The hack India Knight, who has a unique insight into Jesus’s mind, suggests in today’s Times that he would.
He’d gently pick up all those rioting stowaways in Calais, carry them across the Channel and then soften our hearts enough for us to extend a warm welcome to all persecuted Christians.
She doesn’t exactly say that, relying instead on laying a smokescreen of emotive subtext out of which Jesus’s message (as transmitted through India) would emerge as a ghostly apparition.
In common with all demagogues, India limits herself to puffery, eschewing anything concrete, especially – God forbid – numbers.
Nor does she make any specific recommendations, trusting the reader to reach his own conclusion. A deft kick at Nigel Farage, who heartlessly opposes unlimited immigration, is also there, to focus the reader’s mind.
India tugs at our heart strings by reporting her conversations with the Middle Eastern Christians fleeing from persecution to Calais. One is to infer that they’re the dominant group among the refugees.
I doubt it. I suspect that most of them aren’t Christians seeking safety but Muslims seeking money.
Admittedly I don’t know that for sure. But then neither does India or, if she does, she’s reticent about proffering such information.
What nobody knows is how many in that crowd are terrorists trying to infiltrate into Britain to blow it up or recruit others to do so. Common sense suggests there must be some, although I wouldn’t venture a guess at the exact proportion.
Some figures, however, are available, and India should have cited them. For example, approximately 100 million Christians are persecuted for their faith somewhere in the world, 90 million of them in Muslim countries.
For any Christian, or anyone blessed with a conscience, this is an unbearable tragedy. It’s also a problem demanding a solution.
‘Tragedy’ is an emotional word, coming from a compassionate heart. But ‘solution’ is a cold-blooded word coming from a rational mind.
We’ve identified the problem: 90 million Christians (and many Jews, let’s not forget them) are suffering murderous persecution in Muslim lands. Now what’s the solution?
Sheltering them in Britain would be a humane, Christian thing to do. It would also be suicidal, for no country could survive a rapid 150% increase in her population. The refugees would find themselves in the middle of riotous strife that would make them feel nostalgic for their birthplaces.
No, the solution isn’t to welcome Christians fleeing from Muslim persecution. It’s to stop Muslim persecution of Christians.
I’d suggest that the first step in that direction would be to declare, against all available evidence, that our civilisation still remains Judaeo-Christian.
Therefore, persecuting Jews and Christians is a hostile act tantamount to an attack on our family. Since most of its victimised members live in Islamic countries, Islam is an enemy.
Those prevented from reaching this ineluctable conclusion by their PC piety resort to particularising subterfuge. They’ll talk your ear off insisting that all Muslims can’t be held responsible for crimes committed by relatively few ‘fundamentalists’, ‘Islamists’ or ‘Islamofascists’.
It’s like ‘Bomber’ Harris refusing to bomb German cities because not all Germans were Nazis. He didn’t though. He knew there was a war on, and it had to be won.
Just over a century ago, the West’s commitment to protecting its own hadn’t yet been corrupted.
In 1904, when the Moroccan brigand Raisuli kidnapped a Greek-American named Perdicaris, President Theodore Roosevelt immediately sent warships to Morocco. The ships levelled their guns on Rabat and flew the signal “Perdicaris Alive or Raisuli Dead!”
One Muslim. One Christian. Yet there were no phoney pronouncements on how few Moroccans were brigands. Give us our family member back or we’ll wipe out your capital – that was the simple yet effective message.
Rather than asking her readers “What would Jesus do?”, India ought to have asked “What would Teddy Roosevelt do, seeing not one Christian violated in Muslim lands, but 90 million?” The answer would have offered itself.
Instead she doused her readers with the spray flying off her bleeding heart, co-opting Jesus to prop up her own understated honesty and intellect. Just the stuff of which today’s journalism is made.