Disclaimer: the views expressed here are the sole responsibility of the author, weekly Judean Rose columnist Varda Meyers Epstein.
“We’re not experts in Islamic law — but we’re pretty sure scamming the American people for a living violates every religion,” declared Republican National Committee Press Secretary Kiersten Pels.
She said it with that familiar Western confidence—the kind that assumes every faith, deep down, plays by roughly the same moral rules we do. In this case, the remark came as people were asking hard questions about Rep. Ilhan Omar’s husband, Tim Mynett, whose wine venture eStCru allegedly defrauded an investor out of $300,000 (settled in court), stiffed winemakers, and limped to its grave with just $650 left in the bank. Mynett converted to Islam to marry Omar. Yet he built a business selling bottles named “The Devil’s Lie” and “Blockchain.” Alcohol. Straight-up haram. Forbidden.
Somehow these details get hand-waved away while the financial sleight-of-hand is the thing that raises eyebrows.
And this is the crux of the problem.
Too many in the West look at something like Omar and Mynett’s improprieties and think, Dishonesty is wrong in every religion, right? As if Islam were just Christianity or Judaism with different holidays. As if the moral grammar is identical.
It’s nothing new. We’ve heard the soothing bromides about Islam coming out of Westerners’ mouths since forever.
George W. Bush, for example, called Islam a faith that inspires “honesty, and justice, and compassion,” insisting that we all share the same beliefs regarding God’s justice and human responsibility. Barack Obama stood in Cairo and spoke of justice, compassion, and tolerance, as if these were universal values—as if Muslims see these things the same way as Jews or Christians.
Some bigwigs, notably Pope Benedict XVI and Kofi Annan spoke of the overlapping commitments of the three major religions, to dignity, charity, and basic human goodness. Assumptions that are demonstrably untrue and that lull Westerners into complacency, dangerously unprepared for the wall they keep slamming into. Repeatedly. Without learning anything about Islam in the process.
American policymakers consistently misread Middle Eastern dynamics shaped by Islamic history, tribal loyalties, honor culture, grievance narratives, and religious doctrine. Western negotiators prioritize signed agreements, institutional trust, and reciprocal transparency. Regional actors often prioritize long-term positioning, tactical ambiguity, and fluid alliances built on immediate interests rather than enduring value alignment. Sunni Hamas cooperates with Shi’ite Iran despite doctrinal hostility. Iranian negotiations repeatedly coincide with continued proxy warfare and nuclear advancement. Statements frequently serve strategic positioning rather than candid moral declaration.
The negotiations with Hamas are illustrative of the West’s misunderstanding of the Islamic mindset. Donald Trump has been pushing hard on his 20-point peace plan for Gaza that began with a ceasefire that isn’t. There are daily Hamas breaches targeting IDF soldiers. Yet Trump continues to express total confidence that Hamas will disarm in Phase 2.
In Davos last month, Trump warned that Hamas must hand over weapons and hostage remains “within weeks” or be “blown away very quickly.” His team, including Jared Kushner, assured us that “Hamas signed a deal to demilitarize; that is what we are going to enforce.” Trump even floated a two-month ultimatum, seeing disarmament as the “linchpin” for peace—assuming compliance based on initial agreements and mediator optimism—an assumption that was wildly overoptimistic.
Just this week, in fact, senior Hamas leader Khaled Mashaal rejected Trump’s demand for disarmament outright. Mashaal called disarmament “an attempt to turn our people into victims, to make their elimination easier and to facilitate their destruction at the hands of the Israeli side.”
Mashaal framed the concept of disarmament as victimization. “Questions about the resistance’s weapons are being raised forcefully. Some want to place it in the context that whoever carried out Oct. 7 must be cornered and made to pay the price... As those who participated in the resistance, we must not accept this.”
And he tied it all to deeper roots: “Protecting the resistance project and its weapons is the right of our people to defend themselves. The resistance and its weapons are the ummah’s [Islamic nation’s] honor and pride.” Senior Hamas official Musa Abu Marzouk jumped on the bandwagon, saying “Not for a single moment did we talk about surrendering weapons”—insisting the issue was never even raised in negotiations.
That flat-out denial exposes the gap between the West and the Middle East: Trump’s banking on an “agreement” that Hamas leaders say doesn’t exist, leaving the president chasing a fantasy of compliance that would never be realized.
The divide runs deeper still. Sharia law is built on a historical memory of expansion as glory, a division of the world into realms of Islam and realms of war, and—in certain contexts—religious justifications for violence against those outside the fold. In many Muslim-majority countries, large numbers say they want Sharia as the law of the land. Integration challenges, no-go zones, blasphemy riots, persecution of Christians and other minorities are not poverty or political grievances—they’re more closely related to religious ideas the West has trained itself not to name.
Even when the West gets a glimmer of the truth, it chooses appeasement over censure. In January, for example, President Trump designated key chapters of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, Jordan, and Lebanon as terrorist organizations. This is because the Muslim Brotherhood is a political-Islam network with ties to Hamas and an agenda of gradual supremacy. Europe, however, keeps inviting them to conferences, funding their organizations, treating their violent proclamations as just another voice in the world community.
The West needs to stop imagining that Middle Eastern moral and strategic frameworks line up neatly with its own, to stop assuming that “every religion” rejects dishonesty or violence in the same way. Else, we all pay a terrible price: botched policies, eroded security, societies overtaken by immigrants who do not share their values. And of course, cruelty and horrific violence, such as we saw on October 7. Such as we see now with Iran’s treatment of those who protest against Khamenei’s “vision” of what an Islamic republic should be.
The West needs to stop leaning on comforting platitudes about shared Abrahamic values. Instead of assuming that all people, everywhere, are the same, the West needs the courage to look straight at where Islam diverges from Judaism and Christianity—on alcohol, on “resistance,” on diplomacy and deception, on supremacy, on the status of non-Muslims—and deal with reality as it is, not as it wishes it were.
Western values are rooted in goodness. Take Americans—they’re nice. They want to be kind and open-minded about Islam, while in reality they are only being naïve and reckless at their own peril. The cost of Western blindness to Islamic values continues to climb as Western leaders rack up missed warnings and policy failures—as they fail to make peace while claiming they already did, and taking credit for something they never happened. The future looks grim, because misunderstanding Islam, tends to lead to violent reprisals.
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