By Walid Shoebat (Shoebat Sunday Special)

Uncle Sam,

“Come and let us reason together” shall we? This is what the Almighty says in Isaiah 1:18. l am dying to have a dialogue with you regarding some of the most sensitive subjects you continually bring up: immigrants and assimilation, women’s rights, gay-rights and anti-Semitism. You continually harp about these subjects. I am sure you will not like what I have to say about such matters since I will say everything we are not supposed to say which I believe needs to be said. Lets start with the immigrants, and I am not only talking about Mexican immigrants, these assimilate a lot quicker than us. I am talking about us: the dreaded ‘Middle Eastern immigrants’.

Lets be frank, we know what you privately say about us at your dinner table. Its time you know what we privately say about you while we dip into Hummus. Yes, it is true, us Middle Easterners open up stores and want your greenback. But you too also want to make a living too. So I pay my taxes. I am originally from Bethlehem and I must admit I am one of these people who refuse (as you call it) to ‘assimilate’.

Why I refuse to assimilate? Because I already did. I assimilated into the Christian faith. And buy “Christian faith” I do not mean your brand of faith in what you see all around in your typical American churches. To us the Americans have a unique and foreign brand of Christianity that is disconnected from its roots. Anything else besides Christianity I refuse to assimilate to which I will explain why in detail.

First of all, why is it that you speak of freedom but when I refuse to assimilate you insist I give up such freedom? Why am I not free to refuse to assimilate to your demands? There are many Americans who live overseas and they too never assimilate. So what? I lived once in Saudi Arabia and also in Mexico and there are American neighborhoods who never assimilated. No one harasses them and nags them to assimilate. Also, in the US there are Jewish neighborhoods that do not assimilate and religious Jews keep there traditions that are mostly foreign to you and you never harass them nagging them to assimilate.

Here let me summarize why I refuse to assimilate and perhaps something will click as to what is wrong with this picture:

First of all, tell me, what is this “assimilation” supposed to mean? And what exactly do you want us to assimilate to? Can you be specific? The instant when the Middle East is mentioned the first thing that comes up in your mind is “terrorists”. I cannot tell you how many times I heard after every terror attack a politician stand up and say that the “terrorists attacked us because they hate our way of life.”

Issue #1: what way of life do terrorists hate? Issue #2: Islamist terrorists are not all Middle Eastern. Muslim terrorists attack you because they view you as “crusaders”. This is crazy because you too (like the Muslim) hate the crusaders and always distance yourselves and condemn the crusaders. Both of you are really confused about each other and its time you have the dialogue with the terrorist instead of haranguing us about assimilation. What the Islamists want is that you convert to Islam or die. It has little to do with your way of life. So why do you not insist that Muslims convert to Christianity or be refused entry visa to the United States?

I’d go for that.

But you will never do this because America is not (as you claim) a Christian nation. Here, I will argue my points as to why I refuse to assimilate to your “way of life” or to your version of Christianity and hope you attempt to respond:

Firstly, I am more free than you even think. You have been harping about “freedom” for over two centuries yet we desire to be free more than you do. Christian freedom in my view is the right to refuse and reject assimilation. The Good Book says: “do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind” (Romans 12:2). This is an instruction to never assimilate to anything unless its of God. Even Moses, he wanted freedom to worship God in the wilderness instead of living under the yoke of the Pharaoh.

These days you have become both, the wilderness and the Pharaoh. I escape from the Islamist into your wilderness, than I must also face you, the Pharaoh.

So I will face you and tell you: let my people go and stop harassing them to assimilate. In this letter to you I will not be nice and I will ignore your saying that “you attract more flies with honey instead of vinegar”. Why would any sane person want to attract flies? You sing “God bless America” and mint money (in which you trust) with the logo “in God we trust”! You are able to plan your foreign policy and your military armada to start off wars and skirmishes in Iraq, Syria and Libya creating vacuums for Turkey and Iran aiding the eastern church’s grand enemy. For decades we warned you about your reckless behavior and you still refuse to listen. Must I ask God to smite you with plagues in order that you realize your folly? You would then accuse us of being terrorists.

And when it comes to your version of Christianity I have much to say. Christianity is the religion of Jesus where if you truly emulated His ways the world will hate you, abandon you and even crucify you. Such persecution is repeated throughout the scriptures. How can you then honestly claim to be promoting Christianity if the number one goal of your Christian writers is readership (gather more flies with honey), book-sales, viewership and high-ratings? Christianity will get you hated and condemned, not loved. Yet you insist we conform or else: “if you don’t like it here, go back to where you come from”.

That’s not very nice to say is it? Yet you always insist on niceness.

Stop harping about assimilation. Its time the unassimilated critique you for a change. Lets start with how your youth act and look. I see so many with tattoos, nose rings, lip rings and hair-styles that look stupid and even at times pagan. And whats with this stupid tradition where girls stick their tongue out in a selfie? I rarely had an intelligent conversation with your youth and yesterday I saw an article on two men married with a baby. If this is your “way of life” you want us to assimilate to then I must say: “go to hell”.

Above: Typical American girls you see on most Facebook pages. Below: typical Christian girl from Egypt. Which of the two photos is more pleasing to the eye?

Your youth are terrible. And as far as the elders, in our culture the younger kisses the hand of the family elders. In our culture, the older you get the more respect you gain. I say that is a good custom to import from us that you should consider and assimilate to. In your culture many are the elders who are completely put out of commission and they are filed away where they die lonely. Should we assimilate to this ‘way of life’ and put away our elders too? In your culture the family disperses all over the United States and they get together only on Christmas and Thanksgiving where the cops are the busiest since that is when family feuds erupt. You force your children out at 18 and think that the brain-washing professor is giving them an education. Your youth race to lose their virginity and scorn virgins.

Is this the “way of life” you want us to accept and adapt to?

You continually worry about your healthcare system and you are one of the least healthy. Health-wise, people from my neck of the woods smoke cigarets, yet they rank at the top ten (we are #9) while you rank #35 in health, all the while you harass cigarette smokers and legalize marijuana. I plug marijuana on Google and I get 238,000,000 hits and almost all this volume of discussion over a grass is generated from the US. What is so special about that herb? You are the most medicated people on earth and the number one medication consumed in 2013-2014 was Abilify (Aripiprazole) which is used for Psychosis and depression. This is still one of the most-prescribed medications and goes for $800 for only 30 tablets.

Whats with the legalized drug epidemic?

Then you continually talk about education more than any other nation on earth and your youth rank below average. Palestinians, Koreans and Chinese are way ahead of you. In our Middle Eastern clan we are loaded with doctors, surgeons, engineers, historians and brilliant mathematicians. You then continually speak on marriage in your churches and you have one of the highest rates of divorce in the world.

So why are we healthier, smarter, richer and have much less divorce?

You will never get it. The answer is simpler than you make it out to be. Here is our secret recipe for happiness:

Rule #1, a woman’s life is not her career. Her first focus should be on rearing children. But as soon as we say this, your women get angry and begin to reach towards their anti-anxiety medication.

Rule #2: you don’t get your food out of a box and you plant a garden and eat from it while you learn all your recipes from grandmothers. Where I grew up in Bethlehem I knew of no home that did not have fruit trees and a garden.

Rule #3: only spend 20% to 30% of what you make and save 70% no matter what your financial condition is even if you have to live in your car. When I first came to the US I lived in my Chevy Vega and then rented a room from an old lady and always had roommates. During and after my education my main diet was lentils and garbanzo beans and still is. This is what Daniel ate. I only bought my first 3 homes on loan and waited for the real estate market to rise. When fruitcakes in California flocked to buy homes I sold it to them and when they ran away from homes I bought and with the money I settled far away from California’s nut-cases and paid for the house in full. I owe zero dollars and use no credit card. Only take a loan when you absolutely have to and get rid of it as soon as you can. If need be, you only need 3 meals a day and each meal can cost you one dollar. Do not buy anything unless it is absolutely necessary. In Israel, during the war we spent zero dollars because we had zero dollars. Yet we lived just fine by picking herbs and dandelions. We never owned a telephone or a car or air-conditioning and lived on the hottest and lowest place on earth: Jericho.

Yes, life is that simple.

We lived in the Mediterranean region and if you view Spain and Italy and what you term as “the Holy Land” these are ranked as much healthier than thou. We are top ten healthiest and we ignore the doctors. We rarely visited a doctor. It’s our diet. We still eat as Daniel ate: pulse (legume). Even when we lived in America, while we raised our children, we watched our kids like hawks and threatened any school teacher who attempted to sway their moral values with injury and bodily harm and we meant it. We couldn’t care less if they called the cops. American teachers thought we were crazy and it always worked. We squeaked loud and we got greased. My kids were off limits on condom training, gay-friendly training, or listening to some claptrap demand the kids they write essays to conform them or make them assimilate was off limits. Teachers did not dare mess with the kids because the kids knew more than the teacher and debated them in class until the teacher got frustrated and said: “why don’t you go back to where you came from” and my kid’s response was an instantaneous “I was born in the US. Are you a racist?” They instantly backed off.

We never assimilated and we refuse to. Since I was a kid, my Middle Eastern grandmother gathered all sorts of herbs and dandelions and baked in an earthly oven. Our grand parents lived through Ottoman versus English wars and famine and we lived through the Arab Israeli wars. Regardless of wars we planted our own wheat, cucumbers, eggplants, squash, onions, garlic, garbanzo and harvested the land. We still do this even in the US. We loved our olive oil just as we loved our women, extra virgin, and we kept our youth extra virgin until they get married.

We teach our youth that real wealth is how to become self-sufficient and we teach them to save money at a very young age and when they grow up they did not have a boss and they do not even own a credit-card. They are free and thank me for what I have taught them about life and how to live. We do not like to waste money or own stupid toys (boats, motorcycles, golf clubs, golf balls, tennis balls etc …) and when it came to sports we grew out of it by the time we reached high-school. Soccer is simply for professional soccer players and the older we get the more we throw away such stupidities. We view you participating in your kids sports as silly. What we participated in with our kids are long conversations, spending ample time with them, help with their homework, teach them to be defiant and stubborn and then help them get a kickstart in life. We do not believe that the youth should move out at 18 but only when they get married. My boys already have their nest home paid in full by their hard work saving. They simply rent them while awaiting a girl that emulates Virgin Mary. There are hardly any Virgin Mary in your culture because of your “way of life”.

To you we were boring and to us you were simply out of your minds. To us kicking the evil teacher was more important than kicking and fighting over a ball. Where we grew up if you mouth off to the good teacher he could beat the crap out of you and if your parents found out they too would second the beating. We had much better school teachers than you do and my school tuition was about $5 a year. My first cousin was my teacher, a brilliant mathematician who rarely erred and in geometry the man drew perfect free hand circles and rectangulars and perfect angels on a chalk board without even focusing. To him it came natural. My uncle was a historian who also taught and my other uncle taught biology and my other uncle was a school principle and my father was a school teacher. My cousins are mostly doctors, engineers and surgeons. Sure, we had one or two rotten apples but we avoided these. We laughed when we joined your universities and colleges to see the mathematics.

You all want us to learn English? We try. Your language has unnecessary ways of spelling words with letters you no longer pronounce. For example: you write the word “climb” and when you pronounce it you completely drop the ‘b’ where in the Semitic language, if it did evolve would be written “klaym” with vowels that are like musical notes that instruct you exactly how to pronounce the word. Your style is like your legal jargon; it is unnecessarily complex and cumbersome. Your legal jargon is confusing and complex and you must pay $250 an hour for an interpreter. Your system ensures having more blood-sucking lawyers than any other nation on earth. Your contracts are complex because of the volumes of your lawsuits.

But we put up with it because we live here. Why do you have so many damned blood-sucking lawyers? Has it not been told to you that “when one of you has a grievance against another, does he dare go to law before the unrighteous instead of the saints?” (1 Corinthians 6:1). I had so many great cases to go to court yet I refrained.

We are still wondering: what do you want us to conform to? Adopt your latest healthy Mediterranean diet you just discovered which was ours, and a Semitic religion (Christianity) that came from us long ago?

But let me be frank, your mastery of this Semitic faith is quite disconnected from its roots and has evolved into something of your own making. That, plus in your churches we rarely meet a woman that emulates Mother Mary. The ones that lost weight using our diet emulates Delilah and the others who didn’t, these emulate Samson and Goliath. The humble American male lives under one of these three slave masters and fears them. Our youth still keep their virginity until marriage and your youth struggle with herpes and learn at a very young age how to fit a condom on a banana. Now you are selling your computerized phones in our culture and with your social-media and Facebook you are ruining our way of life.

Is this your “way of life” that you want to be so proud about which you want us to assimilate to?

And is your version of Christianity even Christian? Your daily preachers are terrible. They are full of nonsense and continue to belabor about “Christian morals” and “salvation” while they forget why God sparks judgment-day:

“Youths oppress my people, women rule over them. My people, your guides lead you astray, they turn you from the path. The Lord takes his place in court, he rises to judge the people.The Lord enters into judgment against the elders and leaders of his people” (Isaiah 3:12-13)

God is fed up with you: “He rises to judge the people” He has already filed a lawsuit: Count #1—Your youth are like Cain: “youths oppress my people”. Count #2: your women who raised these brats are also lousy “women rule over them” (the men).

This is exactly the same story when Eve led her husband the way of the serpent who became their guide. Count #3 “allowing your guides to lead you astray”. In other words, your religious and political leaders are the serpent who led you to your perdition. You reversed the order of what God intended to being fruitful and multiplying and you also (by supporting Sodom), reversed the order of fertility. Evangelicals were the first to say ‘praise God’ and jumped on supporting birth control and some men even get clipped (ouch) because their wives do not want to take birth control, which is just as bad. And in almost every church pastors are kowtowing to women and putting down the men as if the man is guilty of everything. You are fulfilling the first prophecy in scripture how men will be led by their Eve to obey the bad guide: the serpent.

Isn’t it better to live in a hut where you are happy than living in a castle with a wife that acts like Goliath?

Your women complains that her life is not in the kitchen. We (eastern men) also cook and have no problem cooking and helping our women in the kitchen. The kitchen is no prison. it is the center, the magnet of the household. We love kitchens. One of my sons builds homes and builds the beautiful kitchens from solid raw wood. Cabinets are ceiling high, giant drawers, beautifully hand crafted vent hoods and huge butcher blocks that take a few men to lift. He learnt building because I once told him that his grandmother needed a place to live. The loft cost only $18,000. Now he builds homes from scratch. He was self-taught because I baptized him by fire.

This is what the American way is supposed to be. We love kitchens. This home is built from scratch by my other son. From ground up to inside everything is hand made from top quality solid woods (maple, White Oak and Poplar)

So the first and last sin was men obeying their wives. Scripture clearly says: “Wives, obey your husbands as you obey the Lord” (Ephesians 5:22).

What part of “obey” does your weight loss Delilah and your feminist Goliath not understand?

Is my interpretation ticking you off? Good. And I hope it “provokes you to jealousy”.

But not all of you are bad. There are the remnant righteous. In the same context God says:

“Tell the righteous it will be well with them for they will enjoy the fruit of their deed.” (Isaiah 3:10)

These “righteous” are the defiant who refuse to assimilate. Those who did not sway from the path shall suffer the suffering of Job, but in the end, if they endure, they shall prevail. The homophobes and the men who reject women to rule over them will eventually triumph.

So according to our Bible, you are the opposite of what Christianity teaches. The warning verses exactly fit you. The Bible goes contrary to what your mega churches harp all day long in blaming the men while keeping your rebellious divorce loving women unchecked. You have one of the highest rates of divorce mostly initiated by women. Two-thirds of divorce cases in the US are filed by women. Does “American woman stay away from me” ring a bell?

Eastern Christians have little divorce and the family bonds are much stronger. Why not emulate them? Go to Egypt and hang out in a Coptic Church for a while and see how they live and behave. You will learn much. Your interpreters are cunning, but only for your sheep not ours. Try what you do in the Coptic Church in Egypt and see how fast they catch your dirty little tricks and throw you out. In Egypt a Coptic kid quotes the Bible better than your scholars.

You probably will loath at what I wrote here while you speak of honesty, integrity and freedom. You always say: ‘be careful, first impressions are the most important’.

So here, I just gave you an impression you will not like. So go ahead and start labeling. In your culture someone’s entire life is decided in the first minutes and once that impression is made, it is hell to undo it. If this is how you operate you would be the first to crucify Jesus and behead John the Baptist for they too will tell you in a similar fashion what we said to you here. My Christian culture it is much different and is why I will never assimilate.

(To be continued next Sunday)