“Do not repay anyone evil for evil”

Wednesday, June 10, 2026

Yesterday, in reviewing the obvious nature of electoral shenanigan’s in Los Angeles, I warned that we must resist the temptation to be like them.  My argument, made in less eloquent terms than the Apostle Paul did in the passage quoted in the headline, was that when we do as they do, we give up our claim to rectitude and lose the argument.  This has become massively apparent in recent developments in Belfast, Northern Ireland.

Like most of Europe, the United Kingdom has seen a massive influx of Islamic immigrants.  This has, as has also been seen throughout Europe in recent times, resulted in a notable uptick of sectarian violence as some of those immigrants have attempted to enforce their standards on the general community. In some cases that violence comes from troubled individuals for whom Islam provides an excuse and in others Islam’s call for violence to spread its message is at root.  In either case it is natural that resentment against that immigrant community would build.  This is especially true in Keir Starmer’s UK where “tolerance” takes precedent over law enforcement.

Late Monday into Tuesday, such an attack has resulted in massive violence.  A Sudanese immigrant brutally attacked an individual with a knife.  Subsequently the streets of Belfast have erupted in the kind of violence not seen since The Troubles. Frankly, I was tuned out of the story until I heard about it from my wife and we checked in with friends that live in Belfast.  Our friends are quite liberal, as is the news source linked previously.  Both are quick to blame “right wing extremists” for the street violence.  And so, reasonable points about the dangers of allowing too much Islamic immigration and not properly policing  are lost in the returning violence.   The necessity to quell the street violence overrides any point the rioters might actually have.  The Apostle Paul, it would seem, was not merely dispensing spiritual advice, but sound political advice as well.

I made a similar, though non-violent, version of this argument on Monday.  In efforts to streamline its religious affiliation classification system, the Pentagon had excluded Mormons from the Christian classification.  I argued that this was a “boneheaded” move as it played directly into the hands of liberals that wish to dismiss conservative Christians as “Christian Nationalists.”  In other words, by playing the Left’s game of paying attention to labels we get smeared with the same brush (“discriminatory!”) that we want to use to paint them as they actually are.

The Pentagon’s classification resulted in pushback, particularly from Mormon legislators.  By yesterday the classifications had been removed altogether.  But that did not stop liberals from still trying to smear conservative Christianity with the discriminatory brush in the form of a charge of “Christian Nationalism.”

In purely political terms – as long as we play the Left’s game, we will lose, even when we are in the right.  We play a different game, with different standards.  We must hold ourselves to those standards, not theirs.