Tucker Carlson said yesterday -
"The people in power don't want you to know this - but Muslims love Jesus."
I assume he means the Jews, and has thus swallowed the world's oldest conspiracy - and calls it "waking up". 1,400-year-old antisemitism apparently tastes different when served as a red pill.
Regardless. In isolation, it's not wrong. Isa - Jesus as prophet - is an integrated part of Islamic theology, and that respect is genuine enough.
But the sentence contains a slippage worth stopping at, because it tacitly suggests that theological sympathy is the same as civilisational coexistence. That because one honours the same figure, one also lives under the same understanding - for instance of what a human being is, what freedom is, what the law is for, and what the state owes those who believe differently.
We don't.
That's why our civilisations are so different.
The word Islamism is often used that way, but it's not a slur. It's a political theology - a complete society-ordering system, where religion and law aren't separated, because they were never conceived as separate.
Islamism is not an extremist reading of something fundamentally peaceful. It is Islam's classical civilisational self-understanding, when translated into state order. And that order treats those who exist outside it in a very particular and very consistent way.
What follows below is not about what individual Muslims believe or want. It's about what documentably happens when Islam and Islamism establish themselves as the governing logic in a country.
The pattern is not accidental. It repeats itself everywhere because it is the built-in logic and consequence wherever it is allowed space to unfold.
🇸🇴 SOMALIA
No churches exist. Converts from Islam risk death. Al-Shabaab has as its stated aim to eradicate Christianity completely.
🇾🇪 YEMEN
Christians can be imprisoned, tortured or killed. Possessing a Bible in Houthi-controlled areas is dangerous. No legal protection exists.
🇸🇩 SUDAN
Over 100 churches have been damaged or destroyed. Christians have been abducted and killed. Islamist extremists operate with impunity.
🇸🇾 SYRIA
Now largely controlled by HTS - an Islamist movement with roots in Al-Qaeda. The Christian population has collapsed from 1.5 million to 300,000. In June 2025 a suicide attack at Saint Elias Church in Damascus killed 22 people.
🇳🇬 NIGERIA
3,490 Christians were killed in 2024 - around 70 percent of the global number - more than the rest of the world combined. Since the year 2000, over 62,000 Christians have been killed in Nigeria. Boko Haram, ISWAP and Fulani militias operate freely. The state has largely failed to prosecute the perpetrators.
🇵🇰 PAKISTAN
Christians constitute 1.8 percent of the population, but bear approximately 25 percent of all blasphemy charges - charges that can lead to the death penalty. Lynch mobs targeting accused Christians are frequent. Entire Christian neighbourhoods have been burned down. Christian girls are kidnapped, forcibly converted and married off. The courts often support the perpetrators.
🇱🇾 LIBYA
No functioning state to protect Christians. Foreign Christians are kidnapped and killed by Islamist groups. No legal protection exists.
🇮🇷 IRAN
96 Christians in 2024 alone were sentenced to a combined 263 years in prison - a six-fold increase year on year. House churches are raided. Converts are accused of espionage and "enmity against God." Apostasy is punishable by death. The state's declared aim is to eradicate the Persian-speaking church.
🇦🇫 AFGHANISTAN
Christians risk being killed if discovered. No public Christian communities exist. The Taliban actively works to extinguish any Christian presence.
🇸🇦 SAUDI ARABIA
No churches. No public Christian worship of any kind. Apostasy and mission are capital crimes under sharia. Bibles are confiscated. Even private worship among foreign nationals can result in arrest and deportation.
🇲🇱 MALI / 🇧🇫 BURKINA FASO
Priests are executed, churches burned, villages massacred. Both countries have experienced state coups within the past five years, and rising Islamist influence has made Christians disproportionately frequent targets. Governments have lost control of large parts of the territory to jihadist groups, including Boko Haram and JNIM.
🇮🇶 IRAQ
The Christian population has collapsed from 1.2 million in 2011 to just 120,000 in 2024 - driven forward by ISIS's genocide. Christians are described as "close to extinction."
🇩🇿 ALGERIA
All 47 Protestant evangelical churches in the country are closed. It is a criminal act to convert Muslims.
🇲🇷 MAURITANIA
Apostasy is punishable by death. No churches exist for Mauritanian citizens.
🇲🇦 MOROCCO
No public Christian worship is permitted. Conversion from Islam can result in prosecution. Foreign missionaries are deported.
🇶🇦 QATAR
Apostasy is death penalty under sharia. Mission directed at a Muslim can give up to five years in prison. Bringing Christian material into the country can give up to two years.
🇹🇷 TURKEY
Over 200 Christian workers have been deported since 2020, stamped as security threats. No legal training of priests is permitted. The historic Halki Seminary remains closed. The Christian population has collapsed from 20 percent to 0.2 percent over the past century.
Muslims may love Jesus.
But it's not him, or those who believe in him, that they protect.
❤️🔥🪽
…
I recommend these three books by Massoud Fouroozandeh and Marianne Søndergaard to anyone who wants to understand rather than simply have an opinion.
Especially "Islam and Christianity - Similarities and Differences" does precisely what the title promises: it separates the two worldviews and shows what collides and why. Not as polemic but as analysis.

Perhaps they can help some of those who in recent years have been marching bloodthirstily under Palestinian flags in European streets to discover that their empathy has been hijacked by one of world history's oldest lies. Though most of that crowd presumably exists somewhere where books are a somewhat weak medicine.
