saudi households. Even embassies (technically foreign soil) come under the ban. Female genital mutilation is widespread in parts of the country.

None of this stopped Hillary Clinton from recruiting Huma Abedin as her “body woman” and likely chief of staff (had she won). Abedin worked with her family on a Saudi-founded and funded journal promoting Saudi-style sharia around the world. None of this stopped Georgetown University from accepting $20 million from a Saudi prince in 2008 to fund its Islamic studies program. Flashback to 1978: Would Georgetown have taken that kind of money from the Republic of South Africa, for a program on race relations?

Treating Muslims Like Mischievous Pets

There’s a powerful double standard at work. It comes to us via multiculturalism. We only hold white, Western, and especially Christian institutions to fully human standards. We treat Muslims in particular as if they were lovable, mischievous pets. The same progressives who denounce Christian churches as “patriarchal” damn critics of Islam as “Islamophobes.” That’s deeply degrading to Muslims as human beings. Much more importantly, it is dangerous to us.

Since I believe that Muslims and country singers are equally human, I’ll say it: I don’t think Toby Keith should sing in Saudi Arabia. I don’t think President Trump should visit that hell on earth, or that the U.S. should pretend that the country is an ally. Instead it is the Comintern for the new face of totalitarianism — a country that exports jihad and jihadists, that accepted zero refugees from Syria but spent millions building them mosques in Germany and Sweden, that keeps a fragile peace in its unjust society by projecting discontent outward: into the West, where we are the victims. (For more from the author of “The Double Standard for Muslims and Christians” please click HERE)

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The mainstream media narrative of recent events in Syria is hand-wringing and intensely moralistic. If all you read were standard liberal media, the account you’d get of what’s happening in Syria would be something like this:

Innocents are dying because the West lacks the moral courage to step forth and protect the weak. Especially Muslims. Those thuggish, bigoted Russians are cooperating with an evil dictator to slaughter women and children, all because they wanted a democracy. If we expect them to settle for anything less than we have here, it’s because we’re inherently racist. President Obama tried to pressure the Assad regime, but Congressional Republicans tied his hands, and the result was a massacre of civilians. For shame.

Turn to hawkish neoconservative sources, and as they see it here’s what went wrong in Syria:

Obama’s muddle-headedness, cowardice and desire to placate the Iranians prevented America from decisively aiding the moderate rebels in Syria, who share our values and wanted to install a U.S.-friendly regime, in coordination with our Turkish and Saudi allies. Instead, thanks to the weakness of the liberals and the Russian connections of the Trump team, Putin has gained a valuable strategic base in the Mediterranean region, and moderate Muslims have learned that they cannot trust us. So more of them are going to rally to the Islamists, such as ISIS. We should have seen that Assad is a dangerous dictator, and intervened decisively as we did in Iraq, to remove him.

Based on his statements on the campaign trail, it seems that the Trump administration takes another view of what happened in Syria, one that tracks with traditional, Jacksonian “realism” in foreign policy. Here’s that narrative:

Like every other Arab Muslim country, Syria has no tradition of democracy or religious tolerance. Because the Assad regime is secularist, it finds it useful to protect the rights of religious minorities, especially of one million Christians.

The “Arab Spring” revolts that President Obama encouraged across the Middle East might have started with the tiny minority of secularized Arabs on Facebook, but they were quickly taken over by the intolerant Sunni Muslim majorities. That happened in Syria, too — where the main rebel groups are allied with al Qaeda and funded by Saudi Arabia — who are no more tolerant of Christians or dissident Muslims than ISIS is. The aid we tried to send to “moderate” rebels mostly ended up in the hands of radical Islamists, who have terrorized Syrian Christians and other religious minorities.

Now in Aleppo, these al Qaeda allies used tens of thousands of civilians as human shields, but the Russians and Assad attacked them anyway, and won. If we help to bring down Assad, the result will be much like Iraq: an Islamic tyranny ruling over a smoldering ruin of a country. (See the NY Times for a heart-breaking account of what the U.S. invasion left behind for Iraqi Christians.) So forget it, we’re staying out. The Russians are welcome to that quagmire.

Leave aside for now the intrinsic merits of each of these views — which there isn’t space to settle here. Let’s consider how each of these narratives affects us emotionally as Christians, whether applied to Syria, Muslim immigration or other related issues.

Preening About the Purity of Our Intentions

The first narrative convicts us of sin, and gives us the chance to beat our breasts. So that’s appealing. Since we are looking out for Muslims instead of our fellow Christians, we also get the chance to be high-minded and disinterested, which offers a pleasant buzz on a Christmas morning. “Thank you, O Lord, that I am not as other men. …”

The second view lets us bash an unfriendly president for not resolving an intractable foreign quagmire. Since Obama has succeeded at advancing the LGBT agenda and keeping our abortion laws the laxest on earth, it feels good to point out his failures — especially on issues that really matter to him, such as protecting Muslims. Furthermore, he wounded our national pride by letting Russia replace us as the “decider” in Syria. The Russian regime is still the enemy of our freedoms and always will be, no matter who is in charge. We feel morally certain of that.

The third narrative both attracts us and repels us. On the one hand, it seems natural to care in a special way about the religious freedom of our fellow Christians, especially in one of their last safe havens in the Middle East, where Jesus was born. We realize, too, that there are dozens of Sunni Muslim countries who are looking out for the interests of the Syrian Sunni majority — while no country on earth seems to care much about the Christians except (perhaps for cynical reasons) Russia. Since nobody else is advocating on behalf of Syria’s Christians, maybe that ought to be our job.

But the moment we assent to any of that, we start to feel guilty, don’t we? Surely as Christians we ought to be above religious tribalism, to care as much about the rights and interests of Muslims as of Christians? In fact, that temptation of tribalism is so powerful a part of our fallen nature, we probably ought to bend over backwards to resist it — and hence to try wherever we can to help the Muslims instead of the Christians, because that’s what Jesus would do. Wouldn’t He?

It’s this last twist of our heart-strings that explains most of the chaos that’s tearing apart the continent of Europe, where church leaders are complicit in the mass colonization of their countries by intolerant Muslim migrants, while Christian religious refugees freeze and starve in the desert. A twisted Kantian caricature of disinterested duty has replaced true Christian charity in the hearts of too many believers. We preen about our purity as the real world burns down around us. And the heirs of that desert bandit and warlord Muhammad chuckle softly into their beards. They know what Muhammad would do, and they are doing it. (For more from the author of “Is It Un-Christian for Christians to Defend Our Fellow Christians?” please click HERE)

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