The Joels and their Islamic Antichrist

Heard the one about the Islamic Antichrist?

That’s the latest story seeking to grant American Christians a license to hate in the name of love. Muslims, the story goes, are willing dupes of Satan, anxiously waiting for the arrival of their messiah, called the “Mahdi.” This mighty ruler is the person identified in the Bible as the Beast and the Antichrist.

Just ask Joel Richardson. Haven’t heard of him?

Joel Richardson is a painter and lay preacher who has turned out books arguing that the Antichrist will be Muslim. Islam, therefore, is evil. He often remembers to add that all Muslims are not necessarily evil. It’s just that they follow an evil belief system that serves the Devil.

Richardson seems to think he has been chosen by God to “release new prophetic understanding concerning the end times.”1 Mostly this understanding consists of reading the books of Daniel, Ezekiel, and Revelation as if they explicitly refer to Islam.

Of course, no one had heard of Islam until A.D. 622, nearly six centuries after the New Testament was finished.2 People would probably give Richardson a hard time if he claimed to find references to Coca-Cola or NASCAR in the Bible.3 How then does Richardson justify finding Islam in there?

Well, he says he did a lot of reading about Islam. Books about “Islamic eschatology.” But more important, Joel Richardson has a personal hotline to the Lord.

ACT for America has an agenda for Congress

ACT for America, an activist group opposing “radical Islam,”1 is pushing a ten-point agenda for the 112th Congress.

Let’s take a look.

Letter to the White House

I cannot sleep, I cannot eat. I’m scared to walk to the bathroom because I’m afraid they will hunt me down.… I’m not the same. — An American citizen trapped in Kuwait Here is my letter: Sir, please intervene to ensure that Gulet Mohamed, age 19, of Alexandria, Virginia, is returned home from prison in […]

Go green, inshallah

The Birmingham Islamic Society is holding a “green” community dinner tonight: Everyone who brings their own plate and utensils will get a free meal. The idea is to reduce waste from discarded paper and plastic products — and not least important, to dispel any idea that environmental concerns are just another form of Western secularism, […]

Ask me about the Muslim Mafia

Well, there’s no hiding from the facts. According to several members of Congress, I am a terrorist sympathizer. As an American Muslim and a member of my local Islamic society, I am ipso facto an agent of the “secret underworld that’s conspiring to Islamize America.”

You know, I had no idea.

The myth of Obama’s “apostasy”

Historical myths and simplifications about a monolithic “Islamic world” are a besetting problem in the U.S. media, and I think professional historians should be concerned — especially when a member of the profession is responsible for sowing confusion in the first place, as in this case. The story, in brief, is that the world’s Muslims […]